English Writings of D V Gundappa - 13

Volume Eight (1963–1967)

Readers of these volumes would surely know that DVG looked upon life as an undivided whole. This worldview enabled him to celebrate the arts, literature and all the fine graces of human life that are enriching on a personal level, and involve in socio-political activities that are beneficent at the collective level – all with the same zest and tenacity. What that literary savant, N Raghunathan wrote in a different context is applicable to DVG in equal measure: “Leaving out what is ephemeral and out of date, there is a core of solid sense and true insight in his speeches and writings to serve as finger-posts and warning signals for those who scan their way anxiously out of the present confusions.”[1]

Some thinkers and thoughts haunted DVG for years. Time and again in these pages we find him contemplating the writings of Plato, Manu and Vidyaranya, the equivalence of truth and beauty, the nature of dharma, the relationship between the State and citizens, and so on. Each revisit reveals a new facet, much like a hidden face of a diamond that coruscates under new light. In an essay titled Teacher of the Criterion of Value, he analyses the dialogues of Plato once again. He notes that in ancient Greece, issues of war and not peace, shaped governmental policies:

The history of the City-States of Greece was largely a history of mutual rivalries and long-lasting wars among them. Athens and Sparta, in particular, kept up their feuds from generation to generation. The self-aggrandizement of the State, rather than the fate of the individual citizen, was the stuff of their politics. The issues of war rather than the issues of peace determined the form of the government. (p. 6)

He observes that (1) people value each other because of their diverse capacities and qualities, and (2) the interdependence of their lives makes the organization of the State meaningful. After elucidating this idea from various standpoints, he concludes categorically: “Make character and capacity uniform, no one will need any other.” (p. 10)

We learn that DVG had discussed Plato’s conception of justice with the eminent Greek scholar, Ernest Barker and had explained its near-total similarity to the Indian conception of dharma. According to him,

Dharma is the attainment of excellence by each person in his or her own line of service to the community, so that all the needs of society for a good life are met in the best manner possible. (p. 12) Plato seeks the self-fulfilment of the individual through life in society. The foundations of the State are thus moral and spiritual, and so is its highest achievement. (p. 13)

In an essay contributed to the Swarajya annual number in 1967, DVG has examined the nature of truth and beauty:

That which gives reality to life is the same as that which makes life enjoyable. Truth and beauty are but the root and the fruit of one and the same cosmic tree. (p. 16) As truth is related to being, beauty is related to becoming. Mere being, without doing and feeling, can have no value. How is passive, barren existence — with nothing to be conscious of and nothing to work for — different from sheer non-existence? To have a purpose in being is to have life; and the purpose which evokes the activity of living is beauty. What turns being into seeking is beauty. Life is thus a procession from truth to beauty. (p. 18) To divorce beauty from truth is to empty truth of its significance and deprive beauty of its home. (p. 28)

In the same essay he has taken up Ode on a Grecian Urn for analysis and explained the symbolism of the urn in a profound manner:

The urn is a symbol of the inseparable concomitancy of the timed and the timeless in life. It shows life and death in juxtaposition; beauty and its transience; love and its ashy end. The fruit of romance has the seed to tragedy hidden in its pulp. Mortality holds the embryo of immortality in its womb. To which member of the contrasting pair are we to give our allegiance? “To be or not to be: that is the question.” (p. 22)

Doubtless, this essay is a capital contribution to the corpus of literary criticism on Keats’ famous poem, and incidentally comprises some of the most original cogitations on the inseparability of truth and beauty. DVG has authored a poem titled Shrngara-mangalam in Kannada based on the same theme, which is unique for its aesthetic distillation of philosophical verities.  

DVG was wedded to the idea of culture, which Matthew Arnold memorably defined as ‘sweetness and light.’ His monograph on the subject in Kannada, although conceived as an entry-level pedagogical work, has outgrown its objective and become a classic that remains a bestseller to this day. The reason for its sustained popularity lies in DVG’s treatment of culture from an Indian point of view that has a solid philosophical basis and yet offers pragmatic guidelines to improve the quality of our life. His meditations on ‘unity through culture’ can be found in the Founder’s Day Address he delivered at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bengaluru in 1963. He argues that the promotion of dharma is the purpose of culture:

The purpose of culture is to promote sattva by freeing it from the hustling goad of rajas and the darkening contamination of tamas. This is necessarily a long process, not admitting of impatience or haste. It is a process of careful self-examination and hard self-training. The schools of training are the family, the clan, the town, the State, the nation, and all the living world. Dharma is this process of self-discipline, and it is co-extensive with the entire field of life. The discipline of dharma wears out the dross of tamas and modifies the strain of rajas, and so strengthens sattva. All virtues and all graces of behaviour serve to purify man. Dharma purges the soul’s eye of its blinding rheum and widens its horizons. Friendship, fellowship in work or play, sympathy, charity — all these extensions of the concern of the heart, out of the narrow limits set to it by ego, serve to build up the sattva element in us and take us nearer to the ideal of unity or atmaupamya. (p. 40)

On another occasion he has identified three cardinal constituents of dharma: (i) the individual’s freedom of self-fulfilment (ii) justice or the regulation of each being’s self-expression (iii) universal brotherhood. (p. 118) DVG advocates sattva as the means to discover dharma and says: “Sattva is in every human being, but not equally active in all. In most of us, it is in various stages of dormancy and corruption. To awaken and to liberate it is the way of ensuring justice and harmony in the life of society.” (p. 122)

