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Kokrajhar, Assam.
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University, Kohima, Nagaland.
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cellence, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh.
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versity, Dharwad, Karnataka.
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College, Basavan Bagewadi
Bijapur, Karnataka.
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namalainagar, Tamil Nadu.
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165) Principal, St. Xavier ’s High School, Keonjhar, Orissa
166) Dr. Rabindra Kumar Gartia, HoD of English, Kuchinda College, Sambalpur, Orissa.
167) Ms. Sunit Kaur, Head, Deptt. of English, Apeejay College of Fine Arts, Jalandhar, Punjab.
A Peep into the Cook - Son Dream World in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss - Dr. A.J. Sebastian - pp. 07-pp. 15.
Kamala Das : The Emergence of the New Indian Poet in English - Kusha Chandra Pradhan - pp. 15- pp. 22
Mahapatra’s Poetry : A Critical Appraisal - Dr. R.P. Lokhande - pp. 22 - pp. 35.
The Black Woman’s Search for Selfhood in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy - Dr. S. Shakila Sheriff - pp. 35 - pp. 38.
Literary Relation and Aesthetic Appreciations - Ms. D. Jalaja - pp. 39 - pp. 41.
Subaltern Sexualities in the plays of Mahesh Dattani - Dr. Ibrahim Khalilulla - pp. 41 - pp. 46.
Niranjan Mohanty’s Articulation of God with a Human Soul : A Study of Prayers to Lord Jagannath - Dr. Pradip Kr. Patra - pp. 46 - pp. 54
Re-Defining Autobiography : A Re-Reading of Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass - Dr. V. Lakshmanan & D. Girisha - pp. 54 - pp. 58
The Voice of the Unvoiced - A Study of Select Poems of Wislawa Szymboska - Persis Barnabas - pp. 59 - pp. 65.
Ordeal and Evolution of a Writer : Text as Context in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival - Rishi Pal Singh - pp. 66 - pp. 73.
Literary Canons of Sri Aurobindo : A Critique of his Poetics - Dr. Archana Agar-wal - pp. 74 - pp. 79.
Evolution in the Psyche of Anita Desai’s Women : From the terror and trepidation of psychosis to a sanguine and bullish view : An Appraisal of her five novels - V. Sunitha - pp. 79 - pp. 85.
Camus Concept of the Absurd - Ms. Sunit Kaur - pp. 86 - pp. 91.
The Art of Galsworthy as a Novelist - Dr. Rita Das - pp. 92 - pp. 94.
Spirit - Writing - Dr. Prafulla Ch. Swain, pp. 94 - 96.
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Henry James & D.H. Lawrence on the Craft of Fiction:- A Comparative Analy-sis- Ms. Madhumeet - pp. 97 - pp. 104.
Thomas Hardy and the Feminists - Jano L. Sekhose - pp. 104 - 111.
Exploration of Hindu - Muslim relations in Sahgal’s Mistaken Identity - Dr. Dwijen Sharma - pp. 112 - pp. 116.
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri : The Path Divine - Ms. Ranjita Barik - pp. 117 - pp. 120.
Kamala Das’s An Introduction : A Feminist Reading - Dr. Kalikinkar Pattanayak - pp. 121 - p. 125.
Author’s Corner (pp. 126 - pp. 129).
An Interview with Chittaranjan Misra - by Trinath Prasad Rath - pp. 126 - 129.
Short Story (pp. 130 - pp. 139)
Pousse - Pousse - Dr. P. Raja - pp. 130 - pp. 134.
The Jackal - Mr. Nityananda Panda - pp. 135 - pp. 139.
Poems (pp. 140 - pp. 142)
That’s Life - Dr. Suguna Patnaik - p. 140.
The Visitors - Peter Asher - p. 140.
Bliss Unbounded - Dhirendra Kr. Mishra - pp. 140 - pp. 141.
Highway Child - Bandita Satpathy - p. 141.
Father’s Second Wife - Noel King - pp. 141 - pp. 142
Two poems by Robin E.J. Chater - p. 142.
The Reckless Wanderer - Raymond Federman - p. 144.
Obituary (pp. 143 - pp. 144)
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177) Dr. Bikram Kr. Mohapatra, Lect. in English, Brahmabarada College, Jajpur, Orissa.
187. J. Dharageswari, Lect. in English, Kandaswamy Kandar’s College, P. Velur, Namakkal, Tamil Nadu.
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A Peep into the Cook – Son Dream World in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss
* Dr. AJ Sebastian sdb
I have nostalgic memories of my visit to Kalingpong and New York, the two worlds, which Kiran Desai has very symbolically and powerfully depicted in The Inheritance of Loss. It is a perfect setting for building a dream world by a diasporic writer for an emigrant cook and his immigrant son Biju. The novelist has captured the dreams of these two characters and the psychologi-cal impact it has on their lives in a very realistic manner Raymond Williams’ argument in the essay “Realism and Contem-porary Novel” is worth examining in the light of Kiran Desai’s psychological analysis of her characters in the novel. He observes: “What we usually say is that the realistic novel has been replaced by the ‘psychological novel,’ and it is obviously true that the direct study of certain states of consciousness, certain newly apprehended psychological states, has been widely abandoned. It is merely that ‘everyday ordinary reality’ is now differently conceived, and that new techniques have been developed to describe this new kind of real-ity…” (Williams 583). Desai’s realism brings to her readers, daily concerns, joys and fears of ordinary people of India. These are very profoundly depicted through the characterisation of the cook and his son and their relationship built on agony and ecstasy. The opening and closing scenic descriptions in the novel can be jux-taposed to present the symbolic landscape in which human relationships and dreams are built : The novel opens with the colours of dusk at Kanchenjunga. “All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit” (TIL 2). The novel concludes with a similar description of Kanchenjunga at the emotional meeting of father and son: “The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you need to do was to reach out and pluck it” (TIL 324). This scenic setting of the novel is symbolic of the concerns of the cook and his son who built their sky-high dreams in America.
* teaches English at Nagaland University, Kohima, India.Rock Pebbles / July - Dec.’09/P. 07
CRITICISM
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As it has been pointed out by Champa Bilwakesh, “Desai leads the reader into the inner lives of the poor, and the shadow lives they live within that country where they are born.... The people she writes about may be bent but they are not broken.” (Bilwakesh). Though Kiran Desai left India as a teenager in the 1980s, she has been deeply rooted in her Indianness and the novel is a study on human emotions and relationships. Reading the novel makes one feel the pangs of Indian immigrants in America. To present her characters’ deep rooted Indianness, Desai had to part from her American style of writing taught at the creative writing course at Columbia University.
In an interview to NDTV, New Delhi, on 26th January 2007 she spoke of the reason for her choosing the story of immigrants in New York. “The novel does not have a geographical location, but an emotional one.” She opined. Hence she wrote something very close to her sensibility as an immigrant. She further affirmed her Indian roots through the various characters portrayed.
I see everything through the lens of being Indian. It’s something that has become stronger. As I’ve got older I have realised that I can’t really write without that perspective…. I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet it belongs to Indian authors living in India. The subject belongs to them. So the only way I could put this book together was to go back to the India of the 1080s, when I left. (The Guardian).
A perceptive critic will find four basic concerns surrounding the novel: (a) The relationship between Mr. Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, the retired judge and his granddaughter Sai; (b) the relationship between Mr. Patel’s cook and his son Biju; (c) Sai – Gyan romance and (d) the setting of insurgency in Darjeeling in the 1980s.
The cook-son relationship and the father’s great expectations from his son in America is the focus of discussion in this discourse. Why does the novelist give such a singular role to an unnamed “cook”?
It may be noted that Kiran Desai had a fascination for her kitchen and cooking. “It’s a great interest of mine; It’s so much a part of my life.. I’m always in the kitchen cooking and experimenting – I love it….But yes, food is a big part of my life.” (Bold Type).
As she narrates the story she enters deeply into each of them, products of her own vivid and mature imagination. She is so involved in their psychological growth, Desai confirms, they are, “…bits and pieces of people I know…. But of course I’m sure they all do have bits of me in them as well, different parts of my personality.” (Ibid).
Throughout the novel he is referred to as ‘the cook’. Why hasn’t he been called by his name? The novelist has very realistically represented him as a type of the cooking class. He has no identity of his own, except by his profession. This is the lot of menial servants in India who are known only by the works they do, be it cook, sweeper, mali, cowman, dhobi. But his son is called Biju. The cook treasures his son, the pride of his life. He fashions a dream world for him and wants him to be a greater cook or someone in a similar profession abroad. Biju is in search of finding an identity of his own which ends up in his vain attempt to get a green card in New York. All that his father wants is that he goes out to America, the land of dreams, doing any job; but being in America, he believes, gives him dignity in his society.
The opening of the novel with the scene of the cold dusk at Kaling-pong with the view of the snow clad Kanchenjunga is a perfect match for the symbolic lighting of the fire in the dilapidated kitchen of the cook who wants to bring warmth to his master at tea time. The symbols of cold and warmth runs throughout the novel through human relationships and interactions. The cook brings warmth to the judge, caring for him in his retirement and taking care of Sai. It is the cook who gives attention to the young girl as she hardly gets any love and affection from her grandfather. He is a migrant worker from Uttar Pradesh. He has been living for survival at the judge’s home and does household tasks. Though attached to the family and taking full charge of Sai, the orphaned granddaughter of the judge, he lives for his son Biju in his old age “Terrible” he said, “My bones ache so badly, my joints hurt - I may as well be dead? If not for Biju…” Biju was his son in America… and Biju changed jobs so often, like a fugitive on the run – no papers” (TIL 3).
When the police come to verify robbery at the house, we are given a glimpse of the unknown story of the cook.
It pained Sai’s heart to see how little he had: a few clothes hung over a string, a single razor blade and a sliver of cheap crown soap, a kulu blanket that had once been hers, a cardboard case with metal clasps that had belonged to the judge and now
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helped him procure his job with the judge. Biju’s letters, papers from a court case fought in his village all the way in Uttar Pradesh…a broken watch that would cost too much to mend…. Two photographs hung on the wall – one of himself and his wife on their wedding day, one of Biju dressed to leave home…. Sai wondered if he had loved his wife. She had died seventeen years ago, when Biju was five…. Biju was their only child. “What a naughty boy,”the cook would always exclaim with joy. “But basically his nature was always good” (13-14).
The cook goes on recollecting the past and building dreams for his son. He keeps showering praises on Biju. Meanwhile the police had scattered all the letters after the search and the old man began to read one of them. “Respected Pitaji, no need to worry. Everything is fine. The manager has offered me a full-time waiter position. Uniform and food will be given by them. Angrezi khana only, no Indian food, and the owner is not from India. He is from America itself.” (14). This story ran wild in the market as the cook kept telling everyone that Biju works for the Americans. He took pleasure in boasting of Biju. Throughout the novel this becomes the ejaculation for the cook. He lived in a fantasy world typical of parents of immigrants. The search by the police had exposed the misery and poverty of the cook. It revealed his self-made dignity. The revelation is embarrassing for Sai as she never knew his material poverty in her material well-being. They lived at different wavelengths: she spoke English – while he Hindi; yet she felt proud of him for the difficult life he lived.
Chapter three unfolds the story of Biju in America struggling to find a job. The narration is replete with humour and irony. He keeps his father alive in his fantasy world writing in letter after letter that he was doing fine.
But although Biju’s letters traced a string of jobs, they said more or less the same thing each time except for the name of the establishment he was working for. His repetition provided a coziness, and the cook’s repetition of his son’s repetition double-knit the coziness. “Excellent job,” he told his acquaintances, “better even than the last.” He imagined sofa, TV, bank account. Eventually Biju would make enough and the cook would retire. He would receive a daughter-in-law to
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The story of the cook-son runs through letters exchanged among them between the two worlds. The novelist adds humour to the story with comical and ironical account of Biju at different jobs. Chapter five enumerates his moving from job to job like in a collage. “Biju at the Baby Bistro…. Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience….On to the Stars and Stripes Diner….” (21). The cook is overjoyed to get all the news from America. He keeps giving advice after advice to his son to guard himself from cheats. Humorously the narrator laughs at Indians present everywhere, even at the North-pole. Yet they are equally disliked everywhere except in Guatemala. During his second year in America, Biju becomes a victim in the hands of his Italian Restaurant owner whose wife couldn’t tolerate his Indian smell. To add to the white man’s degrading remarks on Biju, he was looked down upon by the three Indian girls for whom he had taken soups and egg from the restaurant. Kiran Desai has taken note of racist feelings as well as class-caste-language distinctions among Indians abroad.
As Biju agonises in New York, the cook in Kalingpong establishes his status as the father of a son in America, he keeps sending more and more recommendations to Biju asking him to arrange jobs for the Metalbox watchman’s son. He takes pride in being an intercessor answering petitions.
He was being besieged by requests for help. The more they asked the more they came the more they asked ….He would begin to lecture them. “Look, you have to have some luck, it is almost impossible to get a visa….” It was superhumanly difficult, but he would write to his son… “Biju beta,” he wrote, “you have been fortunate enough to get there, please do something for others…” (94-5)
The letters always sought so many favours for so many people, Biju was totally at a loss. All he could do was to think of the plight of his Pak friend Saeed who was enveloped in a similar situation. He turned it into self-pity. “Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily, hourly, for his response.” (98). While searching for jobs, Biju was advised by Nandu to go back to India where he could do better. But he had set his mind on the green card.
The green card….Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant After The Green Card Return Home, thirsted for it – to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish…. He watched
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legalized foreigners with envy…. Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families….” (99)
In course of time Biju and his friends who were illegal immigrants had to spend most of their earnings on anonymous persons who promised them green cards. Often they waited in fear at strange corners in the city where ve-hicles came by and they paid money along with their photographs and profiles as per INS requirements. Then they waited in vain with the dream of getting the green cards. Adding humour to the story Saeed and Biju keep practicing for INS interview by marrying someone by paying money. But that too doesn’t work with the officials who cross question partners to prove their true identity as spouses. Employing flashback technique the novelist makes Biju introspect on his childhood and thinks of his home, sweet home.
Lying on his basement that night, he thought of his village where he had lived with his grandmother on the money of his father sent each month…. When he had visited his father in Kaling-pong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced “How peaceful our village is….” They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom windows, jealous of the cook’s love for his son. (102-3)
The spontaneous exchange of love between the cook and his son, despite their poverty, is very finely contrasted with the lack of love that existed in the Sai-Judge relationship. The cook while sitting and scanning through Biju’s letters, kept his hope of the dream world and “shifted the burden of hope from this day to the next and got into his head, hooked on to his pillow – he had recently had the cotton replaced – and he mistook its softness serenity.”(120). The novelist makes use of stream of consciousness technique while presenting the cook’s memories of the past. He recollects his sending Biju on a cruise ship four years ago when a recruiting agent came to Kalingpong seeking applications for waiters, vegetable choppers, toilet cleaners – etc. with the promise to get legal employment in the USA. The interview was held at Sinclair’s Hotel which was encircled by innumerable applicants. The cook had called Biju from home to Kalingpong to attend the interview. The judge had objected to the plan as he expected Biju to work in the cook’s place when he retired. Biju’s interview was a success and he was summoned to Kathmandu for a week’s training. But when he reached there he found it was a cheating game. Next he tried directly to get a tourist visa from the American
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He had taken a fake bank guarantee which his father got from a corrupt state bank clerk gifting two bottles of black label. Despite all the lies, Biju got the visa and send the telegram to his father calling himself, “The luckiest boy in the whole wide world.” (187). But that was the idle make-believe world in which the old cook lived hoping for greener days ahead, reminiscing the past. The novelist draws the reader’s sympathy for Biju when he had an accidental fall at the Gandhi Café and the rough treatment he received from the owner. He knew his fate living like a pig when his sponsor refused to get him the green card. He gave Biju fifty dollars and added, “…if you are not bet-ter, go home. Doctors are very cheap and good in India. Get the best medical attention and later on you can always return…. It was a decoy, an old Indian trick of master to servant, the benevolent patriarch garnering the loyalty of staff; offering slave wages, but now and then a box of sweets, a lavish gift…” (189). At this critical juncture, Biju can only escape into a day dream world in nature. “So Biju lay on his mattress and watched the movements of the sun through the grate on the row of buildings opposite.” (189). This is typical of stream of consciousness as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus when confronted with the crisis in his choice of vocation escapes into nature. “Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slow drifting clouds dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky…” (Joyce 190). But one has to finally surrender to his dream. And Biju has to listen to his heart and decide to leave for home as he reads more and more letters from his father and being informed of the situation of uncertainty due to insurgency. The emotional conversation over the phone between the father and the son is remarkable. He hadn’t attained the decency of being granted a holiday now and then. He could not go home to see his father. “WHEN WILL YOU GET LEAVE?” “I DON’T KNOW…”
…he can’t get leave. Why not? Don’t know, must be difficult there, make a lot of money, but one thing is certain, they have to work very hard for it…. Don’t get something for nothing… nowhere in the world….”The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced.” (TIL 233).
Biju tells Mr. Kakkar at the Shangri-la Travel Agency that he had to re-turn to his father. He took a ticket on Gulf Air from New York to Calcutta. Next
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camera, sunglasses, baseball caps that said “NYC” and “Yankees…” (270). As he prepared himself for the return home, the reader is given a peep into the comical side of his tryst with destiny in America. “In the mirror of the bath-room, Biju saluted himself. Here he was on his way home, without name or knowledge of the American president, without the name of the river on whose banks he had lingered, without ever hearing about any of the tourist sights…” (286). His world was very small. He had only thoughts of his father and to return with a lot of money. Nothing else mattered. He even rehearses the scene of his meeting his father with a lot of ‘happiness and emotion.’ It is this happiness and emotion that the author explores in the novel which climaxes in the final section when Biju returns home despite struggles.
The insurgency had blocked all roads to Kalingpong though Biju was insistent and kept saying, “I have to go. My father is there….”(310). He got a lift in a jeep and the insurgents demanded most he owned. The tragic circumstances left him in a worse situation than while in New York. “Darkness fell and he sat right in the middle of the path – without his baggage, without his savings, worse of all, without his pride. Back from America with far less than he’d ever had. (317).
Kiran Desai presents the symbol of darkness and terror that loomed large in the surrounding as well as the traumatic experience Biju went through which would only be compensated with the mission he has – to get to his father. On the other hand, the cook was in agony and under intoxication. He was abused by the judge and beaten with his slippers. He was a broken man who kept weeping. In that moment he forgot his son too. “He didn’t mention his son… he had none… he’d never had one… it was just his hope writing to him… Biju was nonexistent….” (320). The novelist concludes the story with the meeting of the duo in pain. In darkness and gloom when everything reaches the end of the road, only thing that can sustain is human relationships. “Sai looked out and saw two figures leaping at each other as the gate swung open.” (324). It was a time of celebration to which golden Kanchenjunga peaks bore witness. It is love shared that made the two go through their building dreams in their misery. The father and the son finally return to where it all began, into one another’s embrace. Their yearning for the American dream is shattered as they inherit nothing at the end. But they are psychologically and physically united in an emotional location. This is very significant to the Indian ethos where emotional fulfilment gives hope despite material loss.
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References1. Bilwakesh, Champa. 2006. “In Guadeloupe – they love us there?” book review in Atlantic Monthly Press.www.sawnet.org books. Downloaded on 15/10/08.2. Bold Type.2006 Interview with Kiran Desai. www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/ 0599. Downloaded on 10/10/08.3. Desai, Kiran. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Abbreviated as TIL.4. Desai, Kiran. 2007. NDTV interview. New Delhi. 26 January. 5. Joyce, James. 1916. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguine Books.6. The Guardian. 2006. book.guardian.co.uk/ manbooker 2006. 12 Oc-tober. Downloaded on 11/10/08.7. Williams, Raymond. 1972. “Realism and the Contemporary Novel,” 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London:Longman.
KAmALA DAS : THE EmERgENCE Of THE NEW INDIAN POET IN ENgLISH
* Kusha Chandra Pradhan
Among the Indian writers of English, there are not many to whom English is as natural a medium of expression in both prose and poetry as it is to Kamala Das(1934-2009). The sixties of the twentieth century saw a poet writing in English from India and in Indian English and writing as a woman on the themes and issues that directly related to women.Bold, free, frank and unconventional in expression and resentment and protest about how the male-world has abused the female body and restricted its freedom of the soul , she made poetry the very instrument with which much could be achieved .Poetry to her was a tool to work towards freedom. . Not immediately, adequately, sympathetically evaluated and appreciated, this poet being a woman herself * teaches English at Anchalika Mahavidyalaya, Swampatna, Keonjhar,Orissa, India.
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made it her mission to expose the hypocrisy of the husband-wife relationship in the Hindu society - almost a manipulative and coercive practice to keep woman subjugated in all matters including the area of sex life. There is in her poetry an awareness of human rights and her judicious views about how the world could be properly reset, readjusted and reformed.. She wrote for women’s cause in most clear-cut language - appearing to most to be quarrelling while writing. In her autobiography my Story(1977), Kamala Das has maintained that poets “cannot close their shops like shop-men and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them they feel the pressures and the torments. A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay, it is his/her personality”. (1977:165) Kamala Das first published poems in PEN since 1948. Thereafter her iconoclastic poems got noticeably represented in the anthologies, magazines and journals such as The Illustrated weekly, Thought ,Quest, etc.With P.Lal, A.K.Meherotra,Ezekiel and Jayant Mahapatra providing a lead in the field of poetry writing in English, there appeared special efforts by women poets to emerge as a separate entity, and not just as a reflection of the mainstream poetry of the male poets. Bruce king makes the right assessment of the situation:
Rather than finding salvation in art, Kamala Das’s poetry spoke of fantasies, many lovers and the counting disappointments of love. More important than its theme was the use of an Indian English without the concern for correctness and precision which characterized most earlier modern verse. Instead it appeared unpremeditated, a direct expression of feelings as it shifted erratically through unpredictable emotions creating its form through its cadences and repetition of phrases, symbols and refrains. (King 20-21)
Poetry of Kamala Das is Indian in sensibility and content. It deals with the Indian environment and reflects its mores often ironically. The total freedom that language could offer was her search and she used language to express herself fully in all her paradoxical and complex situations. Her revolt as a woman against the traditional concept of womanhood matched with her revolt as a poet against the conventional medium of mother tongue for poetry. Srinivasa Iyengar believed that the women poets of India who wrote in English were poets first and only women by birth. Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamata Kalia, Anna Sujatha Modayil, Sunita Jain, Rina Sudhi, Gauri Pant, Meena Alexander, Lalitha Venkateswaran are some of the names he mentions in his volume Indian Writing in English (2001:721).
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self-consciousness and flamboyance as despair alternated with self-assertion” (King 21). Nissim Ezekiel comes close to Kamala Das when he writes without inhibition on sex ( refer to his “Passion Poems” and “Nudes 1978.”(Das 103) Kamala Das in her quest for freedom and identity in her poetry “reflects the artistic identity. It reflects the artistic movement between utopia and authenticity” (Seshadri 124). In her the “feminine aesthetics” finds an expression in the compelling need “to break through the conventional barriers to establish a new tradition” (Seshadri 126). Criticism in the late seventies has quite timely taken note of the emergence of the new women’s writing though the changes were observed by only a few critics. Women critics like Meena Shirdwarker and Susie Tharu have argued rather convincingly for the case of a feminised tradition. They recognized and defined that this ‘new feminine tradition” is ingrained in its “departure” from existing norm with regard to “Choice of themes” and projection of the female figure” ( Tharu “Tradition of Women’s Literature” (103-4). More recent works have referred to “conflict” as inherent in “female struggle” whereas Raji Narasimhan proposed a sort of “utopian solution” for woman to become “forever free” (Seshadri 63). We may benefit if the status and role of women in India is explained to serve for a foundation for the latter developments to come. Gender distinctions were not taken into account in ancient India as far back as the Vedic Age.
In her poetry Kamala Das challenged the phallocentric idea of society. At a deeper level her poetry seeks to declare through her writings that for a woman writing what she had written was not something totally unexpected. Her writing necessitates a feminist reading. Her ability to depict, not as a male but as a female, the situations, characters and dilemmas straight out of every day dogmatic life, particularly her own - needs to be recognized. At the age of 15 she got married to Mr. Das who was an officer in the Reserve Bank of India, Bombay. Dwivedi records that her life became miserable in the company of her nonchalant, lustful husband whose sexual escapades with maidservants made “his contact with his wife usually cruel and brutal.” This made Kamala Das to initiate herself into “a hectic love life with small capital and just a pair of beautiful breasts and a faint musk-rat smell in her perspiration.” The extract from her autobiography my Story is quite vivid and clear in this regard:
She grew revengeful towards him, and reacted in a non-traditional fashion in lovemaking, offering herself to any handsome and resourceful man who came across her, and forgiving even her rapists. Her husband had no soothing words for her, no time to
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discharge her domestic duties well and look to the needs and comforts of her husband. This eroded her own distinct personality and dwarfed her forever.
The above context rather interestingly asks if Das at all could in real-ity have considered her husband a friend. It is to be noted that in September 1971, Kamala Das published a short prose– piece in The Illustrated Weekly of India’s “Love and Friendship” series. Eunice de Souja records that the piece titled “I Studied All Men – I Had to” is an account of Kamala Das’s early marriage, her husband’s admiring talk about easy women, sluts and nympho-maniacs.. Kamala Das narrates as follows:
Last week the Editor of a Kerala Weekly, a well-known capital-ist, offered in return for my autobiography, a month’s holiday at the most expensive hotel… I was thrilled. My husband said: “why not take K. along with you as diversion? You seem to find him attractive. After working hard, I shall not, grudge you a bit of relaxation.”This is what I mean by friendship. It is hard to find a friend as good as my husband. (qtd. In Eunice de Souza “Kamala Das” Osmania Journal of English Studies-1977)
In view of the tradition and conventionality of Indian women, this con-fession of Kamala Das may appear to be too permissive to be accepted. But it was Kamala Das and her true feelings find place in the statement as above expressing the rebel mood that verily was hers in the given times when her remarks as above were taken with a pinch of salt. Kamala Das, as we know, is “an heir to two poetic traditions, that of Malayalam whose roots go back into the ancient Tamil Sangam poetry and me-dieval folklore, and that of Indian English poetry beginning with Henry Derozio or Toru Dutt…” (K. Satchidanandan, “Transcending the Body,” “Introduction to Only the Soul Knows How to Sing, 9). Instead of often using Malayalam, she prefers to use more frequently English as she feels it gives better expression to her joys and longings as a woman. This as Satchidanandan emphasises is “female sexuality” which truthfully expresses a woman’s “swelling limbs,” “growing hairs,” “the pitiful weight of breasts and womb.” It is the “female physicality” – the sad body of the woman which encounters with masculine violence that belongs to the same frightening world of trees in the storm and the mutterings of the funeral pyre”(Satchidanandan “Transcending the Body”, as “Introduction” to Only the Soul Knows How to Sing.10) Kamala Das fights “fierce battle against patriarchy pinpointing it to be the cause of her crisis as a woman. What she demands is like what Helen Cixous talks about “Female experience” which happens to be repressed and needs a free expression.
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Kamala Das celebrates the female body and female desire. Hers is an attempt to re-state in material terms the positive nature of what in masculine terms, is described negatively as “other”. As she states
…now here is a girl with vast sexual hungers/ a bitch after my own heart. (The Descendants, 38)
Das’s descriptive statements are primarily concerned to elucidate the structure of her text. Conversation is a very convenient kind of English. Her volte face achieves a new kind of dimension, a new vitality, a fresh look and strength as she uses body imagery to lay bare the stark reality of life. Helen Cixous would perhaps say that Kamala Das has performed through the vibrant and volatile experience of her life. Cixous argues:
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve discourse. (Cixous, 256)
In the light of feminist critical theory it can be argued that Das has pro-vided Indian English poetry, a new discourse, the discourse of woman’s body language from the point of view of woman. The poet has rummaged through her body to flush out startling images and metaphors in order to body forth her quest for truth, the Revelation and the Apocalypse. (Dodiya p.147-8). Marriage for a woman like Kamala Das becomes a sort of infringe-ment on freedom creating a crisis of identity. This has been true to other Indian women poets like Mamta Kalia, who says: After eight years of marriage The first time I visited my parents They asked “Are you happy, help us” It was an absurd question And I should have laughed at it Instead, I cried And in between sobs, I nodded yes. (Poems 78,26) Kamala Das is much more than merely freak, and certainly full of anger when she hits out of the male domination. Iyengar observed that she “has a fiercely feminine [female] sensibility that dare without inhibitions to actuate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world” (680). In the opinion of Monika Verma, she brings through her poetry “hope and expecta-tion” for the suffering woman who faces male domination. She must think that basically life is “green”, “sweet and full of sap and juice” (26). However, Kamala Das seeks relief in the eternal love of Radha-Krishna. In her autobiography
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You are my Krishna, I whispered kissing his eye shut. He laughed I felt that I was a virgin in his arms. The sea was our only witness. How many times I turned to it and whispered, Oh Sea, I am at last in love. I have found my Krishna. (180-81)
Kamala Das is unlike conventional Indian women. She comes in the line of Mamata Kalia and Gauri Deshpande. As Mithilesh K. Pandey says: “Armed with Indian austerity, Kamala Das has manifested her own realization of life’s predicament as a woman in her poems with utmost sincerity…” (56). What is significant about Kamala Das is that her discontent is healthy. She has thus asserted herself in larger than private contexts, and she has discovered the means to release the energy of her hidden anger by creating powerful literature. One may recount the situation of her unhappiness by refer-ring to what Germaine Greer has told about the predicament of woman today, be it in India or elsewhere by using the ‘castration’ of women as her central metaphor. The claim of Greer is as follows:
…women have been deprived of their natural power, pressured towards self-sacrifice but denied any notion of what the self is. (qtd. In Patricia Meyei Spacks in “A Chronicle” 160)
Theoreticians of feminine condition describe the stereotypes of body, mind, and soul imposed upon woman and acquiesced in by them, and go on to recount the inequities of marriage, and education. They also emphasize the meaningless destructiveness that develops from such psychic states. Conse-quentially, Greer in her book The female Eunuch recommends avoidance of marriage, advocating a revolution of joy in ‘free sex’ (20) This has been amply demonstrated by Kamala Das who has gone beyond her own personal crisis to achieve freedom. The language in which she has written her poems is symptomatic of freedom.
The remarkable achievement of Kamala Das is the apt Indianisation of English through ‘choice of verbs and some syntactical constructions.’ This rather creates poetry based on local speech. Panday’s remarks are worth quoting in full:
Her poetic excellence can be seen in her realisation of life’s predicaments in the directness of expression and in the em-phatic use of new diction, in which she surpasses even the male contemporary poet like Ezekiel and Dom Moraes. (57)
What Mary Nirmala says, is therefore, justified that Kamala Das dreams of a new India where women will be reinstated into the totality of life as complete individuals. (70) This fullness is existential. It is said that without another person our existence is rather incomplete. It is said that “Existence is fundamen-
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communal in charac ter, and w i thout the o ther [ there is no existence]”Macquarrie:102). In Kamala Das’s poetic world, we always find her persona and her lover/husband commingling.
Kamala Das has been described as a ‘confessional poet’ but the point must be noted whether her ‘private experiences’ particularly in the matter of sex has a ‘public communication.’ Obviously, it has a dual effect, that is, it is accepted wholly in case of the feminist reader and partially in case of those who are tradition-bound. In this she is dedicated to the celebration of love through the celebration of the body.
A composite view of all has been taken to form our evaluation of Kamala Das (Kamala Suraiya) as a poet whose single chief contribution has been to enrich our understanding of the issue of happiness in life in it’s complex inter-linking with the concepts of freedom, equality and frank, mutual celebration of existence. Kamala Das is no more with us now. She left for her heavenly abode on the last 31st of May, Two Thousand Nine. But whole of the literary world will remember her as a great original creative personality, a philosopher of freedom, a prophet of women’s emancipation and a poet going beyond religion,sex and social taboos. The present generation would certainly learn from her how to create art based on facts of life. Her departure has created a great void in the present context.
ReferencesKamala Das: Summer in Calcutta. New Delhi : Everest Press, 1965. Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: D.C. Book, 1996. my Story, New Delhi : Sterling Publisher, 1988. The Descendants. Calcutta : The Writers’ Workshop, 1973. Cixous, Helen. The Laugh of The Medusa: In New French Feminism. Harvestor: Brighton, 1976.Dodiya K. Jaydipsinh, Indian English Poetry Critical Perspectives, New Delhi : Swarup & Sons, 2000.Dwivedi, A.N. Indo-Anglian Poetry. Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1979. Dwivedi, A.N. Ka-mala Das and Her Poetry. Delhi: Doaba House, 1983.De Souza, Eunice. “Kamala Das” Osmania Journal of English Studies, Spl. No. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. Dept. of English, Osmania University; 1977: 1927. Greer,Germaine.The Female Eunuch. New York:McGraw-Book Company,1981. Iyengar, K.R.Srinivas. Indian Writing in English, 5th Ed. New Delhi: Sterling publisher Privet Limited, 1990.Satchidanandan, K. Preface. “Transcending the Body “. Only the Soul Knows How To Sing. By Kamala Das . Kottayam :DC Books,1996.9-18.
