Role of Women in Rao's Kanthapura

The woman has always been the unacknowledged and indiscernible core of the Indian society, without which its patriarchy would fall apart. Never allowed a voice in the seminal aspects of life, the woman yet defines its traditional and cultural boundaries. Here, a community is referred to as modern when its woman wears jeans or goes out to work.  But she has not the independence to control or make the decisions of her own life. She is defined through her male guardian’s identity— as somebody’s daughter, sister or wife.

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is a subtle study of the immense change that the Gandhian movement of the thirties brought into the life of the Indian woman and yet didn’t let her cross the conventional, the so-called feminine boundaries. The novel traces the material and psychological revolution that accompanied the emergence of the woman from within the twin incarnations of the devi and the dasi that has reigned the imagination of the patriarchy since ages. From the polar images of the all-pervading and all-powerful goddess Kenchamma and the Pariah Rachanna’s wife who would spin only if her husband tells her to, emerge the new women who defy conventions and lead the war of independence — Rangamma and Ratna.

Political mass movements in any country, as Ania Loomba suggests, have varying attitudes to the question of female agency and women’s rights. Throughout Latin America, machismo posed a real problem for the women in political struggle. Some critics suggest that Gandhi’s Non-cooperation movement was feminist in nature —it mobilized an unprecedented number of women and also, it adopted attributes such as passivity, and activities such as spinning, traditionally considered to be feminine in nature.

This is correct only to an extent. It is true that the Gandhian movement had a considerable role to play in bringing the woman out of purdah. Women made up a significant part of the satyagrahis and many assumed the role of leaders in the movement. Thus we find the Gandhi of Kanthapura, Moorthy, selecting Rangamma as one of the members of the Congress Panchayat Committee, saying “We need a woman for the Committee for the Congress is for the weak and the lowly”.

But Gandhi’s movement was essentially against women’s militancy and their public roles were entirely an extension of their domestic selves in concurrence with the patriarchal conceptions of the family and society. Despite the references to Rani Laxmibai in Kanthapura, the ideal woman is projected in the figure of the ever-obedient and eternally suffering Sita. It was simply a transition “from a traditional child bride into the nationalist ideal of the wife as help-mate and companion” [Loomba]. We get a glimpse of this painful evolution in the autobiography of Ramabai Ranade, who was married at the age of eleven to the well-known scholar and jurist Mahadev Govind Ranade. Torn between her husband’s persistence for her to be educated and the taunts of her mother-in-law and other female relatives, she decides on one occasion to be absent from a function at the temple where she had to choose between sitting with orthodox or reformist women. Her husband punished her by refusing to speak to her even when she performed the traditional rubbing of his feet with ghee, without even telling her what her fault was. The matter was only resolved when she went up to him and apologized. His response was:

“Who would like it if his own one didn’t behave according to his will? Once you know the direction of my thoughts, you should always try to follow the same path so that neither of us suffers. Don’t ever do such things again.”

We meet with similar resistance to the Sevika Sangha from the men in Kanthapura.

“And when our men heard of this, they said: was there nothing left for our women but to vagabond about like soldiers? And every time the milk curdled or a dhoti was not dry, they would say, ‘And this is all because of this Sevi business’.”

A woman is beaten as a consequence of being a part of this Sangha although she is seven months pregnant. Post office Satamma’s husband forbids her to go to Rangamma’s house and when accosted by the latter says, ‘I am a Gandhi’s man, aunt. But if I cannot have my meals as before, I am not a man to starve’. Rangamma in accordance to the Gandhian ideals tells Satamma not to fail in her timely services to her husband or home.

One of the most interesting factors that played a role in this sea-change in the lives of the women is the letter or the alphabet in the form of newspapers. Shahid Amin in his essay Gandhi as Mahatma (1988) discusses how Hindi journalism played an immensely significant role in the upheaval of the nationalist sentiment in Gorakpur post 1919.

“In April of that year two important papers— the weekly Swadesh and the monthly Kavi — made their appearance. These, especially Dasrath Dwivedi’s Swadesh, were to exercise an important influence in spreading the message of Gandhi over the region.”

Amin goes on to discuss how this influence in the district led to the idea of Gandhi to be appropriated by the peasants to validate their own means of addressing local problems, very much as depicted in Kanthapura.

Women’s education has always been a sore point with the Indian patriarchy. Arguments for women’s education in metropolitan as well as colonial contexts, according to Loomba, rely on the logic that educated women would make better wives and mothers. At the same time, they have to be taught to remain in their places. This idea is as current now as it was eighty years back.Tagore tentatively explores the so-called “dangers” that education poses for the woman in Nashtaneer (1901), better known by its film version, Charulata, and Ghore Baire (1916). The widening up of one’s world as a result of education fails to keep the woman shackled within the four walls of her home and it is precisely this spectre of the truly independent woman that haunts the patriarchy.

The women leaders in Kanthapura are both educated widows, Rangamma and Ratna. Rangamma acts as a source of information, knowledge and inspiration to the village women. Apart from telling them about other galaxies on the one hand and the equal rights that women share with the men in a far-away country on the other, Rangamma is a regular subscriber to newspapers from the city— the Tai-nadu, Vishwakarnataka, Deshabanddhu, and Jayabharatha. These papers supply the villagers with the latest developments in the revolutionary struggle in the other parts of the country and later as to the trial and judgment of Moorthy and his fellow satyagrahis. Rangamma is the one who tells the women about Laxmibai and trains them to resist the lathi blows of the police passively. She modulates the deep core religious zeal in the women and adds a nationalist dimension to it, ‘…we shall fight the police for Kenchamma’s sake, and if the rapture of devotion is in you, the lathi will grow as soft as butter and as supple as a silken thread, and you will hymn out the name of the Mahatma.’

On the other end there is Ratna. Initially, she is detested by the village women along with the evil Bhatta, for walking about the streets like a boy, wearing her hair to the left “like a concubine”, and wearing her jewellery —and all this being a widow. Ratna’s retort when accosted for this is remarkable,

“…when she was asked why she behaved as though she hadn’t lost her husband, she said that that was nobody’s business, and that if these sniffing old country hens thought that seeing a man for a day, and this when one is ten years of age, could be called a marriage, they had better eat mud and drown themselves in the river.”

We find innumerable examples of similarly suffering women in Bengali literature as well, but none perhaps daring to voice so vehement a protest. Her mother reacts to her attitude in the conventional fashion, calling her a wicked tongued creature and significantly, that she ought never to have been sent to school. Later, in the absence of Moorthy and Rangamma, it is Ratna who leads the women against the police as the latter launch a violent assault against the village.

Another great leap towards liberation is achieved by the women in the novel by their deciding to read and comment on the vedantic texts when Ramakrishnayya dies. The women choose Ratna to read the texts and Rangamma to comment on them, a remarkable decision when one considers the contemporary furore over whether a woman at all has the right to read the Vedas or not!  

Rao’s selection of an old grandmother as the narrator in Kanthapura is one of the finest stylistic devices of the novel. We witness the immense change that is gradually brought about in the psyche of the narrow-minded, prejudiced and uneducated widow as she mingles facts with fantasy to describe how the world changed for her and her companions under the influence of Moorthy’s preaching and Rangamma’s Sevika Sangha. This is one of the rare instances where history is looked at from a woman’s point of view as opposed to its analytical, power-structured male version that inevitably leaves the women folk out.

It is because of the Gandhian movement that we witness a considerable change in the portrayal of women in fiction that focus on the India of the 1940s. In Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters (1998), we find emancipated, politicized women choosing to break the bounds of conventional patriarchy by living an active life beyond their husbands and homes. Some like Swarnalata and Shakuntala, attending seminars and giving lectures, succeed in achieving independence. Others like the protagonist Virmati fail in the attempt. It is easy to devalue the efforts of these difficult daughters but necessary not to do so. It is the very effort during that time that needs to be applauded. Dora Sales Salvador, in her note to her Spanish translation of the novel, appositely stresses: 

“Kapur emphasizes the efforts made at that time by numerous women who, while demanding equal opportunities, equal access to education and life-opportunities going beyond convention, were a visible force in the non-violent resistance to the British”.

