Reviews

The Love of Dust.–By Shanker Ram. (A. N. Purniah & Co., Publishers, Bheemannapet, Mylapore, Madras. Price Rs. 3.)

This is a novel of South Indian rustic life. One of the villages in the Trichy district is chosen as the venue; and the fortunes of two families are traced through a generation. Venkatachalam and Mayandi, the seniors, are balanced against Velan and Mallan, the youngsters. Valli, the village belle, is the apple of discord between them. The contrasts are worked out with care and consistency from beginning to end. Venkatachalam is the ‘aristocrat’ of the village, but in decline; all his plans for the rehabilitation of his family wealth and prestige go wrong: and he sinks deeper and deeper into debt. Mayandi is the parvenu who thrives with the help of a fortune brought in by a widowed sister. Of her two nephews, Cholan and Mallan, the younger is her favourite, and she schemes to get for him Valli, the prettiest girl in the village. Cholan, thus unnaturally cast out of the family, becomes a drunkard and wastrel, and vows vengeance against his own parent.

But the main course of the story is concerned with the career of Velan who tries to help his father save something at least from the wreck, but is foiled. The character of Venkatachalam is elaborated with much care; he is so obsessed with the possessive instinct that the very idea of parting with any portion of his ancestral property makes him pathetically and unreasonably violent. Mallan’s father Mayandi gets the whip-hand of him by threatening legal proceedings. Just at this juncture, the action quickens and a series of surprising events take place which drive poor Velan into jail to take his trial for the ‘alleged murder’ of Mayandi on the eve of his son’s marriage. The scene shifts to the District Court, and a Sessions trial; and the truth comes out in the nick of time. The denouement is thus brought about with as many elements of surprise as could be wished for. Velan turns out to be the son of a dear friend of Venkatachalam’s who had to leave the village years ago on account of his difficulties, and through whom Velan ultimately inherits enough to buy up the whole village. Thus the story ends quite happily.

We have nothing but praise for the skill shown by the author in constructing his plot. Improbabilities are carefully eschewed; and in the earlier portions, there is almost a too simplified realism in the conception and delineation of character and incident. The character of Minakshi, the rich aunt of the story, is delightfully rendered. She is from life, loud, large, and. Ugly. With a perpetually husky voice, she domineers over her victims, and cringes before her betters. To say that she is a termagant is but to give a feeble picture of her. Mayandi is a poor fish, and is an accurate portrait of the parasite who thrives on his sister’s wealth. In the same way, the contrast between Mallan and Velan is kept up with spirit and discrimination to the end of the story. The former is a whining cad, while the latter is frank, open, impulsive and unselfish. Valli is a ‘daisy of the fields;’ but, instead of being an ineffective shrinking girl, has plenty of courage and initiative. Venkatachalam does not live to see the enjoyment by his son of his deferred happiness; but even his death on the eve of such happiness is almost necessary for the complete rounding off of the story.

The author’s perception of humour, specially in rustic character, is wholly admirable. Indeed, the only reflection that passed through my mind, as I read through, was to wonder how much better the story would be if it had been written in Tamil. Often I caught myself, unconsciously, translating the English rendering into its vernacular equivalent. The foreign medium has failed, for another thing, to convey in any significant fashion much of the local colour, and almost all the inflections and intonations of the characters in their innumerable clashes with one another. The language is too much of a piece, as obviously it had to be; and the dialogue is often uncharacteristic of the speakers.

But these are inevitable limitations. On the whole, however, the novel may be pronounced a promising performance in a not easy field.

P. M.

Life of Walienstein.–By Francis Watson. (Chatto and Windus, 15 Shillings.)

