Towards Defining a Critical Tradition of English Studies in India*

Dr H P ShuklaProfessor of EnglishKumaun University

Nainital

I

Friends and fellow wayfarers, allow me to begin with an apology. I was halfway

through the writing of this paper when the Mumbai attacks took place, and for the next two

weeks I could not come back to it. I had never been so deeply affected by anything in my

living memory. It was as if not only my country but my own body, my very being had been

invaded by an all-denying evil. I had decided to discuss our cultural roots and the possibility

of defining a critical tradition in this country. But now, in the aftermath of Mumbai attacks, it

seemed idle, even trivial to indulge in intellectual speculations.

For one thing, the Mumbai events thoroughly exposed us as a nation and people. One

could see how utterly immoral and corrupt we had become: it was no use blaming a particular

segment, the whole had become rotten. A sick body invites malicious attacks. When we lose

our sense of values, moral turpitude is the price we pay. Values have their roots in the vision

and insight of a people, in the depths of their tradition. In aping the West in all matters of

theory and systems, of physical and metaphysical insights, we have moved away from our

roots. If the western nations today are not as sickeningly corrupt as we, it is not because their

systems are better, but because they are rooted in their tradition. They have their ground to

stand upon. We have lost ours, because our ruling elite bargained for something else. I have

studied Aristotle and Bacon for well over 35 years, and haven’t learnt a thing from them. I

spend a few hours learning the nature of rasa or figuring out a verse in Sanskrit and I connect

to my roots, to my soul. A memory returns, of imperishable values, sanatana iva nitya

nutanah, and I am whole again.

Thus do I return to my present task, and discover how our elders, from Sri Aurobindo

to C D Narasimhaiah, have for a hundred years been goading us to see the nature of this

malignant corruption growing deep within our national psyche. Ours is indeed a difficult era,

ridden with complexity and antithetical pulls. In such times to reconstruct our identity,

national or otherwise, demands its pound of flesh. We have to contend with a neo-colonial

cultural warfare which threatens to demolish every edifice that seems ancient or medieval,

and aims to supplant it by Euro-American thought-systems as the predominant culture of the

* Valedictory address delivered at the 53rd All India English Teachers’ Conference, Haridwar, 18-20 Dec 2008.Page 1 of 9

world. Globalization, together with the modern technology, is here to stay. But our trap is

much deeper. Not only technology, we have willy-nilly imported a hundred other systems

from the West – economics, democracy, education, to name a few. In our craving for

everything western, we miss the commonsensical wisdom that all systems are products of

theory and all theories a product of their source ontology. When you import a system, you

also import the mind which created that system. But the daemon assigned to us at our birth –

call it soul or spirit – is rooted in a typically Indian ontology and has its own perception of

Being and becoming. It refuses to wed a western bride. This explains our unease and the

raison d’être of this august gathering to debate the nature of “Indian Sensibility in Indian

English Literature”.

However, we are not the first generation of Indian teachers of English facing such a

moral crisis. It was well foreseen a hundred years ago, if not more, and the battle has been

fought by many in a long illustrious line. This heroism of purpose and effort to shatter the

confines of our cultural murk is what constitutes a major tradition of Indian criticism in

English. What are the footprints left behind by the great ones? Mahajano yen gatah sa

panthaah. To find out if any such tradition exists, we shall consider some representative texts

from the four of our major critics: Sri Aurobindo, K R Srinivasa Iyengar, Sisirkumar Ghose,

and C D Narasimhaiah.

The Guru teaches not by precepts but by example. Sri Aurobindo was perhaps the

greatest embodiment of Indian Sensibility in modern times; but the others too revealed the

same Spirit in their various legendary achievements of a lifetime – K R Srinivasa Iyengar

almost singlehandedly established the Indian Writing in English as the core component of

English Studies in India; Sisirkumar Ghose, whose ‘article on Mysticism in the

Encyclopaedia Britannica continues to be reprinted,’ was not only Santiniketan’s but India’s

teacher-ambassador to the outside world; and C D Narasimhaiah has left behind a priceless

gift in Dhvanyaloka as one of the most vibrant centres of Indian studies in this country.