Kamala Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury (1956) focuses on the conflict in a city (evidently Madras) between a repressive Government and the nationalists, both violent and non-violent, a conflict culminating in a trial during the 1942 Quit India movement. One of the principle nationalist figures of the novel is the woman journalist Roshan Merchant. Perhaps inspired by the likes of Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Nehru, Roshan is probably one of the first fictional professional Indian women. She mingles easily in European circles where she has British friends and at the same time contributes a regular column to a magazine she owns which is audaciously critical of the Government. Later in the course of the novel she gets more intimately involved in the nationalist struggle.

History as well as fiction largely ignores the subaltern woman as opposed to her upper or middle class sisters. As Spivak puts it, labouring under a double colonization, she is too deep in the shadow to be generally remembered. Kanthapura records the sexual oppression of the female workers of the Skeffington estate who are subject to the whims and desires of the Sahib.

“He is not a bad man, the new Sahib. He does not beat like his old uncle, nor does he refuse to advance money; but he will have this woman and that woman, this daughter and that wife, and everyday a new one and never the same two within a week.”

If the chosen woman’s male guardian refuses to send her, his salary is cut and he gets a whipping. The Sahib is only timid when it comes to a Brahmin girl. He had shot to death a Brahmin clerk in his employ who had dared to defy his sexual demand for the latter’s daughter. Although Skeffington had subsequently offered to pay for the  damages to the murdered man’s wife and children, he’d eventually paid nothing, for, as Achakka puts it, “the Red-man’s court forgave him.” Despite its obvious unjust outcome, the trial had a sequel that might sardonically, in its historical setting, be called happy. Skeffington never again touched a Brahmin girl, and even when a Pariah said no to him, the sahib “hardly ever,” in Achakka’s words, had the girl dragged to him at night.

Such instances abound histories of other colonized countries as well. A visitor to Trinidad noted the case of a European estate manager who had seven Indian women, “being with child, all by him.” The royal commission of 1871 in Guiana, whose members were sympathetic to planters, stated: “It is not uncommon for overseers, and even managers, to form temporary connections with Coolie women, and in every case with the worst possible consequences to the good order and harmony of the estate.” It is meaningful to notice here that the exploitation of Indian women is viewed mainly in terms of its effects upon production, and not really on the women or families involved.

This gross violation was also given a boost by the many representations of the female native figure in Western Literature and Art which perpetuated the myth of the erotically charged female. The primitive exoticism and siren - like attraction of Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard’s prejudice-strewn 1887 novel She is noteworthy. Another remarkable instance is found in Anne McClintock’s book Imperial Leather (1995), where she studies the links between colonialism, domestic arrangements and sexual labour in South Africa and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. She opens with an astounding reading of the map in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). McClintock argues that if the map is inverted, it looks like the form of a woman’s body, the coveted mines to which the journeying men are heading being suddenly to be located in the pubic area of this topological map-woman. She goes on to make the surprising assertion that “Haggard’s map thereby hints at a hidden order underlying industrial modernity: the conquest of the sexual and labour power of colonized women.” It is perhaps only with the ultimate independence in 1947 that the Skeffington estate women workers were released from their oppression, only to be caught in a wider web spun by their own countrymen.

Kanthapura is a path breaking work in many ways, as its critics widely agree. But to me, it is Raja Rao’s sensitive and realistic portrayal of the emergence of the modern Indian woman, a part of whom we carry within ourselves even today, which has made the novel worth remembering.

Courtesy: Tara's Cosmos

Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

A few words on the two neoteric terms, cybertext and ergodic, are in order. Cybertext is a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener's book (and discipline) called Cybernetics, and subtitled Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Wiener laid an important foundation for the development of digital computers, but his scope is not limited to the mechanical world of transistors and, later, of microchips. As the subtitle indicates, Wiener's perspective includes both organic and inorganic systems; that is, any system that contains an information feedback loop. Likewise, the concept of cybertext does not limit itself to the study of computer-driven (or "electronic") textuality; that would be an arbitrary and unhistorical limitation, perhaps comparable to a study of literature that would only acknowledge texts in paper-printed form. While there might be sociological reasons for such a study, we would not be able to claim any understanding of how different forms of literature vary.

The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of "reading" do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning "work" and "path." In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

Dub Poetry

Dub poetry is usually taken to refer to a particular type of “performance poetry”, a brand of oral poetry performed to the accompaniment of reggae music. The term “dub poetry” itself is thought to have been invented by the Jamaican poet Oku Onuora to describe a form of oral art that had been developing in Jamaica since the early 1970’s.

Oku Onuora defined the term in an interview conducted with the poet and critic Mervyn Morris in 1979. Oku said that a dub poem was “a poem that has a built-in reggae rhythm - hence when the poem is read without any reggae rhythm ( so to speak) backing, one can distinctly hear the reggae rhythm coming out of the poem”. So a dub poem is a poem that relies on a reggae rhythm that can be felt/heard even when there is no musical accompaniment. Oku Onuora later extended that definition to cover all kinds of musical backing, so that dub poetry would include any type of music-influenced poetry.

The term “dub poetry” has not always found favour with all the practitioners of  the genre. For instance Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka have consistently rejected it. In an interview conducted in 1994, Mutabaruka told me that he found the term too “limited”. Linton Kwesi Johnson has repeatedly stated that the term “dub poetry” put poets “in a bag”  and defined only one facet of their work:” I think it’s putting you in a bag really. I just like to be regarded as a poet who writes a particular type of poetry. I think it’s dangerous to categorize you into this “dub poetry” bag”. By the mid-1980’s, the term had obviously run its course and the Jamaican poet Jean Binta Breeze had pleaded, in her poem “Dubbed Out”, for a type of poetry that would not “break” words but let them live.

Thus “dub poetry” may not after all be a valid term for the reggae-influenced poetry produced by the likes of Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and  maybe this term should be applied to the people it was originally meant to refer to, that is Jamaica’s first deejays. Indeed, in a Race and Class article, Linton Kwesi Johnson himself had written about the “dub lyricists” and had called them “poets”:” The dub lyricist is the dj turned poet. He intones his lyrics rather than sings them. Dub lyricism is a new form of (oral) music poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on to the rhythm background of a popular song. Dub lyricists include poets like Big Youth, I Roy, U Roy, Dillinger, Shorty the President, Prince Jazzbo and others”. So the dub poetry tag was originally meant to describe the art form of Jamaican “toasting” or deejaying, a brand of popular poetry produced by and for the Jamaican masses. In fact a case could be made for the recognition of Jamaican deejaying as a form of oral poetry.

The Impressionist of Imperialists: Hari Kunzru

At first glance, Hari Kunzru wildly entertaining debut novel, The Impressionist, looks like a disjointed collection of novels with enough of a unifying theme - race and colonialism in India - to justify a masterpiece of exquisitely done theater four parters lots of elephants and helmets assertive spinal sad. Each of the major centers of book sections, after all, a completely different character, all have some connection to the subcontinent. There Pran Nath Razdan, a pampered and well Indian child born in the century that grows just downstream of the Taj Mahal, Rukhsana, an exotically beautiful hijra, or eunuch transvestite, who is forced by his teacher to perform sexual favors for influential English an official, the lovely white boy, Pretty Bobby, the flag of a Scottish missionary couple in Bombay, which is also a capo demimonde and finally, Jonathan Bridgeman, an aristocratic Oxford student who reluctantly accompanies famous anthropologist Africa on a mission to study African tribes - the black people who hates Jonathan.

What connects the four wildly divergent characters and tales, is much more constant and corrosive confrontation between English and India, between white and black. The surprise of the expert Kunzru and ambitious book is that all these disparate characters are, in fact, the same person: the "impressionist" title, half-Indian, half-English boy who has the uncanny ability to impersonate any two white or black.

The plot follows the chameleon Pran idyllic childhood in his expulsion from the house (after the revelation that he is the son of English lover of his mother) to the street, from his days as a street beggar to his years as sex slave catering to the tastes of their customers extravagant white (one of which opens masturbates while Rukhsana to recite Kipling), from his apprenticeship as a kind of lab assistant for the fanatic missionary (who collects skulls members of "inferior" races and measures its cranial capacity) passing as Jonathan. Through all this, Pran realizes that identity can be much more fluid than many of the people who find how to think - a fabrication own benefit of the powerful. It is no little shock one day he sees how easy it is to make their way into "white" institutions: "You hear a tone and see a face and a set of clothes, and put them together in one person."