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.“Sexual Politics and Kamala Das “.Indian Women Novelists. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi :Prestige Books,1993.102-27. King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987,2001Kalia, Mamta. Tribute to Papa and Other Poems. Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop, 1974.Poems ’78 Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1978. “Breakthrough” Women Poets of India. Ed. Pranab Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta United Writers.1977. Macquarria, John, Existentialism Penguin Book, 1972.Nirmala, Mary. “Man-Woman relationship in Kamala Das and Sugathakunai.” K.V. Eng-lish Poetry: New Perceptions. New Delhi: Swarup & Sons, 2002. Pandey, Mithilesh K. “Kamala Das”: “A Study in Evolving Vision” Indian English Poetry: New Perspectives (ed.) K.V. Surendran, New Delhi: Swarup & Sons, 2002.Seshadri Vijaylakshmi, The New Woman in Indian–English to man continues Since the 1970s. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1995.
mAHAPATRA’S POETRY : A CRITICAL APPRAISAL
* Dr. R.P. Lokhande
Jayanta Mahapatra is one of India’s most modern poets writing in English. Mahapatra started writing poetry comparatively late in life, when he was in his early forties, and as if to make up for the late start, has published thirteen books of verse in the space of twenty years. This poet who had never been abroad until the age of forty-seven has published more regularly in some of the best journals of the West. In India, the critical attention was paid to his works when he won the Sahitya Akademi Award of 1981 for his long poem Relationship and earlier Jacob Glastein Memorial Award of 1975 for his poems published in Poetry, a distinguished Journal of Chicago, Mahapatra has spent all his life in Cuttack, Orissa. He likes to call it a rural place. He lives in the environs of temples and this too has bearing on his personality. His poems unfold the Oriyan landscape with its typical colour and character. The sounds of temple bells, the prayers of priests, the funeral pyres, whores and crows constituted by the land of Orissa become alive in his poetry. Like Keki N Daruwalla whose poetry derives its strength from the vast countryside * teaches English at Rajarshi Chhatrapati Shahu College, Kolhapur, Maha-
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of North India, Mahapatra does from the Cuttack landscape with its varied colours and contours in a highly personalized way. Mahapatra perceives Indian culture and social scene in the light of Christian and Hindu ethos while Daru-walla perceives it in a typical Indian way. The element of bi-culturalism always dominates Mahapatra’s psyche and it reflects in his perception of Indian scene. Due to this, the sense of alienation pervades in the mind of the poet. Surprisingly such a poet has not been discussed seriously. Although some reviews and pieces of criticism throw light on specific features of his poetry, they are mostly in the form of stray articles. Taken as a whole, the criti-cal corpus on Mahapatra’s poetry remains unimpressive and therefore in the present research article an attempt is made to provide a comprehensive critical statement on Mahapatra’s three verse collection, viz., Relationship (1980), Life Signs (1983) and Dispossessed Nests (1986). An attempt is also made to search for the frame-work of philosophy governing Mahapatra’s poetry.
The twelve part epic poem Relationship is analysed and the attempt is made to study experience of the past and the sense of rooted-ness, alienation, loneliness, guilt accompanied with it. The poet is very much conscious of the sense of the past and is confronted with a quest “Who am I?”. The involve-ment with ‘the self’ and ‘the society’ is the root of Mahapatra’s Relationship. The epigraph of this poem is derived from Walt Whitman’s title song Song of Myself. Mahapatra may not openly claim, as Walt Whitman does, that he is ‘large’ and that he ‘contains multitudes’. But the underlying current of this claim, the poet’s profound concern is with the community, the society to which he belongs is basic to Mahapatra’s quest. This sense of past is further clear when he says “the cry of a whole clan of people is on my back” (1983:15). This search for roots and the relationship with the past is the core of Relationship. Here, his concern is not for the contemporary scene but for an indefinite travel into the past to search for roots. At the same time we find evolution of the present through the past. It seems that his is a search for timeless existence. We find his ‘relationship’ with his rich culture, religion, rituals, traditions and myths of Orissa. All this is achieved through his dialogue with Konarka temple which is now in ruinous state. He finds centuries-old stones stir with life, and the living ‘marooned on the stone’. This is realised when he says: Once again one must sit back and bury the face in this earth of forbidding myth the phallus of the enormous stone (1982:9) The sense of the past gets keener and we find the poet trying to locate his roots firmly in the primeval stones, out of which have evolved the topsoil of modern Orissa with all kinds of organic life on it.
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Mahapatra recreates in his mind the scene of the building of the Sun-Temple in the eleventh century A.D. when about twelve hundred artisans and sculptors began work on that massive artistically designed, and beautiful structure. These artisans of stones were dreamers of dream and torch-bearers of tradition, lovers of legends and seekers of souls in stones. They were like ‘brown flowers in passion’ and the aerial roots of any ancient banyan tree which tell the story of their sacred land of the cruelties and the massacres which were perpetrated on her people - the great Kalingas war of 261 B.C. when King Ashoka won victory after a war full of bloodshed and large scale killings before he turned to the ways of peace. He then carved ‘peaceful edicts on Blood-red rock’. All this was trapped in the course of time. Only memories are alive. The poet is disturbed by the savageous past. Mahapatra identifies himself with the rich legacy - the Konark temple and interprets our existence in the context of the dreams of 1200 artisans realised in the form of the temple. Further, he recalls his famous ‘maritime ancestors’ who sacrificed their lives for the peace and prosperity of Orissa and who still are giving their mes-sage of peace to the present generation. But this maritime-power has vanished in the ‘Black Bay without a trace’. The race, once heroic and militant, has now left behind mere memory for its successors who are unworthy of keeping the glory of their ancestors afloat and have drifted away from their ideals. A sense of alienation hunts his mind. Mahapatra realises that the time has sealed off the rich culture of Oriyan land. In order to locate the grace of the past, Mahapatra is struggling to overcome the stumbling-block of time. He seeks “a prayer to draw my (his) body out of thousand years”. Naturally, the poet, like a solitary traveller on the Orissa coast, tries to grasp the brilliant “colours of the past in the ocean’s strange and bitter deeps” (10). Though he is torn by the sense of dispossession, isolation, he cannot deny the past tradition. Though the past is guilt-ridden, he apprehends his own origin through it. The recognition of his existence in and his Relationship with this tradition gets keener- and yet my existence lies in the stones which carry my footsteps from one day into another down to the infinite distance (11)Yet this awareness of his origin alone does not suffice; his questioning journey continues, back and forth, to know “whether the earth would let him find finally its mouth’’ (11), to know the spiritual reality of Orissa and its treasures, because he is conscious that the “stones were (are) my very own” and they embody within them the spirit of mother or goddess and he desires to know their deep meaning, their essence and truth.
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Section Four has a memorable hymn to Konarka temple or the civili-zation frozen on its stone. We find his ‘ancient love’ of gold nose-rings of the figures in the towering ruins of stone, of regal lions, of their breasts and arm-pits. But all this constitutes a sombre vision. He is left with a sense of loneliness, bitterness and sorrowfulness. This disfigured world is painful to Mahapatra. He tries to define himself in the context of it. But he confronts the brutal past and the sense of isolation haunting his mind again. Further, the sense of isolation makes him aware that these crumbled and cracked stones are the real essence of his origin. Mahapatra says that his existence is inseparable from the roots in the past. He agrees that his life-force is shaped by culture, tradition, myths and symbols of past. Though the past is sorrowful and bitter, he declares: I know I can never come alive If I refuse to consecrate at the altar of origins. (18)He reapprehends his relationship with the past. His discourse is with his cultural, historical and personal past. When he explores into the past his mind is filled with guilt, loneliness and alienation. Though he submits himself to the past and finds his own roots in it, his alto-gether painful experience. When we study the kind of psyche working behind this process, we find the element of bi-culturalism accompanying it. Mahapatra is oddly Christian. He is converted Christian but the rituals of Hindu culture no doubt have made a deep impress on his mind and this seems to provide impetus to bi-culturalistic confrontation. His rationalist mind rejects the Hindu God behind the myth and people following myths. He finds myth as an evilsome element associated with Hindu God. The search for “Who am I?” is complete after many confrontations and questions. Hence in Relationship, the sense of alienation and the sense of rootedness develop side by side. We find that the sense of bi-culturalism makes Mahapatra insider as well as outsider and his rationalist mind also on the other hand operates to shape his consciousness. Some Indian ctirics say, ‘Relationship is product of non-linear and fragmented experiences. There is no new realisation as such in it’. But this is not true. Though there are non-linear and fragmented experiences, there is a sort of unity of vision working behind it. The poem is an attempt of the poet’s sustained effort at an integrated experience. Experiences are more authentic and bring to notice that man’s psyche gets shape only because of the influences of the past. And when the roots in the past are confirmed one can proceed further. To search for roots is nothing but the search for existence of the self matters and Mahapatra’s Relationship must be read in this light. The poem is a psychic reliving of one’s imagined origins.
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Relationship has many epic-like characteristics such as ‘sublime’ manner of speech, heightened diction and long sentences, an introductory announcement of its theme, an invocation of the muse, and its division like most epics in twelve parts. It is a modern long poem concerned with the self’s relationship to kinds of historical materials which have in the past been the basis and culture of the epic. The epic traditionally is objective in the sense that the artist is at a distance from the material. In Relationship, however, such distinctions collapse as the narrative is the poet’s attempt to regain the materials of an epic culture through a dream like pilgrimage. There are a few linking narrative connections. After the spiritual quest in the past, the poet moves towards the pres-ent - the present scene of the Cuttack land. The different situations in life are depicted in Life Signs. Every poem is a sign of life and lists the suffering of man on the level of sex, hunger, starvation, drought, religion and intellect. When he deals with social reality, he is more ironic and points out the truth behind it. The poet records every life sign in Cuttack and the suffering of the man located as the centre of it. The Cuttack scene opens with a sense of anguish. The women in or-der to earn their livelihood, engage themselves in repairing and making roads in Cuttack. They have to work hard under the hot eye of the sky, sweating all over their bodies. such a painful sight makes it impress on the poet’s mind – it sharply wails. Even in the bright sun This was world I did not know (1983:39)lrony is the constant attendant of the poet. His attempt to introspect is also an attempt to satirize and mock his society. The sufferings of working women oc-cupy major portion of the poems of Mahapatra. This is noticeable every now and then. The - Sweat smell of woman walking quietly by with a market basket of bananas on her head (43)points out the hopeless economy of India, sucking their marrow. Prostitution is a great social evil. While pointing out how love is degraded to sex, he comments on wild nature of male sensuality. The dryness and futility of an intercourse with a prostitute come alive in – The plump whore he has just left has brazanly gone to work on a new customer (18)Prostitution is a way of livelihood for the ill-fated women and they have to
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to it for-ever. Prostitution is the child their suffering and they have to nurse it, rely on it for their existence. The rape of fourteen year old girl by a priest’s son behind the temple and the cruel rape of the same girl by four constable further suggest the corrupting influences in the administrative set up and defines the corruption rampant in the country – her father found her at the police station assaulted over and again by four policemen (26)The corrupt administrative set-up and lawlessness figure in another. It is a custom of this society to set killers and rapists free. This and many such other social vices are now becoming the signs of life. The everyday paper is full of such signs. Before the morning paper comes I know that Lata’s rapists and killers have been set free (47)The poet is very much conscious of the diseased world, and the signs of such a world are close at his hand. On grieving pout of earth footprints of diseased hollow-cheeked children (9)The Cuttack landscape provides the signs of starvation and poverty too. The Government’s inability to provide is also hinted at. But the people continue to live nostalgically further remembering the tales of the age-old myths. The horrors and realities around make sensitive person aware of his position and his being helpless in the face of such circumstances and hence question follows – Here is my world, and it makes me dream as a child yet why do I wear myself out feeling for the girls who die before their breasts are swollen with milk ? (29) Mahapatra’s has so many queries to make about the fruitfulness of religious activities being conducted throughout this country. Human suffering receives no remedies through the constant devotion of the God in the temples. But for centuries together the same for the God, the same heartful worship continues undefied. Mahapatra is puzzled by this human tendency and so makes a sharp ironical comment : tamed temple god, this river sluggish centuries curled away from its bone (6)with sea, the pictures of fishermen also come alive in his poetry. Mahapatra is aware of the poor, helpless life of the fishermen. He points it out the context
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the fruitlessness of the religious practices. He sees the temple and broken huts of fishermen and comments that temples are weak and dreamy to mitigate social evil like poverty. Here he challenges the religious activities, practices and the power of the god and points out the ruins in life. Fisherman’s broken shacks by the river let even starlight slip out from their weak roofs A temple stands frail and still in the distance, as though lost in reverie (2) The Solar Eclipse is a natural phenomenon, but the Indians observe fast on that day. The poet comments on this blind religious belief and its social implication. The solar eclipse described in the poem offers the ‘new image’ of night for the animals like hyena. This new image of the night is the night of the superstition that has baffled the Indians for centuries together. What only these men would let come through precious paschal fast, dire superstition. (21)starvation and hunger are the issues of social discrimination and unequal-ity. The Asian countries are haunted most by it and the human suffering is at its apex. The country and its politicians respond to this grave situation in a stranger-like way and hence, deaths and diseases are in full progress on earth and in the country like India. They are the all-time evils of the universe and hence ‘hyenas are aware of the dying countryside around them.’ Mahapatra is conscious of the diseased and disfigured world around him. He has much to say about the world of lepers. They are generally seen squatting on stone steps of ghats and the temples. They are social out-casts, hence the sad plight. And this is the world, a part of the social world which Mahapatra fails to know even in the bright sun. the mangled lepers will shuffle along going home their helpless looks (39)The politics of the country is responsible for the tragic realities that encircle the common man. Mahapatra finds that we are living in highly politicised era today. He records the political treat in – The day stands like a mature prime-minister (41)Mahapatra thinks that the country insults itself through the high sounding speeches of its representatives. Corruption, pretence, deception, infidelity, lawlessness, superstitions all weave a snare in which a country is mercilessly drawn. This awareness engenerates silence in the poet. I pick up the morning newspaper and see how a nation goes on Insulting itself
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When he records his observation about a whore house that unmistakably appears in the poem “Morning Signs”, he comments on the beast-like male sensuality there in it. The poem also records other signs of the morning which aim at defining the disordered, disjoined social atmosphere. The morning signs are not pleasant ones; they are painful, nasty, disgusting. The poem “In the Fields of Desolate Rice” depicts ruinous aspect of social life. It describes the ‘desolate rice field’ as well as ‘desolate social field’. It is a comment on the sad plight of the people and the country groping in unabated darkness of uncertainty. When Mahapatra talks about Cuttack, his tone is bitter and painful. His is an attempt to understand social dilemma of the land and the place of common man in it. This land of Cuttack is contaminated by twentieth century diseases like corruption, dishonesty and disintegration. The poet is not only conscious about the contemporary life signs but also the life signs which have shaped his own life. On the one hand there is social involvement and on the other personal. The personal, historical and cultural past dominates a large portion of the poetry of Mahapatra. This looking back into the past is a type of quest for his roots, accomplished on the ironical plane. The poet expresses his deep concern for the lost glory of the sea. He contemplates the wretched condition of the sea at Chandipur and is nostalgiacally reminded of its glory. The sea smell scatters in his mind and takes him to the past. It tells of the songs that are to ‘baffle’ and double the space around our lives. It also tells about the women bidding good-bye to their men. The music and glory at Chandipur sea is now lost, and hence a matter of great regret for the poet. The fishermen’s songs were once the glorious music, now the fishermen only cry and that is harsh and unpleasant to the ears. He expresses his anguish as- Stretched arms to clutch the silence of my being (7)Many times the poet is caught in the childhood memories. He tries to trace the ‘Life signs’ he has got from his father. He wants to escape from his father’s beliefs but in reality he has met the specter of belief. And hence the fact is that he is the true son of his father echoing his voice ‘wearily from bone to bone’ Mahapatra recalls his grandfather and traces his life. It is an attempt to search himself, he says, You are an invisible piece on a board whose move has made our children grow, to know us (20) Driven by huger, the poet’s grandfather, Chintamani Mahapatra em-braced Christianity during the devastating famine that struck Orissa in 1866. With sense of agony and disgust, the poet directs his volley of questions to his grandfather. The poet rightly asks –
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What did faith matter ? what Hindu world so ancient and true for you to hold ? (18)Through natural objects, he traces the voices of his dead grandfather. The past memories present the conflict between the two life forces, one of the grandfather and other the young grand – son. The weary thump of my dead grandfather’s heart following me where the wind breaks water (28)Like Kamala Das’s grandfather, Jayanta Mahapatra’s grandfather is a dominant figure in his family poems. ‘Snakes’ is about Bhopal gas-tragedy. The poems under these two titles do not suck their energy from the veins of real life, but they explore the theoretical contexts of the Punjab and Bhopal events. The idea of terrorism and how it has brought violence and fear in the life of common man in Punjab is a dazzling account. The world of terrorism is the world of bomb-blast, killing, death, curfew and this is the lot of the common man. And the poems one after another underline this social violence and destruction. The various layers of terrorism and its fear is noticeable in the poems - 1,2,4,5,6,7,8, 9,10. The very ‘possession’ of man is threatened by terrorism and heinous killings. Human destruction confirms the dispossession of nests as in: This is the last explosion We hope and a wait How we wonder in the mind’s expanding nova the dispossessed nests (1986:23) The dominance of antisocial elements is responsible for the dispos-session of man in Punjab. The series of bomb-blast leads to destruction and dispossession of man on social, moral and cultural level. Every explosion marks the dispossession and disintegration of men in the country. The psychological and material dispossession also figures in these poems. The land of Punjab is the land of suffering humanity. The socio-political systems have brought this fate to the people. We find the administrative sys-tem careless about the suffering of widow whose husband were shot-dead by terrorists. A lonely woman is standing in the queue for her sustenance allow-ance. This brings out the callousness of the Government that compels widow in queue for sustenance allowance. Mahapatra records the anguish of widow as the voice of the lonely woman standing in the queue for her sustenance allowance
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(her husband shot dead by terrorists last month) a voice which the roar of the Minister’s jet cuts short. (24) It is the duty of the Government to support the people who become the victims of antisocial elements. In Punjab, the fate of window is tragic one. They have to struggle for sustenance allowance by standing in the queue. This is more heart rending and wretched one. The poet points out that the agonised minds of widows are made more agonised by the political decisions. The evil nature of the administrative set-up and its callousness is recorded here. How ‘living’ is unbearable for the old in Punjab finds expression in - And the old man whom I call father slowly opens his month to swallow the spoonfuls of glucose being fed to him I have been watching him lie in his bed for every two years now (24) The ‘living’ for old and widows is worthless. It seems that they are gasp-ing for breath, they are on the brink of death. The picture of the old, disabled, supportless people affected by the horrors of terrorism rampant in Punjab then drawn by the poet well defines ‘Punjab’ of the time. The humanity suffers with the threat of ‘MuIti-National’ companies, the betrayal of political leaders and meets its tragic destination. This is the central concern of Mahapatra in these poems. The Bhopal gas-tragedy and the victims of it is the subject of some poems. Some poems are about corrupt political leaders, and socio-political crisis in the country. The concern for the Bhopal gas-tragedy is to point out the attitude of the multinational companies towards the lives of common man. When this mishap occurred thousands were gasping for breath - small, young and old met the same fate - the death. The tone of the poems in general is morose and elegiac. Mahapatra reflects upon the corrupt political leaders here. He is talking about the ‘Sinister shadow’ of the ‘minister’, with the ‘dark power’ in the ‘merciful sun’ such is the country and political world is left behind for young generation (Poem 28). The corrupt political leaders image forth as ‘the tall dark mountain’ (Poem 20) and their at-titude “with India our India, barely worth raping” (Poem 20). This political decay, negligence makes Mahapatra weary. Their very tendency, he catches as “The taste that comes of our Ieaders/shirking and questions of peoples existences” (Poem 20). He is not talking about the Punjab problem or not giving any journalistic information about Bhopal gas-tragedy. But his is a concern for human suffering imposed by anti-social elements. His inner-self shapes the outer reality, and brings out the human predicament effectively. The terrorism has turned the
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dignity. Every poem in a serious tone, depicts the large, unabating violence on the one hand and the meak submission and helpless acceptance of it by the common man on the other. The horror of supreme knives and bomb-blasts leads to disintegration of humanity. The very Wheatfield which has flourished the mind and body of the Punjab is now habitated by dead bodies of people, and the endless cries. The poems one after the other record the inflicted fear of terrorism in the mind of people. The very existence and possession of man is challenged. Though there is no direct reference to Punjab problem in some poems there is a slight reference to ‘the concept of ‘Khalistan’ ‘ , ‘an enormous pathological dream of ‘Dharma’ ‘. These poems can be studied in the context of Punjab problem or the predicament of man in the socio-political set up. The poems about Bhopal gas-tragedy are concerned with human suf-fering and how man is alone in his struggle with social elements, accepting his lot without any excuse. Mahapatra records the pains of gas-victimised people in the most poignant way. The man behind the gas, gasping for breath is the anguish of Mahapatra. He finds human relationship with it. Mahapatra under-lines the mute suffering of humanity in the hands of social elements setting up such plants and showing the least concern for the victimised and the utmost concern for the commercial profits. Mahapatra also probes into the world of politics to point out how it is degraded and stranger to the well being of the people. Mahapatra’s is a very harsh tone about political leaders and to describe them he uses the image of ‘dark’, ‘dark power’, ‘dark mountain’. He is very ironical about political leaders and the fate of the country. He underlines the evil fate of politics and political leaders and with it the endless suffering of community. His satirical and ironical reflection points out the values of politicised region and commercialised politics. The Dispossessed Nests is the cry of humanity at the sight of destruction, violence, and suffering. Some other themes emerging from its poetry need to be examined. His major bulk of poetry has religious background - the background of temples, priests, myths, rituals and rites. His Relationship and Life Signs have this background. There are hundreds of temples in Orissa. Mahapatra lives in the environ of these temples. Then the question arises whether he is a religious person or what? The answer to this question can be had in his interview with Norman Simms (1986:292), where he clearly explains, “I don’t think, I am a religious person in the way most Indians are. Frankly, I am not”. Hence though Indian philosophy may have coloured and shaped his inwardness he is far away from being religious. His poems do not deliver any religious philosophy. His rationalist mind confronts with religious rituals. When he sees the funeral rites, traditional customs in the area of temples and rivers
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questions himself ‘what inner needs provide religion?’. The colourful religious practices, rituals contrasted with our indifference to human suffering and misery makes Mahapatra uneasy. He finds that religion has not provided any effective and adequate antidote to human suffering. In a letter to Kazuka Shiraish in Tokyo he writes ‘our gods must seem as indifferent and amor-phous as the winds to human misery and sorrow though we are known to be the most spiritual of nations in the world’ (Tarinayya 1985:Vol.20). Irony is the major device in the poetry of Mahapatra. His mediative mind shapes the ideas through irony. There is a built-in irony in his poetry but it is mute, subtle and spread over a long passage so that it never really develops a sting. The use of irony is to point out the hidden truth and Mahapatra is the poet of ‘truth’. The ironical treatment of subject matter of poems evinces that Maha-patra is in a search of unity in life. His is a search for betterment in life, for dignity of man in society, for human relationship. Human dignity and rationalistic approach are the ‘basics’ of Mahapatra’ s poetry. He wants to free the man from spiritual and intellectual fear. His is a healthy approach towards life. He has empathy for suffering. Suffering is the master current in his poetry and it comes vibratingly alive in Relationship, Life Signs, and Dispossessed Nests. More than any other Indian English poet, Mahapatra depends upon resources of the unconscious and his unconscious would seem to connect more than most with collective unconscious of India. Mahapatra’s poetry has some lapses. His poems deliver images one after another and it becomes difficult for the reader to draw proper meaning. Frequently, we come across similar themes. He often jumbles up numerous ideas in a poem whose structure defies them. He frequently gets bemused by the language and this results in his failure to create the proper perspective. His is a poetry of non-comment. Images shape the subject matter. It is on the readers to draw the meaning out of the content. In a sense it is a modern poetry. Mahapatra’s poetry is over-loaded with images. The subject unfolds through images. He draws images from nature, body and inanimate things. A skilful practitioner of the montage technique, he paints image “highly evoca-tive and hunting” (1986:90) through the ingenious collections of familiar words which help him to achieve a remarkable effectiveness not possible otherwise. He uses symbols to express his ‘inexpressible’. His symbols could be classi-fied as: silence, sunlight, dawn, water, sky, moon, rain, temple, beggar, priest, fisherman, crow etc. It profits a little to divide Mahapatra’s poetry according to the con-ventional ‘form’ of sonnet, lyric, ballad etc. As almost all his poems are simply
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scenes, there is impressive number of poems which cannot conform to any particular ‘form’. So far as the metrical form is concerned, Mahapatra writes mostly iambic and trochaic forms and rarely in anapaestic form. Though rhyme-scheme is there in his poetry it is blank verse which is predominant throughout. He like most of the Indian English poets writes in free verse. Mahapatra himself acknowledges that “I’d like to write free verse, if that is verse at all, and I realise academics do not think so” (Qtd. Norman Simms 1986:294). In his Relation-ship and Life Signs we find the use of free flowing of lines. Mahapatra handles his craft with an unusual care, sincerity and dexter-ity. He evinces a deep aesthetic concern for both structure as well as linguistic versatility revealing maturity and originality of remarkably high order. His is a distinctively unsentimental voice, now conversational, now dramatic, now lyrical, now prosaic, now questioning, now searching but always strikingly unpretentious and powerful - as his poems are vivid pictures, scenes of reality. Mahapatra’s Indian sensibility is more vital than any other Indian English poet. He is the only poet in Indian writing in English whose poetic stuff is wedded with Indian tradition, myth, culture and symbols. He lives in the environ of temples and it seems that his sensibility is shaped and coloured by the multitudes of temples. In his poems, there are the sounds of temple bells, the prayers of priests, the funeral pyres, whores and crows constituted by the land of Orissa. Thus the Oriyan ethos is the soul of his poetry and the sensibil-ity. K.A. Panikar (Vol. 13:129) observes it as ‘The sun of the eastern coast of India shines through his poems’. His Indianness is seen at its best in his poem about Orissa, where local and regional is raised to the level of the universal. His Relationship is a hymn on Konarka temple. Here we find Maha-patra’s ‘Relationship’ with his rich culture, myth and tradition. In Life Signs, the Cuttack scene comes vibratingly alive. The social milieu of Cuttack is the concern of Mahapatra. Indian sensibility gets realised in the poems such as: “The Captive Air of Chandipur - on - sea”, “Evening Landscape by the River”, “Autumn”, “Life Signs”, “Total Solar Eclipse”, “The Lost Children of America”, “A Country”, “June”, etc.. Thus the smell of Oriyan landscape scatters in his poems. The poems in Dispossessed Nests are the direct reference to socio-political scene and reality in 1984. Indian sensibility is vital and authentic in his poems. To conclude, Mahapatra is a great poet of Indian writing in English today. The themes depicted in his poetry define the Indian mind and culture and present the image of India on the one hand and the superb handling of them in words and phrases of rare value and sense speaks of Mahapatra’s rich mind and his wider Indian sensibility on the other. His poetry is sharp cry at
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existence in relation to suffering and to make a search for a possibility of its betterment.
References1. Mahapatra, Jayanta. 1982. Relationship. Cuttack: Chandrabhaga Society (First Indian edition).2. Life Signs. Delhi:OUP. 19833. Dispossessed Nests. Jaipur:Nirala Publication. 19864. Simms, Norman. 1986. ‘A Conversation with Jayanta Mahapatra’. The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra : A Critical Study. ed. Madhusadan Prasad. New Delhi : Sterling Publishers.5. Tarinayya, M. 1985. “Jayanta Mahapatra’s ‘A Letter to Kazuka Shiraishi in Tokyo’ – An analysis”. In The Literary Ctiterion. Vol. 20.6. Prasad, Madhusadan. 1986. “Caught in the currents of Time : A study in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra”. In Contemporary Indo-English Verse. ed. A.N. Dwivedi. Bareilly : Prakash Book Depot.7. Panikar, K. A. “The Poetry of Jayanta Mahaparta”. Osmania Journal of English Studies. Vol. 93.
The Black Woman’s Search for Selfhood in Alice Walk-er’s Possessing the Secret of Joy
* Mrs. S. Shakila Sheriff
Alice Walker examines in her fiction the black women’s search for selfhood through an analysis of the individual’s relationship to the community. In Walker’s novels, the black women’s struggle to claim their selves, in order to change their lives and secure a rightful place within the social network of relationships they themselves constitute, usually absorbs the psychic pain involved in such a struggle and shatters the iron bars of gender which limit self-empowerment. The author herself explains: “I believe in ... a willing ac-ceptance of responsibility for one’s thoughts, behavior and actions that makes it powerful. The white man’s oppression of me will never excuse my oppression of you, whether you are man, woman, child ... because the self I prize refuses to be owned by him. Or by anyone”.* teaches English at K.S.R. College of Arts & Sciences, Dist. Namakkal, Tamil Nadu, India.
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The African woman Tashi is the protagonist of Possessing the Secret of Joy ,which explores the complex web of relationships between pain (ritual) and womanhood (resistance), and shows how, in the process of forging female selfhood, the struggle forces the need to change the ritual. This paper discusses the psychological impact of the ritual of female circumcision on Tashi—our protagonist. In America as Adam’s wife, Tashi reminisces on her African experience. Even though Olivia tells her not to go to the ritual, Tashi wants to undergo geni-tal mutilation, and also, have a scar (tribal sign) marked on her face. Both are painful, but they are the signifiers of her idiosyncratic African identity—the only thing that Whites failed to erase in the Africans’ lives: “We had been stripped of everything but our black skins. Here and there a defiant cheek bore the mark of our withered tribe. These marks gave me courage. I wanted such a mark for myself,” says Tashi, “My people had once been whole, pregnant with life.” Tashi has never forgotten how her favorite sister Dura bled to death during the ritual, without even having the right to voice her agony.The unvoiced pain still troubles Tashi now Evelyn Johnson in the United States—in her ter-rifying dreams, to the degree that she tries to mutilate herself in her sleep—a subconscious act to share Dura’s pain—to be rid of the guilt of having been unable to reach out and help her. Later, while in Switzerland, Tashi has a breakdown after seeing pea-cocks in a film Old Man ,Lisette’s uncle—shows. Tashi is unable to deal with the horror that genital mutilation evokes in her. She responds by painting cocks; by painting a huge peacock on the wall, exhausting the space available and forcing open the boundaries of imagination. Her psychological tension, which she expresses as ‘Emotions that had frightened me insane’, has reached such an enormous proportion that she cannot control it: once the repressed pain and fear rise to the surface of her conscious mind, Tashi, conditioned by the taboo not to verbalize pain, and yet compelled to vent open her feelings, can only deal with them through a non-verbal medium. Tashi’s attempt to preserve, through the ritual, what is African in her destroyed her sexuality. Lisette, Adam’s friend and mistress, seems to have kept what Tashi has lost in pain, since she enjoys her womanhood without physical/emotional pain. Perhaps this is why Tashi stones Pierre, Lisette’s son from Adam, born out of wedlock in France, in order to prevent his entrance to their home. Tashi’s jealousy makes her open with her duplicate key Adam’s hidden drawer and read Lisette’s letters. Tashi ends up experiencing a very difficult pregnancy and having an equally difficult time giving birth to Benny.Incapacitated for a long time by the circumcision, “the hidden scar” between her legs, she has always heard in her ears Dura screaming.
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Tashi’s psychological tension, along with her failure to forget Dura’s screams and death, lead her to the point of murdering M’Lissa, the aged circumciser of the Olinka Village, now also in the New World. As M’Lissa explains, before Tashi kills her, she herself was destroyed by the ritual and limped throughout her life. She is not the only person guilty of causing young girls’ pain and death, she says, because Tashi’s mother also held Dura down as she circumcised her. M’Lissa’s own mother—a circumciser as well—used to hide a black clay smiling female doll touching her genitals, an image of a woman who enjoys sex, in the bark of a tree in the forest. Transforming her individual act and need of embracing her repressed womanhood into a ritual itself, the mother circumcised M’Lissa lightly to maintain her daughter’s right to enjoy sex, but to no avail. Noticed by other women who took over, M’Lissa’s circumcision was finalized in great pain. Yet, even though M’Lissa herself is as much a victim of the ritual as Tashi and Dura are, she still believes in its validity, convinced that it is performed. Her conception that the pain a woman feels in preserving and transmitting the tradition is insignificant runs contrary to Tashi’s personal experience: What causes Tashi’s loss of self-control, however, and make her commit the murder. When Tashi is jailed, during her trial, her family helps take care of the patients in the prison hospital. The male patients voice experiences correspond-ing to that of Tashi. A day before her execution, Tashi’s need to write to Lisette, now dead, is her need to communicate with Adam through her—to reach out to the woman she herself could have been, if not for the ritual.
In forcing herself to go through the ritual, Tashi manages to preserve her racial identity at the expense of her gender identity. Since she does not have the power to destroy the ritual, she destroys the agent—M’Lissa, who is, ironically, another victim. In ancient times, women’s blood was sacred, leading priests to smear it on their foreheads to symbolize the “rebirth: the birth of the spirit”, and allowing women freedom of movement: the ‘early African woman, the mother of womankind, was notoriously free!’. Tashi’s wish to wear a red dress, commemorating the color of the earlier African woman’s sacred blood, to inherit her freedom, makes her re-connect with a past, devoid of racial/gender oppression—a protest, but also a celebration that men do not realize. In response to a white colonialist author’s racist remark—’Black people are natural, they possess the secret of joy, which is why they can survive the suf-fering and humiliation inflicted upon them, other women along with her family re-define and celebrate the true secret of black people’s joy with the words written on the banner: “RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!”. Tashi’s joy in celebrating her resistance is marked in her refusal to be blindfolded during
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execution, for she wants to look at the sky—the symbol of freedom—to capture “that moment as eternity”. In contrast to M’Lissa who has been victimized by a ritual she in turn uses to “victimize” others, and who refuses to struggle against a tradition that cripples women, Tashi resists the ritual, enacts her struggle against the op-pressor, by halting M’Lissa, the executor of the myth. Even though murder is a negative version of liberation, Tashi shows her courage to change a situation that prevents the African female-self from blossoming into wholeness. Tashi’s destruction of M’Lissa presents the case that women should not continue “de-stroying” the joy and pride of womanhood in an attempt to serve the masculinist myth sanctioning the lack of female self-empowerment. Tashi’s execution is mythical in the sense that her act of resistance, to a tradition that stifles her wholeness, creates the true freedom of the self. Tashi dies in peace, with no M’Lissa left behind to kill another Dura “screaming her ter-ror eternally into her own ear”. Tashi’s dying is not only a spiritual transcendence of the life-long pain she endures, but is also a forceful act of claiming the right to inherit the dignity and self-empowerment of the early African women. It is an attempt to capture the ancient African women’s life as the unvoiced resistance to the destruction of female selfhood—an act that demands courage. In dying, Tashi reconciles herself to the ancient African women’s vision of freedom. In all her novels, Alice Walker examines black women’s struggle, the courageous fight they put up against a racist and sexist society that stifles their growth towards selfhood and wholeness. The struggle in and of itself requires the need to reach an understanding of the racial past, as a meaningful part of the present, in order to redeem the self. Moreover, developing a conscious-ness to inherit the black heritage renews the black woman’s sense of race and place, expanding her vision into a larger world. Celie, in The Color Purple, re-visualizes the sense of female community to find her true self; Tashi, in Pos-sessing the Secret of Joy, literally lifts the African women to the level of history, which has long “circumcised” their identity from its memory. She attempts to redefine the community of African women who have endured the “mutilation” of their gender identity in order to protect what lies at the root of their spiritual and racial heritage—the Afrocentric self.
