by P.R.Viswanathan
[box]They are masters. They are craftsmen. Each one of them, a genius. P.R.Viswanathan pays a tribute to his favourite and some of the best-ever writers and the writing/characters that they have created.[/box]“When genius speaks to us, we feel a ghostly reminiscence of having ourselves, in our distant youth, had vaguely this self-same thought that genius now speaks but which we had not art or courage to clothe with form and utterance.” That was Will Durant writing in 1926 in the introduction to his “The Story of Philosophy”.
The genius sees clearly the full picture, of which we make out no more than a hazy outline, s/he clothes with form and utterance what we have felt, often deeply, but are able to express only vaguely. The genius could be a filmmaker, a playwright, an actor, a journalist or cartoonist or writer of any kind. Every class deserves our fulsome praise but none more than the writer – plain and simple. The writer has not the advantage of visual impact on the audience, only the power of words set on inanimate paper. One picture is worth a thousand words, they say. And yet what power a writer wields! How skillfully is a writer able to string together a set of familiar words! It is nothing less than genius. Here is my humble tribute to this awesome power that the wo/man of letters wields.
The Bard of Avon
In deference to the snobbish connoisseurs of literature, let me begin with Shakespeare. Here is one sample from the master craftsman; this passage tells us a great truth – it is not what you do but how you do it that counts. After the conspirators (including Cassius and Brutus) kill Julius Caesar, Cassius suggest that they kill Marc Antony as well, as Antony is very close to Caesar and could prove dangerous. Here is the reply of the noble Brutus that sets him apart from all the other conspirators even though he is as guilty as the rest of them; he has as much blood on his hands:
“Our course will seem too bloody Caius Cassius
To cut the head off and then hack the limbs
Like wrath in death and envy afterwards;
For Antony is no more than a limb of Caesar
Let’s be sacrificers and not butchers, Caius
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar
And in the spirit of men there is no blood
……………………………………………..
Let’s kill him boldly but not wrathfully
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds”
When Brutus finally falls, Shakespeare puts no more than three lines into Antony’s mouth to express the outstanding character of the dead man:
“His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, this was a man!”
Apostle of Non-Violence
He has been called a politician-saint and an apostle of non-violence. But Gandhiji also had a way with words. In early 1942, when Britain was being badly mauled by Germany, an offer was made to the Congress, In return for the latter’s support to the war-effort, Britain would consider some form of self-rule for India after the war was over. There were many meetings to consider the proposal, several speeches were made and articles written by the leading lights before rejecting it. But none matched Gandhi’s summing up – in just seven words. He described the proposal as ‘a postdated cheque on a tottering bank.’ Gandhiji’s writings are littered with such powerful words. Here are two more samples; the first one is on the purity of means:
“What shall we call the right effort? One test is that most often, we obtain the desired result from it. We may therefore judge the effort by the fruit it yields. But experience shows that this is not always the case. Right effort is that in which there is deep conviction about the correctness of the means employed, so much so that even in the face of contrary result, the means do not change nor does the effort vary or slacken.”
Gandhi exhorts us to be open to what is good in all cultures and yet stand firmly rooted in our own – in just three sentences:
“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
The Under-Dog
It is sad that the status of literature is not accorded to certain genre of writing. The true connoisseur should have no boundaries. Good writing is a thing in itself; forceful, precise elegant or lyrical, it strikes a chord in the reader, whatever the subject. One denies oneself the joy of understanding, when one becomes the prisoner of any form of literary straitjacket. It has been my standing grouse that the works of one of my favourites has been denied the tag of literature.
Arthur Conan Doyle is a wordsmith par excellence. Who else could have created a character like Sherlock Homes, who he was compelled by a fanatical readership to bring back to life and who still haunts the public imagination? That’s not all! There are heart-wringing situations galore in his stories. Good, amiable, respectable men and women find themselves in difficult, often dangerous situations and place themselves in the hands of the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. All of it comes across and arrests the reader in Doyle’s inimitable style. On the sensitive reader, Doyle casts an aura that lasts. Savour this from “The Five Orange Pips”:
“All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces, which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage.”