That reality exposes the hypocrisy in touching the heart of the racist imperialist. With great enthusiasm and a wonderful light touch - Kunzru tone is always one of amused detachment - the author uses the hybrid nature of its protagonist to show the intellectual, moral and politically unstable structures of colonialism were. In each of the environments through which you travel, the ability to cross borders Pran is pointedly contrasted with the manic energy of a character who is desperate to maintain order. Pran adoptive father, a distinguished lawyer of high caste, is an obsessive-compulsive insanely dedicated to "maintaining impervious boundaries", posing as Jonathan, Pran attends a boarding school in England, where its director, a botanist , teaches his student, a hybrid if ever there was one, of the dangers of cross-fertilization: "The flowers lose their identities in a hybrid swarm, and nature would be in a hopeless muddle."

The more desperate mess we find in this book is inevitably Pran himself, a person whose (totally understandable) interest and experience of the cases, the manipulation of superficial appearances comes at the cost of an authentic personality. Impressionism is often so full of interesting incidents and fine details that can sometimes lose sight of the larger issue, but not so much towards the end, when you see how expertly Kunzru has manipulated his plot to demonstrate moral corrosion that is the greatest legacy of imperialism. For as Pran get the latest in "pass", successfully posing as a well-to-English Oxford University, who have been deprived of what he craves most: the daughter of his mentor, who represents everything English ", Elgar and tea roses. " At the very moment he tries to consummate his love for her, he realizes that his English rose flower prefers black men. When Jonathan dismisses as "the most conventional person" she knows, and he desperately tries to tell the truth about who is exotic, his situation is beyond the poignant tragedy.

The book is not perfect: In all cases, shares some of the defects of his hero. It is likely that buzz through 400 pages Kunzru in a wave of pleasure, and only then might wonder, as I did, why did not affect you more - why I remember is his pleasure in craftsmanship of the author and not the heartbreaking tragedy of the story, he says. The reason, in the end, has to do with Pran himself, a character whose belief that the surfaces are not only does everything "himself fully available", but is not available, ultimately, to the reader. If you were able Pran worry more, to feel with him (instead of just for him), this remarkable debut would be great instead of good. However, if the impressionist is best on surfaces that deep, is an extraordinary book that will leave a lasting impression.

Kamala Das: Her Feminist Ambivalence

Commentators of Kamala Das's poetry often link her poetry to specific incidents in her personal life. They explain her poetry with reference to My Story. This biographical approach to literary criticism is an untenable practice in as much as poets are beings endowed with imagination and they set forth in their poems what they perceive as imaginative truths. When Emily Dickinson was asked whether the "I" in her poems represented her real self she replied that it represented an "imagined I". The greatness of a poet lies in how far he or she is true to his or her imagined self and the honesty with which he or she delineates experiences. Kamala Das's poetic self is made up of millions of Indian women . Her voice is the voice of Indian women silenced through ages of suppression. Hence, the "I" in Kamala Das's poetry is a deceptive one It is the will-o'-the- wisp of the critic . Her real poetic self can be extracted from her various poems collected in three anthologies: Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967) and Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973).

Kamala Das writes about the plight of womanhood in Indian society with. amazing candour. It is difficult for a woman to preserve her sanity, let alone her identity! She writes:

"I must pose,

I must pretend,

I must act the role

Of happy woman

Happy wife

I must keep right distance

Between me and the low

And I must keep right distance

Between me and the high" (The Suicide)

Life is no bed of roses for an Indian woman. Her path is strewn with thorns in the form of innumerable do's and don'ts! Womanhood is a curse under the Indian skies. This is most tersely and poignantly expressed in the line " the weight of my breasts and womb crushed me" (An Introduction) .

Her poem Old Playhouse is a vehement indictment of patriarchy. A girl comes to the house of her husband with great expectations of love and happiness. Alas! Her new home soon proves to be the graveyard of her dreams. Kamala Das gives expression to a woman's indignation when her husband systematically reduces her to the position of a sex- slave:

"You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her

In the long summer of your lust so that she would forget

Not the raw seasons alone and the home left behind her

Also her nature, the urge to fly"

These lines describe the fate of every girl who gets trapped into marriage. Her desire to grow , to have self-knowledge and, self- realization is crushed. She is reduced to the position of a helpless hanger-on on her husband. She is nothing more than a sex-object :

You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured

Yourself into every nook and cranny.You embalmed

My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices

You called me wife

In the suffocating atmosphere of her new home the woman" loses her will and reason". The room is filled with the oppressive smell of "male breath" . Even the cut flowers in the vase smell of human sweat. She feels herself to be a" dwarf cowering beneath the monstrous ego " of her husband.

Kamaqla Das's feminism boils down to one simple and single demand-love! She is not opposed to male domination. It is here that her feminism differs from that of Western feminists like Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter and Virginia Woolf. It is not a subversive philosophy with a political agenda for Kamala Das. Love is what a woman needs most. Without it she will wither away like a flower plucked from its stalk. She says:

"I want to be loved

And

if love is not to be had

I want to be dead"

Kamala Das's feminism matured over the years into an existentialist view of things. One can notice a certain ambivalence in her feminism. In her later poems she does not regard her breasts and womb as symbols of subjugation .On the contrary, she exults in them. they are the symbols of her power and glory. Her poem  Jaisurya  is a celebration of motherhood. A woman needs a man to attain this moment of ecstasy which she gets when she hears the cry of her new-born baby. A woman's life would be lustreless without a man whose touch alone can make her"gleam like burnished brass" (The Looking Glass)

Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali: A Reading

A century is about to pass by since Tagore's Gitanjali took the world by storm. The world of 1913, the year Tagore was awarded Nobel Prize for his Gitanjali, was so unlike the world of today. It was a world which stood perilously on the brink of a disastrous war and people quaked with fear as war clouds gathered on the political horizon of Europe. It was a world sick of materialism ,and despair was writ large on every face. Into this world came Gitanjali as a ray of hope for humanity. It re-affirmed faith in the innate glory of man by pointing out his spiritual potential.

Gitanjali is the supreme achievement of Tagore as a mystic poet. This anthology of 103 lyrics is in the tradition of Vaishnava devotional poetry. But Tagore's romantic touch has transfigured them into exquisite poetry which even lay readers can understand and enjoy. The imagery in which Tagore expresses his vision enables the readers to participate in the poet's spiritual experiences.

Tagore reveals himself as a mystic poet in several lyrics of Gitanjali. The opening Song strikes the key-note The allusion to the Bhagavat Gita adds a mystic dimension to to the opening song: "Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure" The following words echo the words of Lord Krishna in the Gita: "This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again and fill it with fresh life" In Song 2 the poet calls God the Supreme Musician and describes himself as a captive caught in the meshes of God's divine music . The poet would like to join in the heavenly music of the Creator, but his voice fails him and he can only stand in silent amazement!

AS I have said, the Vaishnava devotional poetry had a great influence over Tagore. In song after song we find the poet describing his spiritual experiences in terms of romantic love in the manner of Vaishnava poets. The human soul is depicted as a maiden and God as her lover In Song 18 we can see a sustained use of romantic imagery to express the human soul's longing to merge with the Divine. The maiden has been waiting for the arrival of her lover throughout the day But as the night comes and darkness thickens and dark clouds accumulate in the sky the maiden bursts out in anguish "Ah, love! Why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone".

Charity and self-sacrifice are depicted as the qualities that endear one to God. In song after song Tagore sets forth this idea with suggestive imagery Songs 50 and 54 extol the virtues of charity and self-sacrifice. The poet went a-begging from door to door . All of a sudden he saw the golden chariot of God coming towards him. His hopes brightened He hoped that his evil days were at an end and would cover him with gifts. The chariot stopped before the poet. To the great surprise of the poet, God held out His hand and asked: "What hast thou got to give to me?" The poet opened his wallet and gave a least little grain of corn. When in the evening he emptied his wallet on the floor , the poet saw a least little grain of gold in the poor heap! The story narrated in Song 54 shows that God appreciates even our little acts of kindness and of love: God approaches a maiden in the form of a thirsty traveller and asks for water and the maid obliges. But before taking his leave the traveller asks the maid her name;: "What have I done that he wants to keep me in his memory?" 

