LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT. 33.LITERATURE AND LIFE

LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT

33.LITERATURE AND LIFE

Great literature defies time. It also destroys national boundaries, crosses cultural constraints and language limitations and barriers. One of the basic characteristics of greatness is universality. The literature -be it poetry, drama, novel or short story- may deal with the lives of local characters-real or imaginary, historical or contemporary- or local events, but it involves ideas and emotions which appeal to humanity as a whole. Great minds everywhere have appreciated good thoughts wherever they come from and have restated them in the local language and idiom. This has been happening from time immemorial. Our Veda says: let there be no barrier to the flow of good thoughts from every side!

With the introduction of English education in India, we became familiar with English literature, and through English with the rich literary and cultural traditions of Europe. But, we did not have much direct exposure to the rich and varied literary  treasure of other European languages, which themselves had inspired and contributed to the great English literary efforts: Italian, Spanish, French, German. We learn from the lives of English poets how they read deeply of the literature of Europe, and were eager to get exposure to the fine arts of other countries in Europe, even though they had political conflicts. But we ourselves did not cultivate direct contacts with them. We saw everything only through English eyes. And we were fascinated by what we saw. We forgot to relate it to what we ourselves had, and acted as mere imitators.

The Europeans were appreciative of India too! When they first came into contact with Sanskrit literature, they were simply swept away by its majesty and beauty. The Germans and the French were quick to recognise the philosophical aspects of the Upanishads, and the literary excellence of our classical literature. Even the English appreciated them in the 18th Century, though the company officials who came to India were not  all men of letters.But there were some eminently scholarly persons like Charles Wilkins, Charles Hamilton, William Jones.  Warren Hastings, then Governor General, gave a foreword to the first English translation of Bhagvad Gita,by Charles Wilkins in 1784 and he wrote:

It is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures scarce elevated above the degree of savage life; nor,I fear, is that prejudice wholly eradicated, though surely abated. Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their writings;and these will survive  when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the forces which it once  wielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.

 Many passages will be found obscure and many will seem redundant; others will be found clothed with ornaments of fancy, unsuited to our taste;and some elevated to a tract of sublimity into which our habits of judgement will find it difficult to pursue them ; but few will shock either our religious faith or moral sentiments.

Warren Hastings also observed a Brahmin meditating in Benares and remarked about the similarity between the Hindu way and "the methods of training approved by the most ancient form of Christianity". (Of course it is now established that these ancient Christian traditions had themselves been borrowed or taken from Buddhist sources.) This coming from one who was laying the foundations of British rule in India!

But the company officials and the Christian missionaries got alarmed at such open admiration, and made strenuous efforts to stifle such scholarly interest. Two developments made matters worse. Noticing the similarity between some Sanskrit words and those in European languages, some ventured into the dreary desert sand of philology, which became a bogus science, proposing Indo-European language guesses, ultimately taking the shape of the fancy Aryan theory. Another was the studied effort to suppress Indian learning and sources of knowledge with full official patronage and power, resulting in the introduction of Macaulay scheme of education in 1836. And it is this system which is still ruling us, making us all Macaulay's children!

But Europe caught on . The Gita was translated into French and German and spread throughout Europe. It greatly influenced the Romantic poets and philosophers. William Blake even made a painting of the Brahmin! And it reached the Transcendental poets and philosophers of America, sending an Emerson and Thoreau into raptures.

While the alarmed and crooked Jesuits and other Christian missionaries in India were inventing false stories and spreading them, learned Europeans were studying the original sources, scanty as they were and writing about the glory of India. Voltaire wrote:

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy,astrology,metampsychosis,etc..

            1775

The Greeks ,in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt.

If India,whom the whole earth needs, and who alone needs no one, must by that very fact be the most anciently civilized land, she must therefore have had the most ancient form of religion. (1773)

 We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in courage and wickedness, and how inferior to them we are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually destroyed themselves in this land where we only go in search of money, while the first Greeks travelled to the same land only to instruct themselves.

While politicians and  academic tin horns are governed by greed and ruled by prejudice and pet theories, savants are able to see into the heart  of things and appreciate the essence of any culture, because they are themselves cultured. Thus, Andre Malraux who could read the Gita in the original (unfortunately, many of us who claim either to follow it or oppose it, cannot) wrote in 1957:

......the fundamental evidence of the West, whether Christian or atheist, is death, whatever meaning the West gives to it, whereas India's fundamental evidence is the infinity of life in the infinity of time:'Who could kill immortality?'.

