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From Chhotie Ammi
"The noise of the wedding was over at last. Aslam found himself lying alone in the room next to the one in which his father lay with the bride. Aslam couldn’t sleep. He missed his mother. She had always slept near him. He was unable to sleep without her. He wondered how wretched the poor thing would be, and lay tossing from side to side in his torment. He didn’t realize that his tears were changing into sobs. The sobs were getting louder and louder even though he tried very hard to suppress them... The newly weds must have been together for at least two hours. Aslam heard the door between the rooms open. Thinking that it was his father who was entering to console him, Aslam stiffened his body even as he sobbed on. He waited for some time but no one said anything. After some time, Aslam opened his eyes slightly. In the little light that was filtering in he saw that it was the bride, not his father."
[Top of Page]From The T. S. Eliot-Middleton Murry Debate (1994)
"Some years ago Valerie Eliot disclosed a fact which may have meant very little to most readers though it is a significant statement for this book. She wrote: “Tom often used to say his life was a Dostoevsky novel written by Middleton Murry.” This statement will become meaningful towards the end of this book. For the time being suffice it to say that it is an insight into Eliot’s psyche, where Murry seems firmly planted. If Eliot’s life could be seen in terms of a novel then Murry must be its author. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, the reader, if he agreed with me, would see that Eliot rarely made a statement truer than this. To me, Eliot’s statements are almost never truly felt, genuine utterances, but the results of his pragmatic needs. To get to the real Eliot, we would have to do what he most disliked – pry into his private life. This is possible either through his letters, partly through his recent biographies, or through a detailed study of his debate with Middleton Murry. This last proposition seems to me an indispensable way of knowing Eliot because his letters may not contain every aspect of his development, the biographies may not fully develop the growth of his mind, but his prolonged debate would show the very forces which shaped his critical thought. In a realistic assessment of Eliot, the three must supplement each other.
The debate was unique in that it involved two literary critics who were behind the Modern Age in English literature. These two critics were also editors and literary men each of whom (along with others like D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley) could have emerged as the towering literary genius of the times. There have been several literary debates . . . But the one between Eliot and Murry has no parallel. It was the most significant literary occurrence of modern times not only because it was behind the making of England’s leading modernist critic – Eliot – it was also responsible for creating a literary climate in which an amazing amount of literary criticism and theory found its genesis."
[Top of Page]From The Twain Shall Meet: East and West
Indian Criticism and C. D. Narasimhaiah (1998)
There have been a great number of scholars after Sri Aurobindo but almost no critics. Perhaps the one Indian who can be best described by that name is C. D. Narasimhaiah....
India has produced several intelligent and competent literary scholars but rarely a critic in English. Almost no Indian writing in English has given to the world a critical theory or concept that has been happily accepted. Concepts as striking as Eliot’s theory of Tradition or Objective Correlative, Arnold’s touchstones, Leavis’s affirmative principle, Richards’s Practical Criticism, the New Critics’ Close Contextual Reading, and the Russian Formalists’ working techniques and so on, are quite absent from Indian critical thought. The Indian scholar spends most of his energy understanding and coming to terms with the West’s formulations on literature. The result is that if an Indian scholar has something original to say he has first to counter what the West has already laid down. Thus the time and energies he manages to save for original theory or criticism don’t take him far. Furthermore, his colonial past has made him, almost naturally, a derivative being unable to speak out in a voice of authority. Significantly, in India the critic is almost always the university or college English teacher, writing more for necessity than pleasure. He works with a number of handicaps – and ill equipped library with little or no means to purchase books and articles. His financial condition does not always allow him the leisure of independent study, forcing him to a life of compromise. He is often left spending more time in the gossip of staff room politics for the lack of a more academic ethos. The farthest he can reach out for a critical tradition is at the level of Commonwealth writing. Thus political, cultural and economic factors can be seen as having kept the Indian critic largely behind his Western counterpart.
However, it should not be forgotten that the Indian scholar in English has produced some interesting and useful scholarship in spite of the odds against him. If his work does not as yet show signs of maturity, there is hope for the future. This can be said with the work of Indians like C. D. Narasimhaiah in mind.
[Top of Page]Shakespeare’s Problem Plays: Some Solutions (1999)
"In analysing the Problem Plays of Shakespeare the book addresses itself to several critical issues. A significant issue that it highlights in implicit terms is that, in the twenty-first Century, criticism cannot remain an exclusively Western affair. The West should not, and indeed cannot, remain isolated in its approaches to literature just as the East must learn to accept that it can no longer rest secure on its ancient resources. The contemporary world, if anything, has brought the East and West together. We have crossed cultural and racial barriers, substantially, due to the media and, due to the wide use and popularity of the English language. To remain satisfied with a merely Western or simply Orientalist approach to literature can only deprive the world of much intellectual richness. We are no longer wholly ‘we’, and they are no longer entirely ‘they’. It should never be forgotten that the other could always have something to tell us about. If an Indian can win the Booker, and that from a selection board comprising Western readers, it is quite evident that the human race has moved ahead. This volume brings the twain to a meeting point, at least in literary criticism. It puts together critical analyses of both categories for the benefit of both.
We have lived with the idea of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays for a century now. It is time we decided whether this categorisation has any real justification and whether the label, ‘The Problem Plays of Shakespeare’, deserves to continue. There have been more in opposition to the term than in its support. Some Western scholars, however, seem to suggest that in the plays which are normally studied under this heading Shakespeare was not quite himself. It is generally felt that in these plays he was cynical, moralistic, enigmatic, satirical, feministic, bawdy, contrived, unconventional and whatnot. The plays are therefore more difficult to interpret and are less readily brought onto the neat graph of Shakespeare’s artistic progress....
This volume brings together five essays that are somewhat more positive in their treatment of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays. They are by diverse hands but there is a significant difference between these pieces and other critiques, and this is what makes these five essays of a piece. Each of the five takes some line of argument where the problem of the play in question tends to lose itself into something which, for the lack of a better name, I call a ‘solution’."
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