Evolving India

Can Indians write English poetry?

The Indian Mind and the English Language

W. B. YEATS is said to have " pooh-poohed" the idea that an Indian could write English poetry of a high order. It is indeed true that the subtle inwardness one feels towards one's mother-tongue is likely to be missing .when an Indian attempts to express himself in English. But is it impossible to have it? And is it advisable always for us to fall back upon our vernaculars and leave English to Irishmen like Yeats?

Reading most of the verse turned out by English-speaking Indians we are almost persuaded that we shall never succeed in reaching a high standard. But here lurks a fallacy. Read the bulk of poetry written in Gujerati or Bengali—or, for that matter, in English by Englishmen themselves—and you will have nearly the same impression of decorated barrenness. The trouble, therefore, lies not so much in our using the English language as in the difficulty of being a true poet in any language. Of course, it is more marked where a foreign tongue is concerned, yet it is not necessarily insuperable. And for Yeats in particular to have overlooked this is curious short sight.

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The true language of Ireland is not English. English was imposed on her as part of the British rule and it began to spread as a learnt language and not as a native growth of race. A situation similar to India's was Ireland's, making for a degree of check on genuine poetic utterance. May not this situation be one out of several factors owing to which, whatever the prose achievements, there was no Irish poet of authentic first-rate power before Yeats came on the scene? In the pre-Yeatsian period, the peak was Thomas Moore with his Irish Melodies', but the peak was pretty far from the free airs of heaven. Touching as are those poems, they have little breath of magical articulation. They have a graceful diction, but it is tastefully dressed-up commonplace and no true cadence of the soul of the language. Drawing-room ballads they are and no songs trembling with natural inevitable intensity of expression. If we remember Moore, it is mainly for the tunes to which his poems were prettily matched, not for any word and rhythm of intrinsic rarity. But be the pre-Yeatsian poetry what it may, the fact remains that a foreign tongue has at last given birth in Ireland to a voice from its deeper levels of word and rhythm. Nor is Yeats a glorious freak: he has a great compatriot in A. E. and a fine one in James Cousins, not to mention Seumas O'Sullivan and Dorothy Wellesley. Ireland whose native language was Gaelic has triumphantly "arrived" in English poetry. No

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doubt, Yeats and his fellow-singers heard English at their mothers' knee, even though they may not have imbibed it with their mothers' milk. Most Indians cannot claim such a happy fate; but let us not forget that English has been domiciled here for two centuries now and is a compulsory element in all our education, constantly interspersing in daily life our vernaculars. Besides, the Indian mind has a marked faculty for assimilating languages, an innate responsiveness to diverse forms of significant sound. If this mind masters the English poetical technique and is receptive to that gift of the Gods, inspiration, why should it not ride to perfection the English Pegasus? It is understandable that we do not often attempt the feat, since our own languages come more easily to us, but Yeats has definitely not said the last word—our poets shall have many beautiful words to say which would disprove his sweeping contention.

So much for Yeats's argument. But there is another which a critic lately flung against a book by an Indian of poems steeped in mystical vision and experience. The critic remarked that the poems left a vague feeling of inadequacy because they were written by an Indian in a foreign tongue not indeed ungrammatically or unidiomatically or with imcompetent technique but with a certain Indian-ness of thought which fitted like a round peg the square hole, as it were, of the English language.

In support of this subtle standpoint the name of

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that famous interpreter of literature, Middleton Murry, was invoked. Murry had delivered himself on poems not precisely of a mystical type: he had read in them as typically Indian and typically un-English a luxuriant effeminacy, a backboneless love-reverie on a rich divan. How far the epic Valmiki and Vyasa or even the voluptuous Kalidasa with his bold imagination and firm shaping hand could be charged with these so-called Indian qualities is a question merely y requiring to be asked in order to be at once brushed aside. Nor did the author on whom Murry passed judgment Show such , Indianness. But the fact is significant that Murry jibbed at the poems of Manmohan Ghose on the score of temperament , Manmohan Ghose had been taken to England in his early boyhood and had ' passed through an English school and university. Reading him, Murry praised his knowledge of English verse-technique and declared his knowledge of the English tongue to be notable: only, he could nothing himself to consider the work good English poctry. T his he attributed to his impression that English words were being used to convey ideas and attitudes foreign to their own basic genius and tradition.