Tagore's belief in the immanence of God in nature can be seen in Song 45: "Have you not heard His footsteps?" A true devotee of God can hear God's silent steps "every moment, every age, every day and every night" In the concluding Song Tagore's mysticism is expressed through stately imagery The poet surrenders everything at the feet of God Almighty. Every act of surrender is described with suitable imagery. The poet compares his mind to a rain-cloud of July. heavy with unshed showers. The diverse srtains of his songs join together to form a mighty current flowing into the sea of silence. 

I cannot conclude this write-up on Tagore's Gitanjali better than by quoting this comment made by W. B. Yeats after reading Gitanjali: "these poems have stirred my blood as nothing has for years".

Toru Dutt's "Our Casuarina Tree": A Reading

Toru Dutt (1856-1877), who died at the age of 21 ,left behind her an imperishable legacy. She lived and wrote at a time when cultural studies were at an incipient stage of development, and the idea that mythologies hold the key to understanding a people, was not properly realized. With her amazing insight into things, Toru Dutt realized the importance of Indian myths and legends She did not need an Edmund Gosse to tell her that her poetry should be a "revelation of the heart of India", but she instinctively realized that Indian poetry, to be truly great, must be inspired by Indian myths. Her collection of poems 'Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan " reveals how even shadowy figures of legends can come alive when romantically treated. 

"Flowers look loveliest in their native soil

And their kindred branches: plucked, they fade 

And lose the colours Nature on them laid"

These lines from her poem "Ä mon Père" reveal her conviction that poetry like flowers looks loveliest in its native languages and poetry written in a foreign language cannot capture the rhythm of feelings. Her lavish use of imagery from Indian culture compensates for the lack of spontaneity due to the use of English for expressing her Indian sensibility. 

I think "Our Casuarina Tree" is her most representative poem. This poem reveals the influence of Keats on her. The first two stanzas are an imaginative and sensuous description of the Casuarina Tree, replete with imagery taken from nature . These two stanzas conform to Milton's conception of what poetry should be  "simple, sensuous and impassioned", But the tone changes to melancholic reflections in the third stanza. Toru Dutt explains why the casuarina tree is so dear to her ... "not because of its magnificence", but because she, her brother and sister (both of them are now dead) used to play together beneath the tree when they were little children. The image of the tree rises in her memory till her eyes become dim with tears.The Casuarina Tree becomes an objective correlative from fourth stanza onwards. It is the symbol of her brother and sister"s memory. She can hear the wailing of the casuarina tree wherever she goes. It follows her to distant lands She can hear its plaintive music even in the distant shores of France and Italy, when the waves gently kiss the shores beneath the moon. 

The tone of the last and fifth stanza of the poem is definitely one of triumph - triumph of immortality over death, loss and oblivion. The Casuarina Tree will remain immortal and it will keep alive the memory of her dead brother and sister, though her own poetry is too weak to confer immortality on them! Love will defend her dear ones from the curse of oblivion.

Sarojini Naidu's "Village Song": A Study

When the young Sarojini Naidu showed her early poetic efforts to Edmund Gosse for his comments, perhaps, she did not know that she was in for a shock. His words of admonition have since become part of history. He told her, " What we wished to receive was not a rechauffé of Anglo-Saxon sentiments in an Anglo-Saxon setting, but some revelation of the heart of India. Sarojini Naidu's poetry was never to be the same again. Her mentor's advice sank deep into her mind. It proved to be a turning-point in her poetic career. She was none the worse for it because the glory that is ancient India and the grandeur that is modern India afforded her full scope for the play of romantic imagination with which she was abundantly blessed! 

I consider "Village Song" as an authentic revelation of the heart of India as Edmund Gosse would have liked her poetry to be. In this dramatic lyric Sarojini Naidu reveals the heart of an Indian girl. The girl, carrying pitchers of Jumna water on her head, has to trek along a solitary stretch of land amidst thickening darkness. She blames herself for tarrying to hear the boatmen's song. After all, it was not her fault. Their song was so enthralling! But now she is tormented by fears of all kinds. The cries of white cranes and owls fill her with superstitious fears. For a moment she thinks about her brother and mother who may be wondering about the cause of her delay. Her mind is again filled with fear of snakes and evil spirits. This wild area is prone to thunde-storms at this time of the year. She chants the name of Lord Rama to protect her from all harms. 

This short poem reveals Sarojini Naidu's deep insight into the heart of I9ndian women. It points at Indian women's unflinching faith in their mythical heroes After reading the poem every reader might wonder whether the girl would have made it home if she hadn't had that strong enough faith in Lord Rama as her protector. The poem definitely has a symbolic level of meaning, too. The white cranes and owls symbolize the ills that the flesh is enduring in its journey through the world's wilderness. Indian women are sustained and supported in their moments of trials by their firm faith in their gods and goddesses.

A. K. Ramanujan: "Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House"

It has been rightly said that A.K. Ramanujan is not obvious as a poet; the poet in him has to be gradually discovered. His poems may not impress the readers on the first reading, but a closer reading of his poems will definitely reveal their myriad hidden beauties!

Ramanujan has his own personal views on the poetic process. I think we should be on our guard while making comments on his poetry in the light of the poet's own views on what poetry should be like. A poet's own views on poetry are often the will-o'-the-wisps which mislead the unwary critics. If Wordsworth found it necessary to append a preface to the Lyrical Ballads , it only shows the poet's lack of confidence. T.S.Eliot, on the contrary, set a fine example in this respect. He did not find it necessary to add any preface to his landmark poem The Waste Land In making this short commentary on Ramanujan's poem "Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House" I have tried my best not to be influenced by the poet's own critical theories.

On the surface, the poem is a quaint catalogue of things that come into the Great House but do not go out and and also an equally bizarre list of things that go out but soon come back. Even on the first reading, the reader may feel a bit uneasy and he may find the poem a deeply disturbing one in an inexplicable manner. A closer reading of the poem will convince the reader that the poem is a fine piece of social criticism. The poem will assume a universal significance when the reader ponders on this enigmatic poem. He will then recognize that the poem is an elegy on the death of human dignity and identity. 

It is interesting to compare "Small-Scale Reflections" with V.S Naipaul's masterpiece "A House for Mr Biswas" The hero of Naipaul's romance detests what Ramanujan euphemistically calls a Great House. Actually the Great House is an over-crowded house like the Hanuman House in Naipaul's novel. Both the houses are graveyards of human dignity and identity. Mrs Tulsi does not allow her sons- in law to leave the house. In Ramanujan's Great House sons - in law share the same fate: 

Sons- in law who quite forget 

their mothers but stay to check 

Accounts or teach arithmetic to nieces 

Great House is different from Hanuman House in one way . Here there is no Mr Biswas to start a rebellion. We are, however, informed that sons and nephews "ran away" to join the army, but, unlike Biswas, they do not stay and fight like rebels. In the Great House things and humans are all clubbed together:

They come in every day 

to lose themselves among other things 

lost long ago among

other things lost long ago 

Ramanujan has no compunction to club together things and human beings in the list of things that come into the Great House but do not go out. Look at this bizarre list: straying cows, library books, dishes, servants, phonographs, epilepsies, sons- in law and women who come as brides! Among the things that go out but soon return are daughters who come back as widows and sons and nephews who come back as corpses slain in distant battlefields. Why do daughters soon return as widows? Ramanujan gives the cryptic answer: they were married to "short-lived idiots"! 

This poem is more than a piece of criticism of an over-crowded Brahmin household. of South India. It has a universal significance. When human beings lose their dignity and identity they are little better than cows, dishes. bales of cotton and gadgets like phonographs. This vision of Ramanujan conveyed through this poem exalts it to the niche reserved for the greatest poetry in world literature.

R. Parthasarathy: His Poetic Achievements

Everyone will agree that R. Parthasarathy is one of the greatest names in Indo-English poetry since Independence. His collection of poems Rough Passage has a three-tier structure. In the first section Exile the poet describes his life in England where he felt like an exile uprooted from his culture. In the second part Trial Parthasarathy celebrates love and human relationships. In the third section Home-Coming he gives expression to his joy of discovery when he discovers his native roots and tries to harmonize the English language with Tamil culture. 

