This blog is reponse of Thinking Activity which is assign by Yesha Bhatt Ma'am This blog deals with a few important topics of Indian writing in English. in this blog Three Prose Writers: Radhakrishnan, Raghunathan, Nirad Caudhari; The ‘New’ Poets; and Conclusion from K.R Srinivasa Iyenger’s Indian Writing in English. This blog tries to attempt a few questions assigned to the task.
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Task 1: The Three prose Writers
Here i wrote about answer of questions which is assigned in the task
write a note on Radhakrishna's perspective on Hinduism
About S. Radhakrishna
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, (born Sept. 5, 1888, Tiruttani, India—died April 16, 1975, Madras [now Chennai]), scholar and statesman who was president of India from 1962 to 1967. He served as professor of philosophy at Mysore (1918–21) and Calcutta (1921–31; 1937–41) universities and as vice chancellor of Andhra University (1931–36). He was professor of Eastern religions and ethics at the University of Oxford in England (1936–52) and vice chancellor of Benares Hindu University (1939–48) in India. From 1953 to 1962 he was chancellor of the University of Delhi
Radhakrishnan’s written works include Indian Philosophy, 2 vol. (1923–27), The Philosophy of the Upanishads (1924), An Idealist View of Life (1932), Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939), and East and West: Some Reflections (1955). In his lectures and books he tried to interpret Indian thought for Westerners.
Radhakrishnan has been held up in academic circles as a representative of Hinduism to the West. His lengthy writing career and his many published works have been influential in shaping the West’s understanding of Hinduism, India, and the East.
Radha krishna's perspective on Hinduism
Radhakrishnan argues that Hinduism, as he understands it, is a scientific religion. According to Radhakrishnan, “if philosophy of religion is to become scientific, it must become empirical and found itself on religious experience” True religion, argues Radhakrishnan, remains open to experience and encourages an experimental attitude with regard to its experiential data. Hinduism more than any other religion exemplifies this scientific attitude. “The Hindu philosophy of religion starts from and returns to an experimental basis” Unlike other religions, which set limits on the types of spiritual experience, the “Hindu thinker readily admits of other points of view than his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention” . What sets Hinduism apart from other religions is its unlimited appeal to and appreciation for all forms of experience. Experience and experimentation are the origin and end of Hinduism, as Radhakrishnan understand it.
Radhakrishnan argues that the hallmark of Hinduism throughout its history. In a revealing passage, Radhakrishnan explains: “The truths of the ṛṣis are not evolved as the result of logical reasoning or systematic philosophy but are the products of spiritual intuition, dṛṣti or vision. The ṛṣis are not so much the authors of the truths recorded in the Vedas as the seers who were able to discern the eternal truths by raising their life-spirit to the plane of universal spirit. They are the pioneer researchers in the realm of the spirit who saw more in the world than their followers. Their utterances are not based on transitory vision but on a continuous experience of resident life and power. When the Vedas are regarded as the highest authority, all that is meant is that the most exacting of all authorities is the authority of facts”
Hindus believe that there are different paths to God, and each individual has their own path. This is one of the reasons why there are many different books to learn from, not just the Vedas, but the Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, to name a few. The reason why it is thought that each person has their own path to God is that religious experience cannot be made objective. Instead, our path to God is crafted from how we are disposed to experience God, therefore we all have a different experience of what God is, and a different path to God.
For Radhakrishnan, the marginalization of intuition and the abandonment of the experimental attitude in matters of religion has lead Christianity to dogmatic stasis. “It is an unfortunate legacy of the course which Christian theology has followed in Europe that faith has come to connote a mechanical adherence to authority.
An Autobiography of unknown indian is more of national than personal History Explain
“The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian” is the most widely known work of famous thinker and writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, an Indian English literary artist of the 20th century. He had written this autobiographical account when he was around 50. Although he was born in 1879 in Kishoreganj, a small town of at present Bangladesh, yet his autobiographical description relates his mental and intellectual development, his life and growth connected to Indian atmosphere exclusive Calcutta. His observation of vanishing landmark the connotation of this dual-changing Indian situation and historical forces that were making the exit of British from Indian an imminent affair.
Although, this book is by nature an account of autobiography yet it is more concerned with the story of the struggle of a civilization with a hostile environment in which the destiny of the British rule become necessarily involved. It is about the maturity of a scholar’s mind in that environment. It seeks to show how the mind and character of a typical Indian were made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.
