From Jaipur to Benares

From Jaipur to Benares! Such was the title selected for a symposium on the All India Writers’ Conference sponsored and ‘staged’ by the P.E.N. All India Centre at Benares from October 31 to November 4, 1947. Evidently it was intended to mark the progress made in the country’s creative writing during the last two years which had elapsed, since the ever-memorable First All India Writers’ Conference was convened at Jaipur in the autumn of 1945. But no striking achievements were recorded in this direction; nor were there as many highlights at the present Conference as had heralded its predecessor. Therefore, in a certain sense, no new or further milestone was covered by the sponsors. Both in enthusiasm and in actual achievement, as seen in the Delegates’ Camp, we appeared to move in the shadow of the mile. stone, which the sponsors had set up at Jaipur.

However, for this lack of lustre, the organisers are not at all to blame. They did their part well within the framework of their abiding faith in the eternal visions and values of the undying human spirit. It was the prevalent sense of panic and the fear of insecurity which prevented many a member of the P.E.N. from attending the Conference, and quite a number of those announced in the programme from participating in the proceedings. And as regards the general public, the undercurrent of opposition to English as the medium of deliberations seemed to have kept a large section of it away from the Gaekwar University Library of the Benares Hindu University–the venue of the Conference, thanks to the cordial invitation of its well-known Vice Chancellor, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, to have free access to the University’s premises and personnel.

It was against such a bleak ground that the Benares Conference was held. But what was wanting in warm-hearted fervour was more than made up in large-range faith in the potency of the written word as an indispensable harbinger of hope and harmony in our strife stricken and despair darkened world. It was therefore but in the fitness of things that the axiomatic truths, that Indian culture is one continuous, indivisible whole and that English has a definite role to play in the emerging Independent India of today and tomorrow, were reiterated and reaffirmed by the President, H.E. Srimati Sorojini Devi, the Deputy President, Srimati Sophia Wadia, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, and several other delegates. For implementing our faith in the cultural unity of the country, the need of fostering translations from one Indian language into another was stressed, as also the writer’s special. responsibility in these days of parochialism and partisanship. It was recognised that the basis for the exercise of freedom of expression was self-restraint. The danger of reportage to creative writing was visualised in its proper perspective by Sri K. Srinivasan, late of The Free Press Journal of Bombay–a rich find of the sponsors of the Conference, for what with his rapier-like reasoning out of an issue under consideration, and his ever-alert sense of humour, he gave a touch of liveliness as well as luminosity to the proceedings.

This much on the credit side. On the debit side, there was a feeling it that the Conference had been more of an audience or auditorium than of an opinion-exchange, inasmuch as vital issues were only set forth but not sufficiently descanted upon. There were also two other friendly criticisms which were leveled against the Conference: firstly, that it had afforded more of (sweet) meat-eating (every evening there was a tea-party in the right royal fashion than of meeting one another with a view to reinforcing one’s own aspirations and efforts by coming to know others in the same field intimately; and, secondly, the deliberations were not dynamic enough to enthuse the writers assembled that their dharma is to set right what is wrong with the mentality of the modern man who likes to sup on horrors and half-truths.

The Bharata Natyam performance of Srimati Radha N. Sriram, the musical soiree of the dramatic soprano Janina de Witt, the visit to the Kala Bhavana with its gallery of paintings, ancient as well as modern, were items in the Conference programme on which the delegates would love to dwell reminiscently for many a long day, even as they would on the cordiality shown to them by the members and workers of the Reception Committee, drawn mostly from the elite, the intelligentsia and student community of the holy city.

An assembly of writers in a place like Benares, hallowed by memories of centuries of striving to fulfil the truth that “the word was God and with God” is expected to act as a stimulant to the cultivation of the sublimities of the soul. The sponsors stood up in the public square, the lights of which have been dimmed, and exclaimed within the hearing of the Eternal Ganges, “We believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the ever-shining Light in the soul of Man.”