At the first look one may tend to regard the general issue raised here as superficial and cry out : "what does it matter if it seems that an author has an Indian mind? so long as 10 was good poetry, who cares whether the the good pending so

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English-minded?" I am afraid the real point was that if poetry written in English was not English-minded it was also not good. For, good poetry is a perfect fusion of substance and form. If the poet's vision is not assimilated by his words, his form becomes somehow faulty, he fails in finality of expression. Of course all poetry has a certain aura, so to speak, of the unexpressed and even the inexpressible. There is, for instance, an unfathomable depth, an undertone and overtone of consciousness in Wordsworth's phrase about Newton:

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

But Middleton Murry would not complain that here there is something forced into the words, which they do not naturally tend to hold: their basic genius and tradition have been harmoniously pressed to a particular end, not contradicted and baulked by a meaning, an attitude, a psychology that are un-English. If there were an un-Englishness of mind, then according to Murry the words would not be potent enough to make that perfectly crystallized centre round which the unexpressed and the inexpressible could hang like a halo. Without that centre, poetry would leave a vague feeling of inadequacy and never be absolutely first-rate.

This implies that no Indian can write first-rate English verse—for the one fundamental and all-undermining reason that his psychology does not

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fit the English-minded words he is using. It is quite true that a lot of frothy or else insipid verse is born of Indians taking to the English Muse. That is because the language is not fully at their fingertips and has not got under their skin. But the Murryesque position is surely most wrong-headed. Can we say that the English Muse has one definite basic psychology? When the Romantic Movement caught English poets, did not all the hoary-headed classicists find the result un-English in temper as well as style? How bewildered was even Matthew Arnold by the un-English ethereality that ran riot in Shelley's work! And what about that pre-Romantic Blake? Are his "embryo ideas" and "uninvolved images" and "vague mystic grandeurs" English? Is it English of Wordsworth to poetise the exaltations of pantheism? Is the early Yeats English—Yeats of the dim poignancies and the rich obscurities? Nobody can affirm that the average Englishman has the foggiest notion of what A.E. is singing about; yet A.E.'s poems are a living language, English written by an Irishman with the soul of an Indian. Can we or can we not stamp as English the Bible's poetic passages with their lavish oriental imagination their gorgeous Hebraic religiosity? The English language is the most composite in the world— influences Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, Greek, Latin, Italian and Hebraic have gone into its making as well as mind. It has a capacity to assimilate everything, it can take any colour of

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thought, shade of suggestion, glow of feeling, pattern of experience and turn them into truly English effects—that is, effects achieved with perfect adequacy by English words. What has happened in the past can happen again. Would it not be stupendous superficiality to imply that even a praiseworthy knowledge of English poetical technique and a notable command over the English language at the disposal of Indian inspiration could fail to produce good English poetry? "There ain't no sich person" as English poetry with one simple and uniform body and soul!

The only genuine criticism possible about a foreign poet handling English is that his knowledge of the verse-technique and the natural idiom is not at all remarkable and therefore gives rise to ineffective poetry, in spite of what ever talent or genius he may have for self-expression in his own tongue. Granted die expressive gift and that intimate knowledge, English verse with its infinite plasticity of temper and tone is out and out the best medium for any living vision, any momentous experience. Does the Murryesque critic realise that he is not merely condemning Indians but' also the English language? If, while genuinely appreciating the substance of that book of mystical and spiritual poems as rare if not new, he had gone berserk and, though conceding to the author the rudiments of grammar, accused him of not knowing balance of construction, vividness of phrase or

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subtlety of metrical rhythm, the argument would have been on grounds that might be plausible. But to charge English words with impotence in expressing fully what may be new or foreign or not commonly appreciable is to forget all innovators and to fall into an error that should have been swept away for good when Symons and Gosse sponsored Sarojini Naidu or Fowler-Wright and Laurence Binyon hailed Harindranath Chattopadhyaya.

It is curious to remember that Gosse's advice to Sarojini Naidu amounted to saying: "If you, an Indian with such a flair for our tongue and our literary technique, want to write good English poetry, do not echo English thought and vision but write utterly as an Indian." Surely, if English words were impervious to Indianness of mind, Gosse's advice would be egregious nonsense. The fact is that English words have so diverse a genius and tradition, so multiple and complex a psychological history that they are fit for any use. Much more than any other language they could be mot-toed with the Roman poet's phrase: "Nothing that is human is alien to me." It is not improbable that an Indian who has mastered English will still be felt by Englishmen as having a slight peculiarity of expression which is not hundred per cent English in turn and tone. It will, however, be critical misfire to forget the numberless foreign strains in the composition of English speech. Each strain, when it first entered English, brought its slight peculiarity.