That is the setting in which young John Openshaw enters the home of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street and pours out his chilling story to the famous detective and his friend and chronicler Dr. James Watson. After Openshaw leaves:
“This strange wild story seemed to have come to us from amid the mad elements – blown in upon us like a sheet of sea-weed in a gale – and now to have been reabsorbed by them once more.”
The Bard of Bengal
Tagore’s Kabuliwala, Rahmun is a big bearded Afghan selling dry fruits on the streets of Calcutta. He befriends Mini, a five year-old Bengali girl. On his daily rounds, he would stop at Mini’s house and engage in long chats. Mini’s father looks upon this strange intimacy with an indulgent eye while the Mother is filled with fear. Rahmun would go home to Afghanistan every year. One day, in a street brawl in Calcutta, Rahmun whips out a knife. He is arrested and jailed for some years. When he is released, penniless, he goes straight to Mini’s home, meets her father only to find that it is Mini’s wedding day. In a little while there appears before him an apparition in bridal finery. Mini is no longer the little girl he used to chat with but a grown woman. Rahmun thinks of his own daughter back home; she too must have grown into a woman during the years he was in jail. And then the ending – what can be more moving than one human being, understanding another’s most deeply-felt emotion? Here is the last scene in the words of Mini’s father:
“The marriage-pipes sounded, and the mild autumn sun streamed round us. But Rahmun sat in the little Calcutta lane, and saw before him the barren mountains of Afghanistan.
I took out a bank-note, and gave it to him, saying: “Go back to your own daughter, Rahmun, in your own country, and may the happiness of your meeting bring good fortune to my child!”
Having made this present, I had to curtail some of the festivities. I could not have the electric lights I had intended, nor the military band, and the ladies of the house were despondent at it. But to me the wedding feast was all the brighter for the thought that in a distant land a long-lost father met again with his only child.”
The power of words is indeed incredible. Tagore wrote the original in Bengali. What we just read is the translation by a man who loved India – Rev. Charles Freer Andrews. May we make bold to say, the story has gained in translation?
Master Storyteller
This was a book I just casually picked up and started reading. I didn’t put it down till it was finished some 6 hours later. Somerset Maugham wielded a powerful pen. Here are the opening lines from “The Moon and Sixpence” that arrested my attention and kept me glued to the book:
“I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary. Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness. I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs and arrests. The time has passed when he was an object of ridicule, and it is no longer a mark of eccentricity to defend or of perversity to extol him. His faults are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits. It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius. To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.”
Back Home
Straying once again from the strait and the narrow in literature, this time even more markedly than when speaking of Arthur Conan Doyle, here in India, some of the best words are to be found in the songs of Bollywood. The authors do not enjoy the status of poets but are called lyricists. Here is Ali Sardar Jafri writing for ‘Anarkali’. Anarkali, the courtesan with whom Salim, son of Akbar is in love sings:
“Dil Ki Lagi Hai Kya, Yeh Kabhi Dil Lagaa Ke Dekh, Aansoon Baha Ke Dekh, Kabhi Muskura Ke Dekh
Parwana Jal Raha Hai Magar Jal Raha Hai Kyun, Yeh Raaz Jaan Na Hai To Khud Ko Jalake Dekh”
Here is a wholly inadequate translation rendered in the hope that it does not kill:
You wish to know what my heart is going through. There is only one way. You must lose your own heart; you must weep and laugh in love. You wish to know, why the moth moves inexorably towards the flame and burns itself. There is only one way, you must burn yourself.
Hindu tradition has it that when the Lord creates any entity or object, He only creates a sound. The powerful Gayathri Mantra comprehends within it all the sounds with which God created the earth, the firmament and the heavenly forces. The Book of Genesis in the Bible begins thus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Let us revel in the power of the word and in our violence-ridden world, pray that the pen will triumph over the sword every time.
Pic : DS – http://www.flickr.com/photos/roberts87/
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