The Gift of Goddess Saraswati
CHAKRAVARTI Rajagopalachariar described the English language as the gift of Goddess Saraswati to India. There was, of course, a time towards the end of our independence struggle and in the first decade after becoming free when English teachers were worried whether the pro-Hindi leaders would oust English ultimately because of political compulsions to promote swadeshi. There was genuine concern that the English language itself would be expelled from India as it represented foreign domination and that India would assert its independence in spirit by enthroning the Hindi language in its place. Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, then teaching English in Lingaraj College, Belgaum, thought about the problem and was amazed that in spite of such worries, Indians went ahead embracing the language with greater vehemence:
It is impossible to predict the future of English (the language and literature) of India. Hindi may eventually oust it from its position of vantage, may even kill it altogether as far as India is concerned; on the contrary, one thinks (hopefully) it is likely that English will take deep roots in India, without however prejudicing the growth of vernaculars. Be that as it may, in this so uncertain period of transition, several Indians are aspiring to express themselves in English, in literary prose as well as verse.1
By then, Iyengar had been collecting a lot of English books by Indians and was trying to program them as a separate discipline of Indo-Anglian literature within the larger
1. The Mahratta, 18.6.1937.i think it was published from Pune in those days, I am not sure.
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framework of English literature. Reviewing V.N. Bhushan's Horizons he wrote on 31.12.1937:
The future of the Indo-Anglians is uncertain. The Hindi movement may in due course succeed in killing English in India. Having fielded with English for over one hundred years, - and at the very moment when some Indians learned to feel at home with it - we are now likely to smother it systematically and attempt to start Hindi on its very dubious career as the national language. However, for the time being, English counts; and the Indo-Anglians are doing their best.
Independence came in 1947. The worries were not totally banished. However, at the end of fifteen years, fears were allayed somewhat when a Parliamentary enactment gave English the status of an 'associate language' with Hindi for the future. No time limit was placed on this period of grace. One of the powerful leaders of the movement against banishing English was Rajagopalachariar who said:
I am convinced that the attempt to replace English by Hindi at the Union level, be it now or on a future date, will once again bring into being a disintegrated India. Whatever unification has been brought about as a result of history will be disrupted... With English will go all the all-India feeling we have now got. Nuts, walls and countries easily crack where there is a natural or innate breaking demarkation. I utter this grave warning. It is the warning of one who loves India and loves unity.. .2
But the Spirit of India had added English to its rich repertoire of languages, and no temporal power could reject this gift of Goddess Saraswati. For, even during these 'thirties and 'forties, Mother Saraswati's gift was giving shape to the greatest English epic of our times, Savitri.
2. Quoted in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., Third edition, 1983, p. 11.
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Amal Kiran was a close observer of the growth of this literary flame. A young man then, did he wonder about the future of English in India and the wisdom of casting one's greatest creation in a "foregin language"? Was English foreign? The questions no doubt assailed Amal Kiran and others like him who were undergoing training under Sri Aurobindo to write poetry in English. Sri Aurobindo himself had gained an enviable and creative mastery of Sanskrit (Bhavani Bharati) and Bengali (Durga Stotra) so should he not go further and enrich these great languages of India? In a letter dated 28th February, 1936, Sri Aurobindo gave the reasons for his choice:
I put forward four reasons why the experiment (by us of writing poetry in the English language) could be made: 1. The expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians. 2. We are entering an age when the stiff barriers of insular and national mentality are breaking down (Hitler notwithstanding), the nations are being drawn into a common universality with whatever differences, and in the new age there is no reason why the English should not admit the expression of other minds than the English in their tongue. 3. For ordinary minds it may be difficult to get over the barrier of a foreign tongue but extraordinary minds (Conrad etc.) can do it. 4. In this case the experiment is to see whether what extraordinary minds can do cannot be done by Yoga.