This biography of the great German soldier and statesman of the Thirty Years’ War has a special interest at this time because a good deal of the story, though by no means all of it, centres round those very areas in Central Europe which we’ve all been looking at so intensely in recent weeks. Wallenstein himself was, in fact, a Sudeten German. I suppose this biography, by Francis Watson, would be called a popular biography, but I can’t promise you that you’ll find it easy reading. Mr. Watson is too conscientious to slap the colours about any old way; he doesn’t write history out of his own imagination; and he doesn’t twist facts to suit his own fancy theories. But it’s rather a relief to read a popular biography which doesn’t attempt to be a novel, and those who have the patience to read it carefully with the help of the excellent map at the end, will enjoy it, and will learn a great deal about Central Europe. Mr. Watson, as I say, sticks soberly to the facts so far as he can ascertain them, but the facts are sometimes thrilling enough. Some readers will no doubt greatly enjoy his description of the incident which was the proximate cause of The Thirty Years’ War, when two priests were thrown out of a fifty-foot window, but by the mercy of Providence landed in a dung-heap and got away safe. Others will be interested in the account which he gives of the weekly supplies delivered at Wallenstein’s own castle for himself and his household–6 oxen, 57 sheep, 33 lambs, 14 calves, 150 chickens, 130 pullets, 40 geese, 30 ducks, 3 barrels of salt butter, 100 pounds of fresh butter, 1,800 eggs, 60 measures of flour. Those were great days! Finally, I can’t help quoting (with some slight omissions and modifications) part of Mr. Watson’s description of a certain siege–almost the only siege in which Wallenstein was even unsuccessful. "On July 13th," he says. "Wallenstein’s guns spoke. Throughout that day, according to one witness, 1564 shots were counted. And yet the damage seems to have been slight. We need not take too seriously the miraculous escape of a bedridden lady who was reported to have slept through the bombardment, and discovered on the following morning that she had a twenty-four pound cannon-ball in bed with her. The relative immunity of the city remains a problem. To the people of the city it proved that God was a Protestant. To Wallenstein it seemed that the devil must be in the bricks of Stralsund. And the devil had further mischief at hand, for a few days later there fell such a terrible downpour of rain that his soldiers ‘sat liked soaked cats’ around their demolished tents, or stood in the captured earthworks up to their waists in mud and water, while the defenders beneath their steep tiled roof gave thanks to heaven."

A. J. BOYD

KANNADA

Kemal Pasha–Young Turkey.–By ‘Vilasi.’ (Edited and published by Bindu Madhav Burli, Minchina Balli, Dharwar. Pp. 1-157. Price Re. 1.)

The popularity which biography as a form of literary art is enjoying in recent years is directly traceable to a fundamental change in the attitude of the writer to his theme. The older type indulging in idle anecdotes, dull dates, and high-sounding panegyrics almost obscuring the central figure from the readers’ view has now yielded place to a vivid transmission of the actual personality, to telling portraiture and discriminate praise. Modern biography seeks to establish a more intimate contact with the personality and endeavours to know more and more of the real man, of the way he lived and worked, of the forces that impelled him to action and the vicissitudes that stood in the way of his achievement. Mr. ‘Vilasi’ in the present case has, very successfully, exploited the above method in giving to the Kannada reading public, the life and achievement of Mustapha Kemal, the maker of modern Turkey.

During the first decade and a half of the present century Turkey lay in a "bog of stagnant waters." Frequent wars had drained the exchequer dry. The Balkan Wars, the Tripoli campaign, and above all the world war had exhausted the country of its men and money. Orthodoxy in matters of religion suppressed all progressive tendencies. The townspeople betrayed no greater standard of civilisation than the oppressed and woe-begone peasants of the countryside. The national life of Turkey was at such a low ebb that the Powers on the Continent referred to it as the "sick old man of Europe." But it was in the year 1919 that Mustapha Kemal appeared on the scene, determined to ‘modernise’ Turkey with the motto, "Turkey for the Turks and a clean sweep with the past." Separating religion from the State and divesting the priests of their powers, Kemal got rid of the Caliph of Islam, and set aside the Koran, disestablishing all forms of religion. The older Shariat law was totally supplanted by an entirely new body of Civil and Criminal law. The women were emancipated from the purdah and the nation was conscripted and sent to school to learn the Roman alphabet. Turkey, shedding its medieval form of theocratic government, readily adopted, under the leadership of Kemal, the Western forms of secular government. The author of the present book views all this long tale of the stagnation and rejuvenation in the national life of Turkey against the present Indian ground, and therein lies for us all the significance of the struggle and achievement of Kemal.

V. M. INAMDAR