Towards Defining a Critical Tradition of English Studies in India1

Dr H P Shukla
Professor of English
Kumaun University
Nainital
I
Friends and fellow wayfarers, allow me to begin with an apology. I was halfway
through the writing of this paper when the Mumbai attacks took place, and for the next two
weeks I could not come back to it. I had never been so deeply affected by anything in my
living memory. It was as if not only my country but my own body, my very being had been
invaded by an all-denying evil. I had decided to discuss our cultural roots and the possibility
of defining a critical tradition in this country. But now, in the aftermath of Mumbai attacks, it
seemed idle, even trivial to indulge in intellectual speculations.
For one thing, the Mumbai events thoroughly exposed us as a nation and people. One
could see how utterly immoral and corrupt we had become: it was no use blaming a particular
segment, the whole had become rotten. A sick body invites malicious attacks. When we lose
our sense of values, moral turpitude is the price we pay. Values have their roots in the vision
and insight of a people, in the depths of their tradition. In aping the West in all matters of
theory and systems, of physical and metaphysical insights, we have moved away from our
roots. If the western nations today are not as sickeningly corrupt as we, it is not because their
systems are better, but because they are rooted in their tradition. They have their ground to
stand upon. We have lost ours, because our ruling elite bargained for something else. I have
studied Aristotle and Bacon for well over 35 years, and haven’t learnt a thing from them. I
spend a few hours learning the nature of rasa or figuring out a verse in Sanskrit and I connect
to my roots, to my soul. A memory returns, of imperishable values, sanatana iva nitya
nutanah, and I am whole again.
Thus do I return to my present task, and discover how our elders, from Sri Aurobindo
to C D Narasimhaiah, have for a hundred years been goading us to see the nature of this
malignant corruption growing deep within our national psyche. Ours is indeed a difficult era,
ridden with complexity and antithetical pulls. In such times to reconstruct our identity,
national or otherwise, demands its pound of flesh. We have to contend with a neo-colonial
cultural warfare which threatens to demolish every edifice that seems ancient or medieval,
and aims to supplant it by Euro-American thought-systems as the predominant culture of the
world. Globalization, together with the modern technology, is here to stay. But our trap is
much deeper. Not only technology, we have willy-nilly imported a hundred other systems

1
Valedictory address delivered at the 53rd All India English Teachers’ Conference, Haridwar, 18-20 Dec 2008.
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from the West – economics, democracy, education, to name a few. In our craving for
everything western, we miss the commonsensical wisdom that all systems are products of
theory and all theories a product of their source ontology. When you import a system, you
also import the mind which created that system. But the daemon assigned to us at our birth –
call it soul or spirit – is rooted in a typically Indian ontology and has its own perception of
Being and becoming. It refuses to wed a western bride. This explains our unease and the
raison d’être of this august gathering to debate the nature of “Indian Sensibility in Indian
English Literature”.
However, we are not the first generation of Indian teachers of English facing such a
moral crisis. It was well foreseen a hundred years ago, if not more, and the battle has been
fought by many in a long illustrious line. This heroism of purpose and effort to shatter the
confines of our cultural murk is what constitutes a major tradition of Indian criticism in
English. What are the footprints left behind by the great ones? Mahajano yen gatah sa
panthaah. To find out if any such tradition exists, we shall consider some representative texts
from the four of our major critics: Sri Aurobindo, K R Srinivasa Iyengar, Sisirkumar Ghose,
and C D Narasimhaiah.
The Guru teaches not by precepts but by example. Sri Aurobindo was perhaps the
greatest embodiment of Indian Sensibility in modern times; but the others too revealed the
same Spirit in their various legendary achievements of a lifetime – K R Srinivasa Iyengar
almost singlehandedly established the Indian Writing in English as the core component of
English Studies in India; Sisirkumar Ghose, whose ‘article on Mysticism in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica continues to be reprinted,’ was not only Santiniketan’s but India’s
teacher-ambassador to the outside world; and C D Narasimhaiah has left behind a priceless
gift in Dhvanyaloka as one of the most vibrant centres of Indian studies in this country.

