In the delightful presence of the greats

Keki Daruwalla

This valuable ‘Book of Indian Essays’, edited and compiled by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, is an eye-opener. For instance, we get to know of Buddhadeva Bose’s unstinted admiration for Henry Miller. When we were students, we never bothered to read him. Bose visited him and stayed overnight at Big Sur, where Miller lived. Henry gave him all his time, all his attention. “Perhaps he would be described as an American DH Lawrence — and a writer whose mania was confession”. Miller wanted to go to India to see ‘a real saint’, a venture forcefully resisted by Bose. He could have met a thousand ‘real villains’. I was surprised by Bose’s admiration for Miller. From a book on Nikos Gatsos, the Greek poet, I formed a very poor opinion of Henry Miller.

The book, consisting of 45 essays, is well researched, starting with Derozio, Bankim Chandra, Tagore, Salim Ali, going on to RK Narayan and Desani. There are some famous ones, for instance the scathing one by Nissim Ezekiel on Naipaul, or Amrita Sher-Gil on modern Indian art imitating the forms of the past. Nissim’s counter-punch has become a classic. He lambasts Naipaul for being uninvolved and unconcerned. “He (Naipaul) writes exclusively from the point of view of his own dilemma, his temperamental alienation…” He adds, “Mr Naipaul’s book has the moral authority of hysteria, the interest and value of suffering impotence.”

Amrita Sher-Gil veils her disdain of Indian art’s tryst with mythology. I remember Satish Gujral branding Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings as “calendar art”. Paint Radha or Draupadi as you like, but the sari’s folds better be right. Sher-Gil starts her essay with “It seems to me that I never began painting, that I have always painted”. Born in 1913, it was in 1934 that she was suddenly irresistibly drawn to India, hoping that “my artistic personality should find its true atmosphere in the colour and light of the East”.

(Note the East, Tagore, Aurobindo Ghosh and other Indian savants couldn’t digest their dinner without bringing in the East. It was a palpable presence. Read Tagore’s Nobel Prize speech.) She says, “Those serene or sun-flooded landscapes, consciously naturalistic, with authentic Indian ruins in the ‘middle distance’, that serve as trademarks, conclusive irrefutable proofs as to the genuineness of the article (manufactured in India), not one brushstroke of which conveys India really.”

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay tells us in his skimpy two-page essay, the ‘poojah dalan’, where the idols were kept, got the lion’s share of the money spent on a Bengali house. Tagore has a boring essay on ‘The Nation’ where he says things like “The cult of the nation is the professionalism of the people”. Then he adds, “This cult is becoming their greatest danger, because it is bringing them enormous success, making them impatient of higher ideals.” Who would we credit with ‘higher ideals’ in India today? Sri Sri who hasn’t paid the fine for damaging the Yamuna embankment, or Adityanath Yogi? There’s a fine essay by Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy bringing alive the exhilaration among Indian students at Oxford when Tagore won the Nobel Prize, and visited Oxford to deliver lectures. He felt that “India had once again been placed on the map of the world”. Didn’t Manekshaw do it in 1971, and Kapil Dev in 1983? At lunch, Tagore sat stone-still, “and in the noon haze, I fancied to myself Orpheus sculpted on the prow of some Hellenic boat, mirrored in the waters of the Ionian seas”. Those Oxonians wrote better than us, the ones from Allahabad or Ludhiana. The next essay in the book is by the great Salim Ali on the ‘Indian House Crow’.

One can’t miss a perceptive essay by Victor Anant, ‘The Three Faces of an Indian’. He starts by saying “We finally saw freedom arrive, not with an ideological bang, but with a whimper of political expediency”. Sanjay Subrahmanyam rightly castigates Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel ‘The White Tiger’. The essay is titled ‘Another Booker Flop’. The one essay I didn’t care for was Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Mashobra’; the language as stale as the rajma and chana he ate day after day at a dhaba, no excitement at the landscape, language as desultory as the years he lived there.