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LITERARY RELATION AND AESTHETIC APPRECIATION
* Ms. D. Jalaja
The study of literature is the study of man’s struggles and aspirations. It is the accomplishment of the dream of man. One effect of the study is to enable man to develop an analytical and critical mind. Literature records all types of human experience, experience of all ages, of every degree of intensity. Some records of human experience do not last a week. They are written and forgotten. Some records last for hundreds of years and are read with increasing delight and questioning spirit. They have become literature. Literature is the mirror of life and its objective is to inspire man to lead a purposeful life. Psy-chologists like Freud have interpreted literature in the light of various theories of psychology. Literature or art reflects the repressed person in his writing. The purpose of any art is for enjoyment & edification. Our enjoyment of beauty and value of art is what we call aesthetic experience. These values are bound up with life. Literature for the creative mind stands on the same plane as dream for the common man. Thus, literature is the lengthened shadow of the writer. The invisible man becomes visible in his work of art. A man has to be a member of society and discharge his duties as a house holder and citizen. He has to acquire wealth, gratify his legitimate desires and at the same time practise virtue. Since remote ages, it has been the faith of the people that life is not an idle dream nor a tale told by an idiot but that it is towards self-realization. The word “Discipline” comes from “dis-ciple”, a learner, pupil or follower of a teacher and it means proper training. A disciple puts himself under a teacher to be trained and taught. Therefore the first lesson we learn from our study of any literature is obedience. The next lesson is how to behave, how to form good habits and how to avoid wrong and unbecoming conduct. Each of us has to learn how to govern and rule oneself; how to control passions, resist evil desires and obey one’s conscience. Literature teaches man the secret of happiness. In unselfishness, kindness to others, a clean mind, a clear conscience and an upright life --- in these lies the secret of happiness. Milton in the Paradise Lost says: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can Make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” Relation to literature and its aesthetic appreciation can be experienced in all the works of literature. The aesthetic approach to God in the Tamil verses of Andal is alluring. In the Thiruppavai, Andal enlightens humanity in her* teaches English at Govt. Arts College, Salem, Tamil Nadu, India.
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spontaneous outpourings such as one should not talk ill of the others. If we think of God with a pure heart, He will destroy all the evil elements in and around us. She also teaches us to live united so that the lord will be pleased very much and grant all our wishes. The hymns sung by Manikkavasagar constitute the eighth saiva canon. There is a saying that those who do not melt to Thiruvasagam will melt to no words. The world renowned Tamil Poet Thiruvalluvar’s golden couplets serve a beacon light to mankind for leading an exemplary life. In John Keats’ Ode on a grecian Urn, the Grecian Urn with its inscrip-tions and figures constitute the diverse experience derived by the poet, ranging from the sense of satisfaction to that of withdrawal and doubt. When ultimately the poet tries to effect the union between the timeless and the temporal and presents the message provided by the Urn that “beauty” & “truth” are identical, what is experienced is the calmness, in which the mind experiences perfect equanimity. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”. The unheard melodies are sweeter, because they necessitate free play of imagination and ensure ininterrupted communication. The music played by the piper carved out on the Urn represents perfection, since it is in a position to satisfy the soul.
Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” was hailed as one of the finest dra-matized mediations on man, nature and beauty. The opening verse “My heart aches”, may allude to the pain that may partly arise from an excess or an over intensity of joy, which is emphasized with the use of “drowsy numbness” which, if unusually pleasurable, can produce pain. This is a paradoxical point. In the Ode the nightingale becomes the symbol and sign of the consolation of beauty amid the sadness of life. A lover of literature will be extermely happy to find God’s plenty in it. Wordsworth’s poem glorifies nature as the best teacher in the following lines: “One impulse from the vernal wood, May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can”. These lines also provide food for thought. It is left to mankind to decide whether we need afforestation or deforestation. Even a simple phenomenon, when viewed with heightened awareness can unfold new avenues of learning. Every moment, every encounter, every activity and every experience has within it an unspoken message. There is
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We learn from literature that prayer is powerful. More things can be wrought by prayer than the world dreams of. Knowing this we should pray to God for one another and that is the best way to distinguish ourselves from beasts. It is wise to forgive the erring human. Dreaming is inherent in human nature. When dreams are realised, they create no pain. But when dreams are not realised, they create suffering. In the case of the artist, it is the creative agony that haunts the artist till he has exercised his haunting dream into the creative art. Thus art or literature is the life-blood of the author and live-wire of the reader.
SUBALTERN SEXUALITIES IN THE PLAYS Of mAHESH DATTANI
* Dr. Ibrahim Khalilulla, M.
The term ‘Subaltern’ applied to those of ‘Inferior rank’, commonly refers to the perspective of person from regions and groups outside of the hegemonic power structure. The exact meaning of the term in current philosophical and critical usage is disputed. Some thinkers use it in a general sense to refer to marginalized groups and the lower classes. By ‘Subaltern’ Spivak meant the oppressed subjects. In the early 1980’s, a collective effort of intellectuals, known as Subaltern Studies Group, started a systematic attempt to study the general attribute of subordination expressed in terms of class, age, gender, sex or any other way. Spivak concluded that subalterns are forced to maintain silence against oppression and injustice. The entire terrain of postcolonial literary appreciation became an unpleasant babel of subaltern voices. Identities are created by difference, exclusion and particular violence. It is the struggle of the powerless against the powerful and privileged with those historically denied which has created identities and the demand for rights-human, social, legal, cultural and political. Although questions of identity have been of historical significance in the Indian polity, the questions have acquired a certain critical urgency in recent years. After the upper caste/class agitations over the Mandal Commission report and the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu right wing fundamentalists, the differences in citizenships that were vis-ible have vehemently demanded a new understanding of questions of identity and locations.
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In another, mapping the politics of the present, questions raised around ‘sexual-ity’ and particularly ‘alternative sexuality’ have occupied a significant space in the public realm. In delineating the public realm, both the direct visibility of the queer subject in public spaces as well as to the references and depiction of queerness in the news media, on television and in cinema register memorable mention. Since the late 1980s, there have been several stories in the news media on same-sex relationships/marriages, and while most of these reports seem to represent queer issues, this site remained somewhat marginalized. In the 1990s the themes of queer identity and relationship were presented with films such as Fire (1998), Darmiyan (1996) and Tamanna (1996), which discussed alternative and non-heterosexual identities. While Fire focused on lesbian subjects, sometimes producing mobilizations and sometimes strength-ening and visually enabling the lesbian identity politics and movements, Darmi-yan and Tamanna articulated the otherwise visible ‘hijjra’ subject hitherto an object of heterosexual ridicule in a non-stereotypical manner. The realities of the non-normative experiences- i.e., gender identities, sexual practices, sexual identities, culturally sanctioned forms of erotic behaviour- which contest the embedded nature of hetrosexism in our society are all come under the category called “queer”. So queer resistance is about questioning the fundamental as-sumptions of our society. Queer resistance takes different forms: an alternative reading of a mainstream Bollywood film, publicly holding the hand of someone you love, coming out to friends and family, living one’s chosen sex/gender, embracing one’s body and one’s pleasure often in defiance of the ideas of how ‘manly’ men and ‘feminine’ women should live, protesting against instances of exclusion or violence, or simply existing in a daily-lived resistance that protests the hypocrisy of silence around the desires and needs of a community. Theatre is not a mute and mechanical representation of social dynamics but it is a lively representation of social dynamics and the voices resounding in context of totality of human experience that consciously or unconsciously effect the existing dynamics of human sensibility. Mahesh Dattani, one of the exponents of modern Indian drama, thematically shows about the areas where the individual feels exhausted. Dattani in the process of engineering the current of Indian drama by bringing it closer to the real life experiences tried to articulate the voice of the oppressed sections of the society whose identity is shrouded in the cover of myths and social prejudices. They have been dragged in dark-ness, doomed to survive in perpetual silence bearing the oppressive burden of the hegemony of the elitist class. Dattani within the framework of dramatic structure, tries to investigate the identities of those who occupy no space in social order. The social awareness, social discrimination in the name of religion, humiliation of humanity in the aroma of social pride, irrational
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sacrificing the ethical code based on human love, are brought to the stage through the dramatic vision of Dattani. The social conventions often hamper the growth of individual and do not acknowledge the call of human love. The perpetual clash of the commitments of an individual for social order and the force of personal derives makes life intolerable. Dattani with the fine balance of stage and performance imparts an exceptional vehemence to such situations. In the traditional society of India, the identity of gays, lesbians, hijjras and homosexuals has not yet been organized. Dattani dramatizes the crisis of those relationships that are not rigidly demarcated in terms of socially ac-cepted gender constructions. All his works so far-plays, films, screenplays, focus on the marginalized entity. Mahesh Dattani is responsible for successfully launching the Indian theatre in English. The plays of Mahesh Dattani emerged as ‘fresh arrival’ in the domain of Indian English drama in the last decade of the twentieth century. The plays retain rich ‘Contemporary’ value. Mahesh Dattani recreates life to the bone, dealing with gender issues; he is a spokesperson of all sexually subaltern people (gays, lesbians, hijjras and homosexuals). His plays Seven Steps Around the Fire, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, Do the Needful reveals the hypocrisy of heterosexual society. Dattani’s play Seven Steps Around the Fire represents the voice of eunuch community who are not even allowed to show their faces in public. The play deals with the violence inflicted on the hijjras, who are unseen and unheard in the society. The play express the identity crisis of the hijjras and their heart-felt longing for being treated as a social being in an indifferent society where people like the government minister seldom feel qualm of conscience in getting hijjra burnt to death. So Seven Steps Around the Fire, dwells on the theme of eunuchs, their identity, their constitution and their connotation. Uma Rao, the sociology scholar, emerges as the most powerful character of the play, who fights to establish the identity of a eunuch named Kamala, during her research on the class and gender-related violence and crime. It’s justice in the nemesis of the play. A eunuch, a beautiful one, invited for marriage, and the final tragic death-all seem to be a misconstruct. But it happens. The mystery behind the death is in the police-politician-crime nexus. Uma Rao’s research on this ancient tribe brings into focus the hypocrisy and repression that ‘the big shots’ are capable of because they are beyond the reach of law. The society accepts a hijjra for gracing the ceremonies of marriage and birth but would not allow him to partake of such ceremonies. The author has ironically portrayed this aspect that would not have otherwise received any attention, for any mat-ter related to the hijjra is of no importance to anyone. The heart-rending story about a hijjra murdered simply because she fell in love with Subbu, a young man with a status of importance in society, fills us with horror and sense of
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the fact of her being a “hijjra” is revealed to people, she is mercilessly murdered. Her deprivation in terms of essential femininity instead of arousing sympathy and a feeling of compassion is looked down upon; she is discriminated against and ultimately murdered. A sense of horror and injustice prevails for it is not by choice but by sheer misfortune that she is what she is. For many Indians - both upper and middle class- hijjras exist at the periphery of their imaginaries, making themselves visible only on certain occasions. Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is the voice of Dattani on the prohibited issue of homosexuality and alternative sexuality. Politically, the com-munity of gay and lesbians is marginalized. Marginalization, victimization, self torture, guilt and resistance against the social traditions constitute the spectrum of the existence of gays. Dattani deals with a difficult subject with a bold pen and lays open the hypocrisies of social life which imposes stereotypical roles to men and women and acknowledges and legitimizes only these roles. Male and female-these are the only sexual categories which have secured social existence and society’s approbation. People who do not fit into these two classes either keep trying to fit into the rut and suffer throughout their lives a burden of living the big lie, or if they choose to live with the truth they have to bear social ostracism and contempt. With a fine delineation of characters like Ed and Bunny and Sharad and Kamlesh in a lively and witty manner, Dattani brings out the psychological pressures and fears, the real and the imaginary which gays have to live with. Dattani uses symbolic means to foreground his idea of gay relations. Kamlesh’s small flat is a place where this gay group can meet openly. But in contrast to this small space available to them are visible and invisible signs of the outside world, which has a continuous imposing pres-ence in Mumbai skyline, the wedding procession with all its loud paraphernalia, the beautiful woman who weeps and the failed air conditioner etc. The play is like a charter of demands for homosexuals whose activities are deemed a social taboo in the Indian society. Their sexuality is still strongly forbidden by social custom and are greatly offensive to the prevailing moral and social code. The major concern of Dattani’s plays in depicting homosexual situation is the identity crisis that results from being marginalized and oppressed. Dattani in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai investigates how the human aspirations are insignificant in contrast of social faiths. History is a witness to the fact that the invisible clutches of social forces can never permit an individual to carve his own design beyond the patterns recommended and accepted by society. Dattani’s concern for homosexuals with the hidden agenda for getting the social approval for a tabooed relationship has further been a motif in the play Do the Needful. In both these play, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Do the Needful, dramatist while expressing his sympathy for gays who are
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degraded but mentally sick, exposes their struggle with their own inner selves. The possibility of the shared spaces common to women and homosexuals, is put to active use here with the identities of its protagonists. The common oppressor is the patriarchal structure that refuses to allow any space for the growth of individual beyond a set pattern of gender determined roles. The play Do the Needful is apparently a romantic comedy set around the concept of arranged marriage in the traditional society of India. It begins with two set of families, One Gujarati(Patel’s family) and another Kannadigas (The Gowda’s family) who are negotiating on the marriage prospects. Alpesh, the son of Mr. Patel, is ‘thirty plus and divorced’ and Lata Gowda is ‘twenty four and notorious’. Alpesh being a gay, has his yearnings for Trilok, his companion while Lata is involved with a man who is a terrorist. To avoid the consequences of these two unnatural relationship, both the families are anxious for the hasty marriage. The gay hero and the notorious heroine get into a marriage of convenience with a secret understanding that they will be free to follow their natural inclinations. They resolve to marry just for the satisfaction of their parents and maintain a silence against relations that can’t propagate in society. Lata thought only of ‘Salim’ and Alpesh thought of ‘Trilok’.
In this way, Mahesh Dattani’s plays demonstrate different attitudes that society has towards anybody who is different or who is at the lower end of the political balance. These subaltern sexualities face threat or violence because of their position in the society that are often ignored in registering their legitimate claim through literature politically and socially disenfranchised groups without a voice to be heard. Dattani is narrating the counter claims of the ‘subaltern sexualities’ in a society that promises more in the name of democracy and liberty. His plays depict the social space of violence faced by ‘subaltern sexualities’ and theatrical validity gets transferred to legitimate social responses.
ReferencesBanham, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. New York : Cambridge,
1992.Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, ed. and Trans. H.M. Parshley. Har-
mondswerth: Penguin, 1983.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York and London: Routledge, 1990.Dattani, Mahesh. Collected plays. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2000.Merchant, Hoshang, ed. Yaraana : Gay Writing from India. New Delhi : Penguin
Books, 1999.Narrain, Arvind and Gautam Bhan, eds. Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005.
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Pathank, R.S. Indian English Literature; Marginalized Voices. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2003.People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka (PUCL, K). 2001, Human Rights Violation against Sexual Minorities in India: A Case Study of Banga-lore, www.pucl.org.People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka (PUCL, K). 2003, Human Rights Violations against the Transgender Community: A Study of Kothi and Hijjra Sex Workers in Bangalore.Rao, Raj R. the Boyfriend. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003.Seidman, Ven, ed. Queer Theory/Sociology. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.
Niranjan Mohanty’s Articulation of God with a Human Soul :
A Study of Prayers to Lord Jagannath * Dr. Pradip Kumar Patra
It is the poem one writes, or, the series of poems one writes in one’s lifetime that pursue one throughout his life. I believed once , perhaps when I began writing poetry, that the poem believed as an act of exorcises, helping one to “cleanse” oneself, or, as I said earlier in this piece, to make a better heart the poet possessed. Today, after a lot of thought , one experiences the sense of being pursued, perhaps hunted, by the poems one has made. The poems act as surprises , at times amazing one, bringing the deeper inner silence of a sentient being into focus. So perhaps the poem with its words , triggers an inner silence and in the end shakes one. ( Many Indias 17-18 ) Lord Jagannath is not just a god, rather a god of human soul, over whom the devotees have absolute right. The right is not just steeped in ego (being in the good book of a god who is the off-shoot of a devotional or mythi-cal culture of Orissa ) , rather in intense love. Here is a god who is not just a god of spiritual odyssey, he is rather a part of a general consciousness of the Oriyas. His name is associated with the ordinary and mundane activities of the day-to-day life. Life doesn’t move without Him in Orissa. * Heads the Department of English at Gauhati University , Kokrajhar, Assam, India.
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People in Orissa , at present, have traveled a long way from tradition to modernity. Life has changed. Natural catastrophes like super cyclone and dry-spell have affected life to the very core. But the place of Lord Jagannath in the popular psychology of the Oriyas has never changed. Each and every Oriya is calm and composed even with the experiences of these catastrophes. The relation of the Oriyas with the Lord is not based upon profit and loss alone. They are high above the notion of self-fulfillments. If at all Lord Jagannath is popular it is not because of His magic, it is rather because of His place deep in the heart of the Oriyas. It is the love of the Oriyas towards the Lord that binds. It is the same love that gives them the strength to face the trials and tribulations of life. Niranjan Mohanty truly represents the mind, emotion and attitude of the Oriyas in this book of poetry, Prayers to Lord Jagannath.
Orissa is a land of myths and legends . The Oriyas have their life of their own. Life not just consists of reality and the sufferings attached to it. Myths and legends have their significance in the on-going Oriya life. Myths and leg-ends are inextricably related to Lord Jagannath. The day these will perish, the Lord too will vanish.Hence, each and every moment of Oriya life is charged with creativity. As life in Orissa grows more and more both in time and space, it spills over to neighbouring cultures. As more and more devotees from India in particular and abroad in general pour in at the Puri Jagannath temple, the Jagannath related devotional emotion of the Oriyas no more remains local or regional, it rather goes global. From post-modern stand-point each and every devotee, reader and visitor becomes a participant in the Jagannath culture of Orissa. If we look at the present volume of poems of Niranjan Mohanty in this perspective he becomes a promoter of the devotional culture of Orissa relating to Lord Jagannath.
The most enthralling part of the book is the poet’s prayer which comes from the deepest part of his heart . His prayer is not just some-thing that cher-ishes, it is otherwise an aesthetic sensibility of the poet. With enough of humility he speaks about which is highly artistic.
These are no prayers, Oh Lordmerely offerings of a heart, burnt and burning beyond any measure.
Merely whispers of a soulinto the ears of air, water
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Merely echoes of a song that has been lost in the singing all these clamorous years.
Merely dirts of a wounded heart.Songs of a tongue that doesn’t belongeither to me or to my egregious ego.
Merely blossoms the gardener in mehas preserved, plucking all these years ,dark and dizzy and dicrotic years. (p.21 )
The poet rightly says that ‘these are no prayers’. The question arises what , infact, are these? It is just disclosing to the Lord the experiences of the poet. It appears as if the Lord is not just a God before whom one could pray, but he is also one who could be looked upon as a close friend before whom all the sorrows could be put forth. The poet is in higher level of thought and emotion so much so that he never bothers about any kind of relief. He is in an ecstatic mood. For him his self-expression before the Lord is a relief by itself.
The poet’s ‘prayers to Lord Jagannath’ is an exploration of his own self conditioned by the traditions , beliefs and culture of Orissa. Most importantly , he gives words and wings to the instincts and emotion of his own being. He begins with his subjective expression, but it turns out to be objective , may be or may not be in the absence of his knowledge. Each instinct, emotion, event, situation, myth and legend becomes an objective correlative for the articulation of the Oriya way of life centered around Lord Jagannath.
Teach me how to sharpen my beliefand polish the stone of my faithin the essence of a human heart .
Remind me always of the moments of my births, of my previous deaths,of my ecstasies and woundsso that I don’t get frightenedat the intricate, intriguingmovements of this living . (p.25 )
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In The Bhagabad Geeta Sri Krishna says His words of wisdom that He is every-thing: the greatest among the mountains, rivers, trees, He is every where and in every thing. Prayers to Lord Jagannath reflects the omnipresence of the Lord which is truly realized by the poet.
Before all truths are proven false,before all hearts go faint with sadness,before all wishes are turned into ashes
Oh Lord , make me a piece of idle stone.I’m quite aware of my mortality,my tail-less fear , fever and fret.
I know, my nest would be blown offby a sudden storm , my hiveby the scorching heat of the sun.
Before all the beginnings endand all the ends begin to throbmake me vital as a legend
so that I can spread at least this truth:you exist in all forms , and all other forms are being born from you. (p.29)
It appears the poet has all the experiences of the hardship of life in Orissa. His suffering in this process has not ended in suffering. He has rather transcended it to a height of enlightenment. It is this enlightenment that he wants to share with the others. He wishes to be transformed to a stone, a legend. His sense of quest impels him to know what, in fact, life is , beyond human . By being a stone he wants to be a part of the thrill of being associated with a myth or historic relic. By being a legend he wishes to experience the wonder of the stories related to Gods and Goddesses. The poet has a high sense of romantic adventure like John Keats. Like Keats he wishes to experience the freedom which in reality is not possible. Self-expression in poetry is a kind of fulfillment, although for a short while. Keats says in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus1 and his pards2,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
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Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light , Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (p.110)
The entire poem of Mohanty is a search for his own self. He tries to locate himself , which itself is an endless process, in relation to the Lord. The poet begins from reality , but moves towards a fantasy. But the fantastic world doesn’t appear to be a fantasy as that exactly is the world inhabited by the Lord. The poet’s acceptance of the Lord as the ultimate saviour, his request to bestow the divine power and being enlightened by Him by His human activi-ties bring him closer to a freedom from the day-to-day suffering and land the poet in a world of ecstasy. The intensity of the poet’s feeling while imploring the Lord for granting him an infinite experience in finite form is noteworthy.
Oh Lord of the universe,Lord of the endless dawnsand dusks, dreams and dragonflies,
causes and casualties,bridges and breezeapples and apparatus
lend me an eyethat seeing sees not,feeling feels not.
Lend me a handwhose touching touches notwhose giving groans not.
Lend me a pair of earsthat hearing hears not and a tonguewhose singing rushes not. (p.30) In the process of exploring what is human and what is divine and going to a world of infinite by integrating both , Mohanty makes distinction between
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I’m a frail , common human being, born hereat your oneiric order. I bear a heart which goes heavy with moments ,hours, years
the shining weapons of your immortalitybut the inevitable blood of our mortality.I’m naked to the bones, yet proud of what I am.(p.31) The poet reaches a turning point in his poetic expression. He becomes aware of his human form. He contrasts his mortality with the Lord’s immortality and acknowledges his own limit and says that he is really proud of what he is. His worldly existence itself is the cause of his ‘unalloyed loving’ to the Lord.
What to other is a burden, is a giftto me of the living. Perhaps, my blindness is my sight in this analloyed loving. (p.33)
From the intensity of love for the Lord the poet moves towards the most fundamental aspect of life. He locates the Lord in the grand phenomena like ‘sighs’, ‘silence’, ‘knowledge’, ‘wisdom’, ‘power’,’metaphor’ and ‘language’.These are not just words, these are rather the great ideas with spirit of their own. The poet feels that these are not intelligible, nor they are subject to hu-man comprehension. More these are explained, more mysterious they appear. With their selves enigmatic, they appear to be an emanation of the Lord. The invisible power by which Wordsworth was moved is well-expressed in his poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’.
Be but a vain belief,yet, oh! how oft –In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! though wanderer through the woods,How often has my spirit turned to thee! (p.76 )
Mohanty also writes in the same romantic vein :
Oh Lord of eyes, sighs and silence,tell me the origin of words, the beginning of speech making, in your leisure hours;
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how they changed or how they were shaped .hat fire, air, water or clime reared them?What really has made it a voice that never goes stale?
What knowledge, what wisdom, what powermade my mother’s tongue so sharp, so humbleso human and so bright?
With what vision were those saint-poetsof my tribe born? What what courage had they to tame the words , the tigers of deep metaphors?
Perhaps language is a river nowwhere I can swim and float any way I likeonly to get a feel that I’m a part of the tribe. (p. 37) The poet’s romantic exploration leads him to discover his own self in which finds expression the typical Oriya identity. The poet aptly expresses it through the image like ‘watered rice’ : it is the common food in Orissa liked both by rich and poor. This is the food ( Cooked rice is mixed with water and preserved in the kitchen for a day after which it turns out to be a sour delicious food item ) which belongs exclusively to the Oriyas . It is a symbol of common Oriya life with which the idea of simple living and high thinking is associated. It still remains as an important food item despite the rapid progress of Orissa from tradition to modernity. It is served even in the big hotels of Orissa. As a food item it has a dignified position as it is offered as prasadam to the Lord Jagannath during the summer. The poet says that the English he speaks gives ‘the flavour of watered rice’. English as a language originally belongs to England. Although it has been spreading globally and has been acquiring different identities like African Eng-lish, Indian English, Irish English, Caribbean English etc., it still has a foreign identity in Orissa. When spoken by the Oriyas , Oriya accent and Oriya gram-matical pattern influence the speaking of English. As a result broken English spoken by the common Oriyas appears ridiculous. Although Mohanty is a professor of English his humility and love for Oriya life with all its flaws prompt him to consider himself as very common steeped in Oriya identity. The poet’s sense of wonder takes him to the world of the Lord. Al-though he wishes to remain as he is , in the remote corner of his mind he has a desire to go above the languages like the Lord who can communicate without speaking any language . Thus the poet speaks :
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I know that my English is not English.The music I seek in the words or in their premeditated silence is not English.
It’s half-Orissan, half-Indian.It gives me the flavour of watered rice,the fragrance of plough-shares and soil .
I choose to write in English, not to go beyond the seas, but to meander here like the light at the day’s end
among the jasmine whitenessof my ancestors I choose it to make it my very own , my priceless possession.
Tell me Oh Lord, what is your mother-tongue?Do you stumble or fumble in the middle?Teach me how to write sentences simple. ( p. 75 )
The intensity of Mohanty’s prayers is felt in the part xi of the book. Don’t I have the right to prolong my prayers, Oh Lord ? No, no,I’m not history. My prayers
can bear no end; and I know,as long as I live, they would multiplyand swell like the sea. As long as
the sun swims in our blood,warming the farms of our dreams,and the humble moon measures.
the purity of our innocence,these prayers would survive.Every prayer is a beginning.
Every prayer, a crucifixion’not any one else’s , but mine .These are boats bound to another island. ( p. 101 )
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So far as the intensity of emotion is concerned Mohanty could be com-pared to Jayanta Mahapatra. Although Mahapatra is known for his precise use of image , Mohanty’s poetry brims with devotional emotion of which images are the source of meanings. End-notes :1. The god of wine2. Leopards
ReferencesNiranjan Mohanty , Prayers to Lord Jagannath . New-Delhi : Harper &- Collins . 1994 . (Lines quoted in the article are from this edition.)David Green. ed. The Winged Word. Chennai : Macmillan . 1974 .
Re-Defining Autobiography: A Re-Reading of Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass
* Dr.V. Lakshmanan** Mr. D. Girisha,
In his self-portrait, Flaws in the Glass, Patrick White describes his life as a writer and reasons his social alienation, misanthropy, misogyny and masochist tendency. A discussion of what occasioned White to write his self-portrait, what subversive formalistic and aesthetic strategies he employs in his narration, how he clarifies the images of distorted reality, and how its shifting positionalities provide the readers a continuum to supplement, or to disregard, the authorial intention is the theme of this paper. Why did White choose the autobiographical mode to explain the misconceptions about him? To understand the flexibilities this genre provided him, knowledge of the evolution of the genre itself is essential. A trend that has undoubtedly helped the rise of autobiography and its sub-genres, memoir and self-portrait, is the decline of qualitative criticism.1 For quite sometime now criticism is seen to be sidelined to a peripheral position in our cultural life. In such a situation, a marathon was on among writers to snatch their * Professor of English at Annamalai University Tamil Nadu, India.** teaches English at Govt. First Grade College, Tiptur, Karnatak, India
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share of popularity by contributing to this genre. This enlarged the Who is Who of biographia literati, and what is more important is that they experimented with new approaches, new formulations and new directions. Subversions, re-definitions and reformed applications of existing genre-conventions became the accepted norm among the modern biography-writers. One such tendency is the replacement of the commemorative, ceremonial quality of a biography by the explanatory purpose. A related development is the emphasis on the author’s developing self, than on the people he has known and the events he has witnessed; a shift from the Jungian to Freudian centrality. In such circum-stances it is no wonder White chose the self-portrait mode, to “reach some people, move some people” with propaganda that is art: writing that propagates art and personality. If an autobiography is bound by fact, it is also bound by time. It is true that no genre of literature is more sensitive than biography to the spirit of historical time; but it is also true that biographies are capable of revisionist tendencies. Perhaps this is why countless biographies of Samuel Johnson, Henry James, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are available. The plurality and multiplicity that is expected in all literary arts is also to be found in autobiography. Hence, Flaws in the Glass, like other autobiographies, is susceptible to re-reading and re-defining. In his novel, The Twyborn Affair, published in 1979, White made ho-mosexuality and transvestism his priority themes. This statement is obvious but perhaps misleading. Because “what is important to the novel is the search for personal identity; and to introduce such terms as homosexuality is to impose society’s defensive categories on what is essentially a psychic quest.”2 However, this novel, which White felt everybody would ‘hate’ was one of his most suc-cessful novels. Its immediate success, on one hand, and the popularity of the autobiographical genre, on the other, encouraged White to write Flaws in the Glass to explain his social alienation, misanthropy, misogyny and masochist tendency and clarify the images of stigmatised, distorted reality. The fact that he ventured to explain to the world the misconceptions about him is assuredly, his first positive step towards shedding alienation and annihilating distance. Many critics have set afloat the opinion that Patrick White sub-titled his autobiography as “A Self-portrait” only to highlight the fragmentary and elliptical narrative strategy of Flaws in the Glass. This is a mistaken opinion. In truth, many contemporary autobiographies are discontinuous, jerky, and in the stream-of-consciousness pattern, yet these are classified as either memoir or self-portrait or fictional autobiography. In practice, one of the most powerful and productive aspects of autobiography by marginalised people is its
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ability to challenge, destabilise and subvert traditional generic conventions. For example, the double-marginalised Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston’ autobiography, The Woman Warrior, is non-linear, fluid and broken; these narrative-strategies are now ritually identified as stressing clan or community identity.3 Kingston’s text is considered an important theoretical text in bringing out a paradigm shift in biographical study. Ramifying this dialectics to Patrick White, it can be emphatically said that he uses subverted techniques to create identity, though, in his case, not communal identity, but personal identity. Then the question, why did he sub-title his autobiography “A Self-portrait,” remains unanswered. Perhaps the intention is functional: to glow lit his prime-motive to demystify, to deodorise the foulness attached to his personality — more so when his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize was adversely propagated. The success of his novel, The Twyborn Affair, infused in him the strength and confidence to write this self-portrait. Flaws in the Glass is indeed a self-defence against character assassination, perhaps, in the manner of Pope’s “An Epistle to Arbuthnot.” As early as in the opening paragraph of Flaws in the Glass the domi-nant note of the narrative is struck. The generational and cultural divide, the consummate disagreeableness between the parents and the son is manifest in their different reactions to their Felpham house. White writes: “For my mother, the fuzz of green landscape surrounding us was English, pretty, so much more desirable than glare and drought and the threat of snakes”(1).4 The mother’s desire for the lush, green English landscape is characteristic of the earlier twentieth century Australian imagination entrenched in its colonial position. In contrast, White finds himself an alien in the new house: “For myself it meant solitude in which wounds were healed, until country voices reminded me I was a foreigner” (1). Throughout in the narrative, White reiterates, though consider-ably covertly, filial dividedness as the reason for his decadence and for his life to be a succession of whirlpools. How his parents inherited trouble by begetting him, he sums up in these lines: “They [My parents] were still spontaneously ‘Dicky’ and ‘Bird’, unconscious, poor things, of the cuckoo they were about to hatch out” (10). White’s schooling in Cheltenham is, in his words, a “four- year prison sentence.” This, he concedes, is an outcome of “my mother’s relentless de-termination to do everything for my own good, which included dumping me in a prison of a school on the other side of the world” (9). The post-colonial colonised-colonizer dichotomy is explicit here in the unitary and arbitrary de-cision of the mother: “Cheltenham was a seed sown in an ambitious-colonial mother’s mind by the English head of a preparatory school in Australia” (12). But what is unfortunate to White is fortunate to the literary
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world. Only after suffering such betrayals by fate, was he able to produce those classics like Voss. This brings, to our attention, Vikram Seth. If Vikram is able to synchronise nicely his poems “which are poised between a tearful emotional state and precisely woven verbalization it is because of his unhappy and depressive public school experience! White could never establish warm human relationship with his dis-ciplined, reticent father too. The event related to the facts of life lesson on a Swiss railway platform by the father and White’s determined, never-say-die attitude to withhold his grief due to separation has to be mentioned: “to keep my grief within the bounds of that manliness I was being taught to respect, when I would have liked to tear off the rabbit skin glove he was wearing and hold the sunburnt hand to my cheek” (14). A little later, White quips: “I might have loved Dick had I dared and had we been able to talk to each other” (15). Pages later, on an entirely different occasion, he repeats in this confessional tone again: “Had I been able to talk to him, and if, at the risk of sounding priggish, there had been some vaguely intellectual ground in which we could have met, I would have loved my father” (48). This father-son love-hate rela-tionship is not very dissimilar to that which Sylvia Plath had for her daddy. In both instances, self-negation or self-inferiorization is the reason for withdrawal and world-hating attitude. White alienated not only from his father, his mother, everybody he knew or was acquainted with, but also away from his own self: “I hated the appearance I had been given, but would not have known what to substitute had I been able to choose” (3). The society has to be blamed for this acculturation of White.
