Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

BOOKS BY AMAL-KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)

Published Books.

1. The Parnassians (1923)

2. Artist Love (1925)

3. The Secret Splendour (1941)

4. Evolving India: Essays on Cultural Issues (1947)

5. The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1947,1974)

6. The Adventure of the Apocalypse (1949)

7. The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence (1951)

8. Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (1952, 1967)

9. The Indian Spirit and the World's Future (1953)

10. Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare (1965, 1991)

11. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (1968, 1992)

12. Sri Aurobindo - the Poet (1970)

13. "Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments (1972)

14. Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry (1974)

15. Altar and Flame (1975)

16. The Mother: Past-Present-Future (1977)

17. The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View (1980)

18. Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother (1980)

19. The Spirituality of the Future: A Search Apropos of R.C. Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (1981)

20. The Sun and the Rainbow (1981)

21. Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue (1981)

22. "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1984)

23. The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence with Kathleen Raine (1986)

24. Poems of Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments (1987)

25. The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarmé's Symbolist Poetry (1987)

26. Ancient India in a New Light (1989)

27. Talks on Poetry (1989)

28. Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation (1989)

29. The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems (1993)

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Books in the Press:

1. Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

2. Life-Poetry-Yoga: Personal Letters, Vols 1 & II

3. The Inspiration of Paradise Lost

4. Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Expression

5. The Beginning of History for Israel

Unpublished Books:

1. Problems of Early Christianity

2. Problems of Ancient India

3. The Greco-Aramaic Inscription of Kandhar: Its Call for a Revolution in Historical Ideas.

4. "Raised from the Dead": An Approach to the Problem of the Resurrection of Jesus from the Descriptions of his "Risen" Body

5. Is Velikousky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes

6. A Follower of Christ and a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Correspondence between Bade Griffiths and K.D. Sethna

7. "Classical" and "Romantic": An Approach through Sri Aurobindo

8. "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": An Interpretation from India

9.  Adventures in Criticism

10. Sri Aurobindo and Greece

11. Science, Materialism, Mysticism: A Scrutiny of Scientific Thought

12. The Thinking Corner

13. The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition

14. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual Thought and the Mother's Contribution to it

15. The Basic Teilhard de Chardin and the Modern Religious Intuition

16. The Real Religion of Teilhard de Chardin: His Version of Christianity and Sri Aurobindo's Exposé of the Ancient Vedanta

17. Mandukya Upanishad: English Version and Commentary

Edited Books:

Glimpses of the Mother's Life: Compiled by Nilima Das with the help of Shraddhavan, Vols I & II (Third volume under preparation)

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SOME BOOK-REVIEWS AND BLURBS

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Blake's Tyger

The ‘Tyger’ that is the theme of Blake's most admired poem has been variously interpreted. Symbolism has been read in this strange figure of a beast of  prey described as "burning bright" in nocturnal forests. Kathleen Raine, the famous English authority on Blake, has sought to trace in the details of the poem the play of gnostic-hermetic-alchemical-Kabbalistic tradition with which Blake is shown to have been familiar. K.D. Sethna, Parsi scholar residing  at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry, analyses, step by step, the poem on its own merits and comes ultimately to see in it a parable in which the  Tyger is the embodiment of Christ's wrath when, empowered by God, he goes forth to battle with and expel from heaven into hell the rebellious angels whose ambience is conceived as "forests of the night" and who are  themselves imaged as hostile "stars".  A basis of this mysteriously projected confrontation is discerned in Book VI of Paradise Lost. A deep affinity, worked out with attention to what Blake would call "minute particulars", is disclosed with the action depicted by Milton and even with the language and imagery of the depiction - though everything has undergone a subtle recreation in terms of Blake's individual vision and mentality.

This mentality is less severely Puritan, more humanely sensitive, than Milton's. So it feels shaken and dismayed at the same time that it is splendour-struck by the superbly destructive power emanating from one who has usually been regarded as loving, gentle and peaceful. Hence the query addressed to the Tyger apropos of the double role divinity has assumed:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Apart from Milton, comparative aspects are found in various features of the general Christian tradition to elucidate the relationship the poem suggests between God the Father and Christ the Son, as well as the poem's picture of the winged maker of the Tyger, ascending to "seize the fire" with which to create his dreadful instruments. Several nuances of the poem in the perspective of the large body of Blake's other works are studied at considerable length. At the end, light is brought to bear on the poem from another of Blake's celebrated lyrics- "And did those feet in ancient time..."-- whose often-disputed dramatis person are sought to be clarified.

