Religious ideas in modern Indian literature
When Salman Rushdie’s novel, Mid-night’s Children won the Booker Prize last year, it
was hailed by the judges as a book that contributes to ‘many literatures’ – presumably
British literature, Indian literature and Pakistani literature. Mid-night’s Children also
draws from many Literatures, Indian, Latin American, North American, German and
British, to name but a few. What it draws on, in all these traditions, are elements of the
picaresque, of the marvelous, of the fabulous. Part of a long tradition in the West, these
elements have been resuscitated, revived, and given new importance in the last two or
three decades, after having existed in relative unimportance for the last hundred years or
more. The realism of the Victorian novel gave way to the psychologism of the mitwentieth-century novel, and this has been replaced by the mythic novel of the last
decade.
Rushdie has lived in Britain since the age of sixteen, and has had a British school and
university education. It is to be expected, then, that the myth he uses to explore postindependence India should be a uniquely personal myth, originated and developed by
himself. It is to be expected because the West has repudiated its dominant myths and now
seeks new ones by which to unify, explore and give value to a world in which coherence
and value seem bewilderingly absent.
Other Indian writers who have gone the way of inventiveness and verbal brilliance
include G. V. Desani and Suhdhindranath Ghose. Desani has so far published only one
novel, All About H. Hatterr, but it has had the distinction of being kept in print by
Penguin since its first publication in 1948. Hatterr is a Eurasian and sums up in himself
and in his language Desani’s lampooning of East and West and their pretensions. Like
Rushide and Desani, Ghose loves words and humour and the grotesque, and he
sensuously evokes India by means of narratives within narratives, into which long
digressions are interpolated, and in which realistic narrations weaves in and out of dream,
illusion, poetry, vision. Ghose’s tetralogy1 has his hero, Balarama, setting out on a quest
for Beauty. Instead of developing a myth or fable that is totally his own, however, Ghose
has his protagonist finding this beauty in an Anglo-Indian girl. With her vulgarity,
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brazenness and sexuality, Roma symbolizes the new India in the third novel, as Calcutta
does in the fourth.
Both of these terrible incarnations of Beauty, however, betray
Balarama in a conclusion that suggests the end of a yuga, a cycle of years in Indian
cosmology. In pioneering the incorporation of Indian Puranic and Upanishadic poetic
and epic traditions into contemporary fiction, Ghose produced work that was genuinely
Indian as well as truly modern; the traditional reverberations and the contemporary fable
become a means of exploring the modern Indian soul, which Ghose finds idealistic but
muddled, rootless yet predestined to a search for meaning.
Orthodox and modern
Ghose forms a useful bridge between the modernized or secularised Indian novelist and
those who steer relatively close to some orthodox tradition. Perhaps the most orthodox of
these is Raja Rao. His massive novel The Serpent and the Rope has been called the
greatest Indian novel in English so far; and its title gives away its philosophical concerns.
He is the T. S. Eliot of Indian literature and declares himself an Advaitin,2 and one who
believes in order, hierarchy , and the crucial importance of the feminine principle. In The
Serpent and the Rope, Rao’s protagonist Ramaswamy, a Brahmin student from south
India, marries a sensitive French intellectual Madelein, but their children die, the
marriage collapses, and Ramaswamy finally returns fro his European exile to the Advaita
of his fathers. The novel parallel Rao’s own life: he was a student in France, married a
French woman, and returned to India to study Indian philosophy.
Southern and Eastern India has always been more conservative than the rest of the
country, so it should not be surprising that the other major novelist who defends Indian
tradition, R. K. Narayan, also comes from the south. Narayan is considered the greatest
living English-language novelist by Graham Greene, and he is perhaps the best known of
Indian writers in English.
Narayan’s first novel, Awami and Friends (1935, is a delicate and humorous story of a
schoolboy growing up in the fictional town of Malgudi in which all of Narayan’s stories
are based, and which is almost certainly the town of Mysore in which Narayan has lived
for most of his life. As the town changes and grows, so do Narayan’s preoccupations,
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but his numerous volumes of novels and short stories all seem to have a common basic
structure: while the average inhabitant of Malgudi is a lovable eccentric, it is unlovably
abnormal outside influence which disturbs the town’s easy-going placidity; primeval
order is restored with the expulsion of the alien intruder or the ‘return’ of the erring
protagonist. This structure has allowed Narayan to portray south Indian attitudes as
fleshed out in his individual characters (eg in the 1937 novel The Bachelor of Arts, or the
1945 novel The English Teacher) as well as to explore their relevance to larger problems,
as in The Dark Room (1938),Mr. Sampath (1949), The Financial Expert (1952) and
Waiting for the mahatma (1955), The Maneater of Malgudi (1961) and The Sweet Vendor
(1967) return to more limited subjects but are the most orthodox statements in Indian
English fiction of traditional Indian wisdom; indeed
The Maneater of Malgudi is
arguably a modern version of the legend of Bhasmasura. A number of critics have
commented on how Narayan adapts the linear form of the mainstream western novel to
the cyclical pattern of the Puranas (order – disharmony – return to order).
