Some observations on Prof. T.V. Subba Rao’s essay

THE QUESTION OF LITERARY CRITICISM.

 

                                                                                                                        M.S.Ramesh

 

            At the very outset, let me make it clear that what I have tried to give here is neither a comment nor a summary of Prof. Subba Rao’s essay “The Question of Literary Criticism”, but just some observations.  In fact, at first I thought I could make a summary of the essay, but fearing that I’ll run the risk of misrepresenting it, I later withdrew.  But as one who has learnt something of his serious lectures and works, I think I can, in all modesty, make some observations.  To one for whom it is the first work of Prof. Rao to read, my observations, I believe, could be useful. They may well serve as warnings to those who, without having any acquaintance with his works, think they understand the essay and guidelines to those who, not knowing what to make of the essay, sense that there is something very serious in it.  What difficulties one would usually meet with while reading the essay, and how insurmountable they could prove for us all, is what I have tried to set down here.

 

            Prof. Subba Rao, to start with, is the most difficult and the most important, though the least known, of all the Indian writers.  As a professor, he is in every sense different from our scholarly Indian professors.  He will not, on any account, be academic or prate about this or that fashionable idea or theory when dealing with a work of art.  He wouldn’t even talk on any subject unless he masters it and acquires an inward sense of it.  He is supremely remarkable in applying his mind to literature – remarkable because he could evaluate every work of art, and what is more, he could fix its place historically.  Well, one has only to listen to his classes to feel his incomparable mastery of the subjects and his strong hold on life.  I’m afraid I’ll be accused of making arbitrary opinions if I go a step further and simply put it as “he is the only professor in India who talks sense”, yet, nevertheless, I feel it must not be left unsaid.  But I do know that it will not be in good taste if I go on lavishing praises on him without making any point; nor will it make any sense if I merely say he is difficult or important without substantiating in what sense he is so.  Moreover, there is every possibility of my being understood as a mere eulogist, because very few possess a knowledge of his works which will give content to my praise.  I mean I cannot presuppose any knowledge of his works, as no one thinks it worthwhile to take pains to understand them, and above all, his major and momentous work “The Fate of the Indian Mind” – the keystone of the whole history of India after the Western impact has not yet been published.  I, therefore, realise that I should be very careful not to make it seem a mere panegyric that comes so easy to a clever journalist.

 

            It has to be admitted that, however painful it may be, we have not had the experience of reading serious works.  (Of course, we think we read serious works.  I mean, we are liable to regard everything we read as serious.  Well, what can one do when one doesn’t have standards to assess what is a serious work and what is not?  One can only indulge in self-deception.  Some of us do read, let us concede, really serious works, but when it comes to understanding, mastering, stating and evaluating them, what comes out is mere prattle, shabby knowledge and ludicrous self-important assertions).  Nor have we been exposed to such a dialectical mode of stating as we find in Prof. Rao’s works.  With us, the habit of seeing things in isolation and discussing them as if they existed in a void is so habitual and, therefore, deep-rooted that it is very difficult for us to relate the question of literary criticism with those things that Prof. Rao relates.  It is, therefore, only too natural for us to be shocked or disappointed with the essay.

 

            Most of us may wonder what connection the question of literary criticism could have with the Western impact or Americanisation, the subjects Prof. Rao treats here at length.  They may hold that either the one or the other is quite beside the point when discussing a matter purely related to literature.  Let them be told that the profundity of this essay will be lost to those who do not have any knowledge of his sense of the Western impact on India, who could not see the difference between “Idea” and “Thought” as he perceives, and who fail to realise how harmful ideas could be.  Western impact is a subject that Prof. Rao is very deeply concerned with and so it plays the most crucial and central part in all his criticism.  He is so deeply concerned with it, not because he thinks it is an interesting subject to impress the people with, but because he perceives its cruel and disastrous hand in everything – in our relation to English, our educational system, our philistine ways of living and crude habits of thinking, all of them which simply make us brutal and inhuman monsters.  All these are related to our craze for bourgeois success which is too overwhelming to keep us sane and humane.  I mean it has made us so clever, so secretive and so cunning that we have ceased to be human beings.  Having become self-centred creatures, we are neither honest nor manly in our relationships.  After the Western impact, our structure of life has been so drastically changed that it has lost all its vitality and we now live as if we never had any culture and tradition.  We are so blindly engaged in a mad pursuit of success and easy-living that we are either ignorant of or indifferent, or insensitive to the values of life that are realised in living with vital contact with the past achievements.  It seems as if nothing can bring us to our senses.