By 1942 when the two volumes of the Collected Poems and Plays of Sri Aurobindo appeared it was very clear that Goddess Saraswati's gift had not only struck deep roots in the Indian clime but had also put forth immensely rich foliage where a million flowers bloomed. The disciples were now convinced that an Indian could master the foreign language and even go a little beyond. An Indian could make it a deva bhasha, worthy of encapsulating scriptures. In 1947 Amal Kiran published The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. Here was
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undeniable mantric poetry. Savitri had not been published as a complete work yet. However, Amal Kiran could state unhesitatingly that it was "a poetic marvel":
The power and perfection of each line of Savitri lies in utter faithfulness to the fact, the atmosphere, the life-throb found on the overhead planes.... From the very start we have the full grip on profound realities, the expanse and richness of a revelation beyond the mental meaning.3
So when Amal Kiran began his correspondence with Kathleen Raine in the 'sixties, he was certainly the glorious champion of Indian writing in English and had himself authored innumerable poems and critical studies on a variety of subjects, was editing a highly admired journal, Mother India and teaching English poetry to Indian students. He came in contact with Miss Raine because of his studies in William Blake and his Christological interpretation of Blake's Tyger. Kathleen Raine was already a big name in English writing by 1960.
Born on 14th June 1908 in Essex, Raine had a happy childhood, adored by her parents. A student of Girton College, Cambridge, she began publishing poetry which became a life-long passion. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she believed that a power beyond the mind - call it imagination or whatever - was the source of creativity as well as destruction. For instance, she had once cursed her companion Gavin Maxwell after being banished from the house during a raging storm and while standing under a rowan tree which she had visualised as a visible symbol of their eternal togetherness: "Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now." Unfortunately, from then on Maxwell had to suffer a lot and Raine laid the blame on herself. Such was her entunement with her vocation. Though she did
3. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, Bombay: Sri Aurobindo Circle, 1947, p. 121.
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feel she was not writing as much as she should, she managed to publish more than a dozen books of poetry in the six decades of her active poetic career. Her spiritual inclinations drew her to a poet like William Blake and to India. She considered India to be a beautiful land, its people beautiful metaphorically and literally. This view of life no doubt inspired her to launch the magazine Temenos4 for she felt the sacred was closely related to the arts. It was unfortunate that Western society of her times had lost this link and she wished to correct this "deviation". The Temenos Academy had discussions and lectures on subjects concerning the earth and sought to give a global view of matters concerning man. Indeed she never forgot "the divine vision" till her quiet withdrawal from the physical on 6th July, 2003.
With her turn towards the spiritual, Raine's love for India was genuine. As she wrote in the Resurgence magazine:
I am not an expert on any aspect of India - historical, architectural, economic, political, ecological, literary or philosophical. I am not a devotee of any Indian teacher; I have never travelled south of Bangalore or north of Beas, or seen the great Himalayas beyond Rishikesh where the Ganges flows from the foothills into the plain. I did not set foot in India until I was already an old woman! But what I have is a deep love for something I would call "the India of the Imagination", a realm by no means imaginary - some might say, the real India, the eternal India, created over the long centuries of unbroken civilisation. India's contribution to our shared human heritage, in the realms of sculpture, dance, poetry, music, philosophy, wisdom and glory, all that comes from the heart of life and leaves traces and records as culture that is communicable in mysterious ways other than those of information or academic learning. When I reached India it seemed to me that this was the place to which I had always been travelling.
4. The holy area around a temple.
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According to her all roads in the twentieth century led to India and for one like her engaged in Blake studies, the arrival here was inevitable. When she did, and that was when she was quite advanced in age, she found a dignified beauty here which quite overwhelmed her:
On my first visit to India the beauty of young and old, women and children, came to me as a revelation. And the dignity, above all, that the sari imparted to its wearers; or is it that the wearer imparted the dignity? Beauty was everywhere, even the Tata lorries were beautified with tinsel, lotuses and peacocks, the horns of the cattle painted; all was adorned as if all India recognised that beauty is not a superfluity but a necessity of life....
But a quarter century later, in 1994, she saw a different India with a heavy heart: "Younger women are beginning to adopt the Western unisex uniform of jeans and jerseys, expressing their adoption of Western values. In exchanging the most beautiful and dignified women's dress in the world for the ugliest, they are renouncing the concept of beauty - and with beauty, love and delight."