II

Sri Aurobindo was sent to England at the age of seven where for fourteen years he

received, on his own testimony, “an entirely occidental education without any contact with

the culture of India and the East.” So when he returned home in 1892, he devoted the next

fourteen years to a methodical study of Sanskrit and Indian classics to make up for that gap in

his intellectual culture. At the same time, what was more important, he was also working for

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the upliftment of his country, and not only politically. In 1907, he resigned from his

professorship at Baroda to openly lead the national movement for freedom. He also started

the weekly review, Karmayogin in whose pages The National Value of Art first appeared in

1909. He wrote with fire about the greatness of his motherland and with a stifled cry in his

heart diagnosed her present illness.

The National Value of Art was written with an express purpose, to raise the nation

sphinx-like from ashes. The author brings forward his knowledge of ancient Greek and other

cultures to blend with the greater truths of his own culture. The opening sentence is rife with

suggestiveness:

There is a tendency in modern times to depreciate the value of the beautiful and overstress the

value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an agelong

tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic perceptions; but in India, where we

have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture

and tradition, it is corrected only by the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy,

submerged but not yet destroyed in the temperament of the people. (231)

It clearly points out the dangers ahead and marks the strength of European cultures to stem

this crisis. But alas, because of her “mercenary and soulless education” India has no such

strength. The only hope for her is “the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy,

submerged but not yet destroyed in the temperament of the people.”

To know our present ills, we need to understand ourselves, our place in the hierarchy

of cosmic spaces. Sri Aurobindo traces the evolution of human society and individual from

an animal state where ‘food, shelter and raiment’ are all too important, to a state of clouded

citta seething with “love, hatred, vindictiveness, anger, attachment, jealousy and the host of

similar passions,” to the final, albeit rare, rise of the thoughtful man from thought-sensations,

manas to the buddhi and beyond. But,

With most men the buddhi is full of manas and the manas of the lower strata. The majority of

mankind do not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large minority think confusedly,

mixing up desires, predilections, passions, prejudgments, old associations and prejudices with

pure and disinterested thought. Only a few, the rare aristocrats of the earth, can really and

truly think. (233-34)

The humanity therefore needs give careful attention to the right kind of education, if it

is to grow rightly. Sahitya-sangeet-kala vihinah, sakshat pashu puchchh vishan hinah.

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Pushing this to a practical conclusion, Sri Aurobindo points out how literature, music and arts

alone can transform this animal into man proper. By fostering the growth of aesthetic

faculties they provide the first purgatorial fires for the cremation of this animal-man.

Katharsis in the Greek mysteries is the same as “our cittaśuddhi, the purification of the citta

or mass of established ideas, feelings and actional habits.” The role of aesthetic sensibility in

the preparatory stages of our growth is not only significant but crucial. It opens the door that

leads man to his true manhood:

It raises and purifies conduct by instilling a distaste for the coarse desires and passions of the

savage, for the rough, uncouth and excessive in action and manner, and restraining both

feeling and action by a striving after the decent, the beautiful, the fit and seemly which

received its highest expression in the manners of cultivated European society, the elaborate

ceremonious life of the Confucian, the careful ācāra and etiquette of Hinduism. (238)

Though the Greeks discovered the purifying force of aesthetics, they fell short of the whole

truth. Beauty together with Love and Joy represents the triple measure of Ananda. The goal

of human strivings is to go beyond beauty to the pure and unalloyed bliss, to reach for the

akhanda rasa of “undifferentiated and unabridged delight in the delightfulness of things.” We

must move beyond books to savour poetry and the eight rasas in the very act of living:

When the heart works for itself, then it enjoys the poetry of life, the delight of emotions, the

wonder, pathos, beauty, enjoyableness, lovableness, calm, serenity, clarity and also the

grandeur, heroism, passion, fury, terror and horror of life, of man, of Nature, of the

phenomenal manifestation of God. (242)