II
Sri Aurobindo was sent to England at the age of seven where for fourteen years he
received, on his own testimony, “an entirely occidental education without any contact with
the culture of India and the East.” So when he returned home in 1892, he devoted the next
fourteen years to a methodical study of Sanskrit and Indian classics to make up for that gap in
his intellectual culture. At the same time, what was more important, he was also working for
the upliftment of his country, and not only politically. In 1907, he resigned from his
professorship at Baroda to openly lead the national movement for freedom. He also started
the weekly review, Karmayogin in whose pages The National Value of Art first appeared in

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1909. He wrote with fire about the greatness of his motherland and with a stifled cry in his
heart diagnosed her present illness.
The National Value of Art was written with an express purpose, to raise the nation
sphinx-like from ashes. The author brings forward his knowledge of ancient Greek and other
cultures to blend with the greater truths of his own culture. The opening sentence is rife with
suggestiveness:
Thereis a tendency in modern times to depreciate the value of the beautiful and overstress the
value of the useful, a tendency curbed in Europe by the imperious insistence of an agelong
tradition of culture and generous training of the aesthetic perceptions; but in India, where we
have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture
and tradition, it is corrected only by the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy,
submerged but not yet destroyed in the temperament of the people. (231)
It clearly points out the dangers ahead and marks the strength of European cultures to stem
this crisis. But alas, because of her “mercenary and soulless education” India has no such
strength. The only hope for her is “the stress of imagination, emotion and spiritual delicacy,
submerged but not yet destroyed in the temperament of the people.”
To know our present ills, we need to understand ourselves, our place in the hierarchy
of cosmic spaces. Sri Aurobindo traces the evolution of human society and individual from an
animal state where ‘food, shelter and raiment’ are all too important, to a state of clouded citta
seething with “love, hatred, vindictiveness, anger, attachment, jealousy and the host of similar
passions,” to the final, albeit rare, rise of the thoughtful man from thought-sensations, manas
to the buddhi and beyond. But,
With most men the buddhi is full of manas and the manas of the lower strata. The majority of
mankind do not think, they have only thought-sensations; a large minority think confusedly,
mixing up desires, predilections, passions, prejudgments, old associations and prejudices with
pure and disinterested thought. Only a few, the rare aristocrats of the earth, can really and
truly think. (233-34)
The humanity therefore needs give careful attention to the right kind of education, if it
is to grow rightly. Sahitya-sangeet-kala vihinah, sakshat pashu puchchh vishan hinah.
Pushing this to a practical conclusion, Sri Aurobindo points out how literature, music and arts
alone can transform this animal into man proper. By fostering the growth of aesthetic
faculties they provide the first purgatorial fires for the cremation of this animal-man.
Katharsis in the Greek mysteries is the same as “our cittaśuddhi, the purification of the citta
or mass of established ideas, feelings and actional habits.” The role of aesthetic sensibility in
the preparatory stages of our growth is not only significant but crucial. It opens the door that
leads man to his true manhood:
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 It raises and purifies conduct by instilling a distaste for the coarse desires and passions of the
savage, for the rough, uncouth and excessive in action and manner, and restraining both
feeling and action by a striving after the decent, the beautiful, the fit and seemly which
received its highest expression in the manners of cultivated European society, the elaborate
ceremonious life of the Confucian, the careful ācāra and etiquette of Hinduism. (238)
Though the Greeks discovered the purifying force of aesthetics, they fell short of the whole
truth. Beauty together with Love and Joy represents the triple measure of Ananda. The goal
of human strivings is to go beyond beauty to the pure and unalloyed bliss, to reach for the
akhanda rasa of “undifferentiated and unabridged delight in the delightfulness of things.” We
must move beyond books to savour poetry and the eight rasas in the very act of living:
When the heart works for itself, then it enjoys the poetry of life, the delight of emotions, the
wonder, pathos, beauty, enjoyableness, lovableness, calm, serenity, clarity and also the
grandeur, heroism, passion, fury, terror and horror of life, of man, of Nature, of the
phenomenal manifestation of God. (242)
Europe mastered the art of life by perfecting the symmetry of social conduct but could not
find its poetry because it had no eye for the principle of love which alone should inform our
living. European Art perfected “the portrayal of life and outward reality,” but was found
wanting in the expression of “inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things,
the joy of God in the world and its beauty,” which the Indian Art alone attempted so
completely. Turn homeward, thou who wander: the truth of life and world and God – the
pursuit of all artistic labour – will be found only here. For an action plan, harness all your
critical faculties to decipher Sri Aurobindo’s message:
It is unpardonable that the crude formal teaching of English schools and the vulgar
commercial aims and methods of the West should subsist in our midst. […] The taint of
Occidental ideals and alien and unsuitable methods has to be purged out of our minds, and
nowhere more than in the teaching which should be the foundation of intellectual and
aesthetic renovation. (252)

