LITERATURE- LIGHT AND DELIGHT. 86. ESSENTIAL READING

LITERATURE-LIGHT AND DELIGHT

86. ESSENTIAL READING

Democracy- resting on mass literacy...and ignorance!

Experience, conversation with learned people, listening to lectures and serious reading- these are the main avenues of learning for us. Of these, only reading can be organised at our will, at our own pace.

It is difficult to say how exactly we acquire a taste for reading, and when. May be a teacher inspired us, may be a fellow student or colleague, or some elder in the family. A quality magazine like the Readers' Digest would give so much information on good sources. In the 60s we were lucky to have a magazine like 'Imprint', solely dedicated to literature. Newspapers used to carry weekly reviews of books.Now with all the noise about spread of education and literacy, we do not have so many opportunities.

What appears in the newspapers in the name of book reviews or 'literary supplements' (if they come at all) are all slanted- just in accordance with the editorial prejudices. 

Most of us confine our general reading to fiction. Unless our profession or job requires it, most of us do not read serious literature; most of us do not read anything unconnected with our academic or professional background. Very few people read poetry after leaving school or college. 

Just think how strange the situation is. We are all voters. We hear of democracy, constitution, secularism, inflation, etc. Yet how few among us do really know or understand these ideas! Our democracy rests on such shoulders! Each writer has his own angle, each reader his own idea!

There are however genuine issues. Even in fiction, we have such wide choice, daily growing variety and volume! The only guide to determine good reading is to ask ourselves periodically: 'yes, I have been reading this literature for  3 or 5 years.I have spent so much time and money.What have I gained?'

What makes good literature?

This will make us realise the difference between the classics and the fleeting 'bestsellers' of the day! The classics mould our mind and heart; the modern novels, with rare exceptions, just help us while away our time. William Faulkner, while accepting the Nobel Prize in 1949 said:

Photo by Carl Van Vechten-

Library of Congress Collection

Public Domain.

 I feel this award was not made to me as a man but to my work- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

.....the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.... He must......leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal.....because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man , it can me one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I think Faulkner has given here a key to understanding and evaluating good literature. The Classics dealt with the human spirit, the human heart, the human condition. Modern literature treats of events.

One problem faced by Indian readers is that our educational system has alienated us from our own classics- the sources of our culture, and we have been nurtured on a food of foreign ideas, values, institutions, models, methods and mores! Here too, we have everything from Christianity, Marxism, Nihilism, Scientism- anything one can imagine, clamouring for our attention through all the media. How to choose? Others have faced the problem and found a way out.

Turn to Indian Basics!

Chaturvedi Badrinath wrote about Western encounter with Indian civilisation:

in the form of Western Christianity,Liberalism, Modern Science and Marxism.....each one of them had perceived the foundations of Indian civilisation wrongly. That led me to dharma upon which those foundations were laid, and dharma led me to the Mahabharata...studying the Mahabharata's inquiry into those universal questions of human existence that every human being asks....

And Badrinath raises a very important question, seldom raised in India, and may we say, not answered so far?

Is dharma a self determining reality that gives direction to a person's life and is it to be discovered in a process of self-discovery as to what one is meant to be? And since self-discovery cannot ever be a finished product,is dharma a state of becoming..?

As to the various ideas and dogmas demanding our attention or allegiance, I found Badrinath has given one of the most brilliant and succinct  critical accounts:

......when systematised into an ism, the various explanations of the human condition had fiercely rejected each other. The rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment rejected faith and tradition, and therefore, all religions, not just Christianity. Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment. Utilitarianism and psycho-analysis rejected Romanticism. Existentialism rejected them all.. Marxism, a child of the Enlightenment, rejected Romanticism, liberal individualism, nationalism, and much of Existentialism as well......relativism has tried to show that objectivism, especially in science, is an intellectual myth. Materialism rejected spiritualism as emotional froth.....And Man has been set against Nature.

We can understand the plight of the average Indian reader who has to wade through this jungle of intellectual discord and confusion- without first-hand knowledge of anything! It is here that Badrinath's study of the Mahabharata helps us like a compass, firmly based on our intellectual traditions:

The direction  the Mahabharata takes is a continuation of the one that the Upanishad-s had taken....The Mahabharata is even more steadfast on that path.The Vedic idea of rta, the cosmic order out there, is replaced with the idea of dharma as the foundation of life. The Mahabharata's inquiry is entirely conversational, as it had been in the Upanishad-s. The main difference ...is that whereas , in the Upanishad-s, the conversation begins, and ends, mostly with an abstract problem of knowledge, seeking to know the nature of reality, in the Mahabharata, it begins,  and ends  with concrete human living in all its complexities.

All extracts taken from : Chaturvedi Badrinath: "The Mahabharata" An inquiry in the human condition. Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2007.  This is the most absorbing and excellent writing on the Mahabharata I have seen.I urge all friends to please buy and read this. This book is a life-long companion.

"Concrete human living in all its complexities" - this alone can  be the fit subject of good literature. It is because the Classics deal with this in all its aspects, often uninhibited in its analysis and treatment, that they command an enduring value, overriding all national, linguistic and other barriers human intelligence has devised to divide humanity.

I have found that almost all modern novels, and many Indian movies are a variation on the themes found in the Mahabharata! People may not have noticed that Thalapathi, one of the most celebrated Tamil movies of recent times, was but the story of Karna restated in modern idiom! It was said in olden times that what is in the Mahabharata can be found elsewhere; what is not in it cannot be found anywhere!