Europe mastered the art of life by perfecting the symmetry of social conduct but could not

find its poetry because it had no eye for the principle of love which alone should inform our

living. European Art perfected “the portrayal of life and outward reality,” but was found

wanting in the expression of “inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things,

the joy of God in the world and its beauty,” which the Indian Art alone attempted so

completely. Turn homeward, thou who wander: the truth of life and world and God – the

pursuit of all artistic labour – will be found only here. For an action plan, harness all your

critical faculties to decipher Sri Aurobindo’s message:

It is unpardonable that the crude formal teaching of English schools and the vulgar

commercial aims and methods of the West should subsist in our midst. […] The taint of

Occidental ideals and alien and unsuitable methods has to be purged out of our minds, and

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nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of intellectual and

aesthetic renovation. (252)

III

Coming to academic critics, we find a direct continuity of tradition and also a shift in

focus. Iyengar’s essay, The Problems of the Contemporary Indian Critic (1953) shows a keen

awareness of the rot that had already set in society, particularly in the hallowed ‘temples of

learning’. The professors “find the world too much with them, valuation of answer-scripts

and attendance at Board Meetings take up all their spare time, and they only gather rust from

year to year.” Apart from our own role in this decay, there are other factors involved.

“Society and its leaders should realize that the critic is no parasite, not at his characteristic

best: rather does he ensure the vitality and good health of literature, even as literature ensures

the health of the community” (20). The critic’s calling a spade a spade will not cure society of

its deafness; it serves only one purpose, that of training the critic to speak truthfully. Those

who deal in falsehoods will never be critics. The Acharya who knows his shastra is the

custodian of tradition, and he shall not live by the measures of samanyajana and alpabuddhi.

The Indian critic is heir to “two great traditions which derive respectively from

ancient Sanskrit and ancient Greek.” He also inherits a third, of a modern Indian language,

his mother tongue. One needs a wide critical sensibility to hold such an inheritance, because

these sources of strength have more often than nought brought about only a paralysing

weakness. Like Buridan’s Ass, the Indian critic too turns, now to one tradition, now to

another, and unable to pierce through the crust of difference and touch the underlying unity or

unable to integrate the two critical disciplines into a new synthesis, he is frankly puzzled and

gives up his job as hopeless or he is strictly derivative and brazenly imitative […]. (16)

The author points out that this synthesis between traditions has been attempted before, and

not always without success. “One critic there has been whose example must prove a beacon

to others: this was Sri Aurobindo.” There have been others: “Acharya A B Dhruva in

Gujarati, N C Kelkar in Marathi, C Rajagopalachari in Tamil, and C R Reddy in Telugu.”

Iyengar himself attempts this synthesis in Aesthetics, Indian and Western (1960). But

again, as in Sri Aurobindo, the Indian component dwarfs the Western. After answering basic

questions, “what is rasa?” and “how does rasa arise?” the argument moves to the meaning

and value of Arts:

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The experience that is described in Art is experience freed from the necessities of actual life –

seraphically free from the limitations of time, place and particularity […], samsara, the

bondage of everyday life. […] all experience a sudden heightened tempo of living which is

the essence of joy, similar almost to the Bliss of Brahman, or Brahmananda. (22)

Aesthetic experience is almost akin to spiritual experience, brahmananda sahodarah. Poetry

pierces through the veil of appearances and reveals that which is hidden, secret and sacred.

The poet as a seer is the first recipient of divine epiphanies, but the critic too is no less

blessed. He is sahridaya, the one who can enter into a psychic identity with the poet and

receive an efflorescence of the poetic experience in his heart. Hence Abhinavagupta suggests

that “mere grammarians or dry logicians have no right to attempt literary criticism which is

the task of more gifted souls” (Krishnamoorthy 336).

In reference to the outer embellishments in Arts, Anandavardhana urges, “the reality

within is of far greater consequence than the outer appearance” (23). Here is the key to the

essence of Indian sensibility. The inner beauty of joy, happiness and bliss, of Ananda, the

values of compassion, generosity and love, and Moksha, the final deliverance from the

bondage of Maya are things that matter to us most; the GNP-GDP, industries, road, and

electricity are celluloid images of secondary or tertiary value, for deluded souls wallowing in

the mire of fish, flesh or fowl.