An attempt has been made to render the Christological interpretation of The Tyger complete and convincing by meeting all possible objections squarely, especially those arising from Miss Raine's published treatment and

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from the correspondence she had with the author after reading his thesis in typescript. The author is grateful to her for the interest she has taken in his exposition and for the helpful criticism received from her. Although differing on the whole from his reading she has generously acknowledged in the Notes to her monumental Blake and Tradition the need she felt here and there to modify because of him her own wording. And about the Tyger-Christ identification she wrote to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, well-known editor and bibliographer of Blake, who first read Sethna's original draft and forwarded it to Miss Raine for expert opinion. "Here I think he has found a profound truth not seen by any of us hitherto."

How far Sethna has succeeded in exploring the full pattern of the poem with the aid of this insight is to be judged by the world-wide community of Blake-enthusiasts. it may be of interest that his interpretation gives a semi-mythopoeic semi-Miltonic body to a phrase of T.S. Eliot's, flashed out in another context, in the poem Gerontion: "Christ the tiger."

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"Two Love's" and "A Worthier Pen"

The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets

For over two centuries Shakespearean scholars have tried to identify the three persons who figure anonymously in the famous Sonnets. A solution of the mystery would provide the most important historical features of the great poet-dramatist's private life.

Who was the youth, apparently of a noble status, he called his "fair friend" and who the brunette the scholars have dubbed the Dark Lady, at once Shakespeare's mistress and the amorous intriguer with his cherished patron, his beau ideal? Again, what participant in the literary scene of the Elizabethan Age was the Rival Poet or rather the chief among the writers of verse seeming to have been personally patronised by the Fair Friend? No identification of the first two enigmas - whom Shakespeare has called his "two loves of comfort and despair" - has carried complete conviction. Neither has any of the poets chosen as his main competitor - whom in humiliated moments he considered "a worthier pen" — stood out incontrovertibly.

The primary difficulty has been to determine the time-bracket for the writing of the Sonnets. If we knew the span of years involved, several candidates would be automatically eliminated — at least a negative gain. Then the positive search can more easily get under way. But all the methods adopted up to now have proved unreliable. Literary studies can be shown to be very subjective, while the so-called "historical method" by which supposed hints in the poems are sought to be matched with contemporary

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English or European events can be extremely "tricky", yielding contradictory results. The new method followed in the present book is of what the author terms "internal chronology".

When the language of some of the Sonnets is sharply probed and the conclusions synthetized, one sees that the poems date themselves bypointing to Shakespeare's idea of the full human life-length, of the time when old age starts and of the signs characterizing the various stages of getting old. From the data thus obtained we can arrive at the period in Shakespeare's life during which the sonneteering went on.

From the candidates who fall within this period the most likely in each instance is picked out with the help of a comparative scrutiny of biographical information as well as of literary texts Shakespearean or other. The chapter on the Fair Friend establishes a claim that has often been made but never entirely vindicated because of the uncertainty of the Sonnets' date. The chapter on the Rival Poet springs quite a surprise which is yet justified by theatrical history and "close" textual reading. The chapter on the Dark Lady discovers her very name by the study of ingenious sexual suggestion vaguely suspected so far but never clearly caught even though Shakespeare has been known to be no poet for babes and sucklings. When the full shock of the unconventional poetry has been felt and understood, the fascinating brunette who made the poet her slave despite his recognition of her shortcomigns gets undeniably named.

The book nor only musters evidence in support of its own case for the enigmas: it also tries to answer all possible objections set up in favour of alternative solutions

As the Shakespeare-industry is world-wide, researchers everywhere should be interested in the light thrown in a novel manner on the Bard's life in particular and on his Sonnets in general.

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From Here to the Beyond

The Secret Splendour collected poems of K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran). Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 605 002. Rs. 550.

The Secret Splendour , the title of one of the poems in an earlier collection has been retained as the synoptic title of the 'collected poems' of K.D. Sethna, now approaching his nineties. It is a formidable collection of several hundred poems, mostly lyrical in their provocation and recordation, but carrying also the hallmark of variegated richness and an impressive totality of organisation and achievement.