Cultural conflict is at the heart of R. Parthasarathy's poems. As a young student he was\infatuated with England and the English language. But his life in England put an end to his anglomania! He was caught in a cultural dilemma. His poetry is the product of this cultural dilemma. The first section Exile. reveals that the poet's infatuation with the English language and culture is under strain . The more he sees alien English life. the more he becomes conscious of his Tamil roots. Parthasarathy says: "English forms part of my rational make-up, Tamil my emotional make-up ". This discovery, which must have been very painful to the poet, is expressed in the first section. His infatuation with English has taken its toll. He has lost his Tamil identity! The poet's enlightenment is expressed in these lines of haunting beauty

"You learn roots are deep
That language is a tree, loses colour
Under another sky." 

In Trial the poet is celebrating love. In England he had non- relationships. Back in India he has formed bonds of love with his own people. Love is a reality here. A look at the family- album fills Parthasarathy with nostalgic memories. Love gives one a sense of belonging . He realizes that there is no place like home. In the last section of the poem Home-Coming the poet is in an ecstatic mood, though his ecstasy is tinged with regret.He expresses his joy when he comes back to his cultural heritage. He says

 "My tongue in English chains
I return after a generation to you"

The poet feels at home when he is amidst his own people. The poet regrets his "whoring after English gods" But an important fact to be noted here is that Parthasarathy is not perfectly at home with the present-day Tamil culture. Alas! Tamil culture is now devoid of all its former glory. The poet expresses his sorrow at the decadence in modern Tamil culture. The poet says that Western civilization has sapped the vigor and vitality of Tamil culture. Even the language of Thiruvalluvar has not been spared, its pristine beauty is irrecoverably lost!. There was a time when the Tamils flocked their temples to worship their gods and goddesses, but today they worship a new set of goddesses --"the high-breasted card-board and paper goddesses of Mount Road!" R Parthasarathy laments the present state of Vaigai river, the river that flows through the temple city of Madurai . There was a time when this majestic river symbolized the vibrant culture of the Tamils The Vaigai was like the Thames of Spenser, but today she looks like Eliot's Thames - a symbol of decadence! R.Parthasarathy's criticism of present-day Tamil culture shows that he is honest to the core as a poet, and he is not a mere mouthpiece of Tamil jingoism.

As a poet R Parthasarathy is much ahead of his times. His vehement denunciation of Westernization may not be readily appreciated by a generation dazzled by the glitter and glamour of Western civilization. He will definitely have more and more admirers when people realize that a nation dies when it loses its cultural identity and starts worshipping "wrong gods"

"These ashes are all that's left
of the flesh and brightness of youth,
My life has come full circle: I'm thirty
I must give quality to the other half,
I've forfeited the embarrassing gift
innocence in my scramble to be man."

Keki N. Daruwalla: A Poet With Difference

While reading the poetry of Keki N. Daruwalla one is bound to have the feeling that he is being transported to a bizarre world No other Indo-English poet delves so deep into the mysterious inner world of the human psyche as does Daruwalla. Daruwalla writes with a vision , and the vision follows him like a shadow. Whlle reading his poetry, the reader will have occasion to remember several poets. His attitude towards nature will remind one of Tennyson. His morbid pre-occupation with death will remind one of Emily Dickinson. His supernaturalism will remind the reader of Coleridge. His poetry as a heap of broken images will remind us of the poetic technique of T.S. Eliot.

We can see Daruwalla's worldview in his meditative poem Ruminations. The poet has glimpses of the true nature of life . He can see violence and hatred in the air. They are so omnipresent! Man cannot wash away these evils from his mind, try hard as he will! They stick deep . As violence and hatred reign all around . the natural corollary is death-wish. The poet says

Death I am looking

for that bald bone-head of yours!

Flesh is man's ultimate destiny. Alas! it is a prey to corruption. Neither rose-water nor insense-sticks nor flowers can drown the smell of death.

The drift as it comes to us now

is aroma/stench/nausea

jostling each other

Violence can disfigure the human body. The corpse of a woman lying on the verandah of the morgue, the victim of her husband's jealousy , has a grisly look , her nose being sliced off. Man is submissive to his ultimate fate.

bury him

and he is steadfast as the earth

Burn him and he will ride the flames

Throw him to the birds and he will

surrender flesh like an ascetic.

Can man ever have a cleansed feeling such as one gets while walking to  the temple after a river-bath ? No, says the poet . Nature has a cleansed look after rain.

the hedge smiles

the leaf loses its coat of dust

the scum spills from the pool

Alas for man. He can never experience the cleansed feeling ! Sin sticks so deep that sophisticated man is incapable of redemption.

I have misplaced it somewhere

in the caverns of my past!

Daruwalla elaborates the theme of sin in his poem The Death of a Bird. The poem has the same motif as Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, Man has to pay dearly for perpetrating sins on inoffensive animals and birds. The victim of the poet's cruelty is a king monal that was engaged in love-making with his mate. The sinner and his female companion cannot get away with the sin. "Why did our footsteps drag?"" 

Depressed a bit we took the road 

walking like ciphers disinterred

from some forgotten code 

The consciousness of sin begets weird feelngs and sensations. The terror that the sinner experiences is more-than-life-size. The glazed eyes and throbbing heart of the dying monal fill the poet with terror and foreboding. Every incident after the perpetration of the sin however trivial has a nightmare horror. The pony's cry as it fell into a gorge drowns even the roar of the river. The sinners are even incapable of enjoying love-making! 

Death and nature's cruelty , the two pet themes of Daruwalla, form the subject of The Ghaghra in Spate. The changing moods of the treacherous river are described using unconventional imagery. In the afternoon the river is a grey smudge on the canvas. At night she is over stewed coffee

At night under a red moon in menses

she is a red weal

across the spine of the land 

The river's relentless fury and man's unequal fight for survival are brought out in these lines:

If only voices could light lamps

If only limbs could turn to rafted bamboos 

The people take their tragedy with stoic indifference. 

They don't rave or curse

for they know the river's slang, her argot 

What baffles the poet more is man's indifference to the tragedy that befell other human beings. It is time for celebration for some! Women come in chauffeur- driven cars to collect driftwood to decorate their drawing-rooms. Nature's orgy of destruction is not yet over. Fishes in the fields are strangled to death through an unholy alliance between the sun and mud! 

This is the frightful picture of the Ghaghra painted by Daruwalla. The world depicted by Daruwalla is not a pleasing one. It is a sombre world where man is at the mercy of relentless elements. His poetry provides a unique experience for readers of Indian poetry in English. Daruwalla is indeed a star that dwells apart in the firmament of Indo-Anglian poetry.

Poetic Genius of Keki N. Daruwalla

The jurisprudence of Keki N. Daruwalla’s poetry has an immense and scintillating influence on the Indian scenario. His craftsmanship has an impeccable and highly vibrant quality and very much endowed with aesthetic appeal. His themes are varied in nature. His poem ranges from the greatest expression of Indian thought to the clever dwelling on mundane experience coupled with reality. His poetic endeavour is superior and excellent in terms of the quality and the poetic device he employs. As a poetic craftsman Daruwalla occupies the unique position in the matrix of Indian poetical spectrum. 

Indian Poetry in English is very much indebted to Daruwalla. His contributions to Indian Writing in English especially, verse is remarkable. He had enriched Indian Poetry in English through his range and craftsmanship. He poems have thrived to bring the under current of Indian life. His corpus of poems has echoed the Indian spirit and its sensibility. His poems are deeply rooted in Indian idiom. His poems are the quintessence of Indian sensibility and Indian life. Violence is the foremost theme of the poetry of Daruwalla. The violence pervades the works of Daruwalla both thematically and technically. However, it depicts the multi ethnicity of the Indian experience. His poetry presents the cross section of India. Indian poetry sans Daruwalla is unimaginable as his poetry has become an inevitable force in the annuls of Indian writing in English. His poems are devoid of any inferior poetic utterances. His images are so sound and it strikes the head at the right time. His poetic exuberance is matchless. His poetry is of high quality, dandy, sterling and first class. His poetic acumen is of highest calibre. Among Indian poets writing in English Nissim Ezekiel is comparable to Daruwalla. At times Daruwalla even outwits Nissin Ezekiel. Daruwalla’s technique is sounder than that of Ezekiel. In certain poems Daruwalla comes near the thematic excellence of Nissim Ezekiel. But, in few poems Daruwalla has even surpassed the poetic excellence of Nissim Ezekiel. Daruwalla’s poetry broadens the imaginative range of the reader with thematic universality with a multiple array of significance. Its import has deeper impact on the psyche of the connoisseurs of poetry. In the words of Sinha , “Daruwalla  projects his understanding of the contemporary Indian reality with its multivalent contradictions” (10).