Having meditated on the majesty of the Himalayas, it becomes rather laboured and

fruitless venture to talk about rocks and boulders. Thus even a scholar of the stature of Prof

Iyengar finds it difficult to place any of the Western theoreticians by the side of Indian

Rishis. He says that Plato was “deeply suspicious of the power of poetry”; that for Eliot

poetry was “a superior amusement” and for a few lesser mortals like Tate and Collingwood a

“complete knowledge” or “a vehicle of essential knowledge”, whatever that may mean.

IV

Unlike the calm and serene, almost sage like tone of Iyengar, Sisirkumar Ghose

wields a fiery, passionate voice and a pithy, epigrammatic style. Problems of English in

India: A Search for Identity formed his address at the All India English Teachers’ Conference

in 1973. He does not so much talk about the Indian aesthetics and sensibility as he

exemplifies what others preach. He shows a keen awareness of the world below the navel,

nothing of our filth escapes his observant watch, and yet he achieves that rare transcendence

of vision where the universals alone have their being.

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In 1953, Iyengar complained about professors attending board meetings, evaluating

answer-scripts and prescribing their own edited texts to make quick money. In 1973, the

industry continues to flourish with the addition of reasonably priced merchandise, the Ph D.

The Thesis (with a capital “T”) is now a flourishing industry. You might even call it a cottage

industry. […] Most theses are approved, it is clear, on compassionate grounds. […] let us

weed out the rabbits and not bring down the highest academic distinction to the level of, say,

B.A. Pass. (189-90)

Mark the artistic finesse in the choice of words, “let us weed out the rabbits.” Rabbits not

only destroy the field, they also breed very fast.

But Ghose doesn’t say all this for the sake of saying; it is part of a much larger

argument. The sickness is symptomatic of a deeper malady. If our syllabi and degrees are

rotten, it is because we are rotten at the core. And this rot has entered because we have lost

touch with our roots, with our essential nature and true self. In our craze for everything

‘phoren’ – for getting published abroad and paid in dollars, for a green card, an Angrez wife

and even an Angrez guru in Aristotle or Allan Tate – we have lost our identity, our true face:

we have become downright bogus. To trace back a journey from bogusness to Authenticity

demands a radical revaluation of the nature and meaning of literature, of life, of values, and

more than all else, of culture and tradition: “Art and literature, like myth and ritual from

which they derive, are always part of a wider context, of man’s growing awareness, the

ontological refinements of being” (192).

But we heard all this, or something like that, from Prof Iyengar, you might say. Yes,

they all talk about the same thing, only differently – ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti. But

they do not repeat each other; they form a series of dawns that ever come to illumine our

‘little O, the earth’. Here is Kutsa Angirasa in Rig Veda:

Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead…. She desires

the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters

into communion with the rest that are to come. (qtd. in Life Divine 1)

Mystics have always pondered how to remain in society and yet not be a part of it. Turning it

to the present purpose, Ghose asks, “How to remain Indian in spite of acquiring English?”

and answers in an anguished appeal:

I plead for Indian, Oriental and Comparative Criticism and mention, at random, four elders of

the tribe: Ananda Coomaraswamy, Brajendranath Seal, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri

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Aurobindo. I am not asking you to accept them and their kin, any of them. But even a nodding

acquaintance with their wide and subtle thought will give you depth and direction. True, a

smattering of aesthetics will not turn you into a critic. But it might give you legs to stand on,

self-conscious values. (194)

V

Iyengar said that the main function of the critic was to “ensure the vitality and good

health of literature.” Narasimhaiah in his last major statement, An Inquiry into the Indianness

of Indian English Literature (2003) decides to do exactly that. He assigns for himself a

threefold task: to define the essence of Indianness; to trace ‘the great tradition’ of Indian

English Literature; and to show us the path we all must tread.