In the title-poem, an immediate pleasure is contrasted with the everlasting secret splendour, a deathless magnificence of light and love. It is the

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sharp ambrosial contrast between Appearance and Reality, the Seeing and the Being, the Seeming and the Real.

The earlier ancient inhabitant was most dispirited when evening came and night, and the reign of darkness, but presently the starry firmament was a revelation and this led to the overwhelming query:

"If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life?"

Sethna's poems include the piece 'Two Birds' harking back to the Upanishadic exploration of Reality.  The "small-bird crimson-hued" tastes the overhanging fruit and feels more and more happy and yet the feeling of fulfilment proves elusive. Now the bird sees another bird higher up on the tree, the image of beauty and happiness. The bird now realises that the silent other Bird, all poise and peace, is the realised One, the Bird evocative of the Secret Splendour.  Sethna's Collected Poems carries as a jacket illustration and frontispiece a splendid projection of the two Birds, as the lower frustrated Bird catches sight of the silent other Bird higher on the tree, the picture of silence and realisation. everywhere and at all times, this is the contrast between the Here and the Far, the gaudy Appearance and transcendent reality, the Ego with its frustration and the Psychic with its realisation.

A lyric genius whose sesitive responses to English and French poetryhave filled his poems with honeyed delight. Sethna can coerce us into entering the worlds of the spirit with effortless ease. Would you want to know the saranagati tattva which is the central spring of India's religious thought? Sethna can take us straight to that divine being of fraternal love. Bharata the image of total surrender prayerfully paying his daily homage to the sandals of Rama in Nadhigram:

"Here in this kingdom's vigilant heart I place

Twin-lamps - the quiet sandals touched by the heat.

Of God's pure trample on His own wide power!

Rule, while the lord's bleeding and begger steps

Go printing deep His love on forest paths

Tangled with wry desires and shadowed over

By titan cluitchings at the glow of heaven!

Rule without stir and light each soul to peace!"

Itihasic tales; Vedic-Upanishadic stories (the two birds on a tree, for instance); translation from French and Italian poets (including Dante): swings of mystic ardour; metaphysical conceits ("a fourscore sun focussing eternity"); psychological probings; aspirations. All of them linked, however tenuously, to the central idea that existence is a unified, seamless whole.  Even the Lord of Severance, Death is truly Hiranyagarbha, Lord of Life as the volume takes its title from Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri where the heroine becomes conscious of this inalienable truth:

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"A secret splendour rose revealed to sight

Where once the vast embodied Void had stood.

Night the dim mask had grown a wonderful face."

The title poem takes off from here to exult that beyond the "unfathomed dark" that lays siege to Sethna's spirit lie regions of "immortal rapturous Loveliness". The pain-defying Ananda that marks these poems is a welcome gift of Sethna for a world wallowing in self-pity. Sri Aurobindo's comments add to the value of this lyra mystica and give us a clear idea of how fine poems are shaped on a creative anvil.

K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

(The Hindu, Tuesday, September 27,1994)

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Karpāsa in Prehistoric India

This book is a companion volume to the author's first venture in the historical field: The Problem of Aryan Origins, published in 1980. It converges on the same goal but by different routes and thus adds strength to the central thesis.

What is attempted is a general revision of ancient Indian history. Taking the aid of archaeological discovery, documentary material and linguistic study, the book seeks to bring about a radical change in (1) comparative chronology, (2) the sequence of cultures, and (3) the cultural character of several phases of India's career in antiquity.

By a close investigation of the term karpāsa for cotton in Sanskrit literature and by an alignment of its first occurrence with the first ascertained cultivator of the cotton-plant in our country, the body of Indian writing called Sūtras is shown to be in its early stage contemporary with the Harappa Culture, the Indus Civilization, of c. 2500-1500 B.C. The natural consequences are a new date for the Rigveda which is commonly held to have started in c. 1500 B.C. a thousand years before the Sutras and a new understanding of the Indus Valley Civilization as at once a derivative, a development and a deviation from the Rigveda a millennium after this scripture's beginning in c. 3500 B.C.