Daruwalla’s poetry is subtle and oblique and seems to follow the dictum of  Tillyard, “ All poetry is oblique, there is no direct poetry” (65). His is the poetry of contemplation. Daruwalla’s naturalness goes with thoughtfulness is noted by several critics. Besides naturalism humanism is found in the poetry of Daruwalla. His poems are the reflection of abounding concern for humanism. His humanist attitude surpasses his other poetical qualities. 

Daruwalla has been one of the most daring innovators of Indian poetry in English. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense.

The influence of Ted Hughes as far as expression is concerned cannot be ignored. Partially his style has the similarities of Hughes’ animal depiction. 

Hughes's work is marked by a mythical framework, using the lyric and dramatic monologue to illustrate intense subject matter. Animals appear frequently throughout his work as deity, metaphor, persona, and icon. Perhaps the most famous of his subjects is "Crow," an amalgam of god, bird and man, whose existence seems pivotal to the knowledge of good and evil. In the same vein Daruwalla’s poems project the violent reality of human existence. But his works does not have any thing to do with other worldly forces. His works are rooted with human reality though the brute expression of animalistic tendency is present. 

Daruwalla’s distinctive technical skills, the special subtlety in his adaptation of a very personal colloquial mode to the demands of tight forms, are not immediately seen to be outstanding; but his strengths as a craftsman have increasingly come to be regarded as one of the hallmarks of his talent. He is an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who uses the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects. His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He is always ready to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends. 

Daruwalla produced without fanfare the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any Indian English poet in the last twenty-five years or more. 

The elegance of his poetic diction, brilliance and dexterity of his craftsmanship coupled with the Indian sensibility has made his poetic presence inevitable in the Indian context.. Though he is a Parsi his poems are more Indian rather than a Parsi.  To transform a minor incident or insignificant event into a poetic expression of higher calibre requires an enormity of craftsmanship and technical excellence. Daruwalla possesses that capacity to a greater extent in combining reason and sentiment without sacrificing the grace. Apart from poetry he also attempted fiction. His career as a poet spanning thirty six years and more has been contributing remarkably for the growth of Indian literature especially poetry. 

The themes of his poem include deprivation, misery disease and death. His almost seem to contain Hardian attitude towards life. But in actuality his corpus of poem only presents the stark reality of Indian life. Though he could have been placed at the top level of Indian poetry the critics’ indifferent tendency towards Daruwalla has under stated his poetic excellence. The greatness of Daruwalla’s poetry is very much overshadowed by the critics’ unawareness of his sound poetic quality. However, his poetic genius is acknowledged by the Sahithya Akademi Award. Of late there is a surge in the interest among critics towards Keki N. Daruwalla. His impact on Indian poetry is tremendous. 

His poems tends towards a prolixity and prosiness and he is praised for his bitter satiric tone which is exceptional in Indian verse. 

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: A Reading

The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, focuses on Pecola (pea-coal-uh) Breedlove, a lonely, young black girl living in Ohio in the late 1940s. Through Pecola, Morrison exposes the power and cruelty of white, middle-class American definitions of beauty, for Pecola will be driven mad by her consuming obsession for white skin and blonde hair—and not just blue eyes, but the bluest ones. A victim of popular white culture and its pervasive advertising, Pecola believes that people would value her more if she weren’t black. If she were white, blonde, and very blue-eyed, she would be loved.

The novel isn’t told in a straightforward narrative. In fact, the first paragraph of the novel doesn’t seem to be written by Morrison at all; it reads as if it were copied from a first-grade reading book, or primer, one that was used for decades to teach white and black children to read by offering them simple sentences about a picture-perfect, all-American white family composed of Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane.

For those who have never seen this first-grade reading book, go to the library and check out Kismaric and Heiferman’s Growing Up With Dick and Jane: Learning and Living the American Dream, published by Collins San Francisco. It contains reproductions of the original Eleanor Campbell watercolor illustrations of squeaky-clean Dick and his blonde-haired, blue-eyed sister Jane, the little girl whom Pecola Breedlove so longs to become.

The second paragraph of the novel contains the same paragraph from the first-grade primer; however, this time, the typography loses all punctuation, a visual metaphor for Pecola’s losing her perspective about her worth as a person. Finally, the same paragraph, repeated once more, dissolves into a river of print, having absolutely no meaning, visual evidence of Pecola’s consuming madness—a madness that has its genesis in her quest to be beautiful and loved, to have blue eyes, and to experience the happiness and love illustrated in the Mother-Father-Dick-Jane white family.

After this section, Morrison offers us a fragment of memory, set in italics. Claudia MacTeer, a childhood friend of Pecola’s, is talking. She says that she remembers the autumn when no marigolds bloomed. That was the fall, she says, when Pecola Breedlove gave birth to her father’s baby. Why the incest happened, Claudia says, is too difficult to fathom. Perhaps we should be concerned only with how it happened: how the chaos of Pecola Breedlove’s life culminated and climaxed into her giving birth to her own father’s child, and then deteriorated into madness.

Morrison divides the rest of the novel into four separate time sequences, each of them a season of the year and each narrated by Claudia MacTeer, now a grown woman. Within these season sequences are narratives by an omniscient, all-knowing voice; these sections are introduced by run-on, unpunctuated lines from the first-grade reading book. Finally, near the end of the novel, a single section records a conversation between Pecola and a fantasy friend that she creates. At last we witness the madness that has enveloped the main character of the novel.

As the novel unfolds, listen to the voices of these two narrators. Remember that Claudia’s narration is told in retrospect; she is an adult, looking back. The other narrator, the omniscient narrator, gives us background stories about Pecola’s mother and father, as well as seemingly random but interlocking and connecting elements about Pecola’s futile longing for blue eyes and her need to feel beautiful and loved in a society that defines her as ugly. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison zeroes in on the psychological damage done to a black girl who self-destructively accepts someone else’s definition of beauty—here, the white culture’s definition of the ideal way a young girl should look. Pecola’s quest is for whiteness, synonymous with beauty; blackness, the symbol for ugliness, is something to be feared and avoided.

Nietzsche's Mature Philosophy

Nietzsche's writings fall into three well-defined periods. The early works, The Birth of Tragedy and the four Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873; Untimely Meditations), are dominated by a Romantic perspective influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle period, from Human, All-Too-Human up to The Gay Science, reflects the tradition of French aphorists. It extols reason and science, experiments with literary genres, and expresses Nietzsche's emancipation from his earlier Romanticism and from Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche's mature philosophy emerged after The Gay Science.

In his mature writings Nietzsche was preoccupied by the origin and function of values in human life. If, as he believed, life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value and yet is always being evaluated, then such evaluations can usefully be read as symptoms of the condition of the evaluator. He was especially interested, therefore, in a probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which he characterized as expressions of the ascetic ideal.

The ascetic ideal is born when suffering becomes endowed with ultimate significance. According to Nietzsche the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, made suffering tolerable by interpreting it as God's intention and as an occasion for atonement. Christianity, accordingly, owed its triumph to the flattering doctrine of personal immortality, that is, to the conceit that each individual's life and death have cosmic significance. Similarly, traditional philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, the timeless over the temporal. While Christianity promised salvation for the sinner who repents, philosophy held out hope for salvation, albeit secular, for its sages. Common to traditional religion and philosophy was the unstated but powerful motivating assumption that existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation. Both denigrated experience in favour of some other, \true. world. Both may be read as symptoms of a declining life, or life in distress.

