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Whether with reference to
Aurobindo or Anand, Verma has effectively established the
significance of reading Indian English writing against the
broader context of its "cross-fertilisation" with
European thought that has inevitably resulted from "a
direct confrontation with the moral and philosophical
incongruities and unresolvabilities of history". Verma’s
relentless insistence on this approach throughout his book —
which, in my view, generally works quite well — might cause
some irritation among those readers of his book who either
prefer new critical readings of each text or have otherwise made
it a habit in recent years to read Indian literature (in English
and regional languages) primarily against frameworks centred in
narrow or purist conceptions of Indianness or Hinduism (the two
being the same for some of them). Even I must admit that there
are several moments in "The Indian Imagination" (see
pages 8-9, 63, 167, for example) where the authoror’s anxiety
about his chosen framework is mirrored in an almost crippling
rhetorical sweep of theoretical and historical questions and
terminologies.
For the most
part, however, there are many rewards in Verma’s method and
approach for the attentive reader in terms of insight and
overall view. Verma writes in the mature and polished style that
one would expect from a scholar-teacher of his diverse and rich
experience. He weaves in and out of a Kant precept or a Shelley
poem as easily as he glosses a quotation from Coleridge’s
"Biographia Literaria" or reads a section of Aurobindo’s
"Savitri". Even those who might find themselves
resistant to his overall methodology are likely to acknowledge
that in "The Indian Imagination", Verma has set for
himself very high standards of scholarship and that his book
will serve as a model for many others working in the field of
South Asian literatures.
In the three
chapters on Aurobindo Ghose, Verma has made a valiant effort to
place the mystic poet-philosopher in the clear light of day. The
process involves rescuing for most of us Sri Aurobindo from the
uncritical and adulatory commentaries of those for whom
Aurobindo is understandably a cult figure. As with Tagore or
Wordsworth, it helps to admist that not all of Aurobindo’s
oeuvre is of equal value to those of us who read him primarily
as a literary figure and that an uncritical insistence on all of
Aurobindo would, in fact, ensure the death of much of his work
that is worth preserving in the Indian-English literary
tradition. It would be quite appropriate for a non-Aurobindoite
reader of this poet-critic to establish and publish a text of
Aurobindo selections, a kind of "Aurobindo Reader",
for literary scholars. While Verma’s treatment will surely not
satisfy many Aurobindoites, many others might wonder if
"The Indian Imagination" has gone far enough in its
rescue operation of Sri Aurobindo as an Indian-English author
and critic.
For Verma,
Aurobindo is a figure that we cannot escape coming to terms with
as we try to understand the hybridised, even fractured, reality
that is post-colonial India. As he puts it, "The conflation
of Aurobindo and Marx will provide a nontraditional but
intellectually expansive reading, for after all both Aurobindo
and Marx are theorists of social reconstruction." . In
trying to lift the veil of metaphysics and mysticism that has
— in the hands of "critics of the Aurobindo circle"
— surrounded Sri Aurobindo, Verma emphasises the importance of
Aurobindo as an "astute critic" in the Coleridgean
mode and as "a mythopoeic and visionary poet whose poetic
combines several traditions in Indian and western
literatures." Verma views Aurobindodo’s theory of
"creative evolution" as a way of cutting across all
binaries in Aurobindo’s spiritual (not religious) focus on
individual freedom, on a "new order in which human beings
are able to expand their consciousness and to attain psychic
integration and wholeness". Indubitably affirmative and
defying narrow labeling, "[t]he integralist vision of
Aurobindo is an all-inclusive and timeless vision of unity,
reintegration, and spiritual freedom".
This centred
view of Aurobindo allows Verma — in his chapter entitled
"The Social and Political Vision of Sri Aurobindo"—
to articulate the interrelatedness of the various phases and
components that comprise the poet-saintnt’s career — his
immersion in the West during his formative years, his youthful
commitment to revolution and political radicalism, and his
visionary phase associated with Pondicherry. For Aurobindo,
"Dharma is the Indian conception in which rights and duties
lose the artificial antagonism created by a view of the world
which makes selfishness the root of action." Nationalism as
a dharma suggests a struggle that is not only political but also
ethical and spiritual. In the "Life Divine", Aurobindo
views evil and falsehood as resulting from ignorance but for
him, there is no absolute evil or absolute ignorance. At the
individual level, it is egoism that breeds evil, but humans are
not inherently evil. As Verma notes, there is no room in
Aurobindoo’s vision for repressive measures or for a system of
rewards and punishments, for the "self-dissipating bigotry
of damnation". Like Guru Nanak, Sri Aurobindo rejects the
"overzealous pursuit of other-worldliness and esoteric
goals and rituals" that might reinforce "an
unwarranted division of life and spirit".
In a footnote
(and Verma’s notes are often as illuminating as his main
text), Verma cites a remarkably revealing statement from the
Aurobindo of the Pondicherry period: "Pondicherry is my
place of retreat, my cave of tapasya, not of the ascetic
kind, but of a brand of my own invention. . . . I do not at all
look down on politics or political action or consider that I
have got above them. … all human activity is for me a thing to
be included in a complete spiritual life, and the importance of
politics at the present time is very great."