In this book, Nirad describes in details the life in Calcutta, the different sections of society both Bengali and English, the missions of the rich and the houses of the middle class. The book also describes the advent of Gandhi on the sense and Nirad’s disillusionment with Gandhi’s passive resistance movement because it degenerated into mob-violence. Anyway, Gandhism was the victory of a new kind of nationalism and nationality. According to him, these new politics had destroyed all the other form of Indian nationalism and the moral awareness created by Brahmanism and the new Hinduism of the 19th century. It also destroyed the concept of synthesis between the values of “the East” and “the West”. In the end, only the imitation of the west emerged as the conspicuous feature of our life.
He believes that that the tropical land of India has ever been a corrupting influence on its people. The land was rejuvenated only when foreign invasions took place. He hopes that in the future the USA alone or along or along with the British Commonwealth may come to rejuvenate India again.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s “The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian” is a landmark in the development of the Autobiographical genre in Indo-Anglian literature. In fact, this literary genre in Indo-Anglian literature came to its maturity in the period of the Gandhian whirlwind (1920-1947) due to the emergence of a large number of thinkers, political leaders, whose lines interested the people and they wanted to know about them from their own method. Nirad had a balance and subtle motions for the exclusive situation with exclusive men.
Task:2: The new poet
1.Write a critical note on poems by Nissim Ezekiel:
Ezekiel's early work is very concerned with form and contains strict rhyme and meter schemes. Additionally, they are all written in "proper" English and place themselves within a Western literary tradition. As Ezekiel aged, his focus shifted towards his home country, India, and his poems become much more local and specific. Additionally, about halfway through his career, Ezekiel made the choice to move away from using strict poetic form in his poetry. As the form loosened in his poems, so did the register. Ezekiel's free verse flows with ease and confidence in his later work.
Some famous poems of Nissim Ezekiel
- Night Of The Scorpion. I remember the night my mother. ...
- Minority Poem. In my room, I talk. ...
- Philosophy. There is a place to which I often go, ...
- Island. Unsuitable for song as well as sense. ...
- The Hill. This normative hill. ...
- The Patriot. ...
- Jewish Wedding In Bombay. ...
- Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
It is interesting, however, how many of Ezekiel's themes stay the same. Young or old, Ezekiel's poetics are fascinated with bodies and nakedness, particularly the bodies of beautiful women. Additionally, his poems across his career juggle dualities and paradoxes. Norman Ross E. makes this point in "Nissim Ezekiel's Vision of Life and Death": "All of Ezekiel's work is concerned with the dichotomy of human processes: Word and Silence; Love and Sex; Urban and Rural; and most especially, Life and Death.
Ezekiel was already a well-known poet by the time he was a senior citizen, the Collected Poems were highly anticipated when they were first published. The sheer number of re-prints and editing that it has enjoyed over the years speaks to its popularity as an anthology.
2.Write a note on How Kaikini differs from other Indian poets in his poems?
Jayant Kaikini is regarded as one of the most significant of the younger writers in Kannada today. He is a writer of short stories, film scripts and poetry, and is based in Bangalore. His poetry is characterised by subtle imagism, a minute documentation of the seemingly commonplace, a colloquial idiom and a conscientious refusal to engage in any poeticising. He has so far published six anthologies of short stories, four books of poetry, three plays and a collection of essays.
In an introduction to Dots and Lines, an English translation of Kaikini's short stories, critic C.N. Ramachandran writes, "To understand Jayant's works, we have to situate him in the literary context of the last two decades of the 20th century. During that period, there arose a group of writers who consciously differed from both the earlier Modernist writers (called Navya in Kannada) and those contemporaneous to them, the Writers of Protest (called Bandaya in Kannada) and Dalit writers. They did not subscribe to any particular philosophical or political system of thinking - be it Existentialism of the Modernists or the Leftist ideologies of the Dalit and Protest writers. On the other hand, what they wished to do was to select precise and authentic details of daily life and organize them in such a way as to culminate in a particular experience... Generally, their style was comic-ironic; and the language they used was the spoken language of day-to-day life. They were neither idealists nor cynics; they just wished to observe the life around them - generally mediocre - to register all the fleeting details that marked an ordinary man's daily routine, and lead up to an experience rich in connotations. Jayant was a major figure in this group of writers who, loosely, can be called 'post-modernist'."