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In our own day, Conrad's novels are not hundred per cent English in turn and tone: does any one dream of pushing them down from the high shelf of great style and great literature? Slight outward peculiarities do not matter. I should go to the extent of saying: "Even marked peculiarities do not matter. Haven't you heard of Meredithese and Carlyle's? Carlyle often writes English with a German turn and tone. Some critics even condemn Milton for corrupting the genius of the English language by his Latinism of construction in Paradise Lost. Yet Milton is generally put in the frontline of English poets. Today neither Australia nor British Africa is innocent of slight peculiarities, whereas American peculiarities are not slight but whalish! The English tongue has spread over the whole globe and is no longer insular. So long as Indians do not write incorrectly or ignorantly but with a fine technical and sympathetic grip on their medium, they can grow masters of English. And the least of all obstacles to their mastery will be the Indian consciousness they bring to their self-expression. For, one of the most natural tendencies of the basic genius of English words in poetry is the mystical and spiritual sense that is afire in Indian poets."

What can be labelled as un-English in these writers? One sole thing: English poets have not displayed en masse and in all its bearings the type of inspiration which shines out in the recent work

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of Sri Aurobindo or those who have come under his influence. But a prelude to it is already there; hence that inspiration would be a flowering of what is native in essence and not foreign to English words. Even if the inspiration were - entirely new, the English language by its multifariousness would prove competent to assimilate and convey it. Nowhere can we play Canute to such a language: "Thus far and no further." When, on the contrary, we see that the quick manifold suggestion, either delicate or powerful, which is mystically and spiritually the most desirable as an expressive mode, is the mode par excellence of the English tongue, the mode in which it excels all other modern languages, including the Indian ones, and when we see in addition that in recent times this potentiality has been evoked in the service of mystical and spiritual vision and emotion by English poets with a glory of insight and a sense of vibrating vastness that are unique—when we see these two factors— the Murryesque dictum grows still hollower.

The very quotation I have made from Wordsworth—

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone—

is not merely a crowning moment of English poetry but at the same time, for all its reference to the scientist Newton, a culminating spiritual moment which conjures up the atmosphere and rhythm of the ancient Upanishads. A Rishi of old seems to

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intone that ample and profound verse. A Rishi again comes to life with Shelley's

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Among earlier English poets, there is the true Upanishadic touch in Vaughan's

1 saw Eternity the other nigbt

Like a great ring of pure and endless light

All calm as it was bright,

or in those lines that open up a sudden Vedantic depth in even the most secular of England's first-rate poets, Shakespeare:

... the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

In our own day we have several voices, both Irish and English, bringing the ache that we find in the Vedic seers. The intensest is A.E.'s:

Some for beauty follow long Flying traces—some there be Seek Thee only for a song; I to lose myself in Thee.

Truly and completely English such utterances are, seeds of divine fire within the English genius, seeds that have not been developed on a large scale or to

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their utmost variety of fruitfulness but are none the less alive for that and none the less natural.

Here we must pause a moment and ponder the two sides of the phenomenon: on the one hand the livingness and naturalness of the mystical and spiritual motif in the polyharmony of the English poetic genius and on the other the falling short by that motif of its own integral fulfilment. The medium is there, ready to hand, a most plastic and profound and vivid instrument for mystical and spiritual self-expression and yet one feels that the supreme poet of the Infinite and the Eternal in English has still to come. Perhaps he will never come from among Englishmen. Certain traits of the English temperament might stand in the way of his advent. But the wonderful instrument is now within the reach of a race to which the Infinite and the Eternal is the very life-breath. All that responds rapturously in the English poets to the One that is everywhere, all that bears a thrilled instinct of the Hound of Heaven, all that leaps colorfully to the Immortal Beauty in its world-wandering, all that is a flaming contact with the Divine Dweller within and with the hidden realms of the Gods is raised to a rare intensity and immensity among the Yogic aspirants of India and moves as a subtle concealed current everywhere in the general life of the country that lies at the foot of the Himalayas. The Indian, with the Himalayas of the Spirit in his national history and consciousness, can alone carry English poetry

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to a summit of spiritual fulfilment. Surely the prevalence of the English language in India bears the stamp of destiny!

It is, therefore, eminently desirable that Indian poets who are at home in English should write from the Yogic heart of their country. Whatever vague feeling of inadequacy there may result must be traced to the average reader's difficulty in absorbing Yogic inspiration and not to any unbridgeable gulf between Indian thoughts and English words. In its full form this afflatus from dimensions of consciousness so far explored only by fits and starts or in their first aspects will constitute a new age by the sustained height and depth and breadth it will reveal. The English tongue will bear a taste of the occult and the Unknown as never before. That will be an Indian extension of its basic genius. Still, the fact remains that the extension will be all the more easy and abundant because it will employ the super-suggestive quality residing in the language of England and complete a vital trend of English poetry itself. English poets as well as the singers of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita triumph in essence when Sri Aurobindo, summing up his Yogic ideal, chants the mantra:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme Delight-Life that meets the Eternal with close breast— An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite— Force one with unimaginable rest.

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