It is such a tragic irony that the first English Governor General of India was conscious of the greatness of the Gita and of the fact that the empire, which he was founding, was bound to end one day, whereas Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India was an anglophile and totally impervious to any national  religious or spiritual influence! And our leftists and pseudo intellectuals and self-styled secularists are celebrating Nehru's legacy!

Some may say that the Gita is after all philosophy, or a religious book, and not literature! Such people have no idea either of the Gita or of literature! The Gita is neither a religious book, nor a philosophical manual. In itself, it is just a guide to action in a perplexing situation, based on pure psychology. It enquires into the psychological basis of human action and its motivation, the complication it leads to and ways to avoid it. And any conviction ultimately constitutes a religion- even atheism is a religion! And any subject can become literature if the language is appropriately elevated! It is only in the modern day that junk writing is read as literature, like junk edibles are treated as 'food'. Serious writing in any language is ultimately philosophical in the sense it raises some basic question on some aspects of life. While 'Sphie's World' is philosophy in the form of a novel (like 'Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' is philosophy in the guise of a travelogue) all great literature in all times and climes have been philosophical- eg. For Whom The Bell Tolls, Moby Dick, Jaws, Siddhartha, down to the stories of Paulo Coelho! Why is a story like 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' still read 50 years after its publication, if it does not appeal to a permanent streak in human nature everywhere? And who can say Galbraith's 'The Affluent Society', Gunnar Myrdal's 'Asian Drama' or 'Parkinson's Law' is not literature, because they are not fictional stories?

Or take Shakespeare. Who would read his plays as mere stories except school children? In that case, they may as well read  the Lambs and be done with it! Shakespeare uses poetry, history, story to convey some deeper meaning, though he is not religious or didactic. And that makes him all the more effective as a teacher.  People would regard his tragedies like Hamlet or Macbeth as being philosophical. But take a light comedy like As You Like It. There we come across a passage such as:

"Who doth ambition shun
And loves to live in the sun
Seeking the food he eats
And pleased with what he gets,
Come hither,come hither, come hither
Here shall he see 
No enemy
But winter and rough weather."

Is this poetry or philosophy? Or take another:

"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble,pipes
And whistles in his sound.Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."


What is this if not the purest philosophy? And it does not occur in a manual of philosophy! In fact, not many philosophers will be able to express these truths  so simply, and so impressively. There are of course many pieces of Arunagirinatha expressing more or less the same ideas and even images! And our own Sankara gives a somewhat shorter poem:

Balastavat kreeda sakta:
Tarunas tavat taruni sakta:
Vruddastavat chinta sakta:
Pare brahmani ko pi na sakta:

Meaning: the child whiles away its time in play;the youth is after the opposite sex;old age is full of worries; none has time to think of the Almighty.

Elsewhere he says:

Ma kuru dana jana yauvana  karvam
Harati nimeshaat kala: sarvam.

Do not get puffed up about your wealth, retinue or youth. Time snatches away everything in a trice.


Historically, all cultures have only treated works of a serious nature as literature. The business of life was so hard, time on hand so limited, there was simply no time to read anything frivolous. People's need for relaxation or recreation was always met by some religious festival or activity. In ancient Greece, even the Olympic games and staging of tragedies were part of the festival honouring Apollo or other gods. Reading fictional accounts as literature started in England as the pastime of literate ladies in certain circles because they were not employed  and confined to homes. The first authors were also women, because serious writers considered writing such books somewhat below them. Books were then costly but circulating libraries came up to lend them books. In fact, it is these libraries, and publishers influenced by them who found out that people liked such light stuff and started catering to them. It is very much like what we see today in magazines or movies: they claim to cater to what people want and in the process debase the taste further. But with all that kind of stuff, the great poets and writers like Dickens and Hardy could write serious stuff and command great following. Dickens made public readings of his works both at home and in America. It is estimated that over a million people had heard him read his works in England  alone. And many of them were illiterate. Such reading to illiterate listeners took place by others even in petty shops. But who can claim that Dickens's novels were light? Even Karl Marx had said that his novels raised more questions of social concern than the writings of politicians, while Bernard Shaw contended that one novel of Dickens- Great Expectations- was more seditious than even Marx's Das Kapital! But this is the point: it takes a great mind to appreciate the finer aspects and deeper issues. If the great literary figures of the past are still read, while a new 'best seller' surfaces almost every week (and disappears quickly in the next), there sure is something in them that is more than mere story.

It is a characteristic of our age that with all the so called scientific and technological advance, so  much spread of education and literacy, so much of frivolous writing is treated and read as literature.  .