White wanted to be a poet but found that “Blake was no more than a name ... to the frustrated poet struggling inside me” (7). His multi-chromatic sensibility made him believe that he was draped for fiction: “I chose fiction, or more likely it was chosen for me, as the means of introducing to a disbelieving audience the cast of contradictory characters of which I am composed” (20). White had a natural antipathy towards those who intellectualized art. He, like the British cultural critic Raymond Williams, is highly critical of the extreme formalism and apoliticism in a work of art. He perceived that the heavy hand of academicism shattered the life of the text. He retorts at an adverse academic opinion of The Solid Mandala thus:
Strange to think that the Solid Mandala was ever considered pornographic, yet an Australian professor told a friend it was the most pornographic novel he? she? had ever read. One wonders where he or she spent his or her literary life before The Solid Mandala appeared. (145)
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White retained a passionate belief in the power of books to change the world. He justifies his misanthropy saying:
My inklings of God’s presence are interwoven with my love of the one human being who never fails me. This is why I fall short in my love of human beings in general. There are too many travesties of an ideal I am still foolish enough to expect after a lifetime’s experience, and knowledge of myself. (145)
This low profile attitude of White is reminiscent of the Canadian isolationist A.M. Klein.
Leonie Kramer has noticed a gap between intention and achievement in Flaws in the Glass. And critics are unanimous in their view that Patrick White is given to “overwriting” in his self-portrait. His attempts to create a prose which would convey splendour and translucence is described by A.D. Hope as “pretentious verbal sludge.” No doubt the continuous word-play, unceasing linguistic fireworks and the tonal shifts create a sense of strain. Connected to this strain and sense of loss is White’s growing disappointment with society: “Those who thought they knew me were ignorant of the creature I scarcely knew myself” (1).
Apart from all its ups and downs Flaws in the Glass suggest that “some kind of reintegration into society is possible for the distanced spiritual soul. This new visual of a potential reconciliation between the forlorn individual and society is accompanied by a rather more balanced view of human nature.”5
A successful biography is what it is for Edmund Goose, writing in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life.” When that portrait is indeed faithful and the soul great, biography is a splendid literary form. And, undoubtedly, Flaws in the Glass is a faithful and splendid biography.
References1. Epstein,Joseph. “The Rise of Literary Biography.” The American Review (Fall 1986): 70-79.2. Williams, Mark. Patrick White. London: MacMillan, 1993: 78.3. Goellricht, Donald C. “Asian American Literature as Theory.” A n Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. K i n g - K o k Cheung (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997: 338-67.4. White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass: A Self-portrait (Middlesex, England: Penguin,
1983). All further quotations from this book are mentioned in the text with page number in parentheses.
5. Mark Williams, 86.
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THE VOICE Of THE UNVOICED -A STUDY Of SELECT POEmS Of WISLAWA
SZYmBOSKA* Persis Barnabas
Wislawa Szymborska (born July 2, 1923) is a polish poet, an accomplished translator, literary critic, an essayist, laureate of Nobel Prize in Literature and winner of numerous other awards. While Wislawa Szymboska lives in the town of Krakow, her poetry lives in the sphere of timelessness and universality. She is a woman poet of international recognition. The country, Poland, where she was born and where she lives now, had given her the opportunity to experience the horrors of perhaps the most important but worst of wars in human history, World War II. Her family, like all others, was personally affected by the german occupation of Poland during which she could not continue her education in the usual way. Hence her poetry is poetry of protest against all atrocities. Her poetry springs from personal, subjective experiences, though presented in an objective manner. Nobel Prize Committee describes Wislawa Szymborska as the “Mozart of poetry with something of the fury of Beethoven” (CLC, Yearbook 1996, Vol. 99, 191).
Now 85, Szymborska is an icon in a country that takes great pride in its poets. She is everyone’s favourite literary grandmother. And it’s easy to see why. Her poems are accessible and often learned by heart. Some of them have also been set to music. Though she is one of them, yet she does her best to lead the life of a recluse, like Emily Dickinson. “There’s simply too much fuss about myself”, she explains, with characteristic modesty and teasing smile. “Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation”.
After Poland’s terrible century, Szymborska’s poetry speaks with a beguiling simplicity about the everyday details and emotions that recover humanity. Poems about Jews packed into freight cars, about starvation camps, torture, hunger, hatred and war’s “reality” are what people look for in a twentieth century Polish poet and Szymborska, on these subjects, does not disappoint. Her poetry is not the speech of emotion, but the speech of the intellect and imagination, and in its own way, a commendation and critique of language itself.* Principal, Bethel Matric Hr. Sec. School, Ambur, Vellore, Tamil Nadu,
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Szymborska’s poems were published in a variety of newspapers and periodicals for a number of years immediately after World War II. She is considered the finest postwar Polish poet. Her poetry has been translated to many European languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages. They have also been published in many foreign anthologies of Polish poetry. Irony, satire and paradox are the chief weapons she constantly uses in her poetry and other writings in protest against all kinds of oppressions, especially those against women and war crimes. Her simplicity often hides her complexity and experiment. Szymborska’s poems are available in translations in English. Even Joanna Trzeciak, the translator of Miracle Fair, admits the difficulties in translating Szymborska’s poems and says that several poems were in deed “untranslatable”, as Szymborska has a “penchant for coining new words” (Introduction, 6). This paper focuses on Wislawa Szymborska’s collection of poems selected from miracle fair, Starvation camp at Jaslo, Cat in an Empty Apartment, The unexpected meeting, The End and the Beginning, Still, Hatred, Parting with a View, Clouds in which her voice of anger is heard clear and loud. The poems reflect the universality and timelessness of this living poet. Wislawa Szymborska is a conscious poet. Conscious of the words she uses and conscious of the fame she got, especially after the 1996 Nobel Prize. Szymborska, along with fellow poets Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, held common witness to the struggles of Poland during World War II, the Holocaust, Soviet occupation, post-war Stalinism, martial law, and the transition to democracy. She tempered this, however, with a strong humanism and a desire to deal with sophisticated philosophical issues. Milosz feels that this is one of the reasons for the difficulty of translating Wislawa Szymborska from Polish to English. “miracle fair is Szymborska at her very best”. This is what was rightly said of this collecltion in the Harvad Book Review. As Milosz points out, here is poetry that “speaks to the enduring and irreversible coordinates of human fate” and relates to the plight of human beings everywhere without regard to gender, race, class, nationality or ethnic guilt. Starvation Camp at Jaslo is a poem that shows suggestivity at its height. Perhaps it is the only poem in which she talks openly about people dying of hunger in starvation camps during the German occupation of Poland. Jaslo was in southern Poland and was not actually the site of a starvation camp. The camp was set up in Szebnie, near Jaslo. It served as a camp at different times for Russian prisoners of war and for Polish and Jewish civilians.
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Different sources have estimated the death toll at anywhere from four thousand to over ten thousand. This poem is a lovely song about the way war hits a person right in the heart. The poem begins in an ironic and satirical tone; Write this down. Write it. In ordinary ink on ordinary paper: they were given no food, all died of hunger. All how many?
Instead of answering the question directly, she has this to say: It’s a large meadow. How much grass was there per person? Write it down. I don’t know.
The ironic sarcasm continues in the beginning of the next paragraph too: This is the meadow where it became flesh. But the meadow is silent as a bribed witness.
Szymborska treats the living and the non-living on the same plane. The implication of the meadow being ‘bribed’ is that human beings could be cut to pieces like grass on the meadow. Not only the image of the bird flying above with “nutritious wings” is suggestive of hunger but also the following two lines: At night a sickle would flash in the sky, reaping dreamt-up grain, for dreamt-up loaves.
The irony and the images are highly suggestive of the situation that prevailed in the starvation camp near Jaslo where food could only be dreamt of. This particular poem is probably one of the most remarkable elegy that has been written in the genre of a lamentation. At the same time, it is probably only Szymborska who can describe a great personal loss from the perspective of an abandoned cat. Suggestivity plays a vital role in Cat in an Empty Apartment: Footsteps on the stairs, but they are not the same. Neither is the hand that puts a fish in the saucer.
Suggestivity sometimes takes on the form of explanation of differnt genres in a simple manner: Poets are poetry, writers are prose - Prose can have anything, even poetry, but poetry can have only poetry (Stage Fright)
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Our tigers drink milk Our hawks tread the ground Our sharks have all drowned Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage. The tragedy after war atrocities is keenly and sharply conveyed through the classic poem The End and the Beginning. The poem is worth quoting in full: After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all.
As the first stanza makes us visualize what has to be ‘cleaned up’ after a war and who could be that ‘someone’, the second is satirical: Someone has to push the rubble` to the side of the road. so the corpse-filled wagons can pass.
In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds. “Photogenic it’s not” is highly satirical and “takes years” is suggestive of the pathos involved in returning to normalcy after the deterioration. But she does not leave at that. The war is not content with destruction in one place, as all the “cameras have left / for another war”! The “unsevered head” of the living becomes a subject for irony and is highly suggestive of the severing of thousands of heads during a war forced on the weak. The adjective is strange but apt in this context. Even the end image of the poem is evocative of death: the blade of grass in mouth and gazing at the clouds is suggestive of the unmourned, unsung and unhonoured deaths of war. If Szymborska had lived through peaceful times in a happier country, her love poems alone would have made her lovable, but, as the title of the second group of poems on page 33 declares, “too much ....happened that was not supposed to happen”. She was obsessed with death that seemed to surround her from all directions. Death becomes a dominant theme with Wislawa Szymborska. A conscious poet like Szymborska is perturbed by the unprecedented violence of
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It is but natural that death is a recurring theme in Szymborska. The indifference and cruelty of the German soldiers in transporting the Jewish prisoners to the concentration camp is the theme of ‘Still’. The poem Still presents the scene of forced death. It is about the deeply human and has a very suggestive message: the chilling feeling and indifference toward others’ suffering. Still is especially expressive in this context, where she creates in the very first line an almost anguished expressionistic situation: a train is on its way somewhere but no one steps off because the freight cars are hermetically sealed and the passengers - symbolically represented by Jewish names - can not determine the direction of the trip: In sealed box cars travel names across the land, and how far they will travel so, and will they ever get out, don’t ask, I won’t say, I don’t know.
The name Nathan strikes fist against wall. the name Isaac, demented, sings, the name Sarah calls out for water for the name Aaron that’s dying of thirst....
The poem can be interpreted on several levels but what can be felt especially strongly is the universally human meaning, here having both an existential and a deeply ethical dimension. Szymborska writes with particular consistency about the moral aspects of human history, which of course includes a long series of examples of spiritual imprisonment and different crimes against human rights - crimes that give all too clear evidence that people neither can nor wish to draw obviously correct conclusions about history’s cruel experiences. For that very reason, hatred, such as in the poem of the same title, Hatred, is one of the twentieth century’s leitmotifs. It is hate that most often leads to war and to totally unnecessary suffering and death. Szymborska shows a further dimension of the death motif. This has to do with “common” deaths, so to speak, results of the laws of nature. It is this death, seen with intellectual valor and melancholy, that in some way is a constant part of Szymborska’s poetry. Stripped of all visible pathos, such as “It can’t tell a joke”, it is many times Preoccupied with killing, it does the job awkwardly, without system or skill.
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Awkward or not, death can not be stopped. Yet, it is not only a victor: the mystery of death is the equal of another mystery - man’s human creativity that helps him to conquer the unconquerable: In vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door. As far as you’ve come can’t be undone. The confrontation with death not only encompasses man’s ancient anguish for himself but also belongs together with the survivors’ dilemma: someone else’s death can also affect the survivor in a strong and personal way. The acceptance of the power of fate is a fact that everyone sooner or later must face, must submit to and must reconcile himself with. In protest against fate however the lyric “I” defies the power of death with the small, insignificant means that it has at hand - such as in the poem Parting with the View, that is by refusing a beautiful and beloved place that the survivor used to visit with the loved friend, now gone, its presence: I know that my grief will not stop the green.... I take note of the fact that the shore of a certain lake is still - as if you were living - as lovely as before... There’s one thing I won’t agree to: my own return. The privilege of presence - I give it up....The theme of death is continued from a different angle in Clouds. People may do what they want, then they die, all of them, one after another, for them - the clouds - there’s nothing particularly strange about that. Here can be seen a glimpse of Szymborska’s very special life philosophy. The existential time in Szymborska’s poetry is the present. What happens here and now is just exactly what a person can try to capture for a short moment. Everything else exists as a hypothesis, either reconstructed from memory (the past) or as a product of speculations about the future. The clouds, a key word in Szymborska, aptly symbolize the transitoriness and fickleness of life, of the moment. It makes one aware of the complex nature of being and
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The voice of anger in Szymborska is to be found in both the content and form of her poems. They are easily understood from the irony, paradox, suggestivity and experiment through which she successfully conveys her voice of anger and message. Her poems share a common theme - war and violene. Death becomes a dominant theme with Szymborska. But even personal losses are presented in a detached manner. Though the leitmotif of death is to be found in many of her poems, she always tries to be impersonal. The reader is able to understand the universality and timelessness of this living poet and hear the voice of anger clearly. Her protest is powerful as it is silent. It is a subdued voice which is eloquent in anger. Twentieth century saw the emergence of women poets, especially poet like Wislawa Szymborska who shines like bright star in the literary sky. The voice of this brave poet and her heroic struggle will be reverberated throughout history. Like beacon she will shine and shall lead the rest. She is a trail blazer who will inspire other poets to join her to raise their voices of protest and anger. Her poems are very striking because they are realistic portrayal of grievances of the oppression and suppression of women and fangs of war and its impact. Hers is not the voice of despair but resurgent voice hoping to write history in its own terms. Her cry is a heart-rending cry for justice and a pointed appeal to speak up for an oppressed and humiliated people. Szymborska’s poetry is the voice of her unvoiced people.
References1. miracle fair: Selected Poems, Trans. Joanna Trzeciak. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.2. Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Yearbook 1996, Vol. 99, p. 191.3. “Wislawa Szymborska and the Importance of the Unimportant”. Bogdana Carpenter. World Literature Today, Winter 1997, p. 12.4. Non-Required Reading, 2002, Prose Pieces, Trans, Clare Cavanagh.5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wis%c5%82awa Szymborska - Life of Wislawa6. “Miracle Fair is Szymborska at her very best”, - Harvard Book Review “What Szymborska calls’ the joy of writing’ also becomes, in this book, the joy of reading” - Edward Hirsch http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall02/032385.htm7. A Domestication of Death: The Poetic Universe of Wislawa
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ORDEAL AND EVOLUTION Of A WRITER : TEXT AS CONTEXT IN V.S. NAIPAUL’S
THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL* Rishi Pal Singh
‘Most imaginative writers discover themselves and the world through their works’.1 - V.S. Naipaul
It is a well-defined truth that much of V.S. Naipaul’s writings -- fiction as well as non-fiction - draw on the autobiographical material and these overlapping assertions serve to present a vivid account of this author’s own growth on the one hand and the wounds and malaise of the expatriate Indians in their diaspora on the other. Actually, the unique combination of circumstances which related Naipaul to three societies - the ancestral Indian, the native Trinidadian and the English of his adoption and intellectual training - has played a prominent role in shaping the vision and sensibility of this writer and also in determining the matrix of all it’s works. Obviously, the thematic strains that run through his oeuvre are related to the predicament of the immigrants on alien land; their sense of exile and loss, their alienation and deracination and their disintegration and existential despair in the postcolonial upheavals and chaos. Above everything else, Naipaul sets out to discover himself through his creative works and they are a record of his nightmarish experiences in limbo and also of his irresistible search to carve a self-esteemed niche for his identiy. One can observe a marked autobiographical context to all his fiction as well as his works having his personal outlook and travel records.
In this perspective ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ is Naipaul’s most celebrated travelogue since it articulates his ordeal and evolution into a writer - rather an audacious and relentlessly truthful writer travelling and observing the dynamics of the postcolonial world. As Naipaul has a deep conviction in the novel form due to its seemingly indirectness to make hidden impulses clear, this travelogue presents a marvelous blending of autobiography with the personality of its author. It is a saga of Naipaul’s journey from the Caribbean island to the English countryside of Wiltshire interweaving the development over many years of the postcolonial era to shape a powerful writer within himself. Through a fictional interaction with the history of changing milieu, this novel pictures the metamorphosis of V.S. Naipaul in all its intellectual and psychological depth.
* teaches English at Govt. K.R.G. P.G. (Autonomous) College, Gwalior, M.P., India.
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An analytical study of the travelogue clarifies that in this powerful work Naipaul records, without rancour or nostalgia, the ravages of time on the random rural patch of Wiltshire and gradually a wholly familiar process takes on his alien perspective. It records an emphatic journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England and from one state of mind to another - and is perhaps Naipaul’s most subjective work having the complexity and richness of a fascinating novel. The arrival in the rural Wiltshire for this young Indian from Trinidad, is like a part of the postcolonial turmoil, a change in the course of history and a hope that his stranded position may derive the long cherished self-esteem and authenticity here. He is carrying the burden of his lost ancestral inheritance and the agony of a fluid life which have created a fear-psychosis in him. The travelogue picturises his traumatic experiences in colonial half-made societies and also expresses his response to England by supplying images which both conform to and defy the traditional conceptions of it. It embodies a complex of conflicting attitudes towards England based partly on a distinction between past and present i.e. idea and reality. Disguised as the Narrator for the convenience of the fictional genre the author observes:
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself : a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half- neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange”2.
In fact, the fluidity of life and existential despair have always been agonising him in his shameful past on the Caribbean island where his people have been marooned for centuries. So far life could give him nothing except humiliation and deprivation. Moreover the wounds inflicted on his heart and mind have made him despondent and morbid. He speaks of this deep-rooted malaise as:
“I had always lived with this idea. It was like my curse; the idea which I had even as a child in Trinidad and I had come into a world past its peak. Already I lived with the idea of death, the idea, impossible for a young man to possess, to hold in his heart, that one’s time on earth, one’s life, was a short thing. These ideas, of a world in decay, a world subject to constant change, and of the shortness of human life, made many things bearable”3.
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Jack’s large house and garden and wide-spread bounty in this new surrounding all make Naipaul realise the smallness of his life in Trinidadian dard-alleys amidst his community people there. The indelible impressions of the agonising experiences in Trinidadian society of East Indians have made his temperament pessimistic and even amidst all the richness of creativity and celebration in the English countryside his pessimism persists. He reiterates:
“To see the possibility, the certainty of ruin even at the moment of creation; it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances : the half-ruined or broken-down houses, we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper, and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside man’s control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverised Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century-estates of which this Wiltshire estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis:4.
It is, however, noteworthy that Naipaul - the writer in embryo - has ambivalent feelings of loss as well as gain attributed to him by the immigration of his ancestors and then by his own move to England since his learning of English language and a specific kind of cognizance to make him a high profile writer have come from his double exiled status. Furthermore, his passage to the imperialist’s land has enkindled in him a fierce spirit to have a different vision and voice cut away from his linkage with past or present loyalties. In this new Eurocentric position, though aware of his ancestral Aryan culture and civilization, Naipaul finds it futile to give any historical explanation to his lost identity since all his ‘Indianness’ has been swallowed by the colonial absurdities in Trinidad. Gradually a feeling dawns on Naipaul that he is a ‘no land’s man’ without any hope of redemption from this endless exile. In such a gruesome situation Naipaul finds it difficult to come out of this despondency. His meditation upon the countryside, reflections on the rural tranquility, grave thoughts on imperial decline amongst the cottages and manor house of England, all tend to share the motifs of this artist who, though not a native born Englishman, is gravely intentioned to convert his inner conscience through an exercise of his creativity. A miracle happens and soon his creativity starts spreading in all directions : from his Trinidad Indian people to other Caribbean, African and south American colonies and his journeys through these areas. No doubt, the Port of Spain, the ambiance of Naipaul’s childhood could be material to illuminate his life in England where he housed
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inculcate his creativity. Now his horizon gets widened as the postcolonial turmoil and violence, the social obsessions and strange eccentricities and convictions of people made themselves a larger world to be explored through his genre-defying works. But he could also realise that to be a writer of relentless fervour and truthfulness was a Herculian task and in taking this challenge he could expect favour neither from the colonised nor from the colonisers. Even Trinidad itself, the starting point of his life, could no longer hold him since his new journeys went on qualifying his earlier notions about this world as well as about his own selfhood. So undoubtedly, Naipaul’s ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ like Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ is more than an exercise of nostalgia. How odd it would be were it be memorialising his lost life here in Wiltshire near Salisbury in the 1970s. Even if the novel contains nostalgia of the narrator for his own past then also it is so subversive that it can’t be described as any emotional engagement with his ancestral culture and heritage. It is harnessed with a bleak recognition of ignorance and failure and of a habitual misunderstanding of his past - an endless darkness. This hapless and hopeless situation of Naipaul fills him with an agony of loss and a fear of exitinction and he is charged with an incessant wish to reincarnate himself into a high profile delineator of truths. Accordingly,a violently vigorous and miraculous conviction enters into the soul and psyche of this liberated traveller to have a world of his own perspective. His solitude here gradually enables him to shed his weak colonial nerves and this self-laceration leads him towards the realisation of a new incarnation into a writer. Amidst all the agonising perplexities he allows himself to play lightly with the ancient Mediterranean idea that had come to him from the Chirico painting - ‘The Enigma of Arrival’. He, thus, decides to cleanse off all the ruins of his past from his mind and heart - if he could - and thus have a sort of second birth. Here comes to him at some point a sense, almost a sixth sense, to articulate without any inhibition or reservation all what was uppermost in the thoughts of him and his people. Naipaul’s conviction to maintain a surgeon- like objectivity could also be realised in his frank and ruthless but truthful views about his ancestral land on his visit as:
“In travelling to India I was travelling to an un -English fantasy, and a fantasy unknown to Indians of India: I was travelling to the peasant India that my Indian grandfathers had party grown up in, the India that was like a loose end in my mind, where our past suddenly stopped. There was no model for me here, in this exploration; neither Forster nor Ackerley nor Kipling could help. To get anywhere in the writing I had first of all to define myself very clearly to
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In this way Naipaul’s enigma comes to be resolved and through strange moves a ‘Girmitya turns into a cosmopolitam’ who procures a penetrating vision and dauntless voice. His self-proclaimed dissociation with his past coupled with the English ambiance moulds a new found prolific writer in that man who had left the sugarcane covered island of Trinidad by renouncing even his filial ties. He writes in this regard: “That in the most unlikely way, at an advanced age, in a foreign country, I was to find myself in tune with a landscape in a way that I had never been in Trinidad or India (both sources of different kinds of pain).”6
But this throwing away of his redundant past leads Naipaul into a new crisis since his temperamental despondency has entered deep into his consciousness and thought perception. As a result in his works rootlessness, disintegration, violence, alienation and nowhereness have become more obsessing aspects. This metamorphic effect of morbidity is acknowledged by him in the fifth chapter entitled, “The Ceremony of Farewell’ as: “But it was only out of this new awareness of death that I began at last to write. Death was the motif; it had perhaps been. the motif all along. Death and the way of handling it - that was the motif of the story of Jack.”7
Naipaul adopts London as the epicenter of his creative endeavours across the world. Even Trinidad, where his relations and community people longed for meeting him, becomes almost an imaginary place at a hazy distance. Though he visits Trinidad under the compelling circumstances as on the death of his father in 1953 and that of his sister in 1984, yet he could never be allured to stay there anymore. He is deeply aggrieved on the exiled and trapped destiny of his people stranded in their endless dereliction:
“We had made ourselves a new. The world we had found ourselves in - the suburban houses, with gardens, where my sister’s farewell ceremony had taken place - was one we had partly made ourselves and had longed for, when we had longed for money and the end of distress; we couldn’t go back. There was no ship of antique shape now to take us back. We had to come out of the nightmare; and there was nowhere else to go”.8
On the sad occasion of his visit to Trinidad to mourn the death of his sister, when an old man -- a distant relation of his sister’s husband boasts of the glories of their ancestral culture and religion in the Gangatic plain, Naipaul takes a pity on this egotistical sublimity to derive a pseudo-satisfaction from their dead and vanished past. He treats all this simply as an elegy on their socio-cultural death which had happened long back in 1845 when they had been indentured to Caribbean island under the despotic rule of the British
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souls -- all the Hindu ritualistic incantation from the Gita and other holy scriptures -- are only distant hollow words making no appeal to him. However, in spite of all his proclamation to cut-off from his past, Naipaul could not get relief from the agonies of this loss. All this forces his forlorn spirit to realise that there is no ideal land, no El Dorado, in the new emerging wilderness of the world. Therefore, in spite of his much talked Eurocentrism, Naipaul makes no final commitment to any country for his home and this objectivity enables him to render a fairly detached account of both the colonisers as well as the colonised. In this way ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ dramatises how Naipaul’s pains and pleasures in double-exile make him into a prolific writer and how he could convert his curse of ‘nowhereness’ into a boon of ‘everywhereness’. The travelogue ends with the author’s wonderment and staunch conviction to deal with the naked truths of this mysterious world. He contemplates as:
“It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men and the glory. And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden”.9
Thus, this powerful travelogue tells in first person the story of Naipaul fleeing from the discontent and painful existence in Trinidad; of his arrival in Wiltshire and having a slow adjustment to the English milieu and of his gradual incarnation into a profile writer liberated from all the over possessing sentimentality or grudges. So when he talks about his ancestry there is no sentimentality; when he remembers any region of the world there is no nostalgia and in his truthful delineation he is unsparing and unyielding. It speaks of the ordeal and evolution of Naipaul who, through the process of self laceration, sheds his jangling nerves and incarnates into an audacious writer by experiencing the labour pains of creativity. It also records how a rare wisdom dawns on him and makes him feel that his rootlessness and homelessness are not curse but blessings to rejoice himself as a citizen of the whole world. His trials and struggles attribute him a miraculous perspective and his new travels and contemplations qualify his previous notions and perceptions. Strangely enough, this dawning of wisdom and self-realisation on this writer widens his literary horizon and enables him to look wisely on the global dimension of the problems experienced by him and his people in limbo. He comes to learn that the haunting fears of loss, non-entity, dereliction, fluid life and existential despair are not new curse to him since in the postcolonial era the whole world is in the grip of these maladies. On acknowledging this truth Naipaul propagates a tragic optimism to rejoice the world as it is and those who fail to cope with its ways deserve no place in it.
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This autobiographical work could also be seen as an advanced re-writing of ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ since both the novels record a journey towards selfhood and both do culminate in an achievement of a self-esteemed niche for the struggling protagonists. Moreover, the first half of both ends in failure. The narrator’s return to the English countryside reminds us of Mr. Biswas returning to the Tulsi house in Port of Spain in utter distress to be nursed and rejuvenated to re-start his heroic pursuit again. Mr. Biswas’s tragic struggle ends in building a house for himself, Naipaul’s enigma is resolved in his evolution as a giant writer. In this sense this travelogue could bring a greater fruit to the author’s life and therefore concludes on a note of celebration of finding his alternate identity. This thread of inter-woven progress and continuity of thematic aspects could also be seen in his other works since they derive their strength and inspiration from Naipaul’s lived experiences. It will, therefore, not be any exaggeration to say that the protagonists of his novels may differ in many ways but basically and essentially they all are the faces of one symbolic figure - ‘an exiled Indian immigrant in limbo restlessly searching for some alternate self-image in the mirror of time’. The predicaments of the heroes in his fictional world picturise the different stages of this epical search of the expatriates in the alien environment. Naipaul’s confessional statement in an interview with Ronald Bryden in 1973 justifies this notion as he proclaimed : ‘All my work is really one work. I’m really writing one big book”.10
This novel may also be described as an attempt to deflect the painful consequences of his decision to set himself at an unscalable distance from his own people and also of his initial inability to efface the implications of his colonial origin. It is, therefore, obvious that a ruthless exposition and dissection of the postcolonial situation in the Third World nations is more intended to heal up the wounds and ailments of the ex-colonial societies than to humiliate them. The brutal analyses of their complexities are a kind of shock-treatment which, Naipaul believes, is necessary to pull these people out of their complacency and to make them shoulder their responsibilities towards themselves. It is only then that their economic and cultural parasitism and intellectual secondratedness can be eradicated and decolonisation in its real sense be achieved. On individual level, Naipaul has succeeded in resolving this enigma of identity and indirectly he conveys his sagacious message to boost up the morale of all the immigrants - especially of the East Indians - so as to make them learn this wisdom of celebrating their exile. So ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ is Naipaul’s powerful self-assertion which declares that its writer’s rootlessness is a burden that he carries in his Ulysses-like wanderings across the modern world but it is also his sharp weapon with which he could ironically slice up the countries and societies he visits. It is
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source of his strength as well as his acerbity. Indeed this travelogue records how Naipaul could emerge as a giant writer with a broader perspective and rather an ill-reputed detachment. His objectivity becomes his prerogative since he does not spare any one irrespective of race, class, faith or nationality and herein lies the secret of his universal appeal and appraisal. To conclude, the world is still too much of a whirl to keep Naipaul as a retired writer or a prophet-though not always politically correct - at rest in his private hermitage in English countryside. He is a giant writer having his unique and naive artistic skill of looking while seeing and listening while hearing across the wilderness of the modern world.
References
1. V.S. Naipaul, ‘The Return of Ever Peron with the Killing in Trinidad; (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1981), p. 21.2. V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, (London : Picador - an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., 2002) P. 13.3. Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 55.5. Ibid., p. 167-168.6. Ibid., p. 189.7. Ibid., p. 376.8. Ibid., p. 385.9. Ibid., p. 387.10. Interviewed by Ronald Bryden, “The Novelist V.S. Naipaul Talks about his Work to Ronald Bryden”. Listener, 89 (March 22, 1973), p. 367.
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LITERARY CANONS Of SRI AUROBINDO : A CRITIQUE Of HIS POETICS
* Dr. Archana Agarwal
Sri Aurobindo, poet and patriot, mystic and philosopher, writer and literary critic, was one of the most outstanding personalities of the twentieth century. His many-sided genius is reflected in his voluminous writings which provide the basis for a fuller understanding of life and thought of this great seer, philosopher and political thinker of modern India. Sri Aurobindo’s magnificent intellect and his yogic experiences combines to produce a number of remarkable works in prose and poetry which constitute a corpus that will become increasingly relevant to the human predicament as this century moves on towards its close. Aurobindo received a good grounding in French and Latin (English was his mother-tongue). He also learnt Greek, German and read Homer, Aristophanes, Dante, Goethe and the French poets. Indeed he ranged over the whole field of European thought. In India while at Baroda, he made good use of his time, learnt not only Bengali but Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Sanskrit. He was a profound reader of Indian scriptures especially Upanishadas and Gita. Romain Rolland describes him as the greatest synthesis between the genius of the east and the genius of the west. In this paper the focus is thrown on Aurobindo’s critical remarks on poetry, drama, and fiction found in his Letters and his critical work “The future Poetry”. What is criticism? According to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language criticism is the act or art of analyzing and judging the quality of something, especially a literary or artistic work, musical performance, dramatic production etc. Literature can be enjoyed in two ways: haphazardly as a layman enjoy it and methodically as a trained man does. In the former case, the impression of its worth is vague because a layman cannot read between the lines so his impression of its worth is likely to be confused; but in the latter case, i.e. methodical study, the worth of literature especially poetry, drama and fiction is fully accounted for. It is this latter mode of enjoying literature that is called criticism. Sri Aurobindo was not a literary critic in the professional sense of the term. He was essentially a poet. If the greatest of his poetry was supramental the greatest of his criticism was creative as well as cerebral. It was not only an exercise of the intellect, but an exprssion of the overmind. His criticism, no less than his poetry, bore the transforming touch of his Yoga. In his critical * heads the deptt. of English at M.L.B. College, Gwalior, M.P., India
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theory in ‘The future Poetry’, Sri Aurobindo has put forward the hypothesis that the mediation between the truth of the spirit and the truth of life might be one of the chief functions of poetry of tomorrow. It is a fact that contemporary Indian critic is conditioned by the two great traditions-ancient Sanskrit and ancient Greek. On the one hand, a long tradition of Sanskrit theorists such as Bharata, Bhamaha, Bhatta, Nayaka, Dandin, Anand Vardhana, Abhinav Gupta, Mamata, Jaganath have shown the way to the indigenous critics of poetry. Rasa-Dhwani theory of Indian criticism is fundamentally sound and presents a solid critierian for the enjoyment of literature. Rasa - or communicated sensibility is the deciding factor and ‘Dhwani’ or the richness of the undertones is the soul of poetry. As such the modern Indian critic is lucky to have great theories or practitioners of criticism to show them the way. On the other hand, the study of English Literature and the introduction of western education into India in 19th century familiarized the Indian critics with the climate of thought in Europe which continued to exist through ups and downs, in an almost unbroken tradition from Aristotle to the present day. The study of Shakespeare’s plays charged not only Bradley and Dowden but also Hegel, Horace and so back to the poetics itself. The academic appreciation of English poetry is enriched with the knowledge of ‘On the Sublime’ by Longinus and ultimately of Coleridge and Arnold.
Thus, the modern Indian critic has two authentic streams of critical tradition to feed and sustain him. But the Indian critic turns now to one tradition, now to another, with the result that he fails to pierce through the crust of diffence and touch the underline and to integrate the two critical disciplines into a new synthesis. Sri Aurobindo is the only one whose example must prove a beacon to others. His monuments treatise ‘The Future Poetry’ is a survey of the course of English poetry, a study of the name and nature of poetry, an interpretation of new trends as evidenced by the work of Whitman on the one hand and the 20th century Anglo-lrish poets on the other, which Sri Aurobindo felt would acquire more and a mantric or incantatory character, Sri Aurobindo’s critical canons were derived from both Indian and Western traditions, including and integrally transcending both. His range as whether his discourses on Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe, or on Modern writers like Shaw, Yeats, Lawrence or Walter de la Mare, or on Indian writers like Kalidasa or Bankim or Tagore or Harindranath, or on minute points of poetic theory or technique, always his comments are illuminating and sink in one’s consciousness with a suggestion of finality.
