Hath He a shape, Or hath He none?
I know not this, nor care to know,
Dwelling in light, to which the sun
Is darkness, – He sees all below,
Himself unseen! In Him I trust,
He can protect me if He will
And if this body turn to dust
He can new life again instill. 58
In the Hindu Scriptures, death is regarded as an opportunity to enter a better world in accordance with one’s previous Karmas or Sanskaras. The Bhagvadgita teaches the same thing, the Ramayana also preaches the same spiritual and religious tenet. In the above passage the unwavering faith of Hindu Bhakta has been beautifully brought out. Today, Prahlad has become a symbol of true faith. His story reminds us that Truth, Faith and Goodness will always prevail, even though one may first have to go through hardships.
Savitri impressively illustrates her views on the theory of Karma another important factor of Hindu thoughts:
And each shall suffer as he acts
And thinks, – his own sad burden bear!
No friends can help, - his sins are facts
That nothing can annul or square,
And he must bear their consequence.59
In the legend of Dhruva, Suneete, the mother of Dhruva interprets the doctrine of Karma:
The deeds that thou hast done,
The evil, haply, in some former life,
Long, long ago, who may alas! Annul,
The sins of previous lives must bear their fruit,
For glorious actions done
Not in this life, but in some previous birth. 60
Sindhu too contains an illustration of the essentially Indian doctrine of Karma; a man’s deeds, whether performed intentionally or unintentionally evil, will pursue him inevitably to a righteous retribution. The King shot Sindhu accidentally, as Sindhu himself acknowledged, but Sindhu’s death was in reality the punishment of a boyish sin when he shot a dove, and the king expiated the crime of shooting the boy by death, heart-broken after the exile of his own beloved son. The fatalistic doctrine of the popular Hindu philosophy is expressed in the following lines:
It is my destiny
O fear not thou, but pity one,
Whose fate is thus to die.61
To attain spiritual heights Dhruva sacrificed highly, as he abandons princely comfort and goes out to the woods. Dhruva declares firmly to his mother:
Let Uttama my brother, – not thy son, –
Receive the throne and royal titles,
I grudge them not. Not with another’s gifts
Desire I, dearest mother, to be rich,
But with my own work would acquire a name.62
Finally, he did achieve the completely true mission of his life.
In the context of Myths and legends, it becomes necessary to point out different Hindu ideals represented in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, as the life of legendry persons are guided by those ideals. It might tempt the reader to believe that the poetess had an inclination for didacticism. It is true that she occasionally resorted to preaching moral values in the volume but since she did her job through the medium of old ballads and legends, the charge is partly attenuated.63 Perhaps the themes of antiquity that she handled needed them.
It is obvious that the Hindu ideal of womanhood should have appealed to Toru most and in her Savitri she has sung the praise of that great heroine of Hindu Mythology. So strong was the single-minded love and determination of Savitri that she chose a noble man for her husband, knowing that he had only a year to live, married him with all confidence. Even the God of Death had to relent, and bowed to her love and devotion. In fact, Savitri’s total devotion makes her the ideal of love.
Hindu ideals of duty are depicted with considerable power in each of this series of ballads. Savitri, the heroine of the ballad says :
Where’er my husband dear is led,
Or journeys of his own free will,
I too must go, though darkness spread
Across my path portending ill,
’Tis my duty I have read! 64
Savitri knows her duty very well, and acts how a virtuous woman should.
If Savitri embodies the ideal wife, Lakshman, gives us the ideal Hindu brother ever loving and dutiful, a splendid picture of chivalry and self-control. 65
Lakshman loves Rama from the core of his heart. He is perfectly obedient to the elder brother seeking glory in faithful service, ‘in life long loyalty and truth’. He is forced by the unwarranted and unkind insinuations of Sita to leave her alone in the woods and should go to help of Rama.
In The Royal Ascetic and the hind the two ideals – asceticism and love collides with each other. The King Bharat, a great ascetic, becomes a great lover of a hind under inevitable circumstances and forgets altogether about eternity and God. At the time of his death, too, he is busy thinking of the hind and not of higher issues. In the clash of two ideals, thus love triumphs over stern asceticism. On the contrary, Dhruva reverses the order in the clash between the twin forces of love and asceticism. The young boy having been denied the love of his father due to the interference of his stepmother decides to pursue the path of virtue.
Leaving behind the palace of his father he goes into the forest, practices penances, offers prayers, and attains immortality. To this day when Indian sees the Pole star, they remembered Dhruva, the devotee of perfect purity of mind.
Buttoo is an illustration of the marvellous reverence in which an Indian disciple holds his master. The West would do well to learn something from the East in this and it would be difficult to find a parallel for the act related in this poem an act of super most obedience even to the point of absolute self-renunciation and selfmaiming on the part of a pupil towards a master who had but made him a jest and a laughing- stock before others.66
From the ideal disciple, we pass in Sindhu’ to the story of an ideal son. The Puranic story of Sindhu (Shravan Kumar) provides one example of a sacred ratinale for a mutual sharing of and relation to old age and develops the logic to a point where, in the act of serving the old parents, Sindhu not just lose his precious material possessions but even his life. The story, however, resolves the tragic ending by relating the happening to divine will:
Unwittingly the deed was done:
It is my destiny,
O fear not thou, but pity one
Whose fate is thus to die.67
He requested to the king:
Bear thou the pitcher, friend –’tis all”
I ask – down that steep lane.68
After that, this beautiful soul passed away in an atmosphere of duty and virtue.