Nietzsche's critique of traditional morality centred on the typology of \master. and \slave. morality. By examining the etymology of the German words gut ("good"), schlecht ("bad"), and bose ("evil"), Nietzsche maintained that the distinction between good and bad was originally descriptive, that is, a non-moral reference to those who were privileged, the masters, as opposed to those who were base, the slaves. The good/evil contrast arose when slaves avenged themselves by converting attributes of mastery into vices. If the favoured, the "good," were powerful, it was said that the meek would inherit the earth. Pride became sin. Charity, humility, and obedience replaced competition, pride, and autonomy. Crucial to the triumph of slave morality was its claim to being the only true morality. This insistence on absoluteness is as essential to philosophical as to religious ethics. Although Nietzsche gave a historical genealogy of master and slave morality, he maintained that it was an ahistorical typology of traits present in everyone.

\Nihilism. was the term Nietzsche used to describe the devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic ideal. He thought of the age in which he lived as one of passive nihilism, that is, as an age that was not yet aware that religious and philosophical absolutes had dissolved in the emergence of 19th-century Positivism. With the collapse of metaphysical and theological foundations and sanctions for traditional morality only a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness would remain. And the triumph of meaninglessness is the triumph of nihilism: "God is dead". Nietzsche thought, however, that most men could not accept the eclipse of the ascetic ideal and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence but would seek supplanting absolutes to invest life with meaning. He thought the emerging nationalism of his day represented one such ominous surrogate god, in which the nation-state would be invested with transcendent value and purpose. And just as absoluteness of doctrine had found expression in philosophy and religion, absoluteness would become attached to the nation-state with missionary fervour. The slaughter of rivals and the conquest of the earth would proceed under banners of universal brotherhood, democracy, and socialism. Nietzsche's prescience here was particularly poignant, and the use later made of him especially repellent. For example, two books were standard issue for the rucksacks of German soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gospel According to St. John. It is difficult to say which author was more compromised by this gesture.

Nietzsche often thought of his writings as struggles with nihilism, and apart from his critiques of religion, philosophy, and morality he developed original theses that have commanded attention, especially perspectivism, will to power, eternal recurrence, and the superman. 

Perspectivism is a concept which holds that knowledge is always perspectival, that there are no immaculate perceptions, and that knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage point. Perspectivism also denies the possibility of an all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself. The concept of such an all-inclusive perspective is as incoherent as the concept of seeing an object from every possible vantage point simultaneously.

Nietzsche's perspectivism has sometimes been mistakenly identified with relativism and skepticism. Nonetheless, it raises the question of how one is to understand Nietzsche's own theses, for example, that the dominant values of the common heritage have been underwritten by an ascetic ideal. Is this thesis true absolutely or only from a certain perspective? It may also be asked whether perspectivism can be asserted consistently without self-contradiction, since perspectivism must presumably be true in an absolute, that is a nonperspectival sense. Concerns such as these have generated much fruitful Nietzsche commentary as well as useful work in the theory of knowledge.

Nietzsche often identified life itself with "will to power," that is, with an instinct for growth and durability. This concept provides yet another way of interpreting the ascetic ideal, since it is Nietzsche's contention "that all the supreme values of mankind lack this will - that values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names." Thus, traditional philosophy, religion, and morality have been so many masks a deficient will to power wears. The sustaining values of Western civilization have been sublimated products of decadence in that the ascetic ideal endorses existence as pain and suffering. Some commentators have attempted to extend Nietzsche's concept of the will to power from human life to the organic and inorganic realms, ascribing a metaphysics of will to power to him. Such interpretations, however, cannot be sustained by reference to his published works.

The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the basic conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asks the question \How well disposed would a person have to become to himself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment?. Presumably most men would, or should, find such a thought shattering because they should always find it possible to prefer the eternal repetition of their lives in an edited version rather than to crave nothing more fervently than the eternal recurrence of each of its horrors. The person who could accept recurrence without self-deception or evasion would be a superhuman being (Ubermensch), a superman whose distance from the ordinary man is greater than the distance between man and ape, Nietzsche says. Commentators still disagree whether there are specific character traits that define the person who embraces eternal recurrence.

The world of science fiction

Science fiction is a modern genre. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological plausibility, the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and other contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror. The genre formally emerged in the West, where the social transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals to extrapolate the future impact of technology. By the beginning of the 20th century, an array of standard science fiction “sets” had developed around certain themes, among them space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel. The customary “theatrics” of science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies—exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change, from cynical despair to cosmic bliss.

Science fiction writers often seek out new scientific and technical developments in order to prognosticate freely the techno-social changes that will shock the readers' sense of cultural propriety and expand their consciousness. This approach was central to the work of H.G. Wells, a founder of the genre and likely its greatest writer. Wells was an ardent student of the 19th-century British scientist T.H. Huxley, whose vociferous championing of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution earned him the epithet “Darwin's Bulldog”. Wells's literary career gives ample evidence of science fiction's latent radicalism, its affinity for aggressive satire and utopian political agendas, as well as its dire predictions of technological destruction.

This dark dystopian side can be seen especially in the work of T.H. Huxley's grandson, Aldous Huxley, who was a social satirist, an advocate of psychedelic drugs, and the author of a dystopian classic, Brave New World (1932). The sense of dread was also cultivated by H.P. Lovecraft, who invented the famous Necronomicon, an imaginary book of knowledge so ferocious that any scientist who dares to read it succumbs to madness. On a more personal level, the works of Philip K. Dick (often adapted for film) present metaphysical conundrums about identity, humanity, and the nature of reality. Perhaps bleakest of all, the English philosopher Olaf Stapledon's mind-stretching novels picture all of human history as a frail, passing bubble in the cold galactic stream of space and time.

Stapledon's views were rather specialized for the typical science fiction reader. When the genre began to gel in the early 20th century, it was generally disreputable, particularly in the United States, where it first catered to a juvenile audience. Following World War II, science fiction spread throughout the world from its epicentre in the United States, spurred on by ever more staggering scientific feats, from the development of nuclear energy and atomic bombs to the advent of space travel, human visits to the Moon, and the real possibility of cloning human life.

By the 21st century, science fiction had become much more than a literary genre. Its avid followers and practitioners constituted a thriving worldwide subculture. Fans relished the seemingly endless variety of SF-related products and pastimes, including books, movies, television shows, computer games, magazines, paintings, comics, and, increasingly, collectible figurines, Web sites, DVDs, and toy weaponry. They frequently held well-attended, well-organized conventions, at which costumes were worn, handicrafts sold, and folk songs sung.

Bertrand Russell Prose Style

Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest masters of English Prose. He revolutionized not only the subject matter but also the mode of expression. He has in him a happy blend of greatest philosopher and a great writer. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. The subject matter of his essays may be very difficult but his manner of expression is so lucid and simple that even a layman can understand him without any special difficulty. It is a rare privilege which only few prose masters enjoy. The precision and clarity which Russell’s prose style possesses are very rare in the bulk of English prose. 

Russell has justly been regarded as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Although he is not a literary writer yet his work devoted mainly to problems of philosophy, ethics, morality, political, social life and economics, etc. impresses us greatly by its literary qualities. 

Of course, Russell's style sometimes becomes difficult for the average reader who comes across sentences which he has read for more than once in order to get the meaning. Russell’s style appeals mainly to our intellects and very little to our feelings or emotions. He uses words simply as tools, to convey his meaning plain and effective and not to produce any special effects. It is not a coloured or gorgeous style. Nor is there any passion in it. It is somewhat cold. 

There are no “jeweled phrases” in his writings nor sentences over which we would like to linger with the aesthetic pleasure. Russell’s style is intellectually brilliant. He can condense an idea or a thought in a few words if he so desires. Russell is always direct, simple and lucid. He knows that the complexity of expression leads to ambiguity. Nothing can be more lucid than such opening lines: 

“Happiness depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.”

“Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so disorganized and derailed as the family.”

Russell’s sentences clearly show Bacon’s terseness. They are replete with so deep thoughts like those of Bacon that we may elaborate them in countless pages. Many sentences are like proverbs, replete with deep meanings like: 

“Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.”

“One of the most powerful sources of false belief is envy.”

“Pride of a race is even more harmful than national pride.”