First of all, it will be in the fitness of things to examine Sri Aurobindo’s views on ‘aesthetic sense of beauty’; Sri Aurobindo differentiates between ‘psychic being’ and ‘aesthetic being’. To quote Sri Aurobindo; “The aesthetic sense of beauty is the sense of beauty of form, beauty of life. The aesthetic being moves on the vital plane and on the physical. The psychic sense of beauty is the sense of beauty of something more inward, something that is not much subtle behind that is not experssed, that moves the soul .... Aesthetic helps to purify the vital being, to refine it and this purification is a first step in spiritual development. Moreover, aesthetic beauty is a part of spiritual beauty ..... Psychic beauty in flowers is not in the form, the delicacy, the colour or smell; these things may be or may not be a channel for the manifestation of the psychic ......... The psychic beauty in a flower is something subtle that escapes our sense”1. Here it is clear that Sri Aurobindo has gone a step further and appears to be subtler in his approach to aesthetic sense of beauty than Aristotle who fails to go beyond sensible reality. Rasa is the aim, dhwani is the means: but how does the poet charge language with dhwani? How does the poet infer the ordered reality behind the inchoate appearance? One has here to beg the question and say that the poet has the special gift of ‘Pratibha’ or creative intuition or the divine afflatus. The poet (and the artist generally) is that sort of person. The poet is the ‘seer’ and he is also the revealer of what he has seen the preserver of what he has found. The nature of poetry is such, that, although in the first instance it only blossoms in the hearts of the lovers of poetry (the Sahridayas), and lives there forever, generation after generation, age not staling it, nor custom withering it. In poetry we seek to pierce the ‘Maya’ of visible or congnizable picture or statement, and touch or apprehend the intangible Reality within. The words of the poet are verily like a dance of creative life, and whereas our five sense open without, the sixth sense that poetry gives up opens within, and the undertones of ‘dhwani’ carry us almost to the threshold of Reality. The Rasa-dhwani theory of poetry is thus naturally affiliated to the main Vedantic tradition in Indian philosophy. The above explanation of the nature of the aesthetic experience draws mainly upon the theories of Bharata, Bhata, Nayaka, Anandavardhana and Abhinava Gupta. It is characteristic of the Hindu mentality that aesthetic enjoyment should be linked up with the bliss of Brahman. The difference between them is one of degree, not of kind. Hence, perhaps, the mingling of aesthetic and religious values in Indian literature, through literature to quintessential life, no doubt, but also beyond life-to God. Poetry therefore
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In the words of K.R.S. lyenger: ‘Sri Aurobindo, the Indian yogi and poet has developed a theory of overhead aesthesis in consonance with his own philosophy of ‘the Life Divine’ and in the light of his own poetic experiments and spiritual realizations. Beauty, according to him, is the divine-especially in his power to give joy, Ananda seeking to express himself in perfect rhythm and form. It is when the Divine become the prime mover and Bliss. It is Sri Aurobindo who gives new directions and dimensions to the literary criticism. New literary theories are propounded and illustrated in his book. About the methods of understanding and appreaciating poetry Sri Aurobindo writes: “In poetry as in everything else that aims at perfection, there are always two elements, the eternal and the time element. The first is what really and always matters, it is that which must determine our definite appreciation, our absolute verdict or rather our essential response to poetry”2. About Elizabethan poetry he writes: “Elizabethan poetry is an expression of this energy, passion and wonder of life, and it is much powerful, disorderly and undertrained than the corresponding poetry in other countries, having neither a past traditional culture nor an innate taste to restrain its extravagances”3. Explaining his conception of the dramatic poetry, he writes:
“Dramatic poetry can not live by the mere presentation of life and action and the passions. However truly they may be portrayed or however vigorously and abundantly ...... It must have, to begin with, as the fount of its creation or in its heart an interpretative vision and in that vision an explicit or implicit idea of life; and the vital presentation which is its outward instrument, must arise out of that harmoniously, whether, by spontaneous creation, as in Shakespeare, or by the compulsion of an intuitive artistic will, as with the Greeks”4.
Countless statements, comments, definitions and literary theories such as those quoted above fill the pages of this great book of criticism and they impress us by their aptness and pointedness. His prose style is always remarkable for the forcefulness of its expression and strength of conviction. It has speed and spontaneity and it changes with the change in themes. Sometimes it is simple, sometimes it is complex, sometimes it is metaphorical and makes abundant use of mythological and epical reference but nowhere does it fail to drive in the point it carries. His letters and speeches touch upon a surprisingly large number of topics such as nationalism, politics, philosophy, sociology, world unity, the ancient scriptures like the Vedas, the Upanishadas, and the Gita. Indian art,
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literature and general culture, poetry, plays, literary criticism etc. of his letters to his wife only three survive. The first letter gives us a knowledge of the aspirations, dreams and desires of Sri Aurobindo, the second records his doubts and anxieties and the third enunciates the final resolve, the absolute surrender of the self to the service of humanity and in the hands of the omnipotent.5
Wit and humour too characterize Sri Aurobindo’s prose. In a letter Sri Aurobindo writes : sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have gone utterly out of balance-it is unbalanced enough already-and rushed to blazes long ago’6. Yet these letters reflect Sri Aurobindo’s lofty thought. Commenting upon these letters Dr. Iyenger writes: “They are written in somewhat less lofty and difficult style than his other more metaphysical works and yet they bear the stamp of luminous authenticity and are charged with that high wisdom which comes from the complete living in the spirit’s complete truth.”7
It is clear from the study of the future Poetry that Sri Aurobindo would have us remember, from the first, the true which is also the highest aim and essence of poetry. “What is the highest power we demand from poetry; or - let us put it more largely and get nearer the matter - what may be the nature of poetry, its essential law .....?8 This is the fundamental question he would have us solve first and last. All else can but follow this primary purpose. If we wish to make the best of poetic activity, we must first know “its spirit, its inner aim, its deeper law”9 for knowing this also means knowing the very highest possibility and use of poetry. It is this knowledge which will save both the writer and the reader of it from falling into false traps and side issues which lie on the path even here. What is more, taking our stand firmly on this vantage point we may gain a quite full view of the entire range, mode and purpose of this form of human expression and also develop a more catholic, comprehensive and enlightened attitude towards it than is usually the case with us. But above all it is through this means, more than any other, that we are able to see, says Sri Aurobindo “how out of this arises the possibility of its use as the mantra of the read”.10
References
1. Mother India : (A Monthly review of Culture) Sri Aurobindo at Evening talk (Article) May, 1971, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, p. 260.2. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953, p. 54.3. Ibid, p.88
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5. K.R.S. Iyenger, Sri Aurobindo, Calcutta, Arya Publishing House, 1950, p. 107.6. K.R.S. Iyenger Sri Aurobindo : An Introduction, Mysore, Rao Reghavan, 1961, p.5.7. Letters of Sri Aurobindo : 1st Series, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram-, p. 115.8. Sri Aurobindo : The Future Poetry, Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953, p.12.9. Ibid, p. 1310. Ibid, p. 12
Evolution in the psyche of Anita Desai’s women: from the terror and trepidation of psychosis to a
sanguine and bullish view. An Appraisal of her five novels.
* Ms. V. Sunitha
The image of women in fiction has undergone change during the last four decades. Anita Desai’s place in Indian fiction is significant and noteworthy. The morbid, oppressive milieu that stifled the readers in her earlier novels advance into buoyant, succulent and diurnal life view in her subsequent novels. The external status remains the same but the characters’ perception and involvement receives a positive touch where it marks a great evolution in her writing that makes her women move from self-alienation, self-estrangement to self- identification, self- affirmation and self-realization. Though marital incompatibility is the backdrop of all the novels of Desai, her disintegrated and psychotic women never coincide with the willful and defiant one of the later novels, nevertheless all of them evolve from the womb of author’s pen. The carnage and self-annihilation that was meted out to her earlier protagonists is brought to a halt, as the novelist’s vision of the world has enhanced and becomes profound in a gradual manner. Her creativity gives birth to valiant characters as her career advances. Life threatening instincts are subdued and substituted by love, harmony and understanding in her later * teaches English at Sreenivasa Institute of Technology and Management
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novels. The externalization of self- obliterating forces is a marked triumph in the evolution of novelist as a trendsetter to the contemporary scenario. J. P. Tripathy discovers, “a pattern of positive growth.”(157)in Anita Desai’s novels. Akin to Anita Desai, William Somerset Maugham’s treatment of women in his plays also undergo a sea change where his disdain for women in his earlier plays evolve into veneration and regard in his later fiction. Desai’s first novel Cry, The Peacock (1963) explicates the pathos and agony of Maya who is deeply afflicted and torn ‘within’. Invalidated trepidation of death is the leitmotif of Desai’s first novel. The onset of the novel is menacing and baleful where it opens with the death of Maya’s pet dog Toto that introduces the “death motif so dominant in the novel” proclaims Prasad (56). The novel narrates the complexities of Maya’s experience and her inefficacy to maintain her sunny disposition despite life’s vicissitudes. Maya is acquainted only with the pleasures of life in her childhood and this makes her to transfix in juvenile thoughts even after marriage where she cannot repel from its magnetic effect. She hankers for a life of sensations and dwells in dreams. She feels hard to draw, stone like Gautama her superannuated husband in the game of love. She wishes for her femininity to be subjected under his masculinity but her burning urge for sex is blown out by Gautama and this batters her psyche. Maya’s excessive longing for physical and emotional attachment from Gautama and his immoderate aversion and detachment exhibits the exact picture of their matrimonial bond. Appended to this, the mnemonic words of the astrologer that proclaim death to either of the couple during the fourth year of their marriage is the toxic seed that corrode her psyche. She nurtures and brings it up with all her pessimistic might. The impact of destiny and her desperation to scuffle against its clutches is of paramount importance in devastating her. The ensuing paranoia betrays to domicile herself even at opulent household. She has no aspirations to come out of the malice thought of death that is generated and percolated in her psyche. Day by day the persecution complex sprouts inside, evolving her as a psychotic. Panic-stricken Maya embarks on a journey to the netherworld to seek eternal damnation. Her inordinate submission to the panicky forces reaches an inextricable stage. “Her neurosis keeps mounting wave upon wave till she loses her hold on sanity” avows Gulati (106).Fear! Fear! Death! Death! Albino! These forces erode and abrade off her reasoning and thought process. Toto’s death, Gautama’s lovelessness, her sybaritic temperament, motherlessness, impotency, albino’s portend, strenuous fidgetiness on death all emerge into various branches were uprooting becomes impossible. It oozes out lethal and death dealing chemicals inside her. She reaches a stage where escape and survival are beyond her possibility. Her personality contaminates by the virulent forces. It is not the domestic
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her but the delirium caused by the busy engagement of her psyche in the ambience of solitariness. Deluded Maya pursues wrong aims, indulges in wrong actions and finally is destined to suffer the consequence of her actions. Being caught in the clutches of mental disorder she exterminates Gautama and commits suicide at the end. Anita Desai’s first protagonist Maya becomes a pathetic victim to death and loses her life. The next protagonist of Desai is a pusillanimous woman Monisha in Voices in the City (1965). Devoured by pugnacious ambience at home she sets ablaze and passively retreats from life. The domestic chores of the fam-ily coupled with her childless state and her husband, Jiban’s lack of concern engulf her. She coils in her cocooned self by repressing the oppression and ill treatement meted out to her. Amid the hubhub of the joint family her seclusion unveils the ostracism that she endures in the family. Swindled by the preda-tors of the home she is destined to lose her life. The relentless and ruthless deportment of her in-laws is enough to contuse her psyche. Her childless state puts salt on her afflicted psyche. The buoyancy and the ebullience of the con-nubial hardly did exist even in the initial days of their wedlock. Jiban like Desai’s other men is stiff and rigid to bend to the rudimentary needs of his wife. When compared to Maya, Monisha is not a neurotic who pursues the course of life in reveries and dreams. She not even implores for Jiban’s love nor considers it of paramount importance like Maya. Monisha’s lusterless and colourless life opens the gates of death to her as she is exploited through and through in the name of wedlock with no scope for voicing her inner trepidation. She has no alternative than to submit herself to the trials and tribulations of life. It also explores her false conception on life, where she is of the opinion that death is the only rejoinder to a woman like her. When confronted with departure from life and putrid existence she readily opts for death as departure from stale life is far fetched and unattainable, according to her. Amla, Monisha’s sister is a girl with bubbling enthusiasm to life. Her portrait introduces the readers to a hilarious and vibrant world after the en-counter with the vapid and prosaic world of Monisha. She perceives life as rapturous and ecstatic. “Compared to her sister Amla appears full of life and vivacity with a streak of frivolity and an uncontrollable tendency to ride full blast on the tempest.” affirms Bande Usha.(103) As an extrovert Amla envisions the bright side of things. Being a damsel, she carries an elevated whim on life and fancies that the vistas of happiness are accessible and assured to her. As a commercial artist in a private firm she steps into Calcutta after winding up her education at Bombay. But this damsel is thrown into distress as Calcutta city cannot requite her exaggerated speculations. The pining for an unruffled and blissful life in the stale city is beyond the realms of possibility to her. It did not
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exuberant and sunny life that she yearned for. All her fantasies and fancies are torn into bits; her elation gets deflated when she confronts the real world that showcases disgust and detachment. Her infatuation with a superannuated man Dharma is a sequel of her thoroughly fagged-out mind that has lost the stamina to rationalize things. But she is shrewd and cautious enough to eschew away from her unrewarding affair with him. She leaves him and once again soldiers on into the regular pattern of life. The ebullient and delightful life that Amla has anticipated to live is not in proportion with what she confronts but she is not the one who betrays her ‘self’ and becomes a neurotic like Maya or timid like her sister Monisha. She can be eulogized and given bouquets for her flexibility. Problems are inevitable. To withstand it and survive amidst it underlines Amla’s valour. Her sturdiness is exceptional and can be given a standing ovation. Desai’s next protagonist Sarah in Bye Bye Blackbird (1971) also joins hands to authenticate Desai’s advancement and sanguine view in projecting her characters. Sarah’s predicament as an English woman who marries an Indian stands different from the doldrums of other women of Desai. Her feelings of dignity as an English woman finds difficult to set compatibility with an alien man. She is lost in the labyrinth of inferiority complex and it is more than her flesh and blood can stand. The epithet, ‘Adit’s wife’ makes her nameless in her own country. “She has shed her name as she had she her identity.” (33). Her love for her spouse is inveterate, veritable and consummate. But the muted sounds of whispering thoughts that always remind Adit’s foreignness regulate her conjugal bond which nibbles away her complacency. Her marriage marks the beginning that ends her identity. Her anomaly springs from her anonymity. She averts anyone’s presence in her personal zone because she is chary of her own position. She recoils internally by entering into the domain of demo-tion. The society, her blood ties wrap and hurl her in a corner belabouring her lowliness. But soon Sarah succumbs to Indian customs, becomes prepared to abjure her cherished and adorable land and ventures to become a part of her husband’s country. She becomes mentally prepared to face the odds or dispari-ties that she may have to encounter in unknown country, but she anticipates that there is light at the end of the tunnel which would help to gratify her hopes. Thus self-analysis, self discovery and the prowess to manipulate in compliance with the external pressure are the portals that unlatch her from the maze of life. She copes with the dire straits of life not by escaping but by involvement. Her formulae for life is commitment to her spouse and so she wraps up her English ‘self’, bids good bye to it, sets aside English life style and with a staunch belief proceeds ahead. Desai projects Sarah as a character who is sacrificial and propitiatory in giving up her belongings for the sake of human relations.
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is necessary for the protagonist is ‘inner awakening’, the miraculous realization that you aren’t a victim and perhaps never been one, are both necessary and sufficient for breaking the victim cycle.”(204). Rejection, repudiation, emotional fracas and the consequent repressed feelings of infancy disintegrate and dismantle Sita’s stance as a housewife and mother in Anita Desai’s next novel Where Shall We go This Summer?(1975). Being exploited emotionally and psychologically in her tender age Sita becomes a victim to inner conflicts and trauma which impede her conjugal affinity and rapport with her children. Preponderantly, she is stripped off from the love of both the parents who have made the tender bud Sita to droop and go flac-cid by nullifying reinforcement and back up to her. She cannot stomach the thought of her vanished mother. The charismatic old man, her father has his own measuring scales to distance Sita but clings to Rekha, her step sister by all means. Her emotional hunger is not satiated by her heroic father. Raman, her husband adds fuel to the fire and helps for its combustion by placing twigs called cold attitude, immune temperament, lack of intimacy, failure to picture the inner cravings of wife etc. Hence Sita throws her into drastic actions be-cause her psychological, ethical and sentimental issues are at loggerheads. Her abraded psyche culminates in whimsical decisions. She fancies preserving her child in the womb without giving birth to it. Despite of expecting world to tune to her rhythm, Sita transforms to the tunes of reality at the close of the novel, where the melodrama of insan-ity blurs, fastening stability and balance in her. The concept of Art of Living becomes apparent to her. The novelist finally ties her to a string called ac-ceptance and pulls her back from the abyss that she fantasized to dwell in. Perhaps the novelist is very cautious in projecting Sita, where she does not want her to sway to the nihilistic dominion that conquered Maya’s psyche in Cry, The peacock. Deterioration and annihilation that was once the realm of the novelist when she authored Cry, The peacock and Voices in the City, have undergone a tremendous change in this novel. Maya and Monisha are projected as the sequels of their glumness, but Sita, though sets off to the precipice of extinction is retrieved and knotted to the set patterns of life. A gradual advancement is discerned in the novelist’s forecast of characters. The incompatibility and the mismatch that is the rule and order of Desai’s couples can be witnessed in this novel too. But it is lax and lenient here. Like Sarah and Adit whose conjugal bond is not quacked by racial barriers and bridged at the end, Sita and Raman too do not go astray and try to convalesce at the end. This is a clear indication of not only their maturity but also the novelist’s maturity in presenting her characters. Marriage as an institution has failed to provide domestic bliss to So-phie due to Matteo’s exorbitant thirst for spiritual awakening in Journey to
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Matteo, Sophie, Laila and the trials and tribulations in their quest to attain self-realization is the fulcrum of the novel. The couple- Matteo and Sophie, embarks on India with different intentions. She feels to revel in the beauty of India as a globetrotter, but to her husband the visit is an audacious and adventurous quest for self-realization. Thereby, Sophie follows Matteo physi-cally, much inappropriate to her imaginative existence, to scramble through the dense, thorny undergrowth called ashrams, gurus etc, the experience of which is likely to poke and bruise her psyche. Sophie wants Matteo to wind around and get him to be latched inside the wedlock but Matteo beseeches to be buttressed by The Mother to attain ethereal reality. His maniacal penchant for her exacerbates Sophie’s angst. Her plans to bracket her in the family life with Matteo and their children and thus metamorphose her life of sobriety and abstinence into joie de vivre become unfeasible. Though Sophie agonizes for the inimical circumstances that swamp her in the ocean of ordeals, grieves for her husband’s comportment she is sanguine and is not victimized by the melancholy and woe that encompass her. She resists, takes a new dimension and sets forth to explicit the reality behind Mother’s camouflage in order to have Matteo for herself. Laila, who is dressed herself up as Mother is unique in disposition, outlook and comportment amidst Desai’s women. Her psychic make-up is the embodiment of tenacity, persistence and indefatigable spirit. She can also be christened as temerity instead of Laila, her actual name because she is the paradigm of it. Her intrepid and dauntless spirit would toss and shrug aside Desai’s faint-hearted women in her previous novels. She is so, “headstrong and so independent.”(164) The fire inside Laila is a raging inferno that would not abate and peter out until she is engulfed by the ethereal elation. The attainment of oneness with the divine spirit is quite demanding and a Herculean task. She has to submit herself to manifold quandaries and muddles on the way but her submission do not pilfer her psychic might and valour. Despite this her sangfroid and sanguine nature accompany her in all her ventures to visualize the Guru, her Master. It is here that Laila stands aloft and can be revered and august when compared to the feeble woman of Desai. Let the external circumstances be inimical and venomous but the inner faculty of Laila is self-assertive and formidable that would convert even a toxin into nectar and make it favourable for her goal of merging with the soul of God. Thus Laila encounters with the supernatural power and goes beyond the limits of human knowledge, experience or reason in a spiritual way. ‘Tree of Eternity’ brightens her vision. It becomes obvious that Anita Desai’s later fiction have undergone a great metamorphosis where her women in her later novels though agonize for the inimical circumstances that swamp them in the ocean of ordeals; they
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“A scrutiny of Anita Desai’s art, shows that the novelist is growth-oriented. The development from her first heroine, to her latest creations has a steady ascent towards self-realization.”(169-170) The turn of events may not be propitious and affirmative to her valiant and dauntless women like Amla, Sarah, Sita, Sophie and Laila but they spare every effort to ameliorate it and triumph to stabilize their life. Desai’s later protagonist do not swim against the current but swim with the current and thus demonstrate their stamina, mettle and might. They are pragmatic, rational and commonsensical. Desai aims not for severance but for synthesis. She says in her interview with Jasbir Jain, “I don’t think anybody’s exile from society can solve any problem. I think basically the problem is how to exist in society and yet maintain one’s individuality rather than suffering from a lack of society and lack of belonging.”(61-69) Despite the loss of life in Cry, The Peacock, unquenched quest for a meaningful life in Voices in the City, the protagonists of Desai in Bye Bye Blackbird, Where Shall We go This Summer? and Journey to Ithaca are forging ahead to unravel their mysteries in a propitious way. This is clear evidence on the novelist’s maturity in verbalizing her concepts on reality rather than succumbing to the vortex of maniac and dementia. In an interview with Atma Ram, Desai makes it clear that, “suicide would have been too melodramatic an alternative for the middle aged woman.”(27) that’s why she makes her later protagonists to visualize a new horizon amidst the sea of disarray rather than drown and die in it.
References1. Atma, Ram. “Anita Desai”. Interviews Indian- English Writers. Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop. 1983. 2. Atwood, Margaret. Survival. Anansi. Toronto. 1972.3. Bande, Usha. “ Amla Dharma Love: An Enigma in Voices in the City.” Indian Women Novelist Set I, Vol III. Ed. Dhawan R.K. New Delhi: Prestige Books. 1991. 4. Bande, Usha. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflict. New Delhi: Prestige. 1988. 5. Desai, Anita. Bye Bye Blackbird. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. 2006. 6. Desai, Anita. Journey to Ithaca. London: Heinemann. 1995. 7. Gulati, Vinod Bhushan. “Structure in the novels of Anita Desai”. Perspectives in Anita Desai . Srivastava Ramesh .K. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan.1984.8. Jain, Jasbir. “Interview with Anita Desai”. Rajastan University Studies in English. Vol XII, 1979. 9. Prasad, Madhusudhan. “The novel of Anita Desai: A study in imagery”. Perspectives on Anita Desai. Srivastava Ramesh. K. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakasham. 1984.
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Camus’ Concept of the Absurd
* Ms. Sunit Kaur Absurdity, in its various manifestations, is one of the key issues of our age .Its meaning is no longer confined to the philosophical or theological context. Its impact is felt everywhere. Forces of nihilism have made serious inroads into all branches of Knowledge. We have come to question with despair the net outcome of our achievements. The power of reason, which exalts human beings over animals, has resulted in a manipulative use of intelligence .We are always seeking new modes of escape from our freedom. Brich Fromm says about the modern man: “ He has covered up the whole reality of human existence and replaced it with his artificial, prettified picture of a pseudo-reality, not too different from the savages who lost their land and freedom for glittering glass beads .” 1 Not only is reason being undermined everywhere but we are increasingly questioning the gains of science too.The idea of absurdity is rampant in the field of science also.The theories of Einsteinian relativity and quantum physics suggest multiple answers.What is posited today is bravely deconstructed tomorrow.Charles B.Harris observes:”The ‘new’ logic , with its acceptance of the illogical, and modern science with its denial of casuality and its concept of entropy,elevate chaos to the level of scientific fact.” 2
The sustaining force of religion, which provided a meaning to our life, has suffered serious blows in the present rational age which demands concrete proofs for everything. No doubt, there seems to be a religious renaissance now a days in some parts of the world. Unable to confront the reality of life, we are once again rushing to the churches, the synagogues or the mosques. But the genuine faith is missing. The sense of religion, which was once the corner stone of our existence, now only skims the surface. Visiting the shrines has become another version of meeting at the clubs. We are interested in our material progress through our associations with the supreme god who runs the corporation of world. The questions of salvation and damnation exist only on the periphery of theology. Questioning the current mode of theism, theology., Erich Fromm asks: “Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of the ‘Man upstairs,’ to teach to pray in order to make God your partner in business, to ‘sell’ religion with the methods and appeals used to sell soap?”3 Having lost faith in God, the modern man has made religion a charade. Even the scriptures are held absurd. Pointing out the basic contradiction of the Book of Genesis, Marcus K. Billson exposes the fraud of God. In the garden of Eden, God promulgates a law which makes use of absurd logic. Genesis 2:16-17 * heads the deptt. of English at Apeejay College of Fine Arts, Jalandhar,
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reads: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die .”The irony of the situation is that Adam does not know the meaning of death. Further ,the law is meaningless unless disobeyed. If Adam does not violate it , he is to be deprived of Knowledge .The joys of felix culpa cannot be obtained without questioning the authority of God.And if he questions it, then he suffers the consequences of mea culpa.Either way he is caught .4 So absurdity lies in the genesis of man.Adam is asked to obey God in a language which is yet to exist for him.He does not know the meaning and implications of God’s command .There is no communication between the two of them and yet he is asked to choose not only his fate but also the fate of his descendants.Now the question arises :If man’s position in the world has always been absurd ,then how we can call it the basic problem of our age? The answer is ,in lack of faith in traditional answers . Unlike the previous ages ,we do not find in religious faith any answer to our human predicament .With the annihilation of our sacred Tradition ,we want to know the meaning of existence .If the signifier life has no satisfying signified ,then what is the purpose of life ?5 If we always find the negation of our desires by the hostile universe, what should we do then? This dilemma of our desire for meaning and the inevitable chaos of universe always haunts us .What adds to our anguish is that the institutions of society, which are supposed to serve us and create order, are aggravating our plight. Events hang together but there is no cause-and-effect relationship. We aspire for one thing and are rewarded by another. Albert Camus has made a perceptive analysis of man’s innate desire for meaning in a hostile and fragmented universe both in The Stranger and The myth of Sisyphus. What he affirms in both the books is that man should have a lucid knowledge of his position in the world. The dubious nature of scientific certainties, the inability of reason to fathom the mysteries of the universe, the inescapable fact of death cannot in any way justify the negation of life, either through physical or metaphysical suicide. In the face of absurd, we must affirm our rage to live. While in the novel he evokes the feeling of absurd, in the treatise he offers the philosophy of absurd. As both the books explore aesthetically and philosophically the problem of absurd in the present times, they serve as keys in explicating other novels which deal with the same theme. Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger is a clerk and confirms Camus’ approximation of a “sub-clerk in the Post Office” to a “conqueror if consciousness is common to them.” 6 Further the novel is divided into two parts and we may note that the Meurasult of the first part is different from the Meursault of the second. Philosophically speaking,the Meursault of the first
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narcissist content to lead a life of instincts and sensual gratification.”Instead of living within the comfort of an emblematic and remote God,Meursault lives within the embrace of a glaring sun,his only truth,which affirms the evidence of animal life and the power of immediacy” 7 .In other words,he is leading his life on a primitive level and is unware of the basic predicament of the absurdity of man in a godless world.Bereft of any spiritual or societal illusions,he leads his life from moment to moment. According to Grossvogel,”Meursault is,in part1,the denizen of an existential Eden before a necessary and humanizing fall:he has an exemplary emptiness adequate to make of him an existential anti-hero,but he has not yet begun to ask questions.” 8 But when the chain of automatic daily gestures is broken by his murder of the Arab at the beach,he becomes aware of his human fate.”I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day,the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy.But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.” 9 His awareness of “my undoing”10 has two different meanings. It has the ramifications of both mea culpa and felix culpa.Like Adam,he has broken a law and therefore deserves the extreme punishment. But ,like him,he has also become aware of his human destiny and the absurdity of the lies of society. In other words,Meursault in the second part gradualy moves to become the hero of the absurd.He refuses to seek solace in religion. For people like the examining magistrate a leap into faith is the very basis of life. To Meursault,he says: “That was unthinkable,he said;all men believe in god,even those who reject him. Of this he was absolutely sure;if ever he came to doubt it,his life would lose all meaning,” 11 But the protagonist refuses to subscribe to this form of metaphysical suicide. For him, the postures of both the magistrate and,later,the priest are simply absurd. In a profound confrontation with the latter, he explodes and challenges his myth of the ordered universe with the vision of the absurd. None of the certainties was worth one strand of women’s hair. Living as he did,like a corpse, he could’nt even be sure of being alive.” In the face of absurd,there is no question of any religious solace;” Nothing, nothing had the least importance,and I knew quite well why.” 12
What he realizes is that there is no escape from death:” All alike would be condemned to die one day.” 13 At this stage it appears that Meursault is going to be another version of Caligula, who will justify murders as a proper answer to the predicament of human mortality. But he moves beyond it. Maurice Friedman comments:” This levelling down of everything to a common nothingness is reminiscent of Caligula,But in the end of The Stranger Meursault archieves a transformation
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and even a sort of happiness which were altogether denied Caligula.” 14 Unlike the legendary emperor who sought in bloodshed an answer to the problem of life and dealth, Meursault affirms the meaning of life in a meaningless universe “With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again.” 15 Drawing a lesson from his mother’s commitment to life, he also is suffused with the rage to live in the face of the marked hostility of the society. In sum,Camus in The Stranger illustrates through the character of Meursault and his confrontation with the absurd the way out of absurdity.In a world where anything may happen anytime, one should not commit either physical or metaphysical suicide. The first negates the very tension of the absurd and the second provides a life of illusions .What Camus posits in this novel is that man must preserve the tension of the absurd with complete lucidity.
It is,however,important to note that for Camus the notion of the absurd is dependent on two ingredients—intention and reality. In case we drop one of the terms, we destroy the concept of the absurd.The feeling of absurd arises only when two elements are present—the desire of the human mind that the world should be explicable and understood in human terms and the naked fact that the world is not thus explicable. It depends upon man as much as upon world. In other words,it comes into being from the inherent conflict between our consciousness of death and our desire for life, from the conflicts between our desire for meaning and the chaotic nature of the universe. Thus the feeling of absurd is based on human awareness of the disproportion between our intentions and hostile reality. And if one persists with it,one realizes the notion of absurd which becomes the main urge of life.David D.Galloway,sums up the main points of Camus absurd vision as expounded by him in The myth of Sisyphus in these words. “The first step in the development of the absurd consists in the individual’s shocking recognition of the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. The second step consists in the absurd man’s living the now apparent conflict between his intention (his inner voice) and the reality he will encounter, the third step consists in his assumption of heroic dimensions through living the conflict and making it his god.” 16 The ideal hero of absurd is Sisyphus. There are different versions of Sisyphus.But they concur on one point.He is always ready to rebel against gods to retain the priceless gift of physical life.Each version portrays his hatred for the gods and his enormous passion for life. Moreover,in Camus’ view,he is the beacon light for man because he knows that his task for carrying the rock to the top of the mountain is futile.He will never attain success in his mission.It is an unending,meaningless
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of his struggle.Camus says: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. 17
In sum, Sisyphus does not find any rational pattern and significance in his life.In the course of his unending task,he does not seek the solace of any religious doctrine or possible salvation in future.Rather he insists on happiness in leading a life without illusions in a godless universe.What he stresses is a relentless struggle against a witless universe.In this way,he becomes an ideal image for ordinary men who are also involved in incessant struggle for a meaning in life.Without providing them the assurance of either religious ideology or logical abstractions,he urges them to have faith in life. We know that this affirmation of life is at best a negative truth.Mere existence reduces us to the level of animals.So Camus goes beyond it in The Plague.The protagonist of the novel ,Dr Rieux,along with his associates wages a relentless war against the plague which strikes his city,Oran,knowing well that it is a losing battle. A final victory over the epidemic can never be scored. One plague may come to an end but other epidemics will strike human beings in future. There is no escape from the plagues. But he refuses to give in and to cease to be a rebel against suffering and death. It is just this endless rebellion in the service of life that constitutes the moral imperative for Camus : to live without appeal to absolutes of faith or reason ; to see as clearly as possible ; to avoid giving others pain ; to fight plague wherever it appears.” 18
The elements of absurdity and man’s heroic fight against them are present in much of the contemporary American fiction. It does not imply that the American novelists have consciously drawn from Camus’books though some of them may have. Nor does it mean that they have consciously endeavoured to illustrate the philosophy of absurd as enunciated by Camus in their novels. It simply means that they are also occupied with an identical problem : how to live in a world where both religious and scientific absolutes have become meaningless. Some of them, like J.D. Salinger, seek in exotic religions like Zen Buddism a solution to the human predicament. Camus would have definitely condemmed such latest versions of spiritual suicide. Some others like Kurt Vonnegut accept absurdity as an inevitable part of life, but they do not repose any faith in human struggle against absurdity. But some like Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller are in analogous position with Camus. They probe with relentless energy the factors especially responsible for societal absurdity. Like those of Camus, their characters do not find in physical or intellectual suicide an answer to the human predicament. Significantly, in their books there are characters like Meursault and Dr.Rieux among others. Bereft of the heroic dimensions of Lears and Ahabs, their heroes do not indulge in metaphysical rants against the universe.
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they are ordinary men and speak in our idiom. And that is why their struggle against the dehumanizing forces of life means more to us than that of the legendary figures.
References
1 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955;rpt.New York: Facett Premier,1985),p.153.2 Charles B.Harris, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd (New Haven, Conn: College and Uneversity Press,1971),P.17.3 Fromm, p.158.4 Marcus K.Billson, “The Un-Minderbinding of Yossarian: Genesis Inverted in Catch-22,” Arizona quarterly,(19 ),319.5 Ibid., p.320.6 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trns. Justin O’Brian(1975; rpt.Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977),p.66.7 David I. Grossvogel, Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie (Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press,1979),p.78.8 Ibid ., P.79.9 Albert Camus ,The Outsider, Trans. Staut Gilbert (1961; rpt.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1975),P.64.10 Ibid.,p.73.11 Ibid ., P.118.12 Ibid .13 Ibid., P.119.14 Maurice Friedman, To Deny Our Nothingness(New York: Delta Publishing Co., 1967),p.152.15 Camus, The Outsider, p.120.16 David D.Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin and London : University of Texas Press , 1966), p.16.17 Camus , The Myth of Sisyphus ,p.111.18 Robert N.Wilson , The Writer as a Social Seer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p.126.
