Viswanatha: The Living Legend in Indian

VISWANATHA
The Living Legend in Indian Literature

Andre Gide, writing about Dostoevsky, observes, “Like the bees the Montaigne tells of, I have but gathered from his works what I needed to make my own honey.” I should say the same of myself and a large number of writers of my generation as well, in relation to Sri Viswanatha Satyanarayana. The influence that his personality wields, is so profound and so pervasive that many hardly realise it, like one does not realise the gravitational pull of the earth.

His creative force which unleashed profuse literary activity, spreading over four decades carried, on to this day relentlessly, has dwarfed his fellow-writers beyond recognition. Very often he reminds me of Dante's lines from The Divine Comedy, “On all sides the sun was shooting forth the day and with his keen arrows has chased Capricorn from the mid-heaven.”

In him we meet a dazzling personality of spiritual greatness and intellectual magnificence, who has seen and expressed the beauties and tensions of the world, its conflicts and reconcilia­tions, who would look unflinchingly on the immense erosion of time and yet has taught us how to transform the continuously perishing moment of today into an enduring timeless moment, a moment that could belong to the eternal.

Viswanatha is the living link between the past and the future, though he has been often misrepresented by some as “anti-progressive.” He could only be called “anti-progressive” if Tilak, Gandhi and Gokhale could also be termed as anti-progressive. A mind that moves on such intellectual plane as his, cannot wholly be appreciated by sub-average standards of criticism. It is perhaps T. S. Eliot who said that the content of a classical genius has to be assessed always in relation to the past and the future, because he breaks the barriers of time and transcends the narrow boundaries of language. Viswa­natha’s works are on an epic scale; his style and finesse unfold great vistas of epic grace and grandeur; they play on the entire emotional range of the human psyche.

He opened to his people a vast inward realm of self-discovery and self-identification. A new movement was initiated enlighten­ing our tradition and culture in all its Indianness, which was regenerative in its basic faith, classical in weight and prestige, and at the same time universal in its communicability. All works of lasting value have, as a rule, in their core, the scent and honey of their native soil. It is said Dostoevsky had a grievance against Turgeniev that he could not trace in the latter “this national feeling, his opinion being that Turgeniev was too westernised.”

There is no branch of literature which Viswanatha’s creative pen did not touch and turn into gold – poetry, song story, novel, play and criticism. But his “Veyipadagalu” stands out like the Himalaya among the mountains, as a creft of creative genius and as the product of a master-mind, steeped in the culture and learning of his soil. May be the story is loose and flabby as some critics complain; but it acquires tremendous power in the hands of this expert story-teller. Here this author is comparable to the great masters of the West like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Russians are the makers of novel in the modern literature, and curiously enough the Russian novel from Tolstoy to Boris Pasternak consistently preserved its characteristics, of which a wide canvas of ground, perhaps of giant-size is the most remarkable one. Russian novel as a matter of fact thrives on its enormity. However, scanning with a more careful eye, one will be certainly impressed with the imposing power of the ground in which the relevance of plot becomes inseparable from the ground itself.

The genius of each country or language thrives best in only one of the various branches of literature like novel in Russia, play in England poetry in France, though France seems to diffuse all branches of her literature with intellectualism. However, the best of the French poetry is only behind the poetry of many Eastern countries, Middle East or Far East or India. Perhaps poetry is an Eastern characteristic just as criticism is a western characteristic. We find the clue in the Upanishads which are apparently the product of critical accumen of the human intellect but containing beautiful passages of great poetic value.

Among the Indian writers Sharat Chandra Chatterji, whom I consider a star in the galaxy of world literature, loses a point in being less literary in style than Viswanatha. A masterly work in any medium of literature cannot be said to have reached the watermark of perfection if it has no literary style about it, though this may not entirely hold good for a play. Style is the persona­lity and bearing of the work. However, I am one with Somerset Maugham when he says “.......there is no particular reason why the dramatist should have a literary training .....and an acquaintance with literature is perhaps chiefly useful in help­ing him avoid the literary.” But in the case of the story and the novel, which are purely prose narrations, literary attire is necessary to cover their nakedness.

