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PARTIAL RECALL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Essays on Literature and Poetrv Literary History Nine Enclosures Distance in Statute Miles Middle Earth The Trilnsfiguring Places Translations The Absent Traveller: Prakrit LOZJCPoetry from the Girhisaptaiati ofsatavahana Hala Songs of Kabir Edited Books Twenq Indian Poems The Oxford India Anthology of Tiir,elz~eModern Indian Poets Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar PARTIAL RECALL BY THE SAME AUTHOR Essays on Literature and Poetrv Literary History Nine Enclosures Distance in Statute Miles Middle Earth The Trilnsfiguring Places Translations The Absent Traveller: Prakrit LOZJCPoetry from the Girhisaptaiati ofsatavahana Hala Songs of Kabir Edited Books Twenq Indian Poems The Oxford India Anthology of Tiir,elz~eModern Indian Poets Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar Published by PERMANENT BLACK 'Hirnalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, for Ranikhet 263645 Vandana and Palash [email protected] Distributed by ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LTD Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna ISBN 81-7824-3 10-5 Typeset in Agararnond by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075 Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, New Delhi 110092 Published by PERMANENT BLACK 'Hirnalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, for Ranikhet 263645 Vandana and Palash [email protected] Distributed by ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LTD Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna ISBN 81-7824-3 10-5 Typeset in Agararnond by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 110075 Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, New Delhi 110092 Contents Introduction Descendants Partial Recall Death of a Poet Mela I I The Bradman Class The Emperor Has No Clothes Towards a History of Indian Literature in English Looking for A.K. Ramanujan Street Music: A Brief History What is an Indian Poem? Translating Kabir Bibliographical Note Introduction Br~adl~speaking,my two preoccupations in the essays that follow have been the nature of the multilingual imagination and the invisible web of connections that lies beneath a literature, the stories that are hidden behind tHe stories we read. The two pre- occupations, which really are one, are guided less by a desire to interpret the pattern in the carpet than to understand how it came to acquire the shape it did. While my writerly soul has travelled through realms of gold, the body, for at least part of the time, has been immured in Allahabad. Three of the essays, 'Descendants', 'Partial Recall', and 'Mela', are glimpses into this other world that I've inhabited. 'Towards a History of Indian Literature in English' ends with the examples ofwriters who, when they looked in the mirror in the hallway, saw more than their own smiling faces staring back at them. I. Allan Sealy saw Henry Derozio, Nirad Chaudhuri saw Toru Dutt, Salman Rushdie saw G.V. Desani. I had hoped that the awareness of their precursors shown by these writers would lead critics to explore the idea further. A decade after writing the essay I realize that this was wishful thinking on my part. A literaryland- scape is made up of much more than isolated works of literature; it requirescritical scrutiny, intelligent encouragement, and credible evaluation, but there is such a scarcity of these that the Indian one looks more barren than ever before. If there are any productive 2 Partial Recall Introduction 3 intellectual communities living in the scrub, whether nomadic or which, if he happens to be an authority accustomed to command settled, freelancers or attached to universities, they've kept them- respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root selves well hidden from view. of all excellence. The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those A year later the subject was still on his mind, only this time he who teach in the country's English departments, thc academic broadened the scope of the attack: community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new But while books and newspapers aredaily pouring from the press, the introductions, histories, canon-shaping (orcanon-brealung) antho- quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its logies, readable translations, revaluations, exhaustive bibliographies bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part [of]what is published is absolute devoted to individual authors, and critical essays that, because of rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall the excellence of their prose, become as much a part of the lite- have to speak in terms of high pyaise, but the number of these is so ratureas any significant novel or poem. Little ofthis has happened. small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomiced Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards re- deeming the character of the whole. .The case ofcriticism is worse. there. A year goes by, then a decade, and nothing appears to tell We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature the reading public why the author deserves to be read and how he in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. ('Bengali fitted into the larger story of a literature to which he spent a Literature') lifetime contributing. Whether it's Srinivas Rayaprol, or Nissim Ezekiel, or A.K. Ramanujan, or Dom Moraes, or Arun Kolatkar, What Bankim said about the state of Bengali literature in 1870 orAgha Shahid Ali, or G.S. Sharat Chandra, or Gopal Honnalgere, could be said about many Indian literatures, particularly the one or Kamala Das, or Dilip Chitre, to mention only the poets, the in English, in 20 1 1. Books continue to daily pour from the press story's been the same. And the dead writer is now rwice dead. Ifwe and some of them are reviewed. The reviews here, unlike reviews can't read or rediscover our contemporaries, what chance of doing elsewhere, seldom connect the title to anything that's been done this for our classics? previously in that genre by others or by the same author. Reading 'Intelligent criticism may be said to be a thing unknown to the them, you'd think that the book had emerged from a litkrary Native Press', bemoaned Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya in 'A nowhere, which it hasn't, though headed for nowhere, 'in the utter Popular Literature for Bengal' (1870): absence of anything like intelligent criticism', it certainly is. The first few weeks in which the reviews appear are, for the book, like There is some inherent defect in the Bengali character which renders the task of distinguishing the beautiful and the true from the gaudy the first few weeks of a newborn's life. This is the period of rampant and the false a task of even greater difficulty than the higher effort infanticide, a time when books are killed not by hostile reviews but of creation. This deficiency in the culture of the cultivated Bengali by meaningless ones. This happens all the time. The review of reacts on the literature. The blundering critic often passes a verdict, an Oriya novel in the literary section of The Hindu of 6 August 2 Partial Recall Introduction 3 intellectual communities living in the scrub, whether nomadic or which, if he happens to be an authority accustomed to command settled, freelancers or attached to universities, they've kept them- respect on literary matters, misleads by its error and strikes at the root selves well hidden from view. of all excellence. The great betrayal of our literature has been primarily by those A year later the subject was still on his mind, only this time he who teach in the country's English departments, thc academic broadened the scope of the attack: community whose job it was to green the hillsides by planting them with biographies, scholarly editions, selections carrying new But while books and newspapers aredaily pouring from the press, the introductions, histories, canon-shaping (orcanon-brealung) antho- quality of our current literature is by no means proportioned to its logies, readable translations, revaluations, exhaustive bibliographies bulk. In fact, by far the greatest part [of]what is published is absolute devoted to individual authors, and critical essays that, because of rubbish. There are several modern Bengali books of which we shall the excellence of their prose, become as much a part of the lite- have to speak in terms of high pyaise, but the number of these is so ratureas any significant novel or poem. Little ofthis has happened. small in comparison with the mass of publications yearly vomiced Writers die, are mourned by other writers, and the matter ends forth by the Bengali press, that they go but a little way towards re- deeming the character of the whole. .The case ofcriticism is worse. there. A year goes by, then a decade, and nothing appears to tell We can hardly hope for a healthy and vigorous Bengali literature the reading public why the author deserves to be read and how he in the utter absence of anything like intelligent criticism. ('Bengali fitted into the larger story of a literature to which he spent a Literature') lifetime contributing. Whether it's Srinivas Rayaprol, or Nissim Ezekiel, or A.K. Ramanujan, or Dom Moraes, or Arun Kolatkar, What Bankim said about the state of Bengali literature in 1870 orAgha Shahid Ali, or G.S.

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