Narayan does have more complex and ambivalent novels, however, such as The Guide
(1958) and The Painter of Signs (1977). It is worth pausing to consider the distance
Narayan has traveled between these two novels.
In the first, Raju is an innocent
youngster whose obsession with the dancer Rose leads him to a tragic chain of events that
lands him in prison. Broken and embittered on release, he is mistaken for a sannyasi a
holy man, and cynically decides to go along with the simple villagers who offer him
victuals and worship in return for his commonplace observations which are accepted as
words of wisdom. Matters get out of hand, however, when a drought affects ‘his’ area,
and the villagers importune him to fast till the drought breaks. Near death, and in
despair, Raju tells all to one of the village elders. But, instead of being scorned, Raju
finds his past life treated as a preparation for this moment of truth when he will genuinely
become a holy man. Raju, ironic and skeptical, dies just as the rains begin. Has he
indeed become a holy man? If not, how are we to treat the eventual arrival of the rains?
They may be coincidental, but Raju’s redemption is at least possible, and Narayan’s
pattern of the restoration of order has not been disturbed.
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But this pattern is disturbed, as is life in the whole town of Malgudi, in Narayan’s most
recent novel, The Painter of Signs, when a government-appointed team of familyplanning advisers arrives. It is not the errancy or hypocrisy of individuals that prove
unamenable to Indian wisdom, nor indeed the massive, complex, or subtle problems of
politics, finance and the rest; it is the onward march of material progress that changes the
physical face of Malgudi, and it is the secular juggernaut of social change which proves
intractable and finally seems to have broken Naranyan’s cherished circle.
If Rao
documents the stories of individuals who return to their roots with an intensity dependent
on their exposure to the alien, Narayan portrays a traditional society which appears now
to be succumbing to the blandishments of the modern. Tellingly, The Painter of Signs is
the least oriented to the spirit of all of Narayan’s works.
North Indian literature
The most prolific Indian author, Mulk Raj Anand, also attempts to portray the changes in
Indian society, but in his case it is north Indian society, changing from the feudal to the
modern. Even more than in the case of Narayan, Anand’s mode is realistic, and he has
never accepted either the ultimate value of Indian traditions which have sentenced
millions of human begins to an almost inhuman level of degradation for centuries by
virtue of the last system, or the idea that any possible salvation is to be obtained within
Indian or indeed any other spiritual tradition. He sees hope for Bakha, his protagonist in
Untouchable (1935), only in the gradual introduction into Indian latrine sweeper’s job
unnecessary.
Anand has been through a sort of a Marxist phase, though he has always been more a
warm and sympathetic delineator o the dilemmas and difficulties of the underdog in
India. He has also repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Mahatma Gandhi for converting
him from being a ‘brown sahib’ to being an Indian, in touch with the life of the
underprivileged and deprived.
In contrast to what might be called Anand’s indifference to religion is Bhabani
Bhattacharya’s anger at it: like Narayan, Bhattacharya takes up the theme of a bogus holy
man in He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). However, this is a viciously satirical portrayal of
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the religious credulity that leads to precious food being waste on idols, while millions
starve. Bhattacharya’s protagonist, Kano the blacksmith, is reduced by famine to accept
work as a pimp for a brothel where he discovers his own daughter surviving by
prostitution. Enraged, Kano turns himself into a miracle-working exploit of the same rich
and powerful people who once despised him. However, Kano retains his humanity,
sharing food with children who are hungry. But he is finally so sickened and disgusted at
the chicanery and hypocrisy of the worshippers that he announces the truth to an upset
crowd of them before turning to a new life.
In A Goddess Named Gold (1960), Bhattacharya’s protagonist Meera is presented by her
grandfather with a magical talisman, which will turn all the copper which she might
happen to have on her body into gold, provided she wears the talisman and performs an
act of pure kindness. Meera misguidedly allows the talisman to be exploited for profit,
and it fails. Her grandfather, a wandering minstrel, returns one day to tell her that the
talisman represents Freedom: India’s coming independence will bring prosperity only if
goodness is pursued rather than profit. The novel is a parable meant to warn India
against selling he soul to modernization and progress.