III
Coming to academic critics, we find a direct continuity of tradition and also a shift in
focus. Iyengar’s essay, The Problems of the Contemporary Indian Critic (1953) shows a keen
awareness of the rot that had already set in society, particularly in the hallowed ‘temples of
learning’. The professors “find the world too much with them, valuation of answer-scripts
and attendance at Board Meetings take up all their spare time, and they only gather rust from
year to year.” Apart from our own role in this decay, there are other factors involved.
“Society and its leaders should realize that the critic is no parasite, not at his characteristic
best: rather does he ensure the vitality and good health of literature, even as literature ensures
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the health of the community” (20). The critic’s calling a spade a spade will not cure society of
its deafness; it serves only one purpose, that of training the critic to speak truthfully. Those
who deal in falsehoods will never be critics. The Acharya who knows his shastra is the
custodian of tradition, and he shall not live by the measures of samanyajana and alpabuddhi.
The Indian critic is heir to “two great traditions which derive respectively from
ancient Sanskrit and ancient Greek.” He also inherits a third, of a modern Indian language,
his mother tongue. One needs a wide critical sensibility to hold such an inheritance, because
these sources of strength have more often than nought brought about only a paralysing
weakness. Like Buridan’s Ass, the Indian critic too turns, now to one tradition, now to
another, and unable to pierce through the crust of difference and touch the underlying unity or
unable to integrate the two critical disciplines into a new synthesis, he is frankly puzzled and
gives up his job as hopeless or he is strictly derivative and brazenly imitative […]. (16)
The author points out that this synthesis between traditions has been attempted before, and
not always without success. “One critic there has been whose example must prove a beacon
to others: this was Sri Aurobindo.” There have been others: “Acharya A B Dhruva in
Gujarati, N C Kelkar in Marathi, C Rajagopalachari in Tamil, and C R Reddy in Telugu.”
Iyengar himself attempts this synthesis in Aesthetics, Indian and Western (1960). But
again, as in Sri Aurobindo, the Indian component dwarfs the Western. After answering basic
questions, “what is rasa?” and “how does rasa arise?” the argument moves to the meaning
and value of Arts:
The experience that is described in Art is experience freed from the necessities of actual life –
seraphically free from the limitations of time, place and particularity […], samsara, the
bondage of everyday life. […] all experience a sudden heightened tempo of living which is
the essence of joy, similar almost to the Bliss of Brahman, or Brahmananda. (22)
Aesthetic experience is almost akin to spiritual experience, brahmananda sahodarah. Poetry
pierces through the veil of appearances and reveals that which is hidden, secret and sacred.
The poet as a seer is the first recipient of divine epiphanies, but the critic too is no less
blessed. He is sahridaya, the one who can enter into a psychic identity with the poet and
receive an efflorescence of the poetic experience in his heart. Hence Abhinavagupta suggests
that “mere grammarians or dry logicians have no right to attempt literary criticism which is
the task of more gifted souls” (Krishnamoorthy 336).
In reference to the outer embellishments in Arts, Anandavardhana urges, “the reality
within is of far greater consequence than the outer appearance” (23). Here is the key to the
essence of Indian sensibility. The inner beauty of joy, happiness and bliss, of Ananda, the
values of compassion, generosity and love, and Moksha, the final deliverance from the
bondage of Maya are things that matter to us most; the GNP-GDP, industries, road, and
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electricity are celluloid images of secondary or tertiary value, for deluded souls wallowing in
the mire of fish, flesh or fowl.
Having meditated on the majesty of the Himalayas, it becomes rather laboured and
fruitless venture to talk about rocks and boulders. Thus even a scholar of the stature of Prof
Iyengar finds it difficult to place any of the Western theoreticians by the side of Indian Rishis.
He says that Plato was “deeply suspicious of the power of poetry”; that for Eliot poetry was
“a superior amusement” and for a few lesser mortals like Tate and Collingwood a “complete
knowledge” or “a vehicle of essential knowledge”, whatever that may mean.