This disillusionment was to come later. The English Language and The Indian Spirit (1986) contains some of the letters exchanged between Kathleen Raine and Amal Kiran in 1961 and 1962. The background is of course Raine's love for India and Amal Kiran's love for English literature and the love both have for William Blake. The correspondence begins with Amal Kiran's manuscript of Blake studies which had been sent to Kathleen Raine by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar spent some time cogitating upon the approaches of Amal Kiran and Kathleen Raine to Blake's poem and wrote to Amal Kiran:
As in your study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in the present work too, you have mobilised to brilliant effect your seasoned and manifold faculties, now on the issue of a christological reading of Tyger. But a doubt per-
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sists: to seize the "meaning" and surrender to the magic of the poem, should we read it necessarily in the light of Milton's description of the war in heaven, or (as Kathleen Raine does) with the insights of the Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabbalistic and Alchemist traditions? To the extent I have been able to follow the winding bout of reasoning in the book, I'm more inclined towards yours rather than Raine's interpretation, but this may be because I am far more familiar with Milton than with the "sources" investigated by her. It is a pity the two readings - the result of so much research and hard thinking - cannot be entirely reconciled with each other.5
If there was no reconciliation of the viewpoints, there was certainly a richness of understanding between the two scholars in their letters. It is a charming world that we enter when we take up the slim volume. There is no stuffy scholasticism with Raine embroidering the alternate traditions to Christology or Amal Kiran on his favourite spree of quoting at length from masters of poesy. We have nothing in Raine's letters to give us an idea of her way of life (marriages, motherhood, separations, elopement); but Amal Kiran's deep engagement in the yoga of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is made clear. These are like-minded wanderers in the realms of golden memories. Here is an evocation of Greece as a literary whisper from Amal Kiran:
Katounia, Limni, Euboeae, Greece - how these names move me! Ever since I was at school the sense of Greece has been like a glow in my heart. Perhaps you would expect me to say "in my mind" - and indeed I have drawn a lot of joy and strength from Greece's "foundations" in "thought and its eternity", but my sense of her
5. From a letter to K.D. Sethna, dated 15.4.1989.
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has been much more than intellectual. Even to get fully at her thought in its characteristic movement of beauty, shouldn't we combine the heart with the head?6
The thought of Greece gives Amal Kiran an "imaginative thrill" and there is an adequate response from Raine for she too had "lived in imagination in Greek mythology (the mythology I knew best, as all children in England did at one time) and the Gods were entirely real to me." But then a curiosity about life had led her to Natural Sciences at Cambridge and away from the loftier flights of ancient mythology though she came back to the Platonic tradition by her involvement with Blake. Instead of dissecting Tyger the two correspondents experience the leap and the calm and the dangerous sweetness of the planes beyond what is seen by the naked eye as when a lovely letter from Raine about her surroundings in Greece enraptures Amal Kiran' living in the (then) sleepy town of Pondicherry with all its old-world grace:
It is as if the very air, the very soil retained and conveyed, in the midst of all modernisation, the chiselled lucidity that was the soul of antique Hellas, the moulded mystery that was the soul of early India.7
So the pukka Cantab English and our own Aurobindonian English meet in the glowing morning twilight of a distance-conversation. The diction meets and merges: monastery, transcendence, Holy Cross, the Silence beyond the world, Nirvana. And oh so casually, Raine makes a pertinent remark that would lead us all to meditate upon life and literature. After commending Amal Kiran's poems and expressing, her desire to be born in India in a future life, Raine remarks:
6. Sethna, K.D., The English Language and The Indian Spirit, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1986, p. 1.
7. Ibid., p. 5.
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Only one thing troubles me: why do you write in English? You write of the land of India, subtilised, in an almost physical sense, by the quality of life that has been lived there; is not the same true of language? Have you not, in using English, exiled your poetic genius from India, to which it must belong, without making it a native of England, for English learned as a foreign language can never nourish the invisible roots of poetry. I feel this even about Tagore, and so did Yeats. I do not believe that we can - or if we could, that we have the right to - write poetry in a language other than our own.8
Strong words! But for the fact that we know she was so totally in favour of the beauty of life and the truth of a gnostic atmosphere covering the world and had total sympathy with India, these words would be put down to the arrogance of a colonial power. Amal Kiran received the words as an opening for another adventure in intellectual areas of intercontinental understanding. Was the English language a gift of Goddess Saraswati or the instrument of a great thief?
