The wrong sort of devotion
By Adil Jussawalla

ANYONE who saw the exhibition of works by Santiniketan’s pioneer painters and sculptors must have been excited by the richness of the collection. Anyone who is aware that this richness including a hoard of Tagore’s manuscripts which were not on display — is assiduously kept away from the eyes of painters and students who visit Santiniketan must regret the parochialism of those responsible for such a prohibition.

It’s true that old manuscripts and paintings need special care and that not everyone can be given free access to them. But painters and scholars who visit Santiniketan out of curiosity or for their research have a regular complaint: the authorities are suspicious and uncooperative. Visitors fear that many of the paintings and manuscripts are being seriously neglected.

Publishers haven’t had it easy too. Attempts to publish new editions of Tagore’s works are routinely scuppered by his literary executors. Accusations of copyright infringements and legal hassles begin crowding an area where the public should be free to buy new, updated and corrected editions.

Corrected, because errors creep into even the greatest writer’s works. Shakespeare scholars have turned their corrections and variorum readings of his plays and poems into an industry. It seems the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas will go the same way. Joyce’s Ulysses seems particularly to have suffered at the hands of its early editors, publishers and printers. Every few years a publisher claims to bring out the "definitive edition."

Avid readers and bibliophiles have to live with the fact that there will always be people obsessed with clearing up a real, supposed or imagined mess. When they take on older texts their task becomes herculean. With all their probing will we ever find out what the original Mahabharata was? Or the Bhagavadgita.

I don’t think so but thank God such scholars exist. They activate the mind into thinking differently, they stir up our interest in sources. In a massive book called The Road to Xanadu, the British scholar John Livingston Lowes traced the books which went into the making of Coleridge’s wonderfully mysterious poem Kubla Khan; he tracked down Coleridge’s references. Hundreds of references, scores of books meticulously researched — and the poem only 63 lines long!

More recently I read that the second volume of Kipling’s correspondence had been published with more volumes to follow. The second volume! When Kipling’s family, particularly his wife, thought it had succeeded in acquiring and destroying all his letters!

Such possessiveness!

But in India it isn’t possessiveness alone that make some people want to own a writer now and forever. It’s the wrong sort of devotion. When you’re called Gurudev, as Tagore often was, you become divine, no mortal is supposed to criticise you or interfere with you or your work. Now, according to the latest issue of Outlook, it’s Sri Aurobindo’s turn. Two editors, who happen to be foreigners aren’t being allowed to proceed with their task of bringing out an edition of Sri Aurobindo’s collected works. Sri Aurobindo’s devotees claim that he was a poet and a yogi and that his work should not be edited by those who are neither.

Sooner or later we make our iconic writers vehicles of the divine. All pretence at humanist and secular inquiry stops there.

And someone acquires another hoard.

Associated News Features