Age of Indian-English Writing

AGE OF INDIAN-ENGLISH-WRITING (IEW)

Am insider-outsider

IEW (the abbreviation is an indi­cation of the sick and sickening hurry humans are in) is ageless and ageful: partakes of the veda (sruti, relevation, knowledge, education), the Ramayana (the adikavya, anadikauya, anan­thakavya), the Sita-Rama-myth, the compassion ocean - universe (you re­ject the Sita-Rama-myth, as Mulk Raj Anand says, or eject it, yet it is within you), the Mahabharata, the fifth veda, and Kalidasa, the Dhammapada, the Bible and Shakespeare, the Zend Avesta, the Koran, the Granth Sahib and so on.

Is ancient and ever-new, that is what purana is (remember Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s The Dance of Shiva, its subtitle, “Fourteen Indian Essays”, his essay, “Young India”, there, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s The Con­tinent of Circe, its subtitle, “An Essay on the Peoples of India”, V.S. Naipaul’s three travelogues on India)

Includes Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, the far-distant third, Raja Rao (the distance is the Indian earth), and so on

A comparativist calls critic - “eunuch’s shadow”.

A localist calls critic “lesser mor­tal”.

Name-calling or naming is harm­ful-harmless.

(Literature itself is naming. Re­member, to Polonius’s “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words”.)

Self says to a Cambridgean: When one is into one’s own creative agony, one’s critical effort pales into insignificance. Johnson’s time-meta­phor or Johnson’s mirror-metaphor about Shakespeare, or another about another, creation goes and goes on, criticism goes and goes on. And crea­tor and critic are one. Let us approach and appreciate art or a work of art as sui generis (svayambhu).

I happen to be a poet in English, said to be a gift of Saraswati to India by C. Rajagopalachari. Which India, this or that? Am full of complexes and questions to non-complexity and non-­questioning.

Of compatriots, Ezekiel belongs here and does not. (What is belonging? And who belongs where?) Ramanujan creates through transla­tion (literature itself is translation: non-sound sounding and resounding inwards-and-outwards), narration, transcreation. Mahapatra clarifies, or tries to, through ambiguity, obscurity, abstractness.

IEW, then, like all activity, all human activity, is and is not. Kali­dasa’s Sakuntala’s waist

[A statement made at 41st All ­India English Teachers’ (-and-Non­Teachers’) Conference, Department of English, Osmania University, Hydera­bad on December 31,1993].