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THE ART Of gALSWORTHY AS A NOVELIST
* Dr. Rita Das
Like any other novelist Galsworthy dealt with the situation prevalent during his time. The Victorian era was in its dying state giving way to the emergence of a middleclass which seemed almost non-existent during the period of its time. The novelist wrote of an age when the working classes were not yet a major force in British life and the old aristocracy of birth were ceasing to be so. A typical novelist of the Edwardian Age, Galsworthy epitomised the predominance of the middle-class in his novels. He presents not a complex picture of the Edwardian world, but rather a close view of a single very important section of society, the commercial upper middle class. The series of novels, The forsyte Saga is a study of the upper middle class. In the first novel of the series The man of Property, the novelist presents his central character Soames Forsytes. The protagonist has a sense of property which extends to his beautiful wife as to his house. Soames suffers from indignity when his wife runs away with another man. Like the protagonist others in the Forsyte family never give up their “sense of property” which results in turning them narrow minded. Galsworthy’s early life and periods spent in his own country gave him that intimate acquaintance with the manner and character of the classes to be seen in his novels. Every important character of Galsworthy bears the trace of having been taken to pieces and then put together again. As a result his characters do not seem larger than life, they all seem to be normal and natural beings. Like his characters the different leading classes of the society is presented with equial ease. The characters drawn from the urban world in his novels are the Forsytes in The forsyte Saga, the Monts in A modern Comedy. These characters, being the cream of the English urban society enjoy all the comfort and luxury of life. Galsworthy’s characters drawn from the rural world are the Pendyces in The Country House, the Caradocs in The Patrician. They belong to the landed gentry and do not enjoy the social status of the rich. In The man of Property he made an attempt to reveal the realities of the pre-war society. In The Country House he laid bare the ruling motives of the landed gentry. Modern novelist made a bold deviation in the method of projecting life in their novels. The prudish reaction of Victorians to sex gave way to describing reality about man - woman relationship. Galsworthy drew delightful pictures of love. His greatness as a novelist lay in describing youthful love in the same
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fervour as he did that of mature love. Love comes to old Jolyon in The forsyte Saga in his eightyfifth year. In In Chancery Irene, twelve years after the failure of her first marriage, falls passionately in love with young Jolyon and marries him almsot in the same manner as Ada loved and subsequently married Galsworthy. The novelist did not hesitate to bare the passional secrets of his characters. Speaking of sex was no more a matter of shame. To Galsworthy love is deeply rooted in sexual attraction. In several of his novels he made the marriage of his characters unsuccessful due to lack of sex attraction. In The man of Property, Irene loathes her husband which leads to tragic consequences. Irene is more of a rare possession of her husband than a life partner who shares the joys and sorrows of life. She tells him: Yes; it was a crime to marry you. I have paid for it. (1956:381) Ultimately Irene obtains divorce and finds true love in the company of Young Jolyon. Galsworthy points out the big difference between “a sense of property” and “the sanctity of the marriage tie”. To the novelist it was a social evil that ought to be removed by revolutionary change in the views outlook of the people. Galsworthys method of story-telling is conventional. He is the “omniscient” author and incidents and characters are presented from his “point of view”. He builds up stories gradually through a series of pictures which are vivid and economical. In The forsyte Saga he presents graphic pictures of the commercial upper middle class world. Another technical device used by Galsworthy is the contrast of two opposite worlds with the help of two parallel sets of characters belonging to two opposing classes of the society - the upper middle class and the lower class. The novelist also uses the flashback technique by moving the story forward and backward while presenting glimpses of the life of the characters. The events of his stories stretch over a long period of time. In his first trilogy The forsyte Saga the story lingers on for thirty-five years. During this long span of time various changes in social and individual life take place. Soames, the central character grows old during the said period. When the story of saga begins, the central character is a young man married to the beautiful Irene. Three generation of the Forsyte family are made to pass within this period of time. The story of Soames lingers on to his old age presenting his second generation. The love story of Fleur and Jon Forsyte is presented with the same intensity as that of Irene Bosinney and Irene - Jolyon. Galsworthy developed his philosophy of life in his manhood when he found himself face to face with a world full of strife, misery and unhappiness. His wife’s first unsuccessful marriage introduced him to misery and he broke out of a sheltered life to face a world of inequality, class conflict and poverty. A really perfect world, according to Galsworthy, is the world which is ruled by humanity and the only religion to be followed in practical life is the religion of
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mutual help and understanding. As a critic of life the novelist rejected all distinctive Christian doctrines and believed in good human actions and deeds. Wisdom comes to Soames through his love for his daughter. He learns the truth in later life and in the end dies for her. Love of order and beauty lay at the root of Galsworthy’s social philosophy. Talking about philosophy the novelist writes: My philosophy is merely a belief that if we all understood and tolerated each other a little more than we do the world would be a happier place to live in. (1935:263)
References1. Allen, Walter. The English Novel. London: Penguin, 1958.2. Cecil, David, Early Victorian Novelists: Eassys in Revaluation, London: Constable and Co., 1934.3. James, Henry. The Art of Fiction. New York, 1948.4. Marrot H.V. The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy. London: Heinemann, 1935.5. Mottram, R.H. For Some We Loved: An Intimate Portrait of Ada and John Galsworthy. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1956.
SPIRIT - WRITINg* Dr. Prafulla Chandra Swain
Most tales of the supernatural are tales about ghosts, phantoms, fiends, witches, spirits, fairies, angels and dead men and women and haunted houses and places. The supernatural stories are enjoyed by almost everybody even those who do not believe in ghosts, spirits, etc. A gripping supernatural story may well cause a “willing suspension of disbelief” as the plot unravels itself. That is the reason why many great writers have included the supernatural in their literary works. A number of such scenes and characters appear in the plays of William Shakespear. In The Tempest, Ariel is an airy spirit who helped Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda while dwelling in the uninhabited island to which they were exiled. Names of other good spirits who accompanied Ariel and attended Prospero are Iris, Ceres and Juno besides a number of nameless nymphs. In macbeth and Hamlet respectively, the readers come across the ghosts of Banquo and Hamlet’s father posthumously. They appear on the scene as airy apparitions only. The
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A midsummer Night’s Dream is full of fairies. Oberon and Titania are the King and queen respectively of the fairy kingdom who descend on earth for some time to have fun and festivities. Samuel Taylor Coleridge depicts the supernatural in his poems, “Kubla Khan” (1797) and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). In “Kubla Khan” he writes; --- A savage place, as holy and enchanted As ever beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman waling for her demon-lover.He portrays a vampire like female spirit in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also: Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold. According to the story, Life-in-Death played a game of dice with Death, another vampire in a skeleton ship and won over the cursed mariner and tortured him with deadly pain without killing him. In the poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Marci’, John Keats also picturises a fiendish lady trying to entice a young gallant to a cave to suck his blood and drain him of all life. In the poem, “The Listeners” the poet Walter de la Mare paints a lonely house, haunted by invisible spirits who do not respond to calls by a human visitor, though the visitor could smell the presence of invisible phantoms inside. Mary Godwin Shelley, wife of P.B. Shelley, wrote frakenstein (1817) as a weird and incredible story creating a monster who unleashed much horror in the novel. Similarly the ghostlike presence of the mysterious Bertha, kept away from public vision finally wrecks the house and its inmates in the Charlotte Bronte novel Jane Eyre (1847). Her mad screams represent the frustrating spirit seeking resurrection. Daphne du Maurier sketches the beautiful and elegant Rebecca - who lends her name to the title of the novel Rebecca (1938) - is never seen. It is only her spectral will-o’-the wisp presence that is felt in the housefold. A full-length detective novel The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conal Doyle (1859-1930) creates an eerie and mysterious surrounding of a haunted house, visited by a ghost at night. In the famous French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-93)’s novel The Hostelry, the protagonist Ulrich - bound in snow in the high Alps - is hounded by his friend Gasper’s invisible spirits crying out for help from his icy grave. Ulrich turns insane, trying to drive away the ghost, perhaps working in his mind. By far the most popular and widely-read fiction writer of the supernatural in the Indian English literature is Ruskin Bond. Bond argues that a good story of the supernatural can make one mull over the mysteries of human existence
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something akin to a soul-force and the aura of a person that lingers on after the body is gone. It would appear from Bond’s stories that ghosts are almost always melancholy spirits looking for lost love or a lost home. They are unquiet and unhappy souls sometimes haunting the place they once knew. Frustrated or betrayed lovers and wives who committed suicide or met with an accidental death reappear as ghosts in captivating Bond stories like “Listen to the Wind”, “Wilson’s Bridge”, “Whistling in the Dark”, “Topaz”, “The Ghost in the Garden” and “Susanna’s Seven Husbands”. The story “The Haunted Bunglow” describes how ghosts in peepal trees attack unwary passers-by and play havoc with their lives. Sheer malignity, almost motiveless, is characterized by rich and pitiless Susanna, in the story “Sussana’s Seven Husbands”. According to the story, she disposed of her husbands while alive and still looking for her final victim after her death. In the Bengalee literature Rabindra Nath Tagore deals with the supernatural in his stories “Kshudhit Paashan” (meaning hungry stone) and “Nishithey” (At Night). The former story echoes the out-of-date Meher Ali’s screans of “stay away” while the protagonist has nightmarish visions of trapped souls within the ancient ruins. The latter story echoes the frantic voice of the first wife and freezes the romantic overtures of the husband towards his newly-married second wife after the death of his first wife. To other Bengalee writers, Rajshekhar Basu and Shrishendu Mukhopadhyay also deal with such supernatural elements in thier works. The famous Oriya poet Godabarish Mishra’s supernatural poem “Kalijai” which describes the hauntings of the unsatisfied soul of a newly-married girl who was drowned into the blue water of the Chilika lake after the country boat capsized. The people, especially the fishermen could hear her wailing voice and started worshipping the spirit as a goddess. All these supernatural stories and plots are written to entertain than to instruct. They are not all frightening or devilish. The supernatural has its funny side too as some of the above stories will testify. Psychologists define the supernatural as expression of the dark thoughts and impressions trapped in the subconscious crevices of the human mind.
References1. Bartlett, John : familiar Quotations, Mac Millan, London 1962 (Continental Edition)2. Magill, Frank N. : masterpieces of World Literature in
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Henry James and D.H. Lawrence on the Craft of Fic-tion—A Comparative Analysis
* Ms. Madhumeet Henry James and D.H. Lawrence have been two of the most important practitioners of the craft of fiction in the last hundred years or so. The career of Henry James (1843-1916) spans the last quarter of nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, whereas that of Lawrence (1885-1930) is limited to the early part of the twentieth. But the difference between these two great novelists is not merely that of seniority or juniority. It is fundamental, even essential. Both the novelists are great in their own right, but they have altogether different orientations, different critical beliefs and principles which we can see embodied in their creative work. James is a great artist, with an immaculate, exquisite technique. He looks down upon sloppiness and crudeness. Lawrence is in no sense of the term a technician or even a craftsman. He is fitful and capricious, as capable of masterpieces as of sheer rubbish. He can be called a romantic1, an inspirationalist, a vitalist, and so on (though there is ample truth in Middleton Murry’s assertion that Lawrence is really unclassifiable and if he belongs to a tradition, it is “the tradition of himself”).2
Like most novelists, both James and Lawrence have expressed them-selves on the craft of the novel. It will be instructive to compare their viewpoints. The comparison of the two great minds delivering themselves on the art which engaged their greatest attention and which occupied the best part of their lives will not make us understand their critical stances better but also furnish us with new insights for the study of their novels and even the novels of writers other than them. James’s critical writings would fill a sizable volume: Leon Edel has in fact collected his critical essays in a book entitled The House of Fiction. As for Lawrence, his performance, volumetrically, is skimpy—three or four brief essays plus, of course, a number of stray comments on the novel scattered all over his writings, even his novels. In this paper we shall concentrate more on James’s “The Art of Fiction”—a longish essay most representative of his critical thinking on the novel, namely, “Morality and the Novel”, “Why the Novel Matters,” and “The Novel.” Where James is a systematic and rigorous theorizer, Lawrence is ex-tremely inconsistent and, at times, downright arbitrary and irrational, though he can sometimes be extremely illuminating and incontrovertible. James’s main-interest is in what he calls the “execution” part of a novel, but Lawrence goes deeper than the questions of form, style, and execution to confront the very* teaches English at Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Jalandhar, Punjab, India.
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essence of the novel. Incidentally, James is the first important theorist of the English novel. As Gillie rightly observes, “James is important as the distin-guished writer in English to give the novel and its form concentrated critical attention,”3 Lawrence figures nowhere among the theoreticians of the novel, like, say, E.M. Forster, but what he has to say about the novel is important and interesting, though at places too whimsical and strident. In “The Art of fiction” (1888) James laments that English novel so far has been without a theory. The French novel has been luckier in this respect. The English novel, in James’s words, “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.”4 People in general and even the novelists themselves had simplistic notions about the novel and were quite apologetic about novel- writing as if it were something to be ashamed of. James insists that the novel is as respectable as, say, music or painting. He endorses the view of Besant (whose small pamphlet on the novel prompted “The Art of fiction”) that the novel is not an idle pastime but “one of the fine arts.”5 Interestingly, many people, especially those with a Puritanic background, shy away from the word “art”. According to them, the function of a story or novel is to entertain and to instruct. If a writer makes his story too artistic, it will be-come so much the less entertaining. Even its instructiveness will lose its edge because it is believed that artistic stories should not be overly didactic. So art is branded as a villain, a spoil-sport. For example, in artistic novels, we cannot have happy endings which so please the populace. James wittily remarks: “The ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes.”6 James insists, nevertheless, that fiction is a fine art though today it stands vulgarized by the so-called popular novelists. Two fundamental points made by James emerge from “The Art of Fic-tion” which need some elaboration. They are:1. The choice of a theme or story is not important. What is wholly and solely important is “execution.”2. A novel is an organic whole, the constituent elements of which cannot be isolated or examined separately. The first of these two points shows James to be an aesthete (as against a moralist) and the second shows that he is an organicist or holist. Like all aesthetes James puts all the stress on the execution. He declares unequivo-cally: “The execution belongs to the author alone… and we measure him by that.”7In other words, the choice of the theme or story is an act extraneous to the writing of a novel. Furthermore, the merit of a novel is independent of the
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observes: “The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”8 However, we find a little relaxation in James’s technical demands in his words: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.”9 If James’s viewpoint is classicist with a bit of impressionism, that of Lawrence is, broadly, romantic and expressionistic. In his emphasis on the organic nature of a novel, James harks back to Aristotle and to more recent critics like Coleridge. James avers: “A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.”10 With remarkable insight James dismisses as futile any attempt to isolate such elements as incident, description, and char-acterization. Witness his famous rhetorical question: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but illustration of character?”11 It is to be noted that Lawrence too believes in the organic nature of a novel. In “The Novel” one of the three essential characteristics of a novel listed by him is that “the novel inherently is and must be…interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically.”12 Because a novel is “quick” (informed with life), it has got to be an organic whole. We may see the aesthetic viewpoint of James coalescing with the vitalistic concern of Lawrence on this point. An important point on which James does not deliver himself at any length, but which claims Lawrence’s greatest attention, is the relation between morality and the novel. James merely refers to Besant’s observation that most English novelists have a “conscious moral purpose.”13James wonders if Besant is “recording a fact or laying down a principle.”14James pulls up Besant not only for his vagueness but also for congratulating the English novelists for having a “conscious moral purpose.” What strikes James is the moral timidity of the English novelists. They have not made any bold experiments, nor have they brought in new themes and materials to enrich the genre. Far more important than James’s indictment of the moral timidity of the English novelists is his fundamental aesthetic position that the novel, being one of the fine arts, has nothing to do with morality. In his words, “questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair.”15This is an ultra-aestheticist position which would endorse the slogan ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. Lawrence’s position on this point is nearly antithetical to that of James, as we shall see hereafter. Moving from James to Lawrence is like moving from a sharp and me-ticulous intelligence to the strident vociferation of a prophet and crusader
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who attaches little importance to form and consistency. And yet Lawrence’s essays on novel are full of insightful intimations beyond the reach of most conventional critics. The trouble begins right from Lawrence’s concept of the novel. Whereas James thoughtfully describes it as an impression of life that is both, inclusive and exclusive, typical as well as selective, Lawrence in “Why the Novel Matters” defines it in his own whimsical manner and then goes into a rhapsody over what he calls “the book of life.” Whereas James’s definition is representative, Lawrence’s is highly personal though convincing enough in its own right. Lawrence’s unconventional concept of the novel is intimately related to his philosophy of life. Lawrence is a worshipper of life—life not in the abstract, but life as embodied in the individual. An individual is a whole and integrated being. Lawrence does not believe that an individual is a duality comprising a body and a soul. The two are one and the same. Now science or philosophy is the product of the mind of a man in which the body finds no expression. The novel, on the contrary, is an expression of all the faculties of an individual working in unison. This is what makes the novel superior to science, to phi-losophy, and, what is strange, even poetry. Lawrence says: “For this reason I am a novelist. And being novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”17 All books which are expres-sive of the whole man alive are brought by Lawrence within the ambit of the novel. The Bible is described by him as “a great confused novel.”18 Homer and Shakespeare are likewise, “the supreme old novels.”19
Both James and Lawrence relate the quality of a novel to the character of the novelist. In James’s words, it is a “very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the produce. . . .No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”20If according to James the novelist should be a man of profound intelligence, experience, and sensibility, according to Lawrence he should be a whole man alive, a well-rounded individual who responds with the whole of his being to experience and transforms it into art. The novelist in this sense is superior to the poet, the scientist, and the philosopher who unlike him, are not whole men alive. Unlike James, Lawrence ignores to a large extent discussion of such constituent elements of the novel as character, plot, setting etc. in their isolation. Nevertheless, he does make some extremely meaningful observations re-garding characters in fiction. In “The Novel” he writes: “The man in the novel must be ‘quick’.”21 By “quick” he means full of passional life and true to one’s instincts. Characters in a novel must pursue the goal of self-fulfillment through the satisfaction of their instinctive urges in utter disregard and even defiance of
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taboos. Lawrence admires most characters of Hardy because of their quick-ness but blames Hardy for not making them complete social rebels. He blames Tolstoy even more for making his Pierre and Vronsky cowardly in the same manner. Lawrence writes: “In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing.”22 A character who is “quick” forms lively relationships with everything around him. He defies all conventions and patterns of behaviour. Characters in the novel should be of this kind. Significantly, Lawrence is inclined to judge the character and merit of a novelist from the quality of his characters. Witness his assessment of Tolstoy, Hardy, Flaubert and so on. This brings us to the troubled question of morality and the novel. As we have noticed above, James is for keeping the question of morality away from the novel and art in general. The novelist is an executant. A novel like a painting can be good or bad, depending upon whether the novelist has executed his theme competently or otherwise; but it cannot be moral or otherwise. Nor can it teach any moral lesson to the reader. Lawrence’s views on the subject are very different and, like most of his views, extremely unconventional. To him, the novel has a great potential for doing evil as well as good. What kind of a novel is morally good? Lawrence does not answer this question in the expected, conventional manner. The vulgar concept of a “good” novel is referred to by James in these words : “One would say that being good means representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed in prominent posi-tions; another would say that it depends on a ‘happy ending,’ on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs , and cheerful remarks.”23 James’s humorous tone makes it clear that he holds no brief for “good” novels in this vulgar sense. For him goodness of a novel is an aesthetic not an ethical criterion, being related only to execution and independent of subject -matter or content. Lawrence’s attitude on this point is opposed both to the vulgar concept of goodness (glib optimism and poetic justice) and the Jamesian concept of goodness as a purely aesthetic category. Lawrence is basically a moralist—but a moralist of his own kind. Being moral, according to him, does not imply living according to a set code of following a given set of Thou Shalt Not’s. True morality consists in living one’s life in accordance with one’s own deepest in-stincts and urges which are normally suppressed by man-made social, moral, and religious codes. A crow flying across the sky is doing something religious. Similarly a man who acts in accordance with his instincts is a truly religious and moral man, even though he may be a social rebel and an atheist. A truly
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moral novel is that which represents such moral characters without apology and without criticism. But such good novels are very few. An ordinary novelist is too much of a social conformist to give fair play to his passionate characters coming to grief thus illustrating his thesis that social conformity and conventional patterns of morality must be followed at all cost. Violating them makes you an exceptional man but kills you too. Lawrence’s indictment of Hardy in “Study of Hardy” follows this line of argument. Lawrence’s notions of religion and morality are perhaps too romantic to be silently accepted. However, the way in which proceeding from them he succeeds in laying bare the inner contradictions and weaknesses of some im-portant novelists (e.g., Hardy, Hawthorne, Melville, and Tolstoy) is remarkable. His critical approach is an amalgam of the psychological and the ideological. The weakness of a novel, according to Lawrence, arises from a split in the nov-elist’s psyche. His deeper self (which is a phallus worshipper, pure passionate self, his inspired self) is at odds with his outer self, his self conscious of itself (which is normally a Christian social conformist). Where the latter overpow-ers the former, there come distortions and flaws in the resultant work. This is the real immorality. Lawrence observes: “The immorality lies in the novelist’s helpless, unconscious predilection. . . . If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act.”24 Conversely, a completely satisfying work is that which arises from an unfractured psyche, in which the “purpose” of the author is “not at outs with the passional inspiration.”25As examples of such completely satisfying works, Lawrence quotes, strangely, “the books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings.”26
Being an emanation from life, the novel is also a great influence on life—at least it has got the potential to be one. James conceives of the novel not as a goody- goody story, an idle entertainment, but as an artifact embody-ing an intense impression of life which gives us aesthetic gratification as well as an insight into life. Lawrence goes much further and describes the novel as “the one bright book of life.”27 Further: “The novel can help us to live, as noth-ing else can. . . .if the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan. But when the novelist has his thumb in the pan, the novel becomes an unparalleled perverter of men and women.”28
If Lawrence is adequately specific anywhere in his writings regarding the influence of the novel on the life of the reader, it is, oddly, in one of his novels—Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence observes: “And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead . . . . But the novel, like gossip, can also
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spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally ‘pure.’ Then the novel like gossip becomes at last vicious.”29
In his characteristic manner, Lawrence has related literature closely to life. Whereas according to James, a novel, though an impression of life, is essentially an artifact, an aesthetic construct, to Lawrence it is a tremulation on the ether, a great influence for good or ill. The two attitudes here are nearly antithetical. To conclude, a comparative analysis of James and Lawrence is quite instructive insofar as it yields vital insights into the craft of fiction, the nature of the novel and its function. James is a technician par excellence. His emphasis on execution naturally falls in place. Lawrence is a prophet and an ideologue whose vociferations are loaded with his unique ideology. He thinks of the novel not in a vitalistic manner—both as an expression of and an influence of life. Tolstoy in his view is comparable to Lenin. If James is the first great theorist of the English novel, Lawrence goes beyond theory and steps onto prophecy.
References
1. “Lawrence does seem to be the last Romantic.”David Gordon, D.H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 151.2. Middleton Murry, Love, Freedom and Society( London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), p. 59.3. Christopher Gillie, Longman’s Companion to English Literature (London: Longman, 1978), p.592.4. Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1888; rpt. in Nation and Region:1860-1900 (New Delhi:Light and Life Publishers, n.d.), p.323. 5. Ibid., p. 326.6. Ibid., p. 327. 7. Ibid., p.329. 8. Ibid.9. Ibid.10. Ibid., p.333. 11. Ibid., p.334.12. D.H. Lawrence, “The Novel,”in Phoenix II, eds.Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 422.13. “The Art of Fiction,”op.cit., p.341.14. Ibid.
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16. D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in D.H. Lawrence: A Selec-tion, eds. R.H.Poole and P.J.Shepherd (London:Heinemann, 1970),p.124.17. Ibid.18. Ibid.19. Ibid.,p.125.20. “The Art of Fiction,”op.cit.,pp. 342-43.21. “The Novel,” Phoenix II,p.420.22. “Why the novel Matters,”op.cit.,p. 126.23. “The Art of Fiction,” op.cit. , p. 327.24. “Morality and the Novel,” in D.H. Lawrence:A Selection, p.119.25. “The Novel,”in Phoenix II, p. 416.26. Ibid., p. 418.27. “Why the Novel Matters, “op.cit., p. 126. 28. “Morality and the Novel,” op.cit., p.122.29. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Stockholm: Jan Forlag, 1946), p
THOmAS HARDY AND THE fEmINISTS* Jano L. Sekhose
Hardy is not only interested in women as womankind and female psychology, his concerns for the lot of women is deeply felt in his works. In his times, Hardy was an enthusiast in the race for women enfranchisement and women suffrage. Rosemary Sumner reveals that in an unpublished letter to the Fawcett Society, written in reply to a request for his support of the suffragette movement, he wrote:
I have for a long time been in favour of women-suffrage.
I am in favour of it because I think the tendency of the women’s vote will be to break up the present pernicious conventions in respect of women, customs, religion, illegitimacy, the ste-reotypes household (that it must be the unit of society), the father of a woman’s child (that it is anybody’s business but the woman’s own)… And other matters which I got into hot water for touching on many years ago…. (190).
* teaches English at Nagaland University, Kohima, Nagaland, India.
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But he is not a feminist in the theoretical sense, but by way of a practical and feeling sympathizer. For instance, he would love women to be liberated but views the religious, social and legal institutions and practices to be obstacles that are infinitely difficult to surmount. In his essay, “The Immortal Puzzle : Hardy and Sexuality”, Phillip Mallet ironically points out that while almost every position in late Victorian science was contested, there developed a near consensus that women were inferior to men in the cultural realm, and that this inferiority was grounded in the physi-ological differences between them. If Darwin stands by the superiority of man over woman, and J.S. Mill considers the so-called nature of women artificial, socially constructed, not given as argued in “The Subjection of Women”, Hardy is seen to track their differing views on “The Nature of Women” (182). That if Rosemarie Morgan sees that narrative generalization as a deliberate stratagem to divert the wrath of the “grundyist” reader and allow Hardy to write as the champion of women’s sexual independence, Patricia Ingham suggests that he “struggles but fails to accept a patriarchal view” and that Roger Ebbatson’s reference to “the creative uncertainties of Hardy’s handling of gender issues” in the earlier novels is nicely neutral, although the late novels are more openly challenging (185). Ingham’s phrase, when she speaks of Hardy’s stance that he “struggles but fails” to accept a patriarchal view, can be reconsidered. Even in an early novel such as FMC, Hardy rather than struggling to accept a patriarchal view, is already exposing the patriarchal male advantages in society, in marriage alliances that so subjugates its spirited heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Ebbat-son’s response of Hardy’s “creative uncertainties” on gender issues can be laid at the door of Hardy’s own revisions as well as conventional censorship to a large extent. Tess has captured many present critics. But criticism gets out of hand when it blows matter out of proportion or gets involved in a tendency to miss the focus when it becomes too theoretical. Hardy himself notes down that it is futile to scrutinize the tool marks and be “blind to the building”(PW 56). The sub-title “A Pure Woman” and the declaration, “Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy” have generated debates and write-ups. Many are unsettled or puzzled by the evasiveness or lack of details at crucial junctures like the incident at The Chase, when there is no knowing whether Tess is seduced or raped, whether there is consent or not. Tess’s recurrent state of sleepiness as on this occasion, too, has raised questions. Tess’s male narrator and the topic of sexuality have been subjected to a lot of discussions. The “narrative appropriation”, declares Boumelha, is resisted by the very thing that the narrator seeks to capture in Tess i.e. her sexual-
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which is so unknowable and unrepresentable, that as Mary Jacobus noted, the state of Tess’s soul appears to be as close to sleep and important moments of speech are absent (48). Laura Claridge has little doubt that Hardy wanted to liberate sex as a forbidden type of knowledge, but she not only feels that there is no distinction between the sexual acts of seduction and rape, but sees Tess as the victimiser and not the victim, that she “dangerously fails Alec in charity - charity that would in fact have saved her as well as him from destruction” (72). Tess on the surface do seem unkind to Alec in his converted state. But one does not and cannot, marry for charity, especially when one is already married and loves her husband. To John Goode, Tess was clearly intended to be one of the most dis-cussed novels in the language. That, interestingly and tellingly, everything about the “presentation of the text calls on the reader to participate” in its production: the sub-title, offering a double challenge, first to the moral values it expects to encounter and contest, and secondly to an aesthetic judgement what a “pure” and what is “faithful” (184). That the division of the novel parts into ‘phases’ divides spatial temporal change so that, at the moment of crisis, between ‘The Consequence’ and ‘The Woman Pays’ a decisive progression is made between “ the moment of speaking and the silence which follows” (ibidem). That if there is no comfort in coherence, we must acknowledge the novel’s disjunctions as a particular strategy. Mallet marks Hardy’s departure from the other “fallen women” narrative in Tess, and that if fictional heroines before her like - Little Emily, Ruth, Hetty Sorrel, Fanny Robin - are deserted by their seducers, it is Tess who leaves Alec (185). Hardy’s strategy in Tess is seen to be reworking the easy antithesis of whether the seduced girl was wicked or foolish, and at least partly to blame for her fall, or innocent and a victim of the actions of others rather than an agent herself. That if the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, even then enormous demonstration demanded that the new Act be vigorously enforced. So also, in making Tess move to Trantridge when she was 16, the age of entry into the workplace, or to legal majority, as well to puberty, Hardy is visibly treading along the line that separates child from woman, the one protected by law, the other unprotected. Mallet notes that in the serial version of the novel, Alec tricks Tess into a bogus marriage but the sexual relationship is otherwise a consensual one. Of how in the first volume edition, Alec carries a druggist’s bottle and drugs her, where there is no ques-tion of consent, and Tess is clearly raped. But, in the 1892 and subsequent editions, Hardy revised the narrative to show no evidence that what happens in The Chase was unpremeditated. That social consequences, on its injustice
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internalisation of it, must receive the emphasis rather than on Alec’s individual unjust act. If Hardy’s text both invites and, frustrates a “quazi-legal” analysis , who Tess is does not depend on the events of one night (ibidem 190). When all is said and done, one might say, the male narrator seeks to present a female’s purity, first and foremost, which aggravates complications. Ingham tells of how, in Hardy’s novels, the narrator’s accounts are complicated by an “incomplete comprehension of the opposite sex shared by all males in the late novels” (84). Hardy, himself, must have been surely aware of his own “incomplete comprehension” of women, but that he had, at least, in a series of impression, tried to faithfully present that ‘pure woman’ in Tess where the innocent, guileless, unmarried child-mother, who can never be the best advo-cate for herself in an intolerant, hypocritical arbitrary society. Hardy notes in his postscript of 1912, the regret of a reviewer in Germany because the portrait of the “newcomer” Sue in Jude had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her same sex, who would, then, never have allowed her to break down at the end (43). On the question raised, whether Tess was seduced or raped is inconsequential to Hardy who portrays Tess to be still tender, in-nocent and child-like. There may be no textual account in detail as Hardy is wont to do at critical junctions. There are no signs of struggle on Tess’s part, but we do know she was in a state of total exhaustion. We also know that on many occasions she thwarts his advances. Alec as the master manipulator is conspicuously shown everywhere. As for Tess’s state of slumber at the time of the accident which kills Prince Horse, The Chase incident, and also at Stonehenge, we find the reasons behind it to be sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion and a general state of weariness.
Hardy’s perception of woman is best represented in the two heroines of FMC and Tess. Bathsheba and Tess can act as the touchstone to measure the worth of the other female characters. That Hardy’s female characters have a family-likeness is not difficult to see, but one must guard against the danger of associating them to be all Hardyan heroines when they are not. For individual quirks or traits when accounted for, go to show a totally different picture for some. If at the beginning of the novel, Oak and the toll keeper pronounces their own perceived judgement of Bathsheba, the book ends with a group of male figures gathered upon the gravel wishing the newly married couple. So then, Hardy’s sympathy for womankind is keenly felt but a woman never finds liberation, however independent and strong she may be because of social legal and customary practices of the time. Hardy comes to expose and attack these man-made obstacles more and more.