When the sky of Andhra Pradesh was clouded by the internal conflict of regionalism, the news of Viswanatha receiving the Jnan Pith Award came as a silver lining, also a new dawn to the literary horizon of Telugu. For long we have eagerly looked forward to this award to be bestowed on this illustrious writer of Andhra Pradesh, who was for many years repeatedly proposed for this distinction and repeatedly ignored by the so-called judges of literature. This honour which was due to him, came like a rambling rose after wandering around for quite sometime. Whether it is now of any interest to the recipient or not, the event is, however, important in the history of the Telugu-speaking people of India and their literature, because it places them on the map of India for the first time in the real sense of the term. Perhaps after Tikkana of the thirteenth century and Srinatha of the fifteenth century, Viswanatha is the only creative genius in Telugu literature, of that outstanding stature, in a certain way even surpassing them. Such historic personages do not appear in every century and it is but natural that he has been the cause of placing Telugu in the map of Indian languages and made history thereby.

However, I was in fact surprised to know that the award was given to this author. Considering the conditions in the field today one would expect that a professor or a quasi-political litterateur would get it. . One should know that the Central Akademi Award went to some obscure persons successively for five years or so after the constitution of that body. Most shocking as it is, it is a matter for investigation into the conduct of these bodies. At a time when only those who are holding offices in the universities, colleges and Akademies are deciding the fate of literature, having made literature their exclusive monopoly, just only by virtue of their positions, this award for the first time shows them their places and declares to the world that literature is not the monopoly of any official hierarchy, but belongs to that grand army of awakened souls whose life and work join the eternal stream of universal culture and civilisation. Literature and art which always claimed the highest level of human conduct has today been pulled down to the most degraded levels where unscrupulous careerists, defunct politicians and mere degree-holders of doubtful merit, cluster around these institutions for offices of profit, or of advantage, for awards and honours; and in the process reduced literature to a farce of a mere race for benefits of one kind or other regardless of merit. This award finally establishes the utter futility of awards and titles and the wretched shallowness of these men in positions.

It is not the commonplace facts of Viswanatha’s life which make him great, for there are only few such. Most of Viswanatha’s living hours are spent in the pursuit of writing and as such he is a very rare person amongst the race of writers, who thinks, lives and breathes writing. He dictates 3 novels a day. He is a living legend. It is essential that a writer who seeks excellence should be free from all other-wordly involvements. It is exactly this that we draw from the lives of great writers of the world (by great writers I mean those in whom greatness surpasses the petty levels of mere literary excellence). The poetic genius of Valmiki would have been only a clock without the main spring if it had a vacuum of higher values that elevated mankind from the level of the beast. It will be interesting to know that Valmiki and Vyasa of Ramayana and Mahabharata went into an intense state of meditation to write those works which made epochs in the history of our culture and literature. It is such intense and single-minded commitment to inner self that yields moments of truth and beauty.

In a life such as this, enemies are not pursued, benefits are not chased and ambitions are not nurtured. Dwarfs are not given the place of giants and that is why, in spite of many enemies and despite withholding many benefits, this great man steadily rose like a pillar of strength by the dint of sheer work and today one can look at him and say, here is a man whose work outshines all the awards and honours given to him. Quite contrary to this we have amidst us many whose titles and awards outshine their work. And it is deplorable that honesty in the so-called intellectual sections of our country is today at such a low ebb that it never occurs to them to feel ashamed of accepting these awards and titles without deserving them. It is well known that Jean Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize when it was given to him; one of his reasons chiefly was, in his own words;

“For example, it has not been awarded to Neruda, one of the greatest South American poets. Lewis Aragon has never been seriously considered but he deserves it. Unfortunately it was awarded to Pasternak before Sholokhov.”

I do not know what the Jnan Pith said in their citation about Viswanatha. But if it were I that drafted it, the tribute to sum up his contribution would be – “He did to India with Veyipadagalu, what Valmiki did with his Ramayana. He gave us the 20th century version of our culture. Sri Viswanatha has fulfilled in his generation, the mission which Shankara, Vidyaranya and Vivekananda in their generations. He has kept the fires burning, the great fires of Vedic Agni.” He is a great man and a fulfilled man at that. To be great is one thing and to be fulfilled is another. Life smiles only on a few great persons. And only they get the chance to express themselves fully, contribute to the story of mankind and help determine the shape of its destiny. I cannot help recalling in this context the powerful words of Henry Miller about Pablo Picasso in his preface to Brassai’s biography of that great painter. How aptly they apply to our own giant. “He is outsized, a human phenomenon. He has made his world, we haven’t even begun to make ours ... one might say that the gods were good to him. But that is not half of it. He was good to himself. He appreciates himself. He knows who he is and what he is.”

            (Written on the eve of conferring Jnan Pith Award to Sri Viswanatha in the year; 1976)