Kathleen Raine was partially right, of course. There was a time when Indians knew nothing about what they were losing when Orientalist Englishmen (or Germans or whoever else from the West) took away bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts or Indian artefacts (it could be a sculpted Shiva in the Grove of Palms, a carved Krishna dancing on Kaliya, a painting of an Apsaras floating in a celestial tarn) and not necessarily were they thefts. The Indians willingly gave them away for nothing or just sold them. They had no idea of the value of their heritage, having been mesmerised by the colonial master that their past was good for nothing, it was barbaric, it brought you neither material rewards here nor spiritual gains in the beyond. Masti Venkatesa Iyengar has caught the theme of our culture in peril during colonial times in his brilliant Kannada story, Masumati:
8. Ibid., p. 7.
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An Englishman comes to the village Masumati in search of old paintings. India under the British appears like an en-slaved person who had once seen better days. The Karnataka village had been despoilt by Muslim invaders a hundred years earlier. It is typical of thousands of such Indian villages. There is a mandapa built with huge stone blocks. A pushkarini (village tank) spreads in its front. About one hundred and fifty square yards encircled by carefully sculpted stones. The work of artisans who found joy in their work. Now weeds have grown over and some stones are loose.
The Englishman Farquhar goes with his local contact to the house of an old man who shows him the paintings stored in his house. One of them is the flute-playing Krishna. Absolutely divine. The old man refuses to show it first, saying it is not meant for the eyes of an outsider. But after a while he is satisfied with the sincerity of Emily and Farquhar. When the painting is brought down and unveiled, the English are amazed. The music flows on as anahata nada9 as Krishna stands grace-fully surrounded by cows and cowherds and cowherdesses and even the air is still with the music, for the leaves of the trees seem to be listening carefully too. This is art that has risen from the depths of the mystic vision of the Indians.
The old man tells them that his grandfather was engaged in painting this picture when enemies struck. The painter immediately got up from the work that was almost finished, left his work saying he will come back to complete the painting and went to defend his village. He lost his life in the battle but the family has safeguarded the painting in the hope that the painter-hero would come back and fulfil his task and redeem his promise. The two foreigners cannot have enough of that painting and keep gazing at it. Emily says:
Here a calf had come running to feed. Just then the Lord had held the flute to his lips and the sweet music had risen. The painter must have thought to paint the calf in a way that the calf's hunger vanished with the sounds
9. unheard melody
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of Krishna's flute. The calf would feel hungry some time after drinking milk from the mother cow. But one will never be hungry again if one heard the sounds of Krishna's flute. It is obvious the rest of the painting had been prepared to usher in this moment.10
Such depth of understanding from a foreigner! From the old man Emily and Farquhar learn that his maternal grand-son has shown interest in the art. Who knows! The genius of the past could have reincarnated in him to complete the painting! With such possibilities, the nation may yet regain its past glory. Else, the spirit will come back to reinhabit its body, but find the body missing. What a great tragedy it would be! The two foreigners decide not to take away such life-giving art from India but leave the Time Spirit to give India a great future, and take their leave.
Thus Raine is quite right in her perception about Indians caught in the danger of losing their heritage. But would writing in English mean such a loss? Apparently not. Amal Kiran posits the problem of English in India, its nativisation over two hundred years, its mastery by a chosen few and its inevitability in usage for the likes of him. He is sure that there is no other language open to him for self-expression. So he crowns English as the only language he finds "more suited to the deepest movements of the Indian soul than are any of the modern Indian languages." This is somewhat naive but understandable in one who has "no other speech open to me". In any case if we are going to question his premise, he will flash his enchanting smile at you and then where would you be but in the booth casting your vote for English? Now comes his meaningful rapier thrust at his correspondent, true to the Aurobindonian self-confidence:
A further truth with the appearance of a paradox is that, since English is the language most subtly, intensely, profoundly developed and since India is still the