Bhattacharya is therefore more attracted to Indian tradition than is Anand, as well as
more repelled by it. Bhattacharya’s ambivalence may be a useful point to ease this long
discussion of “Hindu” novels, and move to Khushwant Singh’s I Shall not Hear the
Nightingale (1959), which naturally substitutes the Sikh tradition for the Hindu.
As in his earlier and better-known novel Train to Pakistan (1956), Khushwant Singh
seemed to search for a heroism that would match the violent birth-pangs of Indian
independence.
He finds this in Sikh traditions (which have married spirituality to
practical vigour) and in the warmly impulsive peasants of north India.
Monohar Malgonkar’s novels have affinities with those of Kipling and John Masters,
but he too searches for the springs of the greatness needed to tackle India’s problems; he
finds it in the Indian Army with its twin heritage of the old heroism of Indian warriors
and the political neutrality and discipline gained during the Raj.
Of Indian women novelists, the best known are Kamala Markandaya, Ruth Prawar
Jhabvala and Anita Desai. Jhabvala explores middle-class Indian life with sympathy and
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a subtle irony, but does not seem to posit any positive values through her work so far,
except the general ones of honesty and humaneness. Desai’s marvelously nervous and
evocative prose style reveals the desolating inner world of her characters, in which selfdiscovery is threatened by the old gods of family custom, tradition, religion, circumstance
and sheer human thick-headedness.
Markandaya’s novels explore the decimation of the human by great social change and
by idealistic movements ostensibly out to secure peace and justice.
Her religious
orientation is perhaps best seen in A Silence of Desire (1960) in which a ‘modern’
government official in the countryside finds herself afflicted with a tumour. She goes to
a local holy man who is held in high regard by the villagers, but derided by educated
townspeople such as her husband, Dandekar. In the face of opposition and unbelief, the
holy man Swamy slips away, and Dandekar’s wife undergoes a successful operation. But
Dandekar himself has started seeing the possibility that Swamy may be a genuine holy
man and healer: were he a charlatan, he might still be necessary to the solace of the
wretched Indian villager, to whose misery the educated sophisticate has nothing to say;
indeed, might not the successful operation itself be a mere means for the working of the
power of faith?
Poetry in India
So far we have discussed fiction, and this has been done by drawing attention to
particular writers and works. But Indian poetry in English is best discussed in terms of
the periods into which it falls naturally. The first of these is roughly from 1900 to 1930, a
period that is difficult to characterize because of the multiplicity and diversity of the
individual voices within it. In the next period, 1930 to 1960, this variety continued, but
the dominant voice was that of the followers of Sri Aurobindo.3
In 1959, the work of most of those who dissented from this dominant Aurobindism was
collected by P. Lal into an anthology4 which gave to this ‘new’ poetry the beginnings of
scholarly and popular respectability. V. Sivaramakrishnan, an Indian critic, thought that
the ‘new’ Indian poetry in English ‘transcended the pseudo-spiritual preoccupations of
the earlier … phase (and had) shifted the poetic quest … to the individual’. If the
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Aurobindians were religious, it was easy to see the ‘new’ poets as humanist, secularist,
modern.
However, this is not in fact the case5 . The actual poetry written by these ‘new’ poets
shows clearly their fundamental concern with essentially religious questions.
P. Lal himself has been involved for a large part of his life with ‘transcreating’ ancient
Indian classics into English, and has repeatedly acknowledged the great personal benefit
he has derived (though with typical modesty he declines to discuss the benefits
themselves in public). It does not take a great deal of discernment to see the influence of
his transcreations on his original or creative work.
Lal’s poetry is therefore perhaps the most systematically and deeply religious of all
modern Indian poetry in English. Almost all of Lal’s poems are the work of a sensitive
personality steeped in a Hindu ethos – one might say an artificially Hindu ethos in the
context of present-day India, for few Hindus have Lal’s knowledge of Sanskrit, fewer
have the time that he has to give them, and even fewer would be likely to invest their
time in Sanskrit if they had it, for they have mortgaged their souls to the new gods of
power, self, and pleasure.