 

            (True, there are some who, claiming to be traditional, reminisce about the past glories, but all that one gets from them is inane sentiments and conservative spirit – a spirit so doggedly and pig-headedly opposed to change that it would never allow our level of understanding to rise, and be equal to the complexities of the problems. They may, for instance, being unable to comprehend the march of modern history, simplify the class-antagonisms.  (Some are so blind as not to have any belief in the existence of class struggle itself).  They may have sympathy for the working class, but as their sympathy is devoid of thought, it cannot lead to anything better.  All that they are capable of is exhorting and appealing to society at large, and thereby, hoping to put everything to rights)

 

It is most unfortunate but not so surprising that we have failed to see the Western impact in its right perspective. Why did we fail?  How come that we were so easily carried away by it?  Couldn’t we have dealt with it intelligently?  Well, we could have, atleast to some extent, if we had resisted our attraction of the then industrially advancing West - a world where nothing but success matters.  But the attraction being too powerful and we being too meek to resist it, we not only succumbed to it but went to the extent of becoming Anglophiles.  Our foolish adoration of the West, combined with our ignorance of the Indian past, nay, our hostility to the Indian past, turned us the most unhistorical beings in the world.

 

So the need for our being intelligent about the Western impact is the need to be historical.  To be unintelligent about it is to be unhistorical.  To be unhistorical is to be undialectical.  This, Prof. Rao, effectively brings to our consciousness by showing how we have all along been misled in our account of the Western impact.  It is now a commonplace to look upon the changes that India underwent due to the West as for better.  But how many things this general account of the change overlooks!  No one even stops to consider that there could be something wrong in the commonplace ideas about the impact.  It is because we have not disciplined ourselves ‘to see things as they are in themselves’.  Prof. Rao could make us see the Western impact as it ought to be seen provided we are ready to give ourselves over to the discipline required for it.

 

But had Prof. Rao stopped there - I mean had he contented himself with seeing the impact as it is in itself, he would only have a limited relevance to us.  But he is too perceptive a writer to stop with that.  His dialectical method of thinking would not, at any rate, allow him to rest satisfied with the mere stating of the conditions as they are.  That is the point here.  He is all the more relevant to us, not only because he states the consequences of the Western impact as such and such, but more so because he perceives how the case could hardly have been different with us.

 

With the Western impact came into existence such conditions as promote democracy, individualism, private enterprise, free trade and the right of having private property and accumulating it.  The moment one enters into this world one gets an itch for bourgeois success.  The mind begins to plan and very soon it becomes habitual for it to scheme against this or that.  Planning for bourgeois success becomes no longer a vice but a custom.  The tragedy is not so much as it becomes habitual but that it passes off as ‘thinking’.  Well, what impulse but ‘the idea of getting on’ could guide one in this world of philistinism?  What desirable and enviable things there could be apart from successful and easy-going life?  All other things such as degrees, education and science are of value in so far as they tend to promote this idea - to materialize our dreams of being better off than others and achieving an enviably respectable status in society.  But for this idea no one would care a damn even for the study of English, which is pursued now with too maddening a desire.  Our educational system itself is so carefully designed as to keep us imbeciles.  Our educationists are really very clever in that they make it (our education) seem as imparting veritable knowledge, whereas in reality, it corrupts our mind and does incalculable harm to human life.  It can never alter our mind – it can never make us intelligent – no, it can never make us better human beings.  It can only make us class-bound and inhuman, as it is given over to the interests of the bourgeoisie, and not to the interests of life.

 

What is to the point here is any attempt to get hold of the arguments that Prof. Rao makes when criticizing our ways of living and habits of thinking must begin with a true understanding of his sense of the Western impact on India.  Western impact unfolds so many things to him that it is very very important for us to grasp them in all their complexities and subtleties.  It will not do justice to his purpose if we, under the pretext of understanding his profound perceptions, try to put them into simpler ideas or reduce them to some impressive formulae.  But we’ll naturally be tempted to do so, because we want to have knowledge without being ready to meet the demands it makes - without being ready to make the sacrifices it demands.  That shows our lack of real interest.  We so readily resort to ideas and theories of any kind, for they make us feel as if we had mastered everything.  We are up to any kind of subterfuge that helps us gloss over our inabilities and inanities.  We don’t want to be self-critical, we don’t like to be exposed either.  We are almost indifferent to any suggestion that tells us that we are also, like all other men, fallible.  That is to say, we always think and like to think, we cannot but be infallible.  We are hostile to any remark that exposes our limitations.  We would rather cherish illusions than change ourselves by admitting our limitations and by being self-critical.      

    

            I am not trying to make hard work of Prof. Rao’s essay.  I’m just trying to show how our conditions of living and habits of reading will make his works inaccessible to us.  The question is can we, with such a spirit as this which makes us blind to the values of life, see his point?  No, we cannot.  At best we can, with all our formidable degrees and scholarly manners, get it wrong.  Let me put it this way: Prof. Rao’s sense of the Western impact will be too trying for us, not only because it is entirely different from the usual, customary conception of the impact but also because it is out and out opposed to it.  There is no common ground in which we can meet and understand him.  I mean there is nothing common between his interests and ours.  So, nothing could be more exacting for us than his works, especially works that produce thought on the Western impact

 