10. Translated by Prema Nandakumar.
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country with the greatest spiritual experience, the spiritual fulfilment of English speech along the inward lines indicated or initiated by many English poets themselves will first come - if it already hasn't - through Indians and not Englishmen, Indians who have steeped themselves not only in the deepest culture of their own land by Yogic discipline but also in the finest essence of the English culture that has been diffused here for some centuries. The coming together, rather the love-affair, of India and the English language has on it the stamp of a divine destiny.11
Raine does not deny any of his arguments but then she thinks India is not yet ripe to produce work "that unites the knowledge of Indian spirituality with the polymorphous potentialities of English" Not for a long time. Pat comes Amal Kiran's reply which I did not read till this volume was published in 1986 and when I did, I felt as though I am, like the squirrel in the Ramayana, one who had brought a few grains of sand to build a bridge to the West for Savitriyana. Heaven it was to know that Amal Kiran had mentioned my name to Raine when speaking of an Indo-Anglian apocalypse as not a whimsy but a settled fact:
He [Wordsworth] is the authentic presage, in the English consciousness itself, of what I have called the destined Indo-Anglian apocalypse which I firmly believe has already taken place in the 23,812 lines of Savitri whose first impact on H.O. White of Trinity College, Dublin, led him to write, after examining for Ph.D., a thesis on the poem by Prema Nandakumar, daughter of the distinguished critic K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar: "I... greatly appreciated the privilege... of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem... I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordi-
11. The English Language and The Indian Spirit, p. 11.
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nary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." (21 July, 1961)12
Kathleen Raine must have smiled to herself as she read through this letter, dated 11th October 1961, that she had a Worthy opponent here. Yes, Amal Kiran cannot be denied. wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman and AE had brought about a union of the English language and the Indian spirit. The devoted student of Sri Aurobindo's The Future Poetry marshalls his arguments and there comes a moment when there is a direct thrust: "But what exactly is meant by writing as if in a foreign idiom? Is the English at fault?" How about Sri Aurobindo and Manomohan Ghose who had learnt English from their childhood? The rapier takes a sharper fling: "Or would you go so far as to assert that one who has English blood in his veins can alone have that literary inwardness?" On and on, so charmingly unstoppable.
Raine does not easily budge, but she knows how to parry: Sri Aurobindo's Isha Upanishad translation is revealing (but she has no sympathy for the archaisms used), she is happy about Amal Kiran's finding the Indian soul in Wordsworth but must needs reiterate that English remains a foreign instrument to convey the Indian spirit. She is in sympathy with Middleton Murry who feels that "Indian poets writing in English employ the words for uses they were never born for", and Herbert Read who feels that "poetry is of all things the most localised speech." But she will not condemn the Indians who opt for this dominant language. At the same time she cannot keep back the hobgoblins that prey upon her mind regarding the future of poetry itself:
But if the impulse in India to write poetry in English is really so strong, I suppose that in time a sort of "silver" English might be produced, comparable to Latin as a world-language. Even so, the world conditions are different; the Church needed hymns in a language understood
12. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
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in all countries; but nowadays it is the scientists and the imperialists and the press-mongers who want a world-language, and the advertisers of industrial products, and the power-seekers, and in a word the destroyers. Well, there it is. I see very little hope for the future of English poetry in any country, truth to say; and how much longer will the world itself last?13
Those were the days of the Cold War. The Atomic Clock was ticking away fast and the United Nations had already proved quite ineffective. If Raine situated in the bleakest part of the exterior world felt depressed, it comes as no surprise. Amal Kiran was in the safe custody of the Mother's love at Pondicherry where the newspapers did not destroy the breakfast time, spreading cynicism all over. So there is sunshine in Amal Kiran's reply who notes that Raine is too conscious of the tiger, "even outside Blake's poem." He is a yogin of the Supermind. For these aspirants nor twilight nor darkness can be hurdles to envision a bright future for the world. The eerie perturbations caused by globalised greed triggered by the West are the necessary pains of delivering a new future for man, an understandable Angst. No, no, mankind will not be destroyed but the human life will be transformed.
Man today is in such dire travail because Superman is being born: only he does not see what has descended from above to help the Divine Wonder break forth from below; hence the feeling of a return of chaos and old night.14
The world is real and darkness is no illusion. But they, are not the whole truth. As for archaisms, one needs them when translating an ancient scripture like the Isha Upanishad] Poor Raine! Amal Kiran chuckles to inform her that she is "somewhat rigid in your attitudes - not plastic enough to the diversity of fact or possibility." Getting back to her state
13. Ibid., p. 30.
14. Ibid., p. 32.
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ment about English poetry is best written by Englishmen, Amal Kiran assures her that "much of the Englishness you speak of is merely a matter of certain national interests, historical habits, popular stock-responses, subtle temperamental 'slants', sensitive mirror-moods." How can a language belong exclusively to a particular territory? Haven't innumerable "creative eccentrics" enriched the English language by bringing a foreign idiom, like the Germanisms of Carlyle and un-English ethereality of Shelley? Amal Kiran is typing so fast that the rapier seems still, it is moving with such incredible skill. Raine steps back and opens another front. Ah, not to use one's mother tongue is a kind of betrayal, what else?