Mainly he wrote about images and metaphors from the simple, day-to-day routine of life. He portrait in a frame-maker’s shop, a dressing mirror in a scrapyard, a street kid kneeling down and peeping into a tiny rainwater pond on a deserted midnight tar road, only to touch the floating image of the moon, which breaks into pieces in small ripples—such images evoke the stories and poems untold.
Task 3 Conclusion
1."India is not country says Raja Rao India is an idea a metaphysic" Explain with examples
About Raja Rao
Raja Rao, (born November 8, 1908, Hassan, Mysore [now Karnataka], India—died July 8, 2006, Austin, Texas, U.S.), author who was among the most-significant Indian novelists writing in English during the middle decades of the 20th century.
Rao wrote a few of his early short stories in Kannada while studying in France; he also wrote in French and English. He went on to write his major works in English. His short stories of the 1930s were collected in The Cow of the Barricades, and Other Stories (1947). Like those stories, his first novel, Kanthapura (1938), is in a largely realist vein. It describes a village and its residents in southern India. Through its narrator, one of the village’s older women, the novel explores the effects of India’s independence movement. Kanthapura is Rao’s best-known novel, particularly outside India.
india is not a country, writes Raja Rao. It is a perspective. And this book explores the perspective that he calls India - its metaphysics, the philosophical underpinnings that sets India apart, uniquely distinguishes its civilization.
Through fable and real-life encounters, descriptions of journeys and events, or in discussions with contemporaries, Raja Rao’s quest is unceasing and single-focused: how this perspective alone can give meaning to man’s daily action. He draws on a wide range of sources, including the Vedas, Upanishads, teachings of Sankara, the writings of Bhartrihari, and the poetry of Valery and Mallarme. There are essays that describe his meetings with Gandhi and Nehru, so too with Forester and Malraux, westerners who drew close to India.
2.Write a note on the changing trends in Post-Independence Indian Writing in English
The ill effects of Partition moved a few Indian English novelists to evocatively deal with this turbulent political phenomenon in their fictional world. Prominent among such novelists are Khushwant Singh, Attia Hosain, Manohar Malgaonker, Balchand V. Rajan, Chaman Nahal & Raj Gill. Khushwant is the first novelist to present this theme as a thought provoking saga of post-partition traumas experienced by both Muslims & Hindus. His first novel Train to Pakistan, the most forceful novel on Partition depicts this political calamity in a thought provoking manner. Like Khushwant Singh, Raj Gill Nahal has focused on the pre& post Partition conditions in his novel The Rape. Similarly Chaman Nahal is preoccupied with the presentation of an exhaustive account of this political trauma in his partition novel Azadi. The novel also exposes the degeneration of values & collapse of system as horrible side effects of Partition. Balchandran Rajan’s first novel The Dark Dancer attempts to combine the theme of Partition with the theme of East-West encounter. But, due to the main focus being on the East-West encounter, Rajan failed to treat this theme as efficiently & successfully as Khuswant Singh & Chaman Nahal. A Bend in the Ganges, a famous Partition novel by Manohar Malgaonkar deserves appreciation for an impressive presentation of the trauma of Partition. H.S. Gill in his novel Ashes & Petals presents the most thought provoking aspect of Partition-Killing of young girls by their fathers on being attacked by the extremists. Attia Hosain enjoys the distinction of being the only woman novelist to nostalgically depict Partition in her only novel, Sun Light on a Broken Column.
As Sri Aurobindo pointed out in the article in the BandeMataram sixty years ago, “the sap that keeps it alive is the realization of the motherhood of God in our country, the vision of the mother, the perpetual contemplation, adoration and service of the mother”. Gandhiji too said at about the same time that the ancient Hindus saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature, that India was one nation, and to bring this home to the people they established holy places in different parts of India.
Post-independence literature in India is rather full of muffled voices or historical cries, and the average writer’s world is filled too much with the irritations, excitements, and frustration of the movement. but there have been expectations too. Babhani Bhattacharya’s ‘A Goddess name Gold’ is a call of Fidelity and faith addressed to the new Indian nation. In the Mahabharata all roads lead to Kurukshetra; In The Serpent and the Rope, all Road likewise lead to Benares, the eternal city on the banks of a holy river, Ganga. and so Raja Rao says “India is not a country, India in an idea of a metaphysic
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