As a critic,
Verma argues in his fourth chapter, Aurobindo rejects the narrow
autonomy of a work of art as rigidly demanded by formalism and
stresses the "impersonal" dimensions of both the poet’s
creativity and a reader’s enjoyment of the work. Aurobindo
acknowledges in "The Future Poetry" his closeness to
"the historical theory of criticism", suggesting that
"both the poet and the reader contemplate the universal,
the infinite, through their inner, subjective imaginations"
(64). Verma glosses Aurobindoviews on many 19th century poets,
including Blake ("Europe’s greatest mystic poet"),
Byron ("different from all the others"), Wordsworth
(" Rousseau moralised … and as it were, transfigured by
the light of imagination"), Coleridge ("the poet in
him never took into himself the thinker"), Shelley
("at once seer, poet, thinker, prophet, artist"), and
Whitman ("belongs to the largest mind of the 19th
century,"… an "intellectual reconciler" of
individual and community).
Verma also
notes the paradox that while as a poet of "Savitri",
Aurobindo is aligned with the classical tradition, as a critic
he exhorts the modern mind "not to become blinded by
tradition but to forge ahead on the path of progressive
experimentation".
If Aurobindo
Ghose takes up three chapters in "The Indian
Imagination", Mulk Raj Anand — a progressive of the
Marxist ilk — is the presumptive subject of two major
chapters. I say presumptive, because the chapter on Anandnd’s
"Conversations in Bloomsbury"–an experimental book
that comprises a series of imaginary interviews with many
Bloomsbury group members — is at least as much a discussion of
E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot at it is of Anand. Relying on his
memory, Anand recaptures his reminiscences of many individuals
from the 1920s and 1930s, including Bonamy Dobree, Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Forster and Eliot.
Verma sees the book centred on "a highly complicated
structure of confrontations, valuations and representations of
the issues of ideology, culture, art, and history."
Verma’s
commentary on Eliot and Forster’s views on Indian freedom
builds on his most evocative treatment in his introductory
chapter of James Mill’s "The History of British
India" (1817) as well as of his liberal son, J.S. Mill’s
puzzling but persistent opposition to India’s freedom. It is
in the juxtaposition — a "contrapuntal" reading in
Edward Saidd’s terms — of the positions taken by Indian
writers and intellectuals against the sameness of liberal and
conservative English thought on Indiaa’s freedom that Verma’s
approach bears its sharpest insights. Aurobindo, Anand, and
Ezekiel — all shaped deeply in many ways not only by European
liberal thought but also by their own English experience — had
strong if varying levels of commitment to Indiaia’s freedom
struggle. In constructing all colonised peoples as barbarians,
J.S. Mill, in the 1830s, had declared "despotism (to be) a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, …
provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified
by actually effecting that end."
A century
later, in "Abinger Harvest" (1936), Forster
admitted that English liberty was "race bound" and
"class bound" — "it means freedom for the
Englishman, but not for the subject races of his Empire".
Forster showed refreshing honesty in adding the following:
"If you invite an average Englishman to share his liberties
with the inhabitants of India or Kenya, he will say, ‘Never’
if he is a Tory, and ‘Not until I consider them worthy,’ if
he is a Liberal." Anand’s dialogues with Eliot, Forster,
and others highlight such contradictions but cover many more
topics on art, culture and politics.
The other
chapter on Anand is a reappraisal of his career and documents
his evolution from his 25 youthful years in England to his
continuing work at the age of 96 on the ambitious series of
autobiographical novels, "The Seven Ages of Man".
Verma disagrees with other critics who feel that in recent
decades Anand has lost his Marxist faith "in the capacity
of social organism to bring about change". Although he does
not provide hard evidence to support his view, Verma sees Anand
committed to the disenfranchised and his values deeply rooted in
liberalism and English social thought. Anand and other Indian
intellectuals who were troubled by the English liberal attitudes
toward India’s freedom were caught up in mimicry, a process by
which, in Homi Bhabha’s definition, the colonised subject is
reproduced as "almost the same, but not quite … so that
mimicry is at once resemblance and menace" ("Location
of Culture 86"). But Anand was not only being a menace to
his liberal English friends by confronting their hypocrisies on
colonialism, in his first novel, "Untouchable" (1938)
— still considered his best by most — he was also exposing
the dehumanising effects of a deeply entrenched caste system
among fellow Indians.
Bakha, its
protagonist, is "mercilessly locked" into a cruel
system sanctioned by Hinduism, subjected forever to economic
exploitation and social inferiority. Anand establishes the
irrelevance of any western models — Hegelian and Marxist
included — to Bakhaha’s situation by showing the inadequacy
of the three alternatives Bakha faces at the end of the novel:
Gandhian pacifism, Christian teachings, and the potential of
science and technology. Verma concludes his reading of
"Untouchable" by suggesting that … is a universal
global problem: in a sense, we are all untouchables and
coolies."
For me,
however, any such attempt to stretch the concreteness of Anand’s
representation to a metaphorical level is to diminish the power
of "Untouchable" as a novel. Anand’s novel — like
Richard Wrightt’s "Native Son" — works through a
kind of Brechtian aesthetic to leave little room for his readers
to take shelter behind mimetic empathy and catharsis, forcing
them to confront the naked degradation of humanity. For Bakha,
there is no redemption at all — not even in the celestial
discourse of the Bhagwat Gita whose message is intended only for
the twice-born upper-caste Hindus. By 1991, it appears from
Vermama’s account, Anand — not unlike Sri Aurobindo — had
come to place his faith in the "struggle for higher
consciousness" as "the only possible way for the good
life." I only hope Anandnd’s Bakhas, Munoos, and Gauris
too have made that discovery.
As a text, "The Indian
Imagination" engages both our critical faculties and our
imagination, as we ponder the historical and intellectual
sources of Indian-English writings of the past and the present.
What more can one ask of a scholarly book?
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