... the very desire to use an alien language reflects a break with tradition, in those who are infected with such a wish. The words of the ancestors come to us loaded with their experience of the earth as they have known it. In disowning our language, do we not disown ourselves?
Sri Aurobindo was uprooted, as I understand, and in any case doubtless wished to write in English for the. instruction of English readers - whose need is certainly great, in philosophic matters, and who should therefore be grateful to him. But his poetry is certainly not on the same level as his philosophic writings.15
Raine's chief anguish is of people considering English as a universal language and writing in it for a global spread instead of remaining compartmentalised in their own local language. This temptation to use what is seen as a universal tongue would be a real loss to world culture which has rich components. We would end up with "this mass tele-culture that infects the whole world now with its sub-humanity." But Amal Kiran will not allow Raine to dissolve in the grey self-pity of living in Anno Bombini. He presents a muster of opinions by English scholars and assures her that Sri Aurobindo never did disown his Indianness. If he had, he
15. Ibid., p. 46.
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would have built his Ashram in England! Nor need Raine fear that Indians accept English for politics and commerce. They love the language. Kathleen Raine has much to say against the materialist civilisation being spawned in the West, Planter's Pea-nut advertisements and outer space shuttles of varied hue, but Amal Kiran reiterates that the language cannot be blamed for these ills. How can anyone criticise a language which now has Savitri?
I should think that the English language, holding as it does the most deeply spiritual poetry of modern times, is just the power that could touch modernism to nobler and higher issues. In England itself and perhaps more in America, this power may be in danger of being stifled by the too loud and rampant materialism that has developed with the modern spirit. But here in India where the voice of the Vedic Rishis is still vibrant and "Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us" -the flute of Sri Krishna sounding from an eternal Brindavan in the collective consciousness - and the revelatory rhythms of Sri Aurobindo's message, "Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps", are about us stronger than the titan roar of the machine.. 16
Raine replies with aplomb congratulating Amal Kiran for saying "the last word on the English language question; history has made English a world-language." In any case why should one bother about it? After all, language itself may lose its prime place as a communicator of ideas. Maybe telepathy would soon take its place! Still Raine is Raine! The English language she and Amal Kiran have been speaking of has no longer a future. Its decadence as a literary language is inevitable "from the influx of so many races which have forgotten their own without perfectly mastering English (how can they, their history and landscape being different?) and of the barbarous illiterate populace produced in England and America by industrialisation."
16. Ibid., pp. 61-62.
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The beaming cheeriness between the two remains to the end of the present volume (they did correspond later but it was desultory and had to do with Blake criticism) and when Raine writes that she is waiting for Amal Kiran's views on her Collected Poems she had sent, he cannot resist one of his angelic smiles and say that he does not understand: "Am I not, as an Indian whose mother-tongue is different from yours, unfitted in your eyes to appreciate a creation like English poetry, which is your language at its subtlest?"
It is a beautiful, meaningful, poetic passage of letters to and from, bridging the East and the West. Amal Kiran's heroic stand to remain optimistic in the face of all the bleakness of the contemporary world must have gone into Raine's statement of hope that India will be the teacher of the world for a beautiful future, the beauty of external living, the beauty of the soul. As she wrote in Resurgence:
India, notwithstanding the deep wounds inflicted on her by Westernisation, still embodies a spiritual dimension which is virtually non-existent today in a world that simply disregards spiritual knowledge as irrelevant, or illusory, probably pathological, no part of the real world. This treasury of spiritual knowledge and practice is beyond doubt India's greatest resource. And it may be that our bankrupt materialism has brought us in the West to a point where we recognise our own need to relearn what our full humanity entails. Western civilisation, notwithstanding our impressive attainments in material sciences and technology, has not significantly impaired that great edifice of India's spiritual civilisation.
It was a gift of Saraswati for the West when Kathleen Raine was born; and Amal Kiran is a gift of Saraswati for us to remain firmly anchored in the Aurobindonian world, taking around the candles he has lit for bringing light and delight into common lives. Bless this candle then, The English Language and The Indian Spirit!
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