However, the argument from karpāsa does not stand alone. Its import is buttressed from several other directions. Pointers from India are rendered sharper by significant suggestions caught from the Mesopotamian region with which the Indus Valley had commercial and cultural contacts. In agreement with several scholars but with an eye to more particulars, a name for this Civilization is discerned in the Sumerian records: Meluhha (pronounced

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Melukhkha). It is then matched - again with a closer scrutiny than given before by like-minded scholars - with a name applied from more inland India to people of the Indus Valley for the first time in the Satapatha Brahmana which just precedes the earliest Sutras and would thus synchronize by the new chronology most appropriately with the initial development of the Harppā Culture. The name is Mlechchha which becomes Melakha or Milakkha in Prākrit.

The riddle of the Indus script is also confronted and fairly long debate is held on the claims of Proto-Tamil and Proto-Prākrit for the language embodied in it. The latter is adjudged more likely to be the base though other elements as part of the superstructure are not brushed aside.

At the end, as a key-insight, the vocable karpāsa itself is disclosed as functioning under a transparent veil in several lists of Sumero-Akkadian words which are connected with the trade between the Harappa Culture and Sumer.

The above resume hints at only a few examples of the manifold research pursued along new lines with a sustained thoroughness.  Here is a book opening up vista on novel vista for the Indologist without sacrificing any of the scientific rigour with which honest investigation of the past is to be carried on.

Dr. Sankalia of international repute in archaeology writes, among other matters: "There is no doubt that Shri Sethna has made a very intelligent use of his deep knowledge of archaeology and Sanskrit literature." Apropos of the relationship between the Rigveda and the Harappa Culture, he ends his Introduction: "Shri Sethna's views deserve careful consideration and should stimulate further research in this vexed problem."

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The Problem of Aryan Origins

From an Indian Point of View

Every aspect of the problem has been examined with scholarly tools. All the theories of an Aryan invasion of India in c. 1500 B.C. have been considered in detail, including the latest and most impressive by the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola. In dating the Rigveda far earlier than the Indus Valley Civilisation, the author avails himself of Sri Aurobindo's insights into Indian history and Indian linguistics. To appreciate the sustained novelty of Sethna's researches on many fronts the reader is requested to set aside all preconception and prepare for a regular adventure in ancient history, covering not only North-Western India but also Baluchistan's recently excavated Mehrgarh as well as old Central-Asian regions.

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K.D. Sethna's book takes up "from an Indian Point of View" a cluster of important historical questions about India's most ancient past and formulates fresh answers to them ingreat detail with the temper of a scrupulous scholar.

At one time modern historians had no doubt that Aryans who were the authors of the Rigveda had invaded the indian subcontinent in the middle of the second millenium B.C. and overrun a primitive Dravidian population.  After the highly developed Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappa Culture, was discovered, the assumed in-coming Aryan were thought to have destroyed it around 1500 B.C. and, though the script of this Civlization has not yet been acceptably read, the general tendency is to consider it as couching an old form of the Dravidian language Tamil. Lately several historians have attributed the destruction of the Harappa culture to natural causes, but the belief that in the wake of that even foreigners who were associated with the Rigveda entered India is still very much in the air.

The first edition of Sethna's book dealt at length with this belief and its various corollariesasthey were conceived up to the date of its publication: 1980. Archaeology, linguistics and literature were pressed into service so as to leave no loose ends. In the process a comprehensive framework got built for the insights and researches of contemporary India's greatest seer and thinker: Sri Aurobindo.  One of the pet current ideas shows with his help as well as independently to lack any firm basis was the popular antimony of "Aryan" and "Dravidan" which has caused a good deal of bad blood in the country.

The second edition, extensively enlarged with five supplements, demonstrate for the period after 1980 - at still greater length - with the same tools of wide-spread scholarship the validity of the first edition's thesis. Whatever criticism, explicit or indirect has opposed this thesis has been unflinchingly faced. Now, at a number of point the penetrating vision of Sri Aurobindo comes into play again with even a more elaborate presentation of this study of the spiritual and cultural issues connected with the ancient Rigveda.  Special attention has been drawn in the longestsupplement to the well- known Finnish linguist and Indologist Asko Parpola who has recently made the most impressive attempt so far to revive the theory of an Aryan invasion in c. 1500 B.C. and to cope with the problem of Aryan origins.