Russell’s quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Roman and Greek writers are harmoniously woven into the texture of his thoughts. The Biblical phrases and quotations lend sublimity to his prose and make his style scholarly. Russell manipulates such allusiveness in order to make his ironical onslaughts more effective. 

Irony is a principal instrument of his style. He ironizes the so-called modern minded people. Russell makes frequent uses of wit and humour but his humour is generally not pure fun or frolic. 

Russell writes chaste prose and there is a rationalistic approach to life. As a deep thinker and a man with scientific mood, he has infused into his style a new depth and a stream-like continuity and clarity. 

His chief concern is to convey his ideas to his readers. That is why his prose style exhibits Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest masters of English Prose. He revolutionized not only the subject matter but also the mode of expression. He has in him a happy blend of greatest philosopher and a great writer. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. The subject matter of his essays may be very difficult but his manner of expression is so lucid and simple that even a layman can understand him without any special difficulty. It is a rare privilege which only few prose masters enjoy. The precision and clarity which Russell’s prose style possesses are very rare in the bulk of English prose. 

Russell has justly been regarded as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Although he is not a literary writer yet his work devoted mainly to problems of philosophy, ethics, morality, political, social life and economics, etc. impresses us greatly by its literary qualities. 

Of course, Russell's style sometimes becomes difficult for the average reader who comes across sentences which he has read for more than once in order to get the meaning. Russell’s style appeals mainly to our intellects and very little to our feelings or emotions. He uses words simply as tools, to convey his meaning plain and effective and not to produce any special effects. It is not a coloured or gorgeous style. Nor is there any passion in it. It is somewhat cold. 

There are no “jeweled phrases” in his writings nor sentences over which we would like to linger with the aesthetic pleasure. Russell’s style is intellectually brilliant. He can condense an idea or a thought in a few words if he so desires. Russell is always direct, simple and lucid. He knows that the complexity of expression leads to ambiguity. Nothing can be more lucid than such opening lines: 

“Happiness depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.”

“Of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so disorganized and derailed as the family.”

Russell’s sentences clearly show Bacon’s terseness. They are replete with so deep thoughts like those of Bacon that we may elaborate them in countless pages. Many sentences are like proverbs, replete with deep meanings like: 

“Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.”

“One of the most powerful sources of false belief is envy.”

“Pride of a race is even more harmful than national pride.”

Russell’s quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Roman and Greek writers are harmoniously woven into the texture of his thoughts. The Biblical phrases and quotations lend sublimity to his prose and make his style scholarly. Russell manipulates such allusiveness in order to make his ironical onslaughts more effective. 

Irony is a principal instrument of his style. He ironizes the so-called modern minded people. Russell makes frequent uses of wit and humour but his humour is generally not pure fun or frolic. 

Russell writes chaste prose and there is a rationalistic approach to life. As a deep thinker and a man with scientific mood, he has infused into his style a new depth and a stream-like continuity and clarity. 

His chief concern is to convey his ideas to his readers. That is why his prose style exhibits his balanced personality. ‘Style is the man’ applies to him more logically.

Russell makes long sentences to pour out his feelings with a poetic flash. He thinks deeply and expresses the matter in a logical manner. The sentence is definitely long but the main link of the thought is not broken anywhere. All subordinate clause move towards the main clause with the definite aim of making the sense more clear. No part of the syntax is loose. 

Russell does not use metaphors and similes frequently. To him, they are the matter of necessity. These are to be used only when there is a dire necessity of using them. Russell makes a great use of the art of rhetoric to emphasize his point. He does not make his rhetoric pompous and exaggerated. 

Bertrand Russell always argues his case in a strictly logical manner and his aim always is exactitude or precision. As far as possible, he never leaves the reader in any doubt about what he has to say. He stresses the need of rationality, which he calls scepticism in all sphere of life. 

Each essay is logically well knit and self-contained. In each essay the development of the thought is continuous and strictly logical, with a close interconnection between one paragraph and another. It is a style best suited to an advocate. There are no superfluities in his style at all. 

To conclude, Russell is one of the great prose writers of the last century, who wrote an almost all kinds of varied subjects with great force and confidence. The unity of his thoughts goes hand in hand with the unity of his style.

After the Raj: A Personal Tour of Indian Literature in English

Strange as it may seem there is a growing number of Indians who write in English. It is strange on several counts, but primarily because Indian writing in English became widespread after Independence. It is typical of the complexities of the Indian mind that having persuaded the British to leave, they both pioneered the concept of a Commonwealth open to all races and nations in the old Empire, and adopted English as the language of their Constitution, their courts and legal systems, education and administration. Optimistically, they wrote into this Constitution (in English, of course) that Hindi was to become the sole official language fifteen years after Independence.

Languages rarely keep to timetables. Those fifteen years expired in the mid-sixties, but English shows little sign of loosening its hold. More magazines, journals, newspapers and books are published in English than in Hindi, the other official language; and though the number of publications in Hindi is increasing under Government patronage, the number of books India produces in English is going up both absolutely and as a proportion of all books published. India is now the third largest producer in the world of books in English, and few countries produce as many periodicals in English.

The continued popularity of English is not due only to its being India’s ‘Window on the World” in the words of the Ministry of Education. Non-Hindi speaking areas comprise more than half the total geographical area of the county and about half the population. They do not see why Hindi speaking areas should be given an automatic linguistic advantage over them in education, administration, and job-opportunities. And since Hindi areas are the least economically and educationally developed in the country, automatic preference for such people seems perverse: it will only ensure a low intellectual and cultural level in the administrative and other national service. However, the other areas are divided, geographically around the Hindi heartland of the central plains, and linguistically between some 800 languages (yes, languages – not dialects). These use different script and fourteen are nationally recognized. That is, if you were presented with a Rupee banknote, you would find the words “One Rupee” written in Hindi and English on one face, and in twelve different languages on the other face!

Whatever the “official” fate of English in India, it should be clear that its actual role is greater and its actual prestige higher now than it was at Independence, and that it is likely to remain so far at least this generation.

So what has India produced in English? I do not wish to perpetuate the false notion. Some people wrongly believe that a few westernized Indians have started writing in English relatively recently. It is essential to have at least the barest facts if Indian writing in English is to be understood.

The most startling fact is that Indians were contributing to English-language periodicals before the end of the eighteenth century. The first Indian pamphlet was published in 1806, and the first volume, Henry Derozio’s Poems, in 1827. The first Indian autobiography was published in the 1830s and the first Indian novel in English in 1864. India was thus one of the first countries outside America and the ‘White Commonwealth’ (Britain, Canada, Australia, etc) to adopt English for literary purposes. In fact, the Indian demand for the introduction of State-supported English education was what resulted in the foisting of Western (rather than traditional) education in all erstwhile British colonies and laid the foundations for the emergence of English as a world language. Of course, the recent role of America in this cannot be overlooked. But it is not widely realized that English is now being used for creative literary purposes not only in all the ex-colonies of the Empire but also by people of Austrian, Brazilian, Dutch, German, Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Russian and other backgrounds. An increasing number of universities now offer courses in ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘New’ literatures in English, even in such unlikely places as Denmark and Spain. And there is an increasing number of academic and popular journals encouraging study of the field.

Indian writers in English have made a distinguished literary contribution in recent decades. In recognition of this, a string of prizes has gone to Indo-English writers: the Winifred Holtby Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the Duff Cooper Memorial Award, the English-Speaking Union’s Prize for the best novel of the year. 

But prizes mean very little: Rabidranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1931 for his Bengali work, though he also wrote in English. Who reads his mistily aspiring English work now? (His Bengali work is, I hasten to say, of a completely different quality.) The Indian writer who is almost as well known today as Tagore was I his day, is R K Narayan. Graham Greene admires him more than any other living English language novelist.

Indian writers now offer a plenitude of material, from comedy to satire, from fantasy to works on national issues, from autobiography to fiction, from journalism to works of lasting merit, from poetry and drama to a chiseled and effective prose.

Indian literature in English has a range and amplitude, a maturity and sophistication that can be envied by many other literatures in English. Opinion is divided on whether it will ever produce a really great writer of the stature of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. I remain hopeful. But while we wait for writers who will fill us all with wild admiration and wonder, there is plenty that the critic can savour and the reader enjoy.