Prahlad is the story of an ideal devotee, who faced the anger of his mighty father for the sake of his faith in God. Poison, sword and fire could not frighten him. Ultimately, the Lord himself responded to the devotion of five-year-old boy and came to earth to rescue him from the cruel hands of his father Heeran Kasyapu.
Sita presents a picture of an archetypal character. Toru wrote in one of her letters to her friend Mlle Clarisse Bader – “The heroine of ‘our great epics are worthy of all honour and love. Can there be a more touching and lovable heroine than Sita? I do not think so”. Sita bears all the humiliation on an envious world around her, and is exiled by her husband for no fault of hers. She does not complain of it, and simply weeps at the underserved treatment meted out to her. In fact she is an embodiment of courage and self-restraint.
One of Toru Dutt’s miscellaneous poems is quite remarkable in this context of Myths and legends. The name of the poem is The Lotus and here Toru comes out as a genius and an innovator, no one to compare with. 69 The poem is in the nature of a gift from one culture to another, a mature response to a challenge conceived by her as personal and racial.
We have heard in our myths and legends of women approaching their spouses for wish fulfillment. Satyabhama asks Krishna for Parijatha and Draupadi asks Bheema for Saugandhika, which sends them on a mission of adventure to t
he other world, Devaloka, in an effort to trace them.
In this poem she goes straight to the presiding deity of all flowers, Flora, and asks for a flower, in her choice imagery at once feminine and very Indian. She asks for a flower that ‘would be queen amidst flowers.’
Her creative imagination pictures before her mind’s eye ‘flower factions’ in ‘Psyche’s Bower.’ The poem presents an acknowledgment at once to her acquaintance with Indian and Greek myths. Her visual imagination finds incomparable verbalization too, ‘Give me a flower delicious as the rose and stately like the lily in her pride’.
Is there a flower, which can manifest such a combination? Yes, for her and no, for William Cowper, English poet who left the lily and the rose as rivals forever in his poem The Lily and the Rose, finding ‘rose red’ obviously common. Toru changes her mind, in an instant opts rather for ‘Lily white or both provide’. Genius that she was, she realizes the need for completeness, a singular gift of her tradition, the union of the rajasik and the sattvik. It seems a gardener who crosses two kinds of flowers and produces a third variety is considered a genius. Flora had no choice but to offer the ‘Lotus, the queenliest flower that blows’.
“How does the lotus appear to the poet? Thanks to her inventive, ever new imagination, nava navanavonmesha salini pratibha. She must have known the lotus was born of Vishnu’s naval and Brahma’s seat, thus mingling the Sattvik and the Rajasik, hence the lotus, the result of a poetic fusion of couple colours and traits, at once generating rasapaka or rasa nishpatti. More: rasa pushti leads to Shanthi pushti”. 70
Thus, we see that Toru was so much interested in Hindu Myths and legends and through her writings; she gave voice to her thoughts. She was a true Christian in that she did not look on other religions with narrow eyes. She was the genuine daughter of Hinduism in that she was not dogmatic, broad minded and tolerant. She never felt as Sir Gosse supposes that Vishnu and Shiva were ‘childish things’.71 In fact, she turned to Hindu mythology so enthusiastically as she felt herself attached to them. The ancient Vedic gods surely fascinated her. She uttered aloud the fatalistic doctrine of popular philosophy of her nation in the following lines:
Death comes to all or soon or late;
And peace is but a wondering fire.72
In choosing the legends of the past she was simply feeding as the modern poet, critic T.S. Eliot believes, the present, for anything creative could be built only on the edifice of tradition. Therefore, we can say in a way, that Toru was one of the modern poets drawing for her sources upon the popular tales of the past.
Some critics have attacked Toru Dutt’s approach to the ancient myths and legends of India. For example E.J. Thompson finds in these ballads only ‘scattered beauties’ and he complains that the poet ‘stands outside the themes and does not enter deeply into them’.73 He further observes: ‘Nor can I consider those themes as of anything like first-class value. Some have rustic charm which strikes the mind pleasantly enough, but not deeply; others had been handled ages before Toru took them up, by writers whose minds were primitive, as hers emphatically was not, and in sympathy, as hers again was not.”74 Edmund Gosse says that the ballads and legends read like translations of the original in Sanskrit.75 All this criticism seems unjust. The poet’s treatment of Indian myths and legends is imaginative and is governed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. She has succeeded admirably in narrating the stories powerfully and investing them with rich symbolic dimensions of implication and hum of meaning. As far as Thompson is concerned, he may be judging Toru in this instance too much as a foreigner, and does not seem to quite understand that. Despite Toru being a Christian, she was certainly able to become a part of the Hindu themes of which she wrote. Neither could the ancient Indian myths ever be old and primitive or lacking in first class value. Toru Dutt praise of Indian women is voiced in a letter to Mlle Clarisse Bader: “and I am proud to be able to say that the heroines of our grand epics are worthy of all honour and love”.76 She was much impressed by the wifely devotion that an Indian wife pays her husband, her submission to him even when he is capricious or exacting, her worship of him as her “god and her life”.