Our ability of understanding itself is called in question, because by the very nature of its interests, our mind overlooks so many things which it ought not to.  We can deny this, but our denial would mean nothing if we fail in relevant arguments.  If we are honest, we should not hedge this question:  Could we have found anything wrong with Lionel Trilling’s address to the American middle class as Prof. Rao had?  (‘Our present day educated, enlightened, progressive middle class’).  No, we couldn’t have.  We would only have been, like the American middle class, flattered and would have admired Trilling all the more for flattering us.  We could never have made intelligent comments on it as Prof. Rao had.  But we could have atleast sensed that there is something false in Trilling’s tone if we had had a different life with different interests -- interests that could keep us from being carried away by such calculated praises -- interests that could make us see that it is dishonest to flatter a class that is swamped with such drives as are life-negating.  It would only be dodging the question if we say it is a matter of opinion.  It is not a mere question of tastes or opinion.  It is more a question of standards; it is even more a question of what interests form our standards.  Unless we realize that self-interests cannot make us perceptive, there is no question of our benefiting from the study of literature—there is no question of our becoming intelligent.  If we cannot see through Trilling’s knavery we cannot make sense of our study of literature.  I say we are unfit to study literature.  But if we could see the relation between our interests and our study of literature, literature would mean so much to the health of our mind; it would become a matter of life to us.  We would then know how profound Prof. Rao’s criticism of the modern American life and critics   is.

 

But again the trouble is no one can get us to be intelligent about our life, for we are satisfied with how we are.  (Of course, we do become dissatisfied when all our efforts of catching up with our successful neighbours fail miserably.)   We are like those two philistines in Arnold’s ‘The Function of Criticism’ who self-complacently boast of the superiority of their race and nation.  We long to have more and more of degrees, more and more of possessions and status. We want this, and only this life.  The more and more we pursue this ‘life of satisfying drives’, the more and more we will be distanced from ‘the discipline of thought and perception’.  Thus we have not one but too many difficulties to overcome.  In fact, all our possibilities of understanding Prof. Rao turn on the intensity of our realisation that there is something wrong with our ways of living—there is something to be ashamed of our turgid language, priggish behaviour and snobbish habits of reading and thinking.  Once we realize this, we may get over atleast some difficulties that confront us when reading him.  He will then, if we resolutely go out of our way to understand him, take us a long way and show what it is that is wrong with us.

 

Reading Prof. Rao is a serious discipline.  No one, like him, could cleanse us of our silly ideas and crude beliefs.  All other writers cannot but mislead us, for they themselves are wanting in seriousness and in a sense of history.  The test is whether they can be relied upon to act as a force of mind.  Some may seem very profound, and may even have the same concern as Prof. Rao.  But ultimately they will fail us, for they do not have a centre and as such cannot offer us one.  They may pretend to possess more than what they really have, but their statements, being linear, will betray their level.  We must, by way of discipline, acquire the ability to see the difference between ‘linear mode of stating’ and ‘dialectical mode of stating’ in order that we may not be misled or cheated by simulations.  In dialectical mode of stating, each and every statement has a force of its own—it has so much force that it can lead to more and more statements.  No statement will be unqualified in this mode of stating.  Only he that has understood a problem in all its intricacies can make statements with qualifications.  Linear stating, with ideas and theories being an integral part of it, can take us nowhere.      It takes refuge in observation, statistical data and sophistry and its arguments are therefore quite naturally plausible.  But we are used to reading and writing linear statements only, and so dialectical stating is always lost upon us.  What is more sickening is we do not even suspect that there could be something better than what we are subject to.  So when confronted with a different mode of stating our inability breaks forth. 

 

But nothing can humiliate us—I mean we are too arrogant to feel ashamed of our poor abilities and indisciplined learning.  For instance, we may be at a loss what to make of Prof. Rao’s arguments but we would not, in any case, admit it—we do not have the grace to admit it.  On the contrary, we will give ourselves airs and criticize them knowingly as being highly repetitive. Whoever goes through his works, whether he understands them or not, will too readily apply the word ‘tautological’ (rather a big word indeed) to them to look critical.  Some will cleverly shrug them off to appear more pontifical.  Well, it cannot be otherwise with those who are always on the look-out for ideas and theories in a work.  Even Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ or Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’ would signify nothing to such minds.  They would only strike them as tiresomely repetitive. 

 

What happens when we look for ideas and theories in a work can be drawn from the bulk of nonsense written on literature.  First, we cannot be close to the text -- we cannot follow the minute details of the work – we cannot help losing the thread of the arguments.  And above all, we will certainly lose sight of the passionate urge behind the works.  What sense will it make if we lose sight of the fact that Prof. Rao’s works are the result of his struggle against academism, journalism, and philistinism? -- all those that sway the general mind.

 

It is very difficult to be sane under the conditions promoted by the Western impact and Americanisation.  But we must be sane, or else, we cannot be human.  Prof. .Rao offers us a discipline that could enrich our sensibility and safeguard intelligence against all corrupting forces.

 

                                                        

                                                                       

 

 

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