DVG was as much a refined rasika as a discerning scholar. His views on fundamental art forms such as music, dance and literature were highly respected by the doyens of those areas. In an essay on Purandaradasa, he has made a perceptive comment on the part played by learning in a musical recital, and has suggested the optimal format to present Purandara’s songs:

Learning is not necessarily art, even as a thesaurus is not literature. Excess of svara connotes self-consciousness in the singer and provokes self-consciousness in the hearer. And self-consciousness is the antithesis of surrender which is the heart-secret of art-enjoyment. (p. 49) Purandara asks for a simple and unornamented elaboration (alapana) of the pure raga. Its purpose is merely to create the atmosphere of sahitya. (p. 52) [The presentation of Purandara’s songs] should be beautiful without being learned; disciplined without being pedantic. (p. 53)

Although professional preoccupations took away much of his time, DVG was au courant in multiple subjects: literature, philosophy, politics and economics among others. An essay contributed to a symposium organized by All-India Radio in 1961 reveals his close study of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetical works. Backed by prodigious learning, DVG succinctly explains how Tagore’s well-turned expressions echo Upanishadic thoughts. His reflections on the nature of poetry reveal a keen mind of the classical mould:

Poetry is to me a soul speaking to itself. All who have known anything of the trials of life can recall occasions when the one soul behaves as though it were two … At such a moment of the soul’s trial, the heart has questions to ask, and the intelligence has to find answers. It is sometimes the heart that starts in excitement, and it is the intelligence that tries to explain. At other times it is the intelligence that suggests an idea, and it is the heart that responds in excitement. The one stirs, the other sighs or smiles. Or the one cries, the other pleads and pacifies. Such deep-voiced intercourse between the emotive and the ratiocinative faculties of the mind is the substance of true poetry. When the intellect predominates in the intercourse, it becomes philosophy. When the heart predominates, it is music. When both are in harmonious co-operation, we have great poetry. This self-dialogue of the soul is the most intimate of all forms of human intercourse and therefore the most revealing. (pp. 59–60)

In a talk broadcast over All-India Radio in 1962, DVG has explained how literature can check the excesses of democracy:

The antidote to the aberrations of democracy is in literature; and, paradoxically, democracy and literature are close kinsmen, both relating themselves to the concern for the good inherent in man. Literature at its highest serves, leading men through visions of the beautiful and the awful in life and inducing his mind to revise its scale of life’s values, to liberate the sense of the good in him from the grip of its opposite and realize the ultimate identity of the beautiful with the good. Democracy seeks to activize that very sense of the good in the contexts of the everyday life of the community. (p. 69)

Over the course of his long and chequered engagement with public affairs, DVG gave eminently pragmatic suggestions to resolve social issues. He was of the firm opinion that a person who draws up lurid pictures of various problems but does not offer constructive suggestions is of little help in public life. “We are impressed by his diagnosis, but left puzzled as to what to do.” (p. 80) On the other hand, he lauded people imbued with a positive attitude who take one step at a time, who know that “success will be but fractional at the best” and yet persevere to counteract problematic factors.

DVG was a devout disciple of Swami Vivekananda’s writings. In a short essay written in 1963, he has beautifully captured Swamiji’s approach to Vedanta and the enormous impact it has had:

The aim of his Vedanta was man-making, not unmanning. His samnyasa was not a ritualistic and cheerless renunciation of all values, but a glad and deliberate rejection of inferior values. To translate the Vedanta into terms of life, — of life at each level and grade according to its circumstances, — was his comprehensive object … This then was his supreme purpose: to bring home to all mankind a sense of its spiritual kinship. The Vedanta should be re-interpreted in terms of the life of today. That is what Sri Krishna did for his day. Shankara for his day, Vidyaranya for his world and his day. Of that long and illustrious tradition, Vivekananda is our contemporary representative. Vedanta for home and society, for the council and the assembly, as much as for the Mutt and the monastery. In Vivekananda we thus salute the symbol of India’s soul reaching out hands of brotherliness to all quarters of the globe. (pp. 92–93)

Engaged in his self-prescribed mission to preserve the conscience of our society intact, DVG wrote timely articles to bring a sense of balance in policy-making and administration. We can get a fair idea of his trenchancy just by going through some of the headings in the ‘notes’ he wrote every month in Public Affairs: Constitutional Jekyll and Hyde, Ministerial Misadventures, Nation Greater than Party, Self-humiliation Day, Darkening Skies, Cocksureness of Half-knowledge, Opportunist Apostasies.

In the well-known Golaknath case DVG wholeheartedly welcomed the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Parliament cannot curtail the fundamental rights of citizens. Commenting on whether the Parliament has the power to amend vital parts of the Constitution or not, he observed:

The amending is to be limited by the spirit and tenor of the Constitution. The provision of fundamental citizen-rights is the vital breath of the Constitution. If the freedom of citizenship were itself to be at the mercy of a party-ridden Parliament, the words “democracy” and “republic” in the characterization of the Constitution would stand emptied of all meaning. (pp. 124–25)

Addressing the ever-urgent problem of religious conversions, DVG suggested the enactment of a law that would keep track of proselytized people and help check forced conversions. He averred that it is not difficult for the heads of Hindu mathas to prescribe sacraments that would validate reconversion into Hinduism – a properly sanctioned scheme of ghar wapsi, so to speak. Alluding to Swami Shraddhananda’s shuddhi and sanghatan movements, he observed:

The time is now coming for the Hindu community for a re-examination of its position in the face of the challenge implied in the campaign of Muslim and Christian communities for an increase of their numerical strength. Number is strength in a democratic State; and a community or group that would survive as such should keep careful count of its gains and losses in population statistics. (pp. 144–45)