IV
Unlike the calm and serene, almost sage like tone of Iyengar, Sisirkumar Ghose
wields a fiery, passionate voice and a pithy, epigrammatic style. Problems of English in
India: A Search for Identity formed his address at the All India English Teachers’ Conference
in 1973. He does not so much talk about the Indian aesthetics and sensibility as he
exemplifies what others preach. He shows a keen awareness of the world below the navel,
nothing of our filth escapes his observant watch, and yet he achieves that rare transcendence
of vision where the universals alone have their being.
In 1953, Iyengar complained about professors attending board meetings, evaluating
answer-scripts and prescribing their own edited texts to make quick money. In 1973, the
industry continues to flourish with the addition of reasonably priced merchandise, the Ph D.
The Thesis (with a capital “T”) is now a flourishing industry. You might even call it a cottage
industry. […] Most theses are approved, it is clear, on compassionate grounds. […] let us
weed out the rabbits and not bring down the highest academic distinction to the level of, say,
B.A. Pass. (189-90)
Mark the artistic finesse in the choice of words, “let us weed out the rabbits.” Rabbits not
only destroy the field, they also breed very fast.
But Ghose doesn’t say all this for the sake of saying; it is part of a much larger
argument. The sickness is symptomatic of a deeper malady. If our syllabi and degrees are
rotten, it is because we are rotten at the core. And this rot has entered because we have lost
touch with our roots, with our essential nature and true self. In our craze for everything
‘phoren’ – for getting published abroad and paid in dollars, for a green card, an Angrez wife
and even an Angrez guru in Aristotle or Allan Tate – we have lost our identity, our true face:
we have become downright bogus. To trace back a journey from bogusness to Authenticity
demands a radical revaluation of the nature and meaning of literature, of life, of values, and
more than all else, of culture and tradition: “Art and literature, like myth and ritual from

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which they derive, are always part of a wider context, of man’s growing awareness, the
ontological refinements of being” (192).
But we heard all this, or something like that, from Prof Iyengar, you might say. Yes,
they all talk about the same thing, only differently – ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti. But
they do not repeat each other; they form a series of dawns that ever come to illumine our
‘little O, the earth’. Here is Kutsa Angirasa in Rig Veda:
Usha widens bringing out that which lives, awakening someone who was dead…. She desires
the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards her illumination she enters
into communion with the rest that are to come. (qtd. in Life Divine 1)
Mystics have always pondered how to remain in society and yet not be a part of it. Turning it
to the present purpose, Ghose asks, “How to remain Indian in spite of acquiring English?”
and answers in an anguished appeal:
I plead for Indian, Oriental and Comparative Criticism and mention, at random, four elders of
the tribe: Ananda Coomaraswamy, Brajendranath Seal, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri
Aurobindo. I am not asking you to accept them and their kin, any of them. But even a nodding
acquaintance with their wide and subtle thought will give you depth and direction. True, a
smattering of aesthetics will not turn you into a critic. But it might give you legs to stand on,
self-conscious values. (194)