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In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess emerges to be the most intense of Hardy’s women characters. Her plight is the most sombre of depictions. The sub-title, ‘a pure woman’ has provoked varying critical write-ups. But as far as Hardy is concerned he has faithfully presented her person. And truly, Tess is a profound representation of a fair sufferer who had to grow up before her time, who is torn between self-dignity and family pressures, whose own vitality is repressed by conventional institutions, social and religious codes of conduct. She had to suffer incessantly, and in her sad plight wonders how a “sin” not of one’s own seeking, could make a sinner out of you (Tess 85). Hardy’s interest and concern for womanhood, but the problematical issues that stand in the way for their liberation, have led feminists to interpret his writings differently. In Dent’s note on “Hardy and his Critics”, attention is drawn towards Marjorie Garson’s reading of the novel. He finds it a pity that such a sensitive critic should accept without question the view of a feminist Marxist critic. He points out that in using the name “Dick”, according to Garson, Hardy was indulging in a sexual pun when the dictionaries of slang which he had consulted provide no example of its use in this way before 1900 (276). As noted time and again, it is easy to run into extremism, if not distortion, if Hardy’s overall picture is left unheeded. Again, to Garson the only occasion when women are shown acting as a group, the gathering of the bridesmaid and mothers on the wedding day, is a ritual of female solidarity treated with broad and somewhat hostile irony by the narrator. However, going by the text, there is hardly a ritual of solidarity. Understandably, the females have gathered upstairs to assist the bride elect whose idiosyncratic step-mother was nowhere to be seen. That they are one in spirit and humour with the men assembled downstairs is not difficult to sense. Conversing through the chinks of the unceiled floor, the tranter looks up enquiringly at the floor above him for an answer and down come Mrs Penny’s voice. In order to be heard in the room above, the tranter speaks very loudly to Mrs Penny, who is said to be sitting at a distance of about three feet from him. Grandfather James on entering, overheard some remarks and says in a mischievous loudness that he knew about some would-be weddings when the men did not turn up. “Well, really ‘tis time Dick was here’” adds another. Unable to endure any longer, Fancy burst out - “Don’t keep on at me so, grandfather James and Mr Dewy and all you down there!” (UGT162). She wished the room below was ceiled. Surely, homely humour dominates the episode rather than hostile irony against the female solidarity. In FMC, Oak is at the receiving end in Rosemarie Morgan’s study of Hardy’s novels. Accounting for Bathsheba’s sexuality which many treat it as a matter to be deplored, she points out that the earlier propriety narrator which
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plays the role of censor is here transferred to the character of Oak, whose views differ substantially from Hardy’s sense-impressionistic point of view. That while Hardy’s appreciative gaze rests upon Bathsheba’s open eyed wonder and soft arousal as the book opens where she gazes at her own reflected image and blushes. The clandestine Oak sees things differently and promptly assumes it to be vanity instead of sensuous self-delight. Of how associations between “the acquisition of monetary advances and property and the taking of the woman in marriage” so infiltrates Oak’s dialogues, action and thoughts (42). That Oak’s compulsion to straighten her to conformity is as unjustifiable to the modern mind, as it was morally right, proper and just to the Victorian Oaks of puritanical persuasion. However, to concentrate on the male Victorian Oak as spy and censor, is to sideline his essential self which fairly cannot be ignored. His understanding of the natural environment and keen observation of the surrounding world is distinctly portrayed, along with his efficient skill as a shepherd. The “love-led” man is also patient, faithful and enduring (FMC148). His sympathy for the suffering Fanny, stability of mind, dependability as a friend and employer is everywhere reflected. His moral censorship and as a male gazer, are ultimately rounded off to be rustic “want of tact” (ibidem 24). When Bathsheba saves him from suffocation in his hut on one occasion, Oak ceases the first opportunity to hold her hands “curiously long”, but his exclamation reveals his rustic innocence- “How soft it is - being winter-time, too - not chapped or rough or anything!” (ibidem 28). In The Return, feminists’ reading presents Eustacia as a wronged woman. Rosemarie Morgan, here again, sympathizes with Eustacia. She argues that Thomasin’s domestic world, with all its conventional trappings, throws Eustacia’s into relief by contrast, the estranged solitary woman belonging to no circumscribed world, least of all Thomasin’s, in the sense of settling in it, becoming habituated to it or wishing to remain it. Venn is assigned the position of Oak in FMC as a moral watchdog and censor. As far as Clym is concerned, he is regarded to be “simply an ‘unseeing’ native of the land”, and although he is one of Hardy’s more sympathetically drawn heroes, parallels, in less demonic form, Venn’s attempt to displace the rare, splendid woman in overshadowing Eustacia in marriage (75). However, if Eustacia is not after a tame, domesticated wife and does not possess good housewife qualities, she is conspicuously cut off from any sort of labour. She hated Sundays when all was at rest, for she only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst of other people’s labour, and so she reads the Bible on a week day so that she might be “unoppressed with a sense of doing her duty”(The Return123). If she is condemned to be idle at home, one cannot overlook her selfishness, her unrealistic quest for idle pleasure, fun,
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great romantic love from somewhere. Loving Clym without the other excitement becomes unbearably frustrating. Hating everything about Egdon Heath, she longs to escape from it. Eustacia is more an alien and cannot be even taken as a partial heroine like Thomasin or Elizabeth-Jane who can be classed under such a category, however limited their choices may be, for their strength in adversity . Venn may fit the role of male censor like Oak, but he is redeemed by his selfless steadfastness in loving Thomasin. He, too, retains a rusticity of manner and behaviour. Like the heathmen, he provides a source of rustic humour. If Clym exercises his independent right to choose his own way of life, it is towards a selfless and noble cause which works against his own material progress and comfort. His and Eustacia’s dilemma, are poles apart in the sense that the former has a selfless basis unlike the latter. Clym, in fact, is a noble hero and not a dominating male censor. He was ready to be the first individual to be sacrificed for the good of his fellowmen in advocating education for ennoblement rather than as a means of material gains or social status. If Michael Millgate is highly critical of the ornate classical context through which Hardy attempts to aggrandize Eustacia, Allingham senses in it and ironical/humorous hallmark of Hardy’s style in his article, “Defending Hardy’s Classical Symbolism to Describe Eustacia Vye”. Of how Hardy the narrator comments that Eustacia had the passions and instincts which make “a model goddess”, but not “quite a model women” (17). Hardy’s perception of women is basically as the fair sufferer however independent and resourceful one may be. And if he sincerely and truthfully examines into the causes of such a debacle and finds the reasons to be too complex and deeply rooted, that to perceive them as free and happy would be false, he went on to create heroines and partial heroines who have captured the attention and imaginations, generations after generations.
References1. Allingham, Philip V. “Defending Hardy’s Classical Symbolism to Describe Eustacia Vye”www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardyov.html2. Boumelha, Penny. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form”: New Casebooks.ed. Peter Widdowson. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 44-62. 3. Claridge, Laura. “Tess: A Less than Pure Woman Ambivalently Presented” New Casebooks. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 63-79. 4. Dent, J.M. “Hardy and his Critics”. London: Everyman, 1996.5. Goode, John. “The Offensive Truth: Tess of the d’Urbervilles” New
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6. Hardy, Thomas. Under the Greenwood Tree. London: Everyman’s Library, 1872 (1996). Abbreviated as UGT.7. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1874 (1998). Abbreviated as FMC.8. Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1878 (1978). Abbreviated as The Return.9. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of d’Urbervilles. Cambridge: CUP, 1891 (2002). Abbreviated as Tess. 10. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1896 (1981). Abbreviated as Jude.11. Hardy, Thomas. Personal Writings. ed. Harold Orel. London: Macmillan, 1967. Abbreviated as PW.12. Mallett, Phillip. “The Immortal Puzzle”: Hardy and Sexuality” : Thomas Hardy Studies. ed. Phillip Mallett. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 181-202.13. Morgan, Rosemarie. Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge, 1988.14. Sumner, Rosemary. Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist. London: Macmillan, 1981.
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Ms. Mashirque Jahan’sSpiritual Consciousness
in the Poetry of S.L. PeeranPrice : Rs. 250/- US $ 10 UK £ 5
Published by:BLZZ BUZZ
# 2, 1st Cross, Kalidasa LayoutSrinagar, Bangalore - 560050, India
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Exploration of Hindu-muslim relations in Sahgal’s mistaken Identity
* Dr. Dwijen Sharma
Writing per se is a political act. 1 After the independence of India, writers had before them the challenge to “stake their claim” on the emerging Indian state, projecting their aspirations, ideals and fears into it and one can do so by the very act of writing about it. The postcolonial Indian English novelists have been trying to fuse consciously or unconsciously their cultural awareness with a reconstructive zeal for making the legacy of pre-independence Indian values as continuous, timeless and universal as diverse, distinct and defini-tive. Pained by the unpleasant realities of post-independence India, they write with a mission of redeeming them by reinterpreting Indian history and tend to display a historical vision which admits of a multitude of probabilities, while at the same time showing multidirectional facets of reality. For these writers, the engagement with history and also politics is not a luxury but an inevitable necessity. Among the post-independent Indian English novelists, Nayantara Sahgal (b. 1927) is one of the leading novelists with a developed sense of political awareness and who, in her novels, weaves successfully the different strands of India’s social, political and cultural history into a viable narrative framework and subjects those to a close critical examination. Her novels not only explore the contemporary realities and trends in all their human details, but also examine them within the framework of a larger historical past of the country. This strategy helps her to anticipate in some senses even the future course of events.
Nayantara Sahgal’s mistaken Identity (1988) 2 is an exploration of the Hindu-Muslim relations during the time of the Indian national movement. She knows that the Hindu-Muslim rivalry is a faultline of Indian democracy. Like in the other two novels of the 1980s: Rich Like Us (1983) and Plans for Departure (1986), she attempts in this novel to write an alternate version of history of the Hindu-Muslim relations so as to salvage certain happenings and feelings, which the traditional historian misses. Moreover, she is critical of the dominant historiography as she feels, it is coloured by the dominant ideology of the ruling class and the time. This novel is a modest attempt at writing her own project for the postcolonial life of India: “writing the nation” as the pro-motion of a set of pedagogic discourses defining collective identity. 3 In this novel, she subjects Hindu-Muslim relations to constant questioning through her protagonist Bhusan
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Singh, the son of the Raja of Vijaygarh, a taluk in the northern India. He is a fun loving dreamy person who goes to study in the US but comes back after one year without doing much study.
Sahgal, in the very introduction of the home town of her protagonist throws a hint about the simmering tension between Hindus and Muslims. She knows it very clearly that this tension has been there since the eleventh century when first Muslim invader came to India. Describing the location of his parents’ country, Bhusan says:
My parents’ country was Vijaygarh, an ancient corner of the level oblong close to Ayodhya…This was holy land, flatland of the Ganges, Hinduism’s heartland. The soil defiled and desecrated by Muslim invasions was where Rama once virtuously ruled. (23)
Sahgal is also perhaps trying to connect Vijaygarh with Ayodhya in order to focus on the site of dispute between Hindus and Muslims. Perhaps she is prophetic in this sense as in 1992 the Hindu kar sevaks marched into the mosque in Ayodhya, which according to them had been built after destroy-ing the Ram temple, and destroyed it. In fact, this act of the Hindus leads to a number of riots in many parts of India. Therefore, the self assertion of India as a nation is challenged by its fragmentation across religion divide. According to T.N.Dhar, “Sahgal is realistic enough to visualize the possibilities of conflict between people of different groups, faiths and beliefs, but derides solutions based on emotional considerations.” 4 Through Bhusan, she makes it clear that although lots of energies were spent in trying to expel out the British by both Hindus and Muslims, not much energy was spent in bridging the gap between these two divisive forces. Only for a short time, both these groups fought together against the British and that too when the Congress supported the Khilafat move-ment. Explaining it, she says: “there was a Hindu-Muslim entente. They had a common grievance against Britain’s treatment of the Ottoman empire and the Caliphate (Khilafat).” (90) However, Sahgal believes that, had the two factions joined hands in their struggle against their common enemy, the British, it would have been easy to get rid of them. But, in her second thought, she knows that if the country becomes sovereign, there will be lots of feud between these two groups. Bhusan describes her thought in the novel in the following words:
And we are divide in any case. It beats me why these men spend their lives planning strategies to get rid of the sovereign power. With half a mind and a scrap of real resolve we’d be rid of it. If we all spat together the sovereign power would drown. But then what? The pandits and ulemas would throw each
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other’s lifebelts and come bouncing out of the spit to boss the show. I think, I prefer, the sovereign power. (38)She is also aware of the complexity involved in trying to bring rap-
prochement between these two divisive forces. When as a young teenager, Bhusan fells in love with a girl unknowing that she is a Muslim and when both of them finds out that they belonged to two warring religion, they are shocked. Bhusan lively brings out the incident in the following words:
We spoke our name together and stopped dead. These names could not be linked by and. We would have been wiser to do without names. But people must call each other something…’Razia,’ I repeated, and lowered her to align her eyelids, her lips, her beating hearts and ribs with mine, and there was nothing least of all the names others had given us, to prevent us from embracing for ever.(52)
However, Bhusan finds out that there is nothing essentially different between them. Once when he saw Razia doing namaaz, he also does it: “I knelt too, facing Mecca, and prayed in imitation of Razia, yet as naturally as if I have been doing it since birth.” (55) Sahgal views that the differences are constructed by man for ulterior motives and she also knows the danger in-volved if someone tries to mix the two religion. Sahgal shows us that the “little escapades,” of Bhusan and Razia’s leads to a riot that killed many persons of both the religion. In the words of the protagonist:
A mob of five or six hundred had made Hindu-Muslim war with knives, stones and broken bottles on the front lawn of the Female College. Someone set fire to one wing and the mob stampeded on to loot pots and pans and sewing machines with yells of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Ram Ram’. Then they went on a rampage through the town, and the killed and raped count was rising in the hospital. (57)Sahgal is critical of the leaders who preaches unity but do not allow
mixing of their blood. She harks to the time when Akbar ruled the whole of India through matrimonial alliances. For her, the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle are vain lots who just try politicising everything. Expressing this con-cern, Bhusan states:
Gandhi makes no sense to me at all. Goes on bleating about Hindu-Muslim love but a Hindu-Muslim marriage would send him on a fifty day fast. He’s all for public brotherly embraces, for Hindu rajas building mosque for their Muslim tenants, Muslim rajas building cow shelter for their Hindu ones, and processions hollering ‘Be one!’ in the streets, but the day you
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their word there’s hell to pay. The unifiers take care not to let our blood mingle. They don’t know poor sods, we are in each other’s blood already. By unity they mean their trumped up uni-ties, public emotions gushed on like taps, then each to his lair until its time to tear each other to pieces again. I’ve never been able to interest myself in their treacherous politics. (35-36)
Sahgal is baffled by the narrow mindedness of the leaders of both the faction. They always try to keep distinct in their dress code, food habits and behaviour and never ever try to develop a syncretic culture. In fact, these leaders try to encourage people to define their identities through religion. She also thinks that the British is also responsible for the Hindu-Muslim rivalry. The bitter Hindu-Muslim rivalry was set in motion by the British in colonial India by introducing separate laws and electorates for Hindus and Muslims, which created stable, neatly compartmentalized religious identities. Colonial classifications and census enumeration forced people to choose a single, well-demarcated communal identity. Sahgal shows us that once Bhusan is arrested on the flimsy charge of sedition by the British authority and in the trial when the British judge slapped charge against him for causing riots in his home province, the defendant Parsee lawyer tells the court:
My client is an agnostic. But he has the utmost respect for Hinduism and Islam, and no wish to demolish the sacred beliefs of either…he dreams of a dawn where there would be no dividing characteristics of race, colour, feature, wor-ship left on earth.”(151)
Sahgal is flabbergasted at the tricks of the British in trying to divide people of India in terms of religion. She believes that Hindus and Muslims could live together peacefully if politics do not interfere in their lives. In a fit of rage, Bhu-san tells the jail inspector:
People who have sat on the same soil together for close to a thousand years grow one fat arse in common and stay put on it. And they damned well learn to bugger along together if nobody meddles. Tell your Government that.(173)In her autobiographical work from fear Set free, Sahgal gives her
concept of India as a single unified nation, which provides for the coexistence of pluralities. She writes about this in the following words:
The human being could best express himself in his own medium and no language, however well taught, however important or influential, could take its place in reflecting the many faceted culture of a people. Nor could one language, one culture, or one religion ever be the formula for India,
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a great deal of value was leavened and lost in the process and the very foundation of India destroyed. 5
Sahgal has perhaps identified Pluralism and reformed traditions as al-ternative elements to reconstruct a sense of collective identity in independent India in order to overcome India’s internal fragmentation across a diversity of communities. Seeing the divisive tendencies in the body of the post-independent India, she writes with a mission of redeeming the situation by reinterpreting Indian history, and tends to display a historical vision which admits of a multitude of probabilities, while at the same time showing the faultlines of the Indian de-mocracy. In this process she attempts to strengthen the Indian democracy.
References1. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1991) 13-14.2. Nayantara Sahgal, Mistaken Identity 1988 (New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers India, 2003). (All subsequent references are to this edition).3. Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and narration (London: Routledge, 1990).4. T. N. Dhar, History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel (New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999) 128.5. Nayantara Sahgal, From Fear Set Free (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962)
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Dr. S.L. Peeran’sglittering Love(An Anthology of Poems)Price : Rs. 100/- US $ 5Published by:BLZZ BUZZ# 2, 1st Cross, Kalidasa LayoutSrinagar, Bangalore - 560050, India
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Sri Aurobindo’s SAVITRI : The Path Divine* Ms. Ranjita Barik
Savitri is a unique epic in the 20th Century because here Sri Aurobindo, the seer poet pictures the Life Divine. The Life Divine is superior to human life as human life is superior to animal life. Man does not exactly live like an animal but leads a life whih is creative, intellectual, aesthetic, social, political and above all spiritual. Man is the spark of the divine and the divinity is very much within him; it flowers only when man marches on the path divine. The Divine Path is not easy to walk on; it is strewn with obstacles, the obstacles are from within. The seven deadly sins that the Christians believe are the obstacles on the Path Divine. Sri Aurobindo not only views the rejection of lower nature - ego, fear, lust, greed, pride etc. but also suggests the aspiration of the higher nature - the aspiration for bliss, beauty, love, compassion and so on. The Path Divine is creative; it is based upon the unflinching faith in the Lord of the Universe. Savitri is a legend in Mahabharat; in such a legend Savitri, the hero-ine gets married to Satyavan who lives in the forest with his parents. He has been deprived of royal status, comfort and luxury. He cuts wood and lives amidst the natural beauty of the woods. Savitri gets fascinated towards him and decides to marry him knowing fully well that he would die after a year. It is the indomitable will that empowers her to reject the proposals of marriage from royal family. Such a decision is unique. When Satyavan dies on the appointed day she does not lose heart but fights with the Lord of Death just to get back the life of her husband. She succeeds. Thus here is a story in which a woman wins over death by the power of chastity. Sri Aurobindo turns this legend into a sublime epic - an epic which shows the way from the death to deathlessness. Savitri’s chastity, her worship of the Lord of the Universe and her courage to fight against death are some of the incidents which make her the heroine of the epic. It is she who walks on the divine path and heralds the life divine. It is she who is the messenger of a better humanity. Sri Aurobindo turns the legend into a symbolic poem. Nature is the creation of God; God manifests Himself in nature. Hence just to walk the path divine a mortal should realise God’s presence in nature. In Book I Canto III entitled “The Yoga of the King: the Yoga of the Soul’s Re-lease” Sri Aurobindo writes ‘God found in Nature and Nature fulfilled in God’. Sri Aurobindo’s statement reminds one of Wordsworth’s remark’ A motion and a spirit that impels through all things’ (Tintern Abbey). A man who aspires to
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realise the divinity within must have faith in the ‘soul’s adventure into the space’ and ‘the murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds / which crowd around our hearts [Savitri (The Yoga of the King)]. The journey on the spiritual path is undertaken by a few aspirants because it is difficult. It is: ... a firm spiritual poise, A constant lodging in the eternal’s realm, A safety in the Silence and the Ray, A settlement in the Immutable. (Book I Canto III : The Yoga of the King) Sri Aurobindo’s language is lofty and sublime. To embark upon a journey on the path divine is to be in quest of the eternal or the immutable. Such a journey on the spiritual path helps the suffering mortals to reduce their suffering. The seer Aswapathy’s ‘spirit’s stillness, Sri Aurobindo, views helped the toiling world’ (Savitri : Book I Canto III). Sri Aurobindo holds that the most powerful part of human being is the spirit: A spirit that is a flame of God abides, A fiery portion of the Wonderful, Artist of his own beauty and delight Immortal in our mortal poverty. (B.I, C III) Sri Aurobindo’s picture of the grandeur of human soul excels that in the Gita. Here soul is not only immortal but also the source of beauty, delight and artistic activity. In the same Canto Sri Aurobindo writes again: This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite, This screened unrecognised Inhabitant, Initiate of his own veiled mysteries, Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought. The soul inside man is not only an artist but also a sculptor. Thus in Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysics it is the power of soul that creates things which are beautiful and worth observing. Sri Aurobindo does not stop with soul but he pictures oversoul. The communion between the soul and oversoul is the journey on the path divine. In the context of the Yoga of Aswapathy Sri Aurob-indo writes: His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul, His life is oceaned by that superlife. Life expands only when there is a communion between soul and over-soul; this expansion is oceanic. In such a communion a ‘topless super nature fills the human frame;. The communion between soul and supersoul occurs only when there is prayer, the fervent prayer to the Divine. Sri Aurobindo writes:
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A prayer, a master act, a king idea Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force. Then miracle is made the common rule. One mighty deed can change the course of things; A lonely thought becomes omnipotent. (The Issue, p. 22) Prayer is the articulation of one’s innermost desire before a higher entity; it is a lonely powerful thought which is to be differentiated from passing thoughts. Only through prayer a man can achieve the impossible; he can per-form the most arduous task. Through prayer an individual spirit communions with the spirit of the universe. Hence to walk on the path divine one must know how to pray. Intuition is essential to walk on the divine path. It is nothing but the seer within. The seer in use can perceive the cosmos behind the chaos in this world. Sri Aurobindo writes in Book II, Canto I, The World Stair. A seer within who knows the ordered plan Concealed behind our momentary steps, Inspires our ascent to viewless heights As once the abysmal leap to earth and life. His call had reached the Traveller in Time. (p. 101) There is a seer within us who sees what our ordinary eyes fail to see. It is the seer within which enables an individual to perceive the invisible behind the visible univrse. The awakening of the sixth sense, the intuition or what Sri Aurobindo calls ‘the seer within’ is a must to march on the path divine. The whole of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy revolves round a two fold path - the process of ascent and the process of descent. Man rises in the ladder of consciousness only through burning desire or pious aspiration; the divine grace descends upon an individual only when he is sincere in his prayer to the Lord of the Universe. Self effort is as much important as God’s grace; they are the two sides of a single coin - a coin which symbolises spiritual progress. The dialogue between Savitri and the God of Death is illuminating. Savitri retorts the God of Death: “In vain thou tempst with solitary bliss Two spirits saved out of a suffering world; My soul and his indissolubly linked In the one task for which our lives were born, To raise the world to God in deathless Light, To bring God down to the world on earth we came, To change the earthly life to life divine. (Savitri, 692)
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Savitri and Satyavan are the messengers of the Life Divine. Satyavan is the embodiment of truth consciousness - the consciousness that is expanding towards the realisation of the ultimate truth. Savitri is struggling with the Lord of Death to conquer mortality. In fact the essence of life divine is the nectar of immortality. When a person is not conscious of the death of his physical self he leads the divine life. One day, Savitri, the heroine of the epic is sure that man on this planet will be transformed into such an entity that it will taste the nectar of immortality. Savitiri says: ... I have felt a secret spirit stir in things Carrying the body of the growing God; It looks through veiling forms at veilless truth; (Savitri, 693) Savitri realises the secret working of the spirit of the universe towards a better world - a deathless world - a world where there will be rule of the truth, joy and beauty and deathlessness. To sum up, Sri Aurobindo’s voluminous epic Savitri has been written on the concept of Life Divine. Like the great poets of the humanity he feels the sorrows, the sufferings of the ordinary mortals. But to him sweetest songs are not those which tell of saddest thought; sweetest songs are those in which there is the echo of the Upanishadic verse - the golden rule of light, wisdom, fraternity, joy and above all immortality. Death is a falsehood; only body which is subject to disease and decay dies; the soul which is the radiant ray of light and which governs the body does not die. Since man does not know the gran-deur of soul he experiences sufferings and human life is not colourful for him. When a man realises the absolute truth, the deathlessness of the spirit, the secret working of the spirit of the universe he experiences undiluted bliss that is divine bliss. A man’s effort to know his own self - the innermost recesses of his own self and deny death as a temporary entity is the way to lead life divine. Thus in this epic the Divine Path has ben spelt out explicitly in beautiful poetry. When Sri Aurobindo views that a ‘death bound littleness’ is not what we are, he paves the way divine. The starting point to realise the divinity within is to contemplate over death, the physical death. Hence Sri Aurobindo in Canto I, Book I of Savitri concludes with the note of the death of Satyavan. In the middle of the epic, the Canto III of Book VIII Satyavan dies. In the end of the epic he revives his own life. Thus the epic ends with the death of death and the rejoicing in life. In fact to walk on divine path is nothing but to celebrate life and defy death-death which Shakespeare holds only cowards embrace.
References Aurobindo, Sri. Savitri - A Legend and A Symbol, Pondicherry : Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1979.
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KAmALA DAS’S AN INTRODUCTION : A fEmINIST READINg
* Dr. Kalikinkar Pattanayak
Kamala Das, the celebrated Indo-English poetess is a feminist to the core; An Introduction is her masterpiece in the sense, here she celebrates the needs of woman: biological and psychological in a style that is disarmingly frank and candid. ONV Kurup, a Malayalam poet of renown, holds that it is ‘an autobiography epitomised in a few words’. Here he perceives the naked beauty of truth. The poetess is a feminist in the sense Rosaline Delmar views:
At the least a feminist is someone who holds that women suffer discrimination of their sex, that they have specific needs which remain negated and unsatisfied, and that the satisfaction of these needs would require a radical change in the social, economic and political order.
An Introduction voices the longing and complaint of a woman who represents all women and she complains against Man who represents every man. She says: .... I met a man, loved him. Call Him not by any name, he is every man Who wants a woman, just as I am every Woman who seeks love. (Lines 43-46) Thus here is a poem which explores relationship between Man and Woman on the vital issue like love. Such a poem provides intellectual food to a feminist. Rick Wilford in his article Feminism says:
Some feminists insist upopn the primacy of biological sex, that is the distinction between female and male, as the expla-nation for the oppression of women - that the fundamentally different experiences of women and men in reproducing the species has been used as the motive for perpetuating inequalities between the sexes; on this view, unless these experiences are transformed, women will continue to be sub-ordinate to men... Other feminists focus not upon biological sex but rather upon the ways in which societies construct gendered, i.e. feminine and masculine, roles to explain differ-ences in the life-changes of women and men. Here the focus is on the cultural meanings attached tothe rules learned by children of either sex and which society considers appropri-ate for women and men. This distinction
* teaches English at S.C.S. (Jr.) College, Puri, Orissa, India.
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between the political significance of sex and gender informs much of the debate among feminists. (Political Ideology : An Introduction, P. 254)
The feminists focus on the subordination of women on two fronts: bio-logical and cultural. Sex is the biological construct but gender is the cultural one; two cannot be separated. In the poem An Introduction the poetess reflects the biological and psychological need of women which need to be studied in the cultural framework of the society. The poem begins as follows: I don’t know politics but I know the names Of those in power, and can repeat them like Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru (Lines 1-4) The poetess is ignorant of politics but she knows the names of those in power instinctively and is capable of repeating them easily. It shows the poetess gets alarmed of politics especially the politics of power in which Nehru strikes her mind, not her daughter. One point is clear that the male dominates in the arena of politics. In the following lines she focuses on the motherland and mother tongue: I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in Two dream in one (Lines 4-6) The poetess claims that India is her motherland; her colour is brown, very brown not fair. She is born in Malabar and speaks three languages, her own mother tongue, Malayalam; national language, Hindi and global language, English. She asserts her choice to write in English despite social restric-tions: Don’t write in English, they said, English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins. Every one of you? Why not let me speak in Any language I like? The language I speak Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone. It is half English half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest, It is as human as I am human, don’t You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my Hope and it is useful to me as cawings Is to crows or roaring to the lions, (Lines 6-17) The poetess prefers to write in English despite the objections of her friends, cousins and critics. She categorically writes that languages should be honest and human, as natural as the sounds of the animals like crow or
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she chooses even if it looks funny to her or her readers. Das speaks on the nature of human speech: .... it Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the In coherent mutterings of the blazing Funeral pyre. (Lines 17-23) The poetess distinguishes human speech from the other modes of communication of natural phenomena or sad human event like funeral. The primary function of human speech is to create awareness; it is neither blind nor deaf. She echoes the views of the linguists that language conditions con-sciousness. Perhaps this function of language impels the poetess to rebel against male domination and subordination of woman in a patriarchal society. She writes: I was child, and later they Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair, when I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me But my sad woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me. I sharnk / Pitifully. (Lines 23-31) The poetess sheds light upon the temporal sequence of growth and maturity of hers who represents every woman. She candidly writes about the process of maturity and manifestation of changes in woman’s body. When a girl gets maturity she longs for love. In a traditional society like India she gets married to a man who is inexperienced in the art of love making and is in dark about the psyche of woman. Hence in Das’s first sexual encounter with he husband she gets irritated and feels that in matters of sex male dominates. This sense of subordination makes her a rebel. She writes: .... I wore shirt and my Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored My womanliness. (Lines 31-33) The author goes for masculinization of her famine body. She puts on her brother’s trousers, cuts her hair short and ignores womanliness. She gets instructions from the kith and kin: Dress in sarees, be girl Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook, Be quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
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Belong, cried the categorisers. Don’t sit On walls or peep through our lace-draped windows. Be Amy, or be Kamala. (Line 33-38) In Indian traditional society women are instructed to put on sarees; as wives they are to play different roles; the roles of an embroiderer, a cook, a quarreller with servants and so on. The basic principle is that they should adjust themselves to the surroundings. Even their gestures, postrures and movements are controlled and directed by male members. The picture of the conservative society in which women are passive and submissive is brought out in the above passage. There are many don’ts that Indian married women are to follow. The poetess writes: Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizopherenia or be a Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when Jilted in love.... (Lines 40-43)
In the conservative Indian society women have little freedom in the matters of sexuality and expression of feminine frivolity and pretension. It is said that when a woman says no she means perhaps; when she says perhaps she means yes; when she says yes she is not a woman at all. But in traditional Indian society women are not allowed for such kind of expressions; they cannot express their sexuality freely and frankly. The author who is educated and progressive in her mentality narrates her own experience: I met a man, love him. Call Him not by any name, he is every man Who wants a woman, just as I am every Woman who seeks love. In him.... the hungry haste Of rivers, in me.... the oceans’ tireless Waiting. (Lines 43-48) The natural desire of man and woman is to fall in love with each other but the way woman feels loved is different from the way man feels loved; the distinction in tendency is due to different psyche. The poetess uses metaphors just to show the way man or woman chooses to be loved. The ‘hungry haste of rivers’ points to impulsive love of male and patient love of females. In matters of love Mrs. Das feels that woman is superior to man; that is why she uses ocean in the context of woman and river in context of man. Das demolishes male’s supremacy in the matters of relationship. Who are you, I ask each and every one, The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and, Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself
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I, in this world, he is tightly packed like the Sword in its sheath. (Lines 48-52) ‘Sword in its sheath’ refers to the passivity of male in matters of sex and love. Woman is no longer weaker sex because it is the stronger sex which has weakness for it. Das is against sexual inhibition and reservation. She writes: It is I who drink lonely Drink at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns, It is I who laugh, it is I who make love And then feel shame, it is I who lie dying With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner, I am saint. I am the beloved and the Betrayed. (Lines 52-58) In the above passage Das throws light upon the role of woman in a permissive society. In a permissive society woman has unbridled freedom. She drinks, makes love, laughs and also does not feel hesitant to feel repentant on some occasions. She can visit the strange towns and can make love to the strangers; what matters is her sexual appeal. She often feels loved, sometimes betrayed. Thus the poetess demolishes male chauvinism. In the concluding lines of the poem the speaker focuses on empathy - the caring and sharing that characterise the lives of the lovers: I have no joys which are not yours, no Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I. (Lines 58-59) The above passage reflects on a kind of love in which the lovers lose as well as retain their identity. Here the poetess advocates a kind of relation between lover and beloved which John Donne would say ‘two legs of a com-pass’. Thus a feminist reading of An Introduction would bring to light three kinds of women in three types of society; the dependent women in a conserva-tive society where ‘woman body’ feels ‘beaten’; the independent women in a permissive society where women are ‘beloved and betrayed’ and the interde-pendent woman in the progressive society where ‘joys and aches’ are equally shared by men and women.
References1. Das, Kamala. Summer in Calcutta. New Delhi: Everest Press, 1965.2. Delmar, ‘Rosalind. ‘What is Feminism?’ in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oak-ley, eds. What is Feminism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, 83. Eccleshall, Robert; Geoghegan, Vincent; Jay, Richard, Kenny, Michael eds. Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 2nd edition,
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AUTHOR’S CORNER
An Interview with Chittaranjan Misra
Dr. Chittaranjan Misra is a bi-lingual poet. He writes poems in Oriya and English. He has authored four anthologies of poems in his mother-tongue and one in English. His essays are both creative and critical. He published a critical study of Harold Pinter’s plays way back in 1992 when no other critical book on the noted British Dramatist was published in the country. It was a pleasant experience for Dr. Misra to learn that Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005. In March,2007 Dr. Misra visited University of Lyon in France as a guest speaker of ‘Viva Pinter’ He was the lone Indian in the International Conference. At the moment he is a faculty in the Dept. of English in G.M.College,Sambalpur ,Orissa, . He has been honored by many literary organization like The Praja-tantra Prachar Samiti of Cuttack, Abhinandanika and Srikhetra Shree of Puri, Satta of Koraput, Pancham Veda of Rourkela and Sandhyatara of Dhenkanal.. He is associated with Indian Association for English Studies, Delhi, Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies, Delhi, Researchers’ Association, Cuttack and Muse India, Hyderabad,Koraput Sahitya Paribar,Koraput,Orissa. Mr. Trinath Prasad Rath met him at Jeypore,a scenic hill-town of Orissa and spent a couple of hours for the interview.TPR: At the moment, literature is said to be post-modern. Do you think you are a post-modern-poet?Cm: I don’t know what kind of a poet I am. Certainly not a post-modern one. Some people in the West are acutely aware of a sense of crisis on all sides. They cling to the present and think the end of the world is nearing. What name will be given to the literatures to be written after fifty years? Post- postmodern?TPR: You write both in Oriya and English. What difference do you feel while writing in a language other than the mother-tongue?Cm: I have been writing in Oriya for a long time. While writing in English I don’t feel any difference in the nature of the creative process. But handling a second language calls for your word power. The sense of failure at the end of writing is always there but in the latter case it is more ?..TPR: When did you start writing poems? What made you trying at this genre ?Cm: In 1970 a poem I sent to the “The Prajatantra” was published. It was on Mahatma Gandhi. I was a student of class eight then. Whenever I was left to myself I tried to scribble something and kept writing. My parents especially my mother encouraged me into my literary pursuit. By the time I left Raven-shaw college, Cuttack I had written a number of poems. After 1980 my poems were published in standard Oriya journals like Jhankara, Asantakali and Sa-hakara.
