Poles of recovery: From Dutt to Chaudhuri

In the second of his three-part essay, noted writer AMIT CHAUDHURI examines how influential writers in Indian languages make the transition from English to the mother-tongue.

ONE might briefly consider, for instance, the life and works of the novelist, O. V. Vijayan, a hugely influential figure in Malayalam literature. Vijayan was born in 1930 in Palghat, Kerala; his first novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak), published in 1969, roughly 107 years after Dutt's epic, is seen to represent a turning point in modern Malayalam literature. Based upon actual experience, it tells the story of an educated, rationalist young man who arrives as a schoolteacher in an obscure South Indian village in which time has not moved. An ambivalent, but characteristic, psychological movement is revealed to us; the young man, who had come from elsewhere to enlighten, finds himself unexpectedly touched and transformed by the existence of the village; not only is the protagonist transformed, but also the novel; what might have been a social realist fiction about conscience and duty becomes something else. Vijayan, who, like many young men in Kerala at the time, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, tells us, several years after the novel was originally written, how it not only fictionalises an episode in his life, but, as it were, enacts the processes of disowning and recovery.

He recalls, in an Afterword to the English translation, the provenance of his novel; how, as a young college graduate who had lost his job, he had taken a job as a schoolteacher in Thasarak through "a State scheme to send barefoot graduates to man single- teacher schools in backward villages". He was, at the time, a member of the Communist Party, and had already published "two long stories depicting imaginary peasant uprisings". He now wanted to write a "revolutionary" novel. Having grown up in the Palghat countryside himself, he was "familiar with its landscape ... and its hilarious dialects", and believed that the character of the "city-bred schoolmaster coming to the village" could be developed as the perfect "pilgrim-revolutionary". The novel, then, was planned as a radical act of disowning of, or as a riposte to, the feudal, the oral, and the indigenous. However, he says, "Looking back, I thank Providence, because I missed writing the 'revolutionary' novel by a hair's breadth." Two things changed the direction the novel might have taken. The first was a historical event, the killing of Imre Nagy at the time in Hungary, leading to Vijayan's disillusionment with Communism. The other was Vijayan's arrival at the village itself, an arrival which was transformed into a spiritual homecoming; just as, in Dutt's sonnet, the neglected mother-tongue becomes the goddess who instructs and commands, the obscure village, in Vijayan's fiction, becomes instructor to the schoolteacher:

The Stalinist claustrophobia melted away as though it had never existed. Ravi, my protagonist, liberation's germ-carrier, now came to the village and re-entered his enchanted childhood. He was no longer the teacher, in atonement he would learn. He would learn from the stupor of Khasak.

One might also find in this narrative, as in Dutt's career, an implicit mirroring of the movement from the English language to the mother-tongue; for Vijayan, before he wrote his first novel in Malayalam, was a student of English literature, and has a Master's degree in English. This is, indeed, a movement that recurs in the lives and works of many of the most influential writers in the regional or vernacular literatures of modern India: Qurratulain Hyder (Urdu), U.R. Anantha Murthy (Kannada), Mahashweta Devi (Bengali), Ambai (Tamil), to name only a few living contemporaries, have all been students, even teachers, of English literature. This cleaving of the tongue is symptomatic, again, of how disowning and recovery permeate and shape the creation of the vernacular sensibility itself in modern India.

U.R. Anantha Murthy presents a romantically persuasive but perhaps somewhat simplified account of this process when he confesses that he undertakes his abstract reasoning in English (the "father-tongue", as the poet A. K. Ramanujan called it), and that his creative idiom and intimate register is Kannada. Anantha Murthy's own story of how he embarked upon his first work, the great short novel Samskara, one of the most celebrated works of fiction in modern Kannada literature, is, tellingly, again, as in Dutt and Vijayan, a narrative of homecoming and return in the middle of exile, of recovery in the midst of physical, and inward, distancing:

It was nearly a little more than 25 years ago that I wrote Samskara. The process of writing was an intense experience. I was in England as a student, and fatigued with speaking the English language most of the time. I needed to recover my mother-tongue, living in the midst of English ...

It all started when I went to see a Bergman film - "Seventh Seal" - with my teacher, the famous novelist and critic, Malcolm Bradbury. The film had no sub-titles. My incomplete comprehension of it started a vague stirring in me. I remember having told Dr. Bradbury that a European has no living memory of the middle ages and hence constructs it through knowledge acquired in books. But for an Indian like me, centuries coexist as a living memory transmitted through oral conditions. This set me off to rewrite a story which I had originally written for a journal.

In spite of Anantha Murthy's claim about centuries coexisting as "a living memory" for him, he self-consciously uses the word "recover" - "I needed to recover my mother-tongue" - almost as if the mother-tongue were not readily available to him. This echoes an account of A. K. Ramunajan's. (Ramanujan was, of course, one of the most important Indian English poets and cultural commentators; but it was also as a translator of ancient Tamil poetry that he made a profound impact on our idea of the relationship between English, the contemporary Indian self, and the "little", non-classical traditions of Indian antiquity.) Once more, in a foreign country - America, in this case - Ramanujan discovered the poems in ancient Tamil which he would later translate:

Even one's own tradition is not one's birthright; it has to be earned, repossessed ... One comes face to face with it sometimes in faraway places, as I did ... One chooses and translates a part of one's past to make it present to oneself and maybe to others. In 1962, on one of my first Saturdays at the University of Chicago, I entered the basement stacks of the then Harper Library in search of an elementary grammar of Old Tamil, which I had never learned ... As I searched... I came upon an early anthology of classical Tamil poems ... Here was a part of my language and culture, to which I had been an ignorant heir. Until then, I had only heard of the idiot in the Bible who had gone looking for a donkey and had happened upon a kingdom ...

Here is an almost mystical discovery made within secular parameters, like Dutt's discovery of the "grand mythology of (his) ancestors". The language moves from the vocabulary of individual choice - "earned", "repossessed", "one chooses" - to that of chance and grace - "I came upon", "happened upon". Self- knowledge is connected to ignorance - "which I had never learned", "ignorant heir" - as it is by mystics. But Ramanujan is working towards forging a secular, not a religious, tradition here; the kingdom he comes upon is not that of God, but a native canon; it is a characteristically modern homecoming, in the midst of actual and metaphorical exile, to what is perceived to be a neglected part of one's self.

(To be continued)

The first part of this article appeared in The Literary Review, The Hindu, on July 15. Amit Chaudhuri is the author of A NewWorld and is one of India's leading novelists writing inEnglish.

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