Lal is representative of educated and sophisticated Indians wose work has been moulded
by popular (as distinct from philosophical) Indian traditions, whether the particular
variety be Shankara’s Aurobindo’s or Radhakrishnan’s. Consider Lal’s attitude to desire,
his preference for the universal over the particular, and his concept of ‘saint’ in these
lines from his poems, The Bee’s Love:
This bee’s sensible,
Loving fragrance, not flower,
Saint-like an stone-like,
Limiting desire
Lal values the Bible, the Buddist Dhammapada, and the Sikh volume of devotional
poetry, the Japji Sahib, as much as he does his own scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita
and the Upanishads- and his recent long poem on Calcutta is presided over by Mother
Teresa. Lal’s tolerance and catholicity are typically and traditionally Indian.
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This tolerate and catholicity has also influenced the work of the Indian Bene-Israeli Jew,
Nissim Ezekiel, who is the doyen of Indo-English poets, and has moved from atheism to
theism as a result of an experience under the influence of drugs in the Sixties. Ezekiel
seems to be still unable or unwilling to write publicly about the nature of his religious
conclusions, leaving us only a few psalms and prayers by which to guess the direction
which he may be going.
If Ezekiel’s scrupulous and witty humanism turned out to be incipiently religious,
Kamala Das turns out to wear a veil which disguises her religious yearnings only from
those who do not want to see them. Popularly identified with free sex and women’s lib,
she can be forthrightly sarcastic about religious people:
This then was our holy inheritance, this ancient
Virus that we nurtured in the soul so
That when at sundown, the muezzin’s high wail sounded from
The mosque, the chapel-bells announced the angelus, and
From the temple rose the Bahmin’s assonant chant, we
Walked with hearts grown scabrous with a hate, illogical,
And chose not to believe – what we perhaps vaguely sensed –
That it was only our fathers’ lunacy speaking,
In three different tones, babbling; slay them who do not
Believe, or better till, disembowel their young ones
And scatter on the streets the meager innards. Oh God,
Blessed is your fair name, blessed be the religion
Purified by the unbelievers’ blood, blessed by
Our sacred city, blessed be its incarnadined glory
(The Inheritance)
Das can even be cynical about the consolations of religion, as in:
. . . not for us even to
Question death, but as child to mother’s arms
We shall give ourselves to the fire or to
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The hungry earth to be slowly eaten,
Devoured. None will step off his cross
Or show his wounds to us, no god lost in
Silence shall begin to speak, no lost love
Claim us, no, we are not going to be
Ever redeemed, or made new.
(The Descendants)
However, as the critic R.K. Agrwal put it when he reviewed Das’s volume of poems, The
Descendants, her apparent sex-obsession is a camouflage hiding the love-hungry Radha,
who typifies the longing of the soul for God, not the passionate Cleopatra. This was
confirmed by Das herself in an article entitled ‘Sex: Mindless surrender or Humming
Fiesta?’, which she wrote for the women’s magazine Femina.
If religious believers, humanists, skeptics and incipiently religious writers such as
Kamala Das are all to be found among Indian writers in English, this is only to be
expected from such an extraordinarily large and diverse country. But if the extent of
religious commitment is surprisingly large and deep, it takes unorthodox forms as of ten
as it takes orthodox ones. And I modern Indian literature in English shows us Indian
traditions in the flux o being modernized and westernized, it also shows some of these
writers appropriating and modifying western literary forms for uniquely individual uses.
1. And Gazelles Leaping (1949), Cradle of the Clouds (1951). The Vermillion Boat (1953) and
The Flame of the Forest (1955).
2. One who accepts the doctrine of Advaita (non-dualism) which is often considered the apogee
of Indian philosophy. In a later book, The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), Rao’s protagonist
returns to his traditional faith after a trance. Critics have suggested that this book is loser to
Ramanuja’s Srivaisnaivism than to Shankara’s Advaita.
3. Sri Aurobindo propounded a Westernised form of Indian philosophical mysticism which
combined elements of nationalism and particular scientific ideas. Many of his ideas are
startlingly close to those of the Roman Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin. However,
any influence, in either direction, seems unlikely.
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4. Modern Indian Poetry in English; an anthology and redo, Kavita Publishers, New Delhi,
India, 1959.
5. It must b remembered that secularist or humanist poetry was being written from much earlier
– for example by Shahid Suhrawandy in the 1930s. Religious poetry was also written by
Grandhians, Tagoreans and other followers of Reformed Hindu or New Hindu groups, as well
as by more orthodox Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Sikhs.
Prabhu S. Guptara was lecturer in English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, from 1970-1973,
before taking a similar position in the post-graduate department at North-Eastern Hill
University, Shillong, India. Based in Britain at present, he has written for various magazines
and newspapers, although his main work remains in English literature worldwide. He is
director of the Minorities Arts Advisory Service, UK, and describes himself as a Hindu
follower of Jesus.
Media Development (London), 3/82
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