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Cm: I don’t select a theme and then start writing. An incident or some im-age triggers the inspiration. The moment you are into the process of writing, I mean when your pen starts moving on the blank paper you discover the structure called a poem only after it is written. Working again and again on the first draft is a conscious process. But the initial attempt is a kind of spell when you don’t know what words are going to be absorbed and what ideas are to be abstracted. The impetus determines the nature of the subject. It may be about love, death, your helplessness at the atrocities and hostilities, memories sweet and bitter, anything under the sun. TPR: What aspect or technique you value as most important in your po-ems?Cm: I don’t like verbose utterances. A poem should be organically compact however riddling it may be. The symmetry is lost if one starts writing the poem before it comes. Lucidity in the poem does not mean rhythm or thyme as found in great traditional verses of Oriya kavya literature. Even in free verse of our time the flight of the ideas is controlled through a choice of words on the basis of their phonic relationship and beauty.TPR: There is a notion that Oriya poems written after Independence are not easily understood by the readers. How do you react to this?Cm: This is not a new thing at all. Understanding a poem is an enjoyment no doubt. But to understand a poem one needs to have a willingness to read, to approach it with care, a finer sensibility. In the past poets relied much on myths and poetry was grounded on faith. A shared common ground of understanding was always there as a frame of reference. That is the reason why Sarala Das and Jagannath Das were so popular. But in case of Upendra Bhanja and his contemporaries interpretation is not an easy thing. Modern poets have shifted their focus to socio-political truth constructed by the individual poet. The rich versatility of young poets of Orissa is certainly impressive. Their works are less riddling than that of the poets published in sixties and seventies.TPR: Why do you write both in Oriya and English? Do you feel writing in Oriya is not enough?Cm: I don’t feel I have to say one thing in Oriya and another in English. In fact I have written far more poems in Oriya than in English. My fascination for English grew with my exposure to English literature as a student. It was a great feeling to be taught by poets like Soubhagya Mishra and Bibhu Padhi in Ravenshaw College. Moreover the very presence of the poet Jayanta Maha-patra (though he belonged to the Dept. of Physics) was a great inspiration. TPR: What about your translation? Is it a rewarding experience?Cm: Translation does not retain the power one finds in the text in source language. It is exceedingly difficult to recapture the structural beauty in another language but it is a rewarding experience. It is creative and at the same time quite challenging. I’ve translated some poems selected from Gopabandhu
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Mahaptra, Rabi Satapathy and young women poets like Sushama Mishra, Pritidhara Samal and Shailabala Mahapatra. Some of these were published in Indian Literature. I have translated a volume of Oriya poems by a woman poet into English. Recently I have translated Krishna Baldev Vaid’s “ Uska Bach-pan” (abridged Hindi Novel) into Oriya, published by NBT. I have told about my translation of Pinter. I feel translation demands an excursion into parallel language systems in the process of replicating an experience of the source writer which can be never accessed for sure.TPR: You have written a book in Oriya on contemporary literary theory in the West. Do you think theory enriches your sensibility as a poet.?Cm: It is a difficult question to answer. Maybe theory robs the poet of the magic he is prone to explore. Once you are conscious that what you are go-ing to write is a feminist or a Marxist or a postmodernist (self reflexive) kind of writing the poem is lost. The flow is weakened. The possible critical tools for interpretation will loom large and will result in the ebbing away of the creative process. Contemporary theory glorifies the reader and deconstructs all ideas of glory associated with the author. Theory tells you: author is merely a func-tion; a language writes us, words are just a matter of habit, they obfuscate meanings more rather than communicating them, what is in the margin could be right in the center, what is taken for truth is falsehood coated, floated and marketed without your knowledge. These things burden the mind with the load of associated jargons. The rationale of theory invalidates the passport of the poet to the world of magic.TPR: But you have been engaged in writing critical essays in English and Oriya for different journals. Cm: I have written papers on Mahesh Dattani, Sobha De, A.K.Ramanujan, R.K.Laxman, Jayanta Mahapatra, Bibhu Padhi, Chetan Bhagat and may others writers. I have written a book on Harold Pinter published by Creative, Delhi way back in 1992 (by that time no other book on Pinter was available in India). Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. It was pleas-ant news for me. People congratulated me as though I had done something great.TPR: What made you interested in Harold Pinter? CM: After reading Beckett I felt like exploring Harold Pinter who was considered to be his British counterpart. Once I entered Pinter’s world I was stuck and could not come out. I translated Pinter’s The Lover in 1990 and later his politi-cal plays like mountain Language, Party Time and One for the Road. Pinter was generous enough in sending me these three plays by post in 1994, I was teaching at PG Dept. of English, SCS College, Puri then. His plays, poems, screenplays reflect an inimitable style at handling language. His keen percep-tion of the human condition of our times is represented through power games in his plays. Every serious reader of literature should go through his Nobel lecture where Pinter’s vision of art, truth and politics finds superb-expression. TPR: You were invited to “Viva Pinter” the international conference on the
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Cm: The conference brought together views of scholars, stage directors, film directors, and lawyers. I was the lone Indian guest there. Interacting with Master Pinter scholars like Prof. William Baker of Northern Illinois University and Steven H. Gale of Kentucky State University was highly educative. I met Jerry Schatzberg who has directed Reunion (adapted from the novel by Fred Uhlman, and from a screenplay by Harold Pinter) and the film maker David Jones, who has filmed Kafka’s The Trial based on its screenplay by Pinter. In the presence of the directors we watched the films followed by rewarding discussion. I was fascinated by the actor Jim Haynes who has been organizing Sunday dinners for the last twenty five years at his Paris atelier. Last year he came to Kolkata. Prof. Brigitte Gauthier interviewed me in the University studio and asked me about Indian English drama and poetry in addition to issues related to Pinter plays. The edited version of the interview along with another paper on Pinter have recently been published in a book entitled European Connections(Peter Lang, Bern, Switzerland).I cannot forget the youngsters like Fiole Laurence, Caroline Minguage and Sebastian who were so good to me.TPR: Do you think Indian English is a new modality of writing? Do you use the same?Cm: I don’t think this to be a new modality. When an Indian writes in English his skies, earth and culture figure in his writing which can be treated as ‘Indian-ness’ as a matter of content. That makes the writing different. But the Indian immigrants seem to be more European or American in which diasporic issues are addressed. Since culture and human behaviour patterns are standardized everywhere under the pressure of globalization the readers and writers go away from their tradition. The visibility of local historical and mythical antecedents is fast fading in our life and literature. Since English has become a global language the non-English people learn it for its cash value. Literature departments in universities and colleges at the moment justify their existence by shifting their focus on language skills, linguistics, culture studies etc. in place of literature.TPR: Do you think poetry will die in a consumerist culture?Cm: Consumerism contains in itself its own opposition. It thrives on the idea of discontentment or a sense of lack. Fulfillment does never come on the mate-rial level. The problems of the insatiability of human desires are addressed to in poetry. If ever poetry dies it will be with the departure of the last man. Death of poetry means end of history.TPR: What new works are you engaged with at the moment? Are you plan-ning a new anthology of your poems?Cm: I am rewriting my book on Harold Pinter for its second edition. Also writ-ing a portion of a dictionary of literary terms (in Oriya) assigned to me by “The Sambad”. I keep writing for journals and seminars. But I am not able to write poems as often as I was writing some three years before. Maybe a silence is shaping my words to come, without my knowledge.
(Trinath Prasad Rath heads the Dept of English in a Govt. College at Jeypore, Orissa, India)
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POUSSE-POUSSE* P. Raja
A lonely sultry afternoon drove me into a museum I have never before visited in my two score and twelve years of my sojourn on Planet Earth. It is not that I am a stranger to museums. I had spent several precious hours inside the museums of Chennai, Kolkata and Trivandrum not with any purpose of gathering historical knowledge but with the ulterior motive of whiling away the time. I had the opportunity of staying in these places at the expense of the academies that sponsored my trip as a writer. Most of these sessions unfortunately fell in summer and summer is summer wherever we are in India, unless we reach heights. I found not much difference between one museum and the other for they invariably spoke in silence for the glory of our past. Cultural heritage, spiritual heritage, literary heritage, historical heritage, political heritage and God knows what other heritage do these places of interest display for their interested, disinterested and uninterested visitors. Most of the rooms in these museums stink of bat turd, the only thing not known of in history books. I have seen several people throw up in such rooms and thereby create a mess of that place preventing others from entry. These purported to be well maintained, but in fact ill-maintained mu-seums in spite of all the inconveniences they are capable of, certainly served as hiding place from the wrath of the world old Sun. Where else can one find a cooler place when the whole world outside radiates heat? Thanks are owed to the unbearable khatri veyil and the mind-boggling loneliness, both of which are capable of driving anyone to the edge of mad-ness. But for these two reasons I would not have ventured into the Pondicherry museum, whose incumbents mostly preserved in showcases, are bound to uninterest me like any dull subject say algebra or trigonometry. I never knew that I would be lonely inside the museum too. I found the curator sleeping in his chair with his short and sturdy legs resting crisscross on the table in front, with a few registers piled up on it. My presence did not disturb him, though it pulled an elderly lady on the verge of retirement out from a nearby room. She simply raised her eyebrows at me perhaps signalling me to answer her unasked question about the purpose of my visit.“I would like to see the museum,” I said, “Where should I buy the entrance ticket?”
SHORT STORY
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“There is no such thing here. Simply enter your name and address in the register on that table and go anywhere you like. We close at six sharp in the evening. And don’t get lost,” said the lady. “You mean you’ll lock me in if I don’t get out in time?” “Of course…you can’t expect me to go from room to room and drive out our visitors. By 5.50 we ring a bell which is only an indication that you should quit the museum. And museum, as you know, is not a good place to spend the night”. I shrugged my shoulders in sheer fear for I believe in ghosts and I am sure museums are the best haunting places for ghosts and ghouls. “You don’t expect visitors at this hour?” I asked. “This is no tourist season. Museums are no local’s paradise. Perhaps you are the first and last visitor for his afternoon session,” said the lady and disappeared into the room wherefrom she emerged. While I wrote my name in the entry register, the curator half-opened his eyes and looked at me in a daze. He then quickly closed his eyes and rushed back to his dreamland. The first room displayed weapons of warfare that in any other museum would have remained untouchables. But here they were lying on the floor with a cautionary placard announcing ‘Do not step on these’. It is of course risky to step on them for many of them for want of proper care have rusted and if we stump our toes on them we are sure to die of teta-nus. My eyes rowed from one weapon to the other till they stood riveted to a sword and a shield. They looked similar to the ones I saw in Trivandrum. And to compare notes would be futile for there are people who safeguard our heritage and there are people who consider that as a big botheration. Somebody’s minus is somebody else’s plus. I felt an instant urge to hold the sword in one hand and the shield in the other and sincerely hoped that their very presence in my hands would make me a warrior and catapult me to a bygone era. I bent down to pick up the sword first. Desiring to swish it in different directions I grasped at its hilt. But it was so sturdy and heavy that it refused to budge. I then pressed both my hands into action. The sword showed signs of yielding to my temptation. Huff…huff…puff…huff…yeah! I was lifting the sword… I was lifting the sword…but to what extent? I managed it up to my knee and that too with great difficulty. Then I gave up. My back began to ache. I could not hold it further and the sword was back to its place. Great hopes! What a fool am I to lift the
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I learnt my lessons from the sword. The shield, as big as the shell of giant tortoise, really scared the shit out of me. Oh, God! Had I tried with it first, things would have become different. With dislocated shoulder joints I would be resting in a hospital. That set the ball rolling. I can’t even lift the sword. And to heave the shield is out of question. But how did my ancestors in Pondicherry manage this sort of acrobatics? My God! What sort of giants were they? The very idea of their strength kept me flabbergasted for long till I entered the next room exhibiting the vehicles used by the French and the Indians in Pondicherry a century or two ago. That big and palatial hall was cooler and so heart warming. I felt like sitting in one of the vehicles and enjoy a siesta. I moved from a thookku to a pallakku, very much in use among the moneyed people of Pondicherry and then to a huge palanquin. I was all the time wondering what great beauties would have travelled in such vehicles and what sturdy musclemen would have prided in carrying them on their rocking shoulders. “Don’t repeat me…Answer me,” came the curt reply. “I…I…I am a visitor”. My voice shivered. “How dare you sit in this pousse-pousse used by Monsieur Pierre?” “Pousse-pousse?” “Yes! In French it is pousse-pousse and in English it means ‘push-push’”. He replied. I found an answer to my tormenting question. So the vehicle was pushed from behind and the man who took the seat steered its direction, ap-plied break when necessary and so on and so forth. My face brightened up. “And who is Monsieur Pierre?” I asked without any hesitation. “He was a secretary to the French government in Pondicherry. He used this pousse-pousse till he breathed his last,” said the unidentified man. “And who are you?” I asked. “A blacksmith who gave life to the dreamy design of Monsieur Pierre,” he said with pride filled face. He then attracted my attention to the golden ear studs that adorned his earlobes and said, “Monsieur Pierre awarded me with these…a magnanimous Frenchman”. My curiosity filled eyes perhaps probed into his past. “This fellow for whom I made this pousse-pousse was a woman-eater,” he began with a wink. He heaved a sigh, God knows for what reason, and then continued: “He liked the local brown beauties and they too liked him for his white skin”. “He was not married perhaps?” I interrupted, my cultural doubt having
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“Well! Of course he was married. His wife was a real beauty. I saw her only once when he invited me home to show me his pencil sketch of a vehicle he had drawn out of his imagination and asked me to design it with iron and wood,” he replied. “Why then did he take a liking for local brown beauties? Perhaps his wife was not tasty?” I reciprocated with a wink. “Don’t betray your poor knowledge about the French,” he reprimanded me and added, “Frenchmen are real gluttons when it comes to wine, women and food. Their women too had their own clandestine ways. It was this white people’s insatiable lust for the warmth of human bodies that had created Cre-oles in Pondicherry”.
I stood spell bound. He continued. “This vehicle was made to order. When I was giving final touches to this vehicle, Pierre came to my smithy and said, ‘You have created a palanquin on wheels. You may get many more such orders. Some intelligent fellow will one day improve upon my design and advise you to make a beautifully improved version of my pousse-pousse’.” “The vehicle was pushed from behind?” I wanted to confirm. “Of course! That is why it is named pousse-pousse. The man behind would push the vehicle forward, then gather speed and run pushing it as fast as he could shouting at intervals ‘ pousse-pousse, pousse-pousse’, thereby warning the people on the path to move aside,” he said daubing the hem of his sash against his face.
“Coming to the most interesting part of the story,” he said showing all his teeth that have gone brown owing to intensive pan chewing, “Pierre had fear of the public opinion and feared his wife too. I was told he had a shrew for his wife. Yet he never resisted the temptation of visiting his beloved brownies. And that is why Pierre designed his own vehicle so as not to get noticed in public”. “He could have very well used a palanquin that was in vogue during his days in Pondicherry,” I said to show off my knowledge of local history. “Don’t be stupid,” he reprimanded, “Pierre was no nitwit. The Govt. higher-ups on official trips used palanquins. The other palanquin users were mostly women. And so Pierre wanted a vehicle for himself”. “He could have been easily identified,” I said to snub the blacksmith. “I told you that Pierre was not as stupid as you are. He lived at a time when street lamps were not even heard of. People rarely stirred out of their houses after the sunset; and on unavoidable circumstances they carried a hurricane lamp in hand to save themselves from the ditches on their path. And
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“Quite interesting!” I said in all jubilance. “I’ll tell you something more interesting,” said he. I looked at him like a child with my mouth wide agape. “Pierre moved out of his house under the pretext of going to his office to look into the urgent files. He returned home very late and thereby kept his green-eyed wife away from suspicion. Pierre parked his vehicle in some darker corner amidst bushy trees and allowed his pusher to sit in the pousse-pousse and sleep comfortably till he returned. This way Pierre had his fill arousing no suspicion in his wife,” he said laughing most of the time. I too had my laugh. Amidst my laughter I asked him, “But why did you choose to tell me your story?” “Pierre’s story,” he corrected. “Yes! Yes! Pierre’s story…But why me of all people?” The blacksmith laughed like a shower of granites unloaded from a tilting truck. His voice faded as he began to vanish. Gr…r…r…
It was the warning bell. I woke up with a start. I must hurry up before the museum keeper locks me in. I jumped out of the pousse-pousse as I cursed myself for not having asked the final question: “Was not Madame Pierre clever enough to find out her husband’s destinations from the pousse-pousse pusher?” “You are as stupid as ever,” came a voice from nowhere. I was sure that it was the blacksmith’s. My physical eyes ran hither and thither in search of him. They couldn’t locate him. But my ears heard him perfectly well: “You are as stupid as ever. Pierre put his brain to proper use. The pousse-pousse pusher Monsieur Pierre
Pt. Laxmi Narayan Mishra LaneSambalpur, Orissa - 768001
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THE JACKAL* Shri Nityananda Panda
Trans: Dr. Amiya Kumar Patra The door opens to the south – towards the river. The wind reigns around the house and creates classical notes while brushing against the front wall, window, and other parts of the house. He intently listens to the music and feels relaxed. Reclining on an armchair he enjoys the soft caress of the wind and fancies it comes only to him. He dozes off while pondering over the experience of his professional days. The illiterate folks of that undeveloped river-side village call him Sahib, though Nirmala Sandhibigraha is his original name. He has studied a lot, dis-charged duties as a Government Officer, and possessed the only building in the village. People knew his father and grand-father as priests. But, he could procure for him this title by the magic of his aforesaid achievements. When-ever some one would address him Sahib and salute, he would immediately remember his late father walking down the river embankment with two small bundles of rice swinging across his shoulder and he following him. Ironically, such contrasting memories don’t disturb, but rather amuse him. Every afternoon, in his trousers and Punjabi, tapping the walking stick, Sahib goes out for a walk. He does not feel the need to talk to any one, but only graciously acknowledges the obeisance of the villagers with silent but affable smiles. Then he would climb up the embankment and continue his stroll while all the time glancing at the Kewda bushes and now and then lashing at the Kewda leaves as if admonishing some one. In fact he does this hoping that a Jackal would jump out of a bush and he would share with him his memories. But nothing like that ever happens. His spirit sinks. On rare occasions he would spot a couple of Jackals playing on the river bed and stop to shout at them: ‘Having a good time, eh! Good! Will you come over here for a while?’ The Jackals would turn round and stare at him for a moment and scamper into the Kewda thickets. ‘Hey, are you shy or don’t recognize me? Didn’t we walk together? Of course it’s not your fault; I stayed away for so many years.’ He mumbles, deeply hurt within. Sahib returns home just before the dusk – to the same veranda, same armchair. He swings on the chair – dozing, ruminating, until he hears the yelp-ing of Jackals signaling the first hour of the night. ‘Now it’s time to sleep’, he would tell himself and get up to go to bed. We cannot say whether he really sleeps or not. But, any way, it is his firm belief that he sleeps until Jackals yelp again at the second hour of the night. To be precise, he wakes up thrice at night, sits on his bed, and listens intently to the Hoo – Ke – Ho noise of the Jackals. In fact it is his long standing * Shri Panda, a noted Oriya story-teller, lives at Jajpur Town, Orissa, India.
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habit turned duty to wake up with the collective howling of Jackals and to fall asleep again when the noise dies away. Now he is convinced that without Jackals on the earth it would be next to impossible on his part either to sleep or to wake up. The other day while swinging on the armchair Sandhibigraha Sahib heard that a Jackal had broken into the goat-shed of a Dalit villager and had run off with a month old kid amidst the plaintive protest of the mother-goat. Sahib smiled and addressed the unseen offender, ‘Shame on you scoundrel! Why steal? If you must have a kid, why didn’t you take one with prior notice? Don’t steal again!’ “Four months old kid disappeared” – was the flashing news next morn-ing. ‘You naughty!’ Mumbling these words he kept swinging on the arm-chair. The third day he heard another extended and dramatized version of the Jackal’s escapade. It almost carried off a year old kid from a daily worker’s goat shade. But, the collective commotion of the goats and their master forced it to dump its victim midway and the kid died soon after. Now let’s put things in the right perspective: Goat-rearing is the pri-mary vocation of more than half of the folks of Forty-three Mauja. But the only fortifications of their goat-shades are either screens made of palm leaves or tattered tarpaulins. Thus it provides ample opportunity to a thief of a Jackal to stealthily creep into the goat-shade, grab a kid that comes handy and make its way into the Kewda shrubs. The people of Forty-three Mauja panicked after the third day’s casualty. What would they do to save their livelihood? They all desired to eliminate the Jackals of that area. But how will they do that? A clever fellow put forth a nice plan: that a team of Jackal Charmers from Gurudijhatia region be commissioned for the job. The proposal was immediately put to action. Sandibigrha Sahib received the news in due time. Something went aflame inside his chest: ‘Would the Jackals be really wiped out? Would the Kewda thickets on the river bed be empty of Jackals? How could I sleep? How could I wake up if I sleep? I wouldn’t live. Would I?’ Sahib was so perturbed that he didn’t open his closed eye lids, and behind those closed eyes he traveled back in time to his childhood days.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Early summer... slight chill still lingering in the dawn air. One night Grandma called him up from sleep and said, ‘Let’s go out to garner green-gram from the field. We’ll return at sun rise. Then, you can study.’ The green-gram field stretched down their harvesting yard. He followed Grandma through the knee-high green-gram plants which could hide a man
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startled Nirmal. Bhalua was chasing something creating furrows in the field. The creature ahead was running for its dear life. It seemed any moment Bhalua would pounce upon it. But, surprisingly the creature was gaining hair-breadth escape. ‘Look, Jackal!’ Grandma shouted. ‘Now, Jackal’s finished’. Nirmal who had never seen a jackal clapped and danced. But, Grandma said, ‘No son, Bhalua can’t harm a Jackal. Just see, it will come back disappointed’. Grandma was right. Bhalua who had once killed a baboon returned in frustrated anger. Grandma sang: Six hundred vultures, nine hundred crows When they perish, Willdiethislordofthefields. Let alone Bhalua, nobody would ever kill a jackal. Listen, when jackal knows dog is closing up, it farts emitting too filthy smell for the dog to bear. For the first time Nilua learned that mysterious quality of the jackal. In his Picture Book he had seen a jackal running away while looking back at a house on fire, and a boy dancing with the rhyme:
The teacher had explained that jackal is mortally afraid of man lest he would burn it to death. So it hides in Kewda bushes at day time. The words of Grandma and the teacher had removed his misgivings regarding the jackal. But, still he shivered in trepidation when he saw a jackal yelping, raising its face to the sky and many others joining the chorus. He thought angry jackals were planning to attack. Grandma then assured with a smile that jackals howl to signal night’s end. When one jackal yelps, another follows suit and then an-other, and then all. If a jackal does not respond, its chest will burst. You know, without jackals there will be no night, no end to night. Nirmal felt assured when he learned the virtues of that small animal. He was amazed to think how they create night at sunset – man goes to sleep, and then end the night – day breaks – man wakes up to begin life’s business. Really what an intimate relationship, he thought, between the two! From that day on Nirmal would cajole Grandma to tell stories about jackals. Grandma would narrate how the jackal inserts its tail into holes and pulls it out with crabs clinging to it... how his crow uncle invites him from miles afar to share the dead ... and how his intelligence could make him the minister of the Lion King. Nillua loved those stories, waited anxiously to hear them yelp-ing, and when they fell silent he sank into the depth of sleep. Years passed and with the passing time a soft corner for jackals devel-oped in him — filled with a mixed feeling of affection, sympathy, and respect
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— which it seemed nobody could ever erase. In most afternoons he would stroll along rows of Kewda shrubs on the river-bed with the hope to meet one or two jackals and a chance encounter on any day would make him elated as if retrieving a temporarily lost something.
* * * * * * ** * * * * * ** * * * * * * But that afternoon Sahib didn’t take his usual path to the dyke. Instead he entered the village. He met a man, perhaps out for shopping. Sahib smiled at him and the man saluted out of habit. ‘I’ll just have a word with you.’ ‘Sahib talking to me!’ The man was surprised. ‘No, I just... it’s about that sly jackal...’ But before he could finish the man added, ‘Don’t you worry Sir. Their Death arrives tomorrow. You’ll see jackals will be wiped out’. ‘No, not like that... My experience says all jackals are not alike. This one has somehow got the taste of goat’s blood. Only this one is stealing the kids. I admit he is the offender. Why don’t you put up watch at night and smash his legs? Would get a lesson...’ Sahib thought he might convince the man. ‘Exactly, we put up watch tonight. If he appears we’ll smash, not his legs, but his head. The liver-eaters arriving tomorrow – jackals will get the kick!’ The man left the place before Sahib could interfere. He felt sad and moved on. A skinny man was harvesting green-gram. ‘How are you?’ Sahib smiled softly. The man seemed cheerful that Sahib himself addressed to him. He gave a brake to his work and said, ‘I’m finished, Sir. That jackal carried away two of my goats. Come next Raja festival and they would have fetched hundred bucks each.’ ‘Let’s drive them out. We allowed you to live when you obeyed us. Now go elsewhere, for you have turned wild.’ The skinny man retorted: ‘Exactly. The gypsies who arrive tomorrow will crush their chest / thorat. No jackal, no foul play. You bloody homeless hordes.’ The man looked angry. Sahib was disappointed. He walked on. An old man of his age was smoking on the veranda. When he saw Sahib, who seldom visited the village, he got up and bowed. ‘How come you appear here?’ ‘Why not? But, tell me how shall I sleep?‘You are right. For three nights I have forgotten sleep. These jackals are on such a rampage that I sit up all throughout the night with this lathi by my side.’ Sahib retuned home and went to bed. But, he forgot to doze. Exactly at the first hour of the night the collective yelping of jackals came floating from
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For him night passed without a wink. He paced up and down on the veranda. He knew the gypsies had already put up their tent under the banyan tree. He grew impatient and reached there in the afternoon. ‘So you people have come?’ When the gypsies saw the spotlessly clad old gentle man, one of them began with the hope of some extra incentive: ‘Don’t you panic, Sir. We are here. You see how tonight we torment jackals to death. Look, our stove’s ready to cook jackal’s liver.’ ‘OK. But, tell me how you think to kill them?’ ‘Think? We have already started our job. Now, these are fat and spice coated grenades. We have planted them inside the Kewda thickets. Their fleshy smell will attract jackals and they will fall upon them to tear them into shreds. Fine, then grenades will go off – BANG! Bodies and heads will be smashed to bits. Sir, you just stay home and count the explosions. One BANG, one jackal finished. But pray, keep us in mind.’ He added this last sentence in utter humil-ity. ‘Well, well, we’ll see to that at day break’. With these words Sahib climbed onto the dyke. Sahib had chalked up a plan and decided to execute that as quickly as possible. He knew he had never done anything with so much secrecy. He glanced sideways, up and down and making sure that no one was looking, went down the dyke to the river bed. He knelt down near a Kewda bush, putting aside the leaves with the help of his walking stick, and crawled inside. Once there, he was thrilled like never before. He imagined he was going to meet his old pals. His knees were skinned a bit, but he didn’t care. Then he noticed an object – a grenade. He was overwhelmed with joy. He picked it up and put it into a bag slinging from his shoulder. Still on his fours, he picked up a good number of grenades. ‘So you came to finish jackals! Bloody fools!’ He smiled sarcastically thinking of the gypsies and the villagers. ‘ ‘Now on I’ll sleep in peace’. He felt assured. He moved along the Kewda bushes like a jackal, down on his knees and hands. Then at a little distance he noticed a grenade and over it two burn-ing eyes – a jackal. It looked up at him. ‘Oh dear, what are you looking for? Just keep off that thing – touch it you will die’. The jackal didn’t move. Sahib grew impatient. As a last bid he leaped towards the jackal. But, as ill luck would have it, he lost balance and landed on the grenade with the force of his left hand. Evening was still to descend. Villagers heard the noise of a series of blasts. Some of them started running on the street celebrating the death of jackals. But the two gypsies under the banyan tree were dumbfounded. How
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POETRY
THAT’S LIFE* Dr. Suguna Patnaik
There was a waitingAnxious parents waiting with mixed-feelingsFor the arrival of the new off-spring.The apple of their eyes, their bundle of joy.Then there is a saga of experi-ences;of caring, raring, upbringing;Attaining, achieving, still hoping;Getting, losing and spending.The saga continues amidst hopes and hopelessness.Fulfilments and disappointmentsJoys and sorrows and struggles and victoriesDreams and despairs : it is life.Then there is another waitingThe never-ending waiting for some.For the final curtain to dropAn unseen wind blows out the candle.So soon or a little later; it doesnot matterThe circle draws to a close in noth-ingnessLeaving behind only memories.And that is Life. * teaches English at Science College, Hinjilicut, Ganjam, Orissa, India.
THE VISITORS* Peter Asher, England.
Visitors come each dayin wish shaped craft asfragile as morning cereal bowls.
staring as always from thebreakfast table into theircoffee coloured visionary eyes -Hoping they’ve brought paradisetoday on which it canbe realised for you and me.Still smiling at each other,as if they are us -they remove their wishing -craft slowly awayTo the two parent saucers -fragile as porcelain inthe morning air.* Add: Gurnell St. Scunthorpe, England.
BLISS UNBOUNDED* Dhirendra Kumar Mishra
When the earth becomes the bedThe palms the pillowThe canopy of sky covers the bodyLike the blanket of a cool winter morn.The wriggling body - tired like a childStretches itselfEyelids close -Life goes out slowly out of a Paining calf, the writhing shoulder,The curved toes, the grinding stom-ach,The puffed cheek and the beating heart.Dreams begin to ooze -A prancing deer, a dancing fountain,A flowing stream, a singing seaAcross the blue skySpread the flowers of stars.The soft snow of a frosty winter
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Descend to the body earthAs the soul risesUp & up - layer by layer.The music of life slowly fadesThe rains of bliss drenches the bodyThe mind & soul afloatIt feels -If Life is beautifulSo the Death eternalA bliss restfulWhen God is so close! * Addl. Commissioner of Income Tax, Cuttack, Orissa. India.
HIGHWAY CHILD* Ms. Bandita Satpathy
Night fallsOnly to make him a wandering soulRoofless, tireless,In a much used world.PackedHouses with unwanted guestsHotels with ghastly figuresParks with mortal loversAndGod with his existential problemsIs out in search of a secured place.There he standsKeeping not much differenceBetween a statue and himselfAll aloneBarely covered from top to bottomAnd Pale light from housesFails to make him warm.Hair dry and copperyEyes deep yet watery
Behind torn robesNo youthful breasts seenInstead a cage hangs.Body with scars of - moments’ rebellionAll symbolic of a pagan civilisation,He, the Highway child,A manifestation ofNever born to a woman. * teaches English at Women’s Polytech-nic, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.
FATHER’S SECOND WIFE* Noel King, Ireland
To explain the new marriage he si-lently offered mea box of Kodak snaps, punched my cheek fondlybefore checking my farm work. The womanmade tea, untied a parcel of sticky buns.Smiled weakly at me: you were photographed ina costume of pseudo Spanish fla-menco - or somecountry - a honeymoon you’d just had with my father,the costume playing games - as the sun does - with him.You changed my mother’s house for the sake of it,made sickly colours in the place, had him carpenter itinto new shapes. I resented helping, holding, shaking,knuckles white on white timber presses he screwed in
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- Nights he screwed you in my moth-er’s bed. Throughthe window I caught you baking bread, throwingthe dough on the wood table and making momentaryphallic shapes, pressing, kneading, flattening them,Crafting ring-bread - at tea-time I said I wasn’t hungryYou took up with me after my father’s stroke, when hecould stoke you no more. We watched The Nancy DrewMysteries and The Hardy Boys Mys-teries together;Alternative Mondays. The Nancy ones proved to you Iwasn’t a Nancy boy. Then your sly, pun-intended commenton The Hardy Boys and we were off. Out on the terracemy father was at the time, a car rug covering.The equipment he no longer had. We got - or you got -more daring in time; doing me while hewas in the house, and eventually - sad this - with him.in the same room, too senile to notice.
Two poems by * Robin E.J. Chater, England.
(I)WANTS
I try to defy timeTo master thingsWhen it’s just too late.At the third collapseI see it for the fall it isAnd look beyondFor the next thingAlways trusting thatWants will suffice.Like a longwall advancingAnd all crumbling behind.The shearer of the mindGliding through rockSearching for a seamLook, I hear myself declareI’m a collier, not a gardener – see?As the worm turnsSilently, undisturbed.
(II)WINK
Soon it will be SpringThe boat race, Wimbledon,A few sultry days in AugustThen the prospect Of another long winter.Time cycles onDown its steepening hillUntil our path flattens outAlong a dark, nameless streetWhere a hunched figure winksAnd nothingness begins. * robin@ ppru.com
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*** OBITUARY
“OUT Of PRINT”
one sentence. I stopped on page 61 to cry, and then we both cried at the end. He had not been responsive for more than 24 hours, so this was especially magical. I thanked him for all the books, all the beautiful sentences, this being the most beautiful I have ever read. I thanked him for being the best father I could ever imagine. I told him he would always be my best friend. His eyebrows told me to stop crying. So I did. I told him I understood because he taught me about laughter.” x x x x x x The man who wrote millions of words, both in English and French, played with them, published more than ten fictions (Double Or Nothing, Amer Eldorado, Take It Or Leave It, The Voice in the Closet, Twofold Vibration, Smile on Washington Square, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, and Loose Shoes etc.), five volumes of poems, four books of criticism and numerous articles is now “Out of Print”. He has changed tense. One of the most original postmodern thinkers is no more. Our literary world is poorer without him. Raymond Federman is born on May 15, 1928, in a Polish Jewish family in Paris, France. He survives Holocaust at the age of 14 while his parents and two sisters are killed in the gas chambers as a part of the systematic extermination of European Jews. After three years he lands on the United States to live out the “excess life” granted to him. He does odd jobs there, joins High School, and as a USA paratrooper goes to the Far East. After his return to New York he postgraduates, does Ph.D. on Beckett at UCLA, and there marries Erica. In 1964 he joins the Department of French at State University of New York at Buffalo, and then moves to the Department of English there where he continues till his retirement in July 1999. Apart from his professional life, writing was his passion; he turned life into a fiction, all his life tried to make sense of what happened to his family and to him, tried to express in words the inexpressible, the absence (X-X-X-X), the “Unforgivable Enormity”. Fiction after fiction he would tell the story of his life, invent and reinvent it, but could never understand the silence, what his mother’s last gesture meant. In his fictions he mocked at history and laughed at his tormentors. His experimental fictions made Surfiction a powerful genre
This was the epitaph lovingly composed for Raymond Federman by Simone, his daughter, some two decades back. On October 6, 2009 she wrote: “My father died this morning. Last night I read all of
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as well as cancellation and subversion. He received many prestigious awards and fellowships both in USA and abroad. His books have been translated into many major languages of the world. Sadly, the Nobel always eluded him; or rather he did not fit into the scheme of things. He traveled widely, and surprisingly, he was most admired and read in Germany – because, as he said, he made them laugh. One of his admirers says, “He cries the tears of the laugh laughing at itself, and lets his tears run down the pages of his book...” Simone’s letter shocked me, but we knew his end was approaching fast. For more than fifteen years he remained so close, regularly wrote to me until a month before his death, and sent me his poems, fictions and other texts. He was such a great human being – kind, affectionate, and warmhearted to this friend from India as he used to address me. He taught me laughter – his writings changed my way of thinking. His death is a personal loss to me – I will always miss him, miss his “present-absence”. I salute you Dear Ray – my friend, philosopher and guide. - Dr. AMIYA KUMAR PATRA
the reckless wanderer
refusing all categorizationhe perplexes the expertswho cannot grasp where he comes from
born nowhere butbeing everywhereat the same timehe constantly arrivesand departs carryingwith him a bundleof souvenirs tattooedin his fleshlest he forget
with effronteryhe abuses a languageunknown in the landthat lies betweenhere and elsewherebetween memoryand forgetfulness
he plays with wordsthat construct in spiralsa tale made of digressionsthat cancel the old souvenirs
but he fears nothing because his infernal taleis spiced with indifferenceand sweetened with laughter.