V
Iyengar said that the main function of the critic was to “ensure the vitality and good
health of literature.” Narasimhaiah in his last major statement, An Inquiry into the Indianness
of Indian English Literature (2003) decides to do exactly that. He assigns for himself a
threefold task: to define the essence of Indianness; to trace ‘the great tradition’ of Indian
English Literature; and to show us the path we all must tread.
Strangely enough, it was his teacher, F R Leavis at Cambridge who by his pronounced
‘Englishness’ put Narasimhaiah on trail to a rediscovery of his Indianness. He learnt much
about it at Princeton, from Emerson, Thoreau and Blackmur; in Australia from Patrick White
and Aborigines, and also from Mexican Dravidians till he could say, “what went out of India
came back with added vigour after incontrovertible reinforcement and lodged in me so firmly
that rough winds cannot shake it – indeed, it has become my swadhrma” (9).
In mapping out ‘the great tradition’ of Indian English Literature, he first mentions the
four of our prose writers – Gandhi, Vivekananda, Tagore and Nehru, all great minds, and all
great Indians. To read them is to rediscover India. Their greatness makes Narasimhaiah say,
“From the lofty heights […] let me come down to the plains, to see how our novelists
function” (25). In the now mushrooming field of Indian fiction, the trio of Anand, Narayan

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and Rao remain the most prominent. But the critic is quick to add, “I wish other Indians who
have acquired a kind of bizarre reputation, internationally, such as Salman Rushdie, Vikram
Seth, Shashi Tharoor and Arundhati Roy had a claim on our attention for inclusion in this
lecture. But you have a right to know why they stand excluded.” Rushdie “is a juggler of
words like Shashi Tharoor, a juggler of myths”; Seth epitomizes “a popular American bid to
level down world’s cultures”; and “the non-stop flow of words, Rushditis” in Arundhati Roy
is condemned as ‘atyukti’ and “dismissed as worthless” (36-38). Before talking about poets,
Narasimhaiah attempts to explain the origins of the Poet:
The human witness, sakshi to the mysterious goings on in Nature and the Mind of Man,
seems, in course of time, to have appropriated the name of kavi to himself, which explains the
descent of the Muse on Man when poetry becomes revelation, and the Poet the Seer. What he
wrote from his meditation or dhyana therefore had the power of incantation, dhyana mantra.
Only three poets are named here, Toru Dutt, Tagore and Aurobindo, “the only major factor in
English poetry with his best known epic Savitri” (39). In the section on criticism,
Narasimhaiah mentions just one name, that of Sri Aurobindo. “The last great critic in India
lived more than a millennium ago”. As for the Western theory, its dismissal comes absolute
after an argument on Sri Aurobindo’s critical concepts: “In the context of such sophisticated
preoccupation with things like ‘rhythmic speech’, ‘spiritual seeing’ and ‘stability of
apprehension behind the instability of word’, I fear I find Western debates on theories so dull
and long-drawn, not to say inconsequential” (44).
Like all the three before him, Narasimhaiah too would strongly plead for our return to
Indian aesthetics. He offers a reading of Blake in Indian terms and concludes,
The resultant state is para-nivritti, total release from the bondage of the world. And for the
reader, momentary detachment, when there is perception, antardarsana, thanks to the
unravelling, bhagnavarana, breaking through the veils of Maya, an experience, one may
presume, that was common to the primitive man with his vasanas, inner dispositions in his
state of nature, as well as rishis with their samskara, cultivated sensibility. And to us, in this
technological age, its residual transmission, svalpam apasya dharmasya…! a little of that
reward. (48)
What shall we do, and where shall we go from here? To answer this, and more, including my
Mumbai demons, allow me to close by chanting in full the above verse:
Nehābhikramnāśosti pratyāvayo na vidyate;
Svalpamapyasya dharmasya trāyte mahato bhayāt.
On this path no effort is lost, no obstacle prevails; even a little of this dharma delivers from
the great fear.
Works Cited

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Aurobindo, Sri. “National Value of Art” (1909). The Hour of God. SABCL Vol. 17. Pondicherry: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, 1972. 231-52.
- - -. The Life Divine. SABCL Vol. 18. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972.
Ghose, Sisirkumar. Modern and Otherwise. New Delhi: D. K. Publishing House, 1974.
Iyengar, K R Srinivasa. The Adventure of Criticism. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited,
1985.
Krishnamoorthy, K. “Sanskrit Poetics: An Overview.” Indian Literary Criticism. Ed. G N Devi.
Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2002. 317-42.
Narasimhaiah, C. D. An Inquiry into the Indianness of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 2003.
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