Strangely enough, it was his teacher, F R Leavis at Cambridge who by his pronounced

‘Englishness’ put Narasimhaiah on trail to a rediscovery of his Indianness. He learnt much

about it at Princeton, from Emerson, Thoreau and Blackmur; in Australia from Patrick White

and Aborigines, and also from Mexican Dravidians till he could say, “what went out of India

came back with added vigour after incontrovertible reinforcement and lodged in me so firmly

that rough winds cannot shake it – indeed, it has become my swadhrma” (9).

In mapping out ‘the great tradition’ of Indian English Literature, he first mentions the

four of our prose writers – Gandhi, Vivekananda, Tagore and Nehru, all great minds, and all

great Indians. To read them is to rediscover India. Their greatness makes Narasimhaiah say,

“From the lofty heights […] let me come down to the plains, to see how our novelists

function” (25). In the now mushrooming field of Indian fiction, the trio of Anand, Narayan

and Rao remain the most prominent. But the critic is quick to add, “I wish other Indians who

have acquired a kind of bizarre reputation, internationally, such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram

Seth, Shashi Tharoor and Arundhati Roy had a claim on our attention for inclusion in this

lecture. But you have a right to know why they stand excluded.” Rushdie “is a juggler of

words like Shashi Tharoor, a juggler of myths”; Seth epitomizes “a popular American bid to

level down world’s cultures”; and “the non-stop flow of words, Rushditis” in Arundhati Roy

is condemned as ‘atyukti’ and “dismissed as worthless” (36-38). Before talking about poets,

Narasimhaiah attempts to explain the origins of the Poet:

The human witness, sakshi to the mysterious goings on in Nature and the Mind of Man,

seems, in course of time, to have appropriated the name of kavi to himself, which explains the

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descent of the Muse on Man when poetry becomes revelation, and the Poet the Seer. What he

wrote from his meditation or dhyana therefore had the power of incantation, dhyana mantra.

Only three poets are named here, Toru Dutt, Tagore and Aurobindo, “the only major factor in

English poetry with his best known epic Savitri” (39). In the section on criticism,

Narasimhaiah mentions just one name, that of Sri Aurobindo. “The last great critic in India

lived more than a millennium ago”. As for the Western theory, its dismissal comes absolute

after an argument on Sri Aurobindo’s critical concepts: “In the context of such sophisticated

preoccupation with things like ‘rhythmic speech’, ‘spiritual seeing’ and ‘stability of

apprehension behind the instability of word’, I fear I find Western debates on theories so dull

and long-drawn, not to say inconsequential” (44).

Like all the three before him, Narasimhaiah too would strongly plead for our return to

Indian aesthetics. He offers a reading of Blake in Indian terms and concludes,

The resultant state is para-nivritti, total release from the bondage of the world. And for the

reader, momentary detachment, when there is perception, antardarsana, thanks to the

unravelling, bhagnavarana, breaking through the veils of Maya, an experience, one may

presume, that was common to the primitive man with his vasanas, inner dispositions in his

state of nature, as well as rishis with their samskara, cultivated sensibility. And to us, in this

technological age, its residual transmission, svalpam apasya dharmasya…! a little of that

reward. (48)

What shall we do, and where shall we go from here? To answer this, and more, including my

Mumbai demons, allow me to close by chanting in full the above verse:

Nehābhikramnāśosti pratyāvayo na vidyate;Svalpamapyasya dharmasya trāyte mahato bhayāt. On this path no effort is lost, no obstacle prevails; even a little of this dharma delivers from the great fear.

Works CitedAurobindo, Sri. “National Value of Art” (1909). The Hour of God. SABCL Vol. 17. Pondicherry: Sri

Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. 231-52.- - -. The Life Divine. SABCL Vol. 18. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972.Ghose, Sisirkumar. Modern and Otherwise. New Delhi: D. K. Publishing House, 1974. Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. The Adventure of Criticism. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited,

1985. Krishnamoorthy, K. “Sanskrit Poetics: An Overview.” Indian Literary Criticism. Ed. G N Devi.

Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2002. 317-42.Narasimhaiah, C. D. An Inquiry into the Indianness of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 2003.

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