Close study of the diverse arguments brought forward by Parpola has led Sethna to probe deeper into his own general position that the Rigveda is anterior to the Indus Valley Civilization by a broad margin. The result is both a minute scrutiny of several surpassing suggestion arising from the Rigveda and a many-aspected review of events dating back to the sixth millennium B.C. and covering not only India's antiquity but also the earliest formative stages of Baluchistan's Menrgam and of Central Asian regions.

To appreciate the sustained novelty of Sethna's researches under a strict scholarly discipline the reader is requested to set aside all preconceptions and prepare for a regular adventure to ancient history.

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Ancient India in a New light

How can one dare to doubt the present framework of ancient Indian history —especially when it relates to the period of Alexander's invasion of India and the period immediately succeeding it, the time currently allotted to Chandragupta Maurya and to his grandson Asoka with his numerous informative inscriptions? Do we not have to tackle even Greek and Latin annals derived from the Indica of Magasthenes, the ambassador sent by Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander's military heirs to the court of the Indian king whom these annals called "sandrocottus" which equates to "Chandragupta"?

Yes, but "Sandrocottus" is not necessarily a Maurya of that name. There is also the founder of the Imperial Guptas who had the same designation and ruled from the same city Pataliputra, know as "Palibothra" to the Greeks. When the traditional chronology of India herself is investigated we find in the midst of legendary matter a calculationwhich, while being unreliable in its early figures, is so adjusted that it bring the time of Chandragupta of the Imperial Guptas exactly to the Alexandrine epoch. And Magasthenes, on being closely scrutinised, yields striking evidence of religious conditions in India which make it impossible to consider his age the age preceding that of the great Buddhist emperor Asoka who also has supplied us with information on the same subject. From Megasthenes we gather too a count of kings going hack from "Sandrocottus", to a primal ruler whose reported achievements can be precisely matched with those of as Indian monarch whom tradition honours as ādi-rājā, "first king", and who is reached if wecount through the line of kings of Magadha back from the founder of the Imperial Guptas rather than from the first Maurya. The material for this counting is drawn from authorities on historial tradition, like F.E. Pargiter and others, who subscribe to the current chronology and are no partisans of a revolutionary disimilar one.

What may be regarded as a theoretical knock out of the current chronology is set forth on pp. 14-16. A sharp look at the very circumstances alleged by modern historians to be responsible for the building up of a mythical time-scheme by Purānic pundits can be shown as leading to the absurdity that these pundits, living face to face with Gupta kings of about the fifth century A.D. dated them over 600 years earlier! To make their dating tally with the actual time of these kings the latter should have to be started not in 320 A.D., as now claimed but towards the end of the fourth century B.C., soon after Alexander's Indian adventure.

But, of course, Asoka with his rock edicts seems as solidly established in chronology as they in topography against any theoretical reductio ad absurdum. How, without indulging in fanciful conjectures, does one get round his apparent suggestions of the post Alexandrine period with Greeks

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inside as well as outside his empire? A detailed attack on many fronts has been launched as part of the enormous revaluation undertaken by K.D. Sethna, a Parsi scholar of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry who has already published two studies: The Problem of Aryan Origin: From an Indian Point of View and Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, both of them convergingalong different and independent routes upon dating the Rigveda farily anterior to the Indus Valley Civilisation of c. 2500-1500 B.C.

However, the need for inversion of epochs argued in these books does not tempt the author of the new volume to be a fanatic of the antiquity-favouring Puranas, even while giving them a good deal of consideration, nor to plead for the traditional fixing of the Kaliyuga and the Bharata War at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. as do the nationalist-minded revisionists of history today.

Mr. Sethna has emphasised in his Introduction that if the chronological scheme of modern historians is to be challenged and changed on a cuefromancient sources, Indian or foreign, the work must be done with the same scientific temper and method - at once sceptical and enquiring, wide-sweeping and attentive to the smallest particulars- as the best of them bring to their field. His adherence to this ideal may be seen amply from the "Contents" of his book with their immense scope side by side with their points to the careful evaluation of every available minutia.

No student of history should have a closed outlook. So the author welcomes criticism and has himself tried to anticipate all that he could of it.  What he would he sorry about is indifference on the part of professional scholars. As his Introduction tells us his appeal is the old Themistoclean cry:

"Strike but hear!"

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