One can conclude by saying: “In her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan she has successfully striven to interpret the spirit of the East to the West. Tales of ancient Hindu life and mythology are narrated in poems alive with profound sympathy and enthusiasm. Hindu ideals of life and character are presented with force animation and vigour. The cycle of nine legends and ballads strung together in this work must be of considerable interest to every Indian who has any pride in the characters that adorn the mythological gallery bequeathed to him by the ancient bards of this country.” 77
References :
Harihar Das, Life and Letters of Toru Dutt, (Oxford University Press, 1921),
K. R. S. Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, (Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd.),
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Dutt, (Sahitya Akademi, Delhi, 1982),
C. F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India, (London, 1912))
Harihar Das ‘The Classical Tradition in Toru Dutt’s Poetry’, Asiatic Review (October 1931),
Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, ed. Amarnath Jha (Kitabistan, 1969), All subsequent quotations from Ancient Ballads refer to this edition.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
The joys of this world are as short lived as the bubbles of water.
Cf Catch then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life’s short summer, man flower;
He dies-alas! How soon he dies.- Samuel Johnson
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
A. N. Dwivedi, ed. Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, (Prakash Book Depot, 1994)
Harihar Das, LLTD,
It is an echo of a well known Sanskrit verse which means that the poison tree of the world has only two sweet fruits; one is the taste of poetry and the other is the company of good people.
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid
Ibid.
A. N. Dwivedi, ed. Toru Dutt, Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan,
Ancient Ballads,
Harihar Das, LLTD,
K.R.S.Iyengar, Indian Writing in English,
Lotika Basu wrongly thinks that the story is drawn from the Puranas, See her Indian Writers of English Verse, (The University Press, Calcutta),
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Duttt,
Kamla Saththianandan wrote an article on Toru Dutt in The Indian Ladies Magazine, Sep-1906
Ancient Ballads,
Mr. R. W. Frazer, Literary History of India, 1898
Ancient Ballads,
Padmini Sen Gupta, Toru Dutt,
Ancient Ballads,
Idem.
Ibid.
Idem.
Idem.
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Harihar Das, Loc. Cit.,
A.N.Dwivedi, Toru Dutt: A Literary Profile’,
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid. Prahlad,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and its development, (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1956),
The great Indian philosopher, Shankaracharya, compares life to a drop of water on a lotus leaf:
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
A.N.Dwivedi, ed. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan,
Ancient Ballads,
Anon, Toru Dutt, Sketch of Her Life and Appreciation of Her works,’ (G.A. Nateson & Co., 1917),
Harihar Das, LLTD,
&n
bsp; Ancient Ballads,
Ibid.
C. D. Narasimhaiah, An Inquiry into the Indianness of Indian English Literature, (Sahitya Akademi),
Ibid.
Edmund Gosse, ‘Introductory Memoir’, Ancient Ballads,
Ancient Ballads,
E.J.Thompson, Supplementary Review to Harihar Das’s LLTD,
Idem.
Edmund Gosse, quoted by P.C.Kotoky, Indo-English Poetry,
Harihar Das, LLTD,
Anon, Toru Dutt, A Sketch of Her Life and Appreciation of Her Works, 2nd edition (G.A.Nateson & co, Madras, 1917),
04. Isolation And Alienation
Part-1
Indian poets in English, like their counterparts in fiction and commonwealth writers, perceive a plurality of identity emerging from the duality of cultures-a co presence of the twain –the inherited and the acquired traditions, form an essential part of the experience of Indo-Anglican poets.The acceptance of English as a language for creative configuration is an involvement in depth and it exposes the writers to the cultural burdens behind it. The experience of biculturalism has filtered into the lives of all those who have been colonized directly or by a remote control.
Since the duality of cultures is a common factor, the crisis of identity is fundamental to all of them, but the difference creeps both in kind and degree of response as the cultural perspectives vary in each country. America draws largely from European heritage but India has an old distinctive culture of its own. Australia is a peculiar land, vast, empty, without the light of enlightenment, isolated from modern philosophical thought, a disjointed panorama of the European man, the Australian landscape and the Aborigine, Judith Wright, the poet like Patrick White, the novelist has tried to give coherence to the Australian experience and thus define the Australian identity. The New Zealand poet James K. Baxter tries to resolve the crisis of identity by raising man to the mythical state, by embodying in poem after poem “the recurring shape of the isolated man on his journey towards death and perhaps rebirth.”1 The West Indies is a transitional land with its ‘unanchored souls’, 2 without the wholeness of existence. Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet, reveals the truth in his anxiety:
Toru Dutt Page 9
