Books and Authors

Dr. D. Anjaneyulu

What is the main difference between historical narrative and historical fiction?

The historian has to give the utmost importance to the establishment of significant facts in their chronological sequence. His facts must be authentic and his evidence must be incontrovertible, at least sustainable, arrived at by the operation of a scientific process.

The historical fiction-writer, on the other hand, is more interested in the development of human character and the interplay of human personality through the unfolding of dramatic situations. A historical novelist, who wants to be taken seriously, can no more take liberties with his basic facts than a historian worth the name. Maybe, he can feel himself freer with dialogue and incident, description and interpretation. But his fancy and imagination will always have to be tethered to his facts, though he can have a long rope, provided he does not tie himself up in knots or hang himself with it. The Napoleon of fiction cannot win the Battle of Waterloo and Darius III of Persia cannot be shown as humbling the pride of Alexander the great. He can, of course, have his own original explanation why both of them had lost.

Both the forms of writing must appeal to the reader’s reason and imagination, though the proportion is obviously different. Both must be reliable and readable though here too the emphasis varies widely. There are students of literature who had learnt their medieval history of Scotland and England from the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott and their late medieval and early modern history of India from the dramas of Dwijendralal Roy and the novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Khandekar. Andre Maurois is able to effect quite a happy blend of authenticity and imagination in his celebrated works on Shelley and Disraeli that one is at a loss to make out the elements of romantic fiction from historical tact in them.

Among the novelists of today handling the materials of history, Gore Vidal strikes me as the most reliable and readable in one. He is a playwright and essayist as well as a novelist; He is equally at home with the ancient and medieval periods as with the modern. Nor is his area of interest limited by geographical borders and national boundaries. He has dealt with ancient themes like those in Julian, Messiah and The Judgment of Paris as well as modern, even contemporary themes, as in Burr, ‘1876’ and Washington D. C. In fact, primeval subjects, of perennial interest, seem to stimulate historical imagination all the more, as in Kalki and Creation.

Creation, a hefty volume of 500-odd pages, is Gore Vidal’s latest masterpiece. If one hesitates to call it his magnum opus, it is not because it is not a great work, but because he may have others, even greater, up his sleeve. It is certainly a tour de force, not only of lucid and absorbing narration but of assimilation of a baffling multitude of historical facts and an amazing variety of philosophical concepts. The East and the West, the North and the South, meet here in a conjunction rather than a confrontation, in a creative process that invests the dry bones of history with flesh and blood. The result is a delightful cavalcade of nations on the march under the leadership of heroes and villains, aided by the female of the species, which could be more deadly, then as now.

Here the author reconstructs the ancient world of Persia, Greece, India and Cathay, now gone beyond recall. He does so with a realism that takes into account the brutality as well as the glory associated with one of the memorable periods of world history. It was the Fifth Century before Christ, in which lived such great figures as Darius I and Xerxes of Persia, Socrates, Pericles and Anaxagoras of Greece, the Buddha and Ajatasatru of India and Confucius of Cathay (or China, as it is now called).

The hero-narrator of the novel is Cyras Spitama, the grandson of Zoraster (the founder of Zorastrianism), and friend and Courtier of Xerxes, who finds himself in many envious and not so envious, but often exciting, situations. He embarks on diplomatic missions to India, where he acquires a wife for himself (a daughter of Ajatasatru of Magadha, offered him as royal gift), besides goodwill and trade routes for his Emperor, to Cathay where he is confined as a slave but given a couple of concubines by way of courtesy for his good behaviour. He visits India twice, in early manhood and middle age and returns to the Persian Court, where his old age is spent in comparative peace, not untouched by suspicion in the harem, among strange faces and other minds.

Finding of new trade routes and making of liaisons with strange women is unlikely to satisfy the inner cravings of one who was the grandson of a prophet, and not for nothing. Cyrus Spitama was in fact deeply agitated by such fundamental questions as the origin of the universe, the purpose of human life, the existence of evil along with good and the nature of time. His was a voyage of intellectual discovery, a spiritual quest, in Indian terms, which brings him to the deer park for a quizzical dialogue with the Buddha, to the river bank where he fishes with Confucius, whose answers could be more puzzling than other people’s questions. Even the Buddha’s disarming habit of answering all questions with counter-questions is depicted by the sceptical narrator as skilful exercises in evasion, more amusing than enlightening, at times irritating rather than satisfying–an extended example of petitio principii.

Cyrus Spitama spends his last days, aged and blind, in a shaded courtyard in Athens where he meets a young stone mason, who comes to repair his wall. His name is Socrates. The whole story of the narrator’s life and travels, adventures, and countless encounters, is related to his nephew, Democritus of Abdera, who organises it and gets it transcribed for posterity.

Thanks largely to the education thus received, Democritus claims to have worked out, not only the causes of all celestial phenomena, but of creation itself. A tall claim indeed! The sort of thing that is hardly acceptable to the Indian philosophical tradition. But there it is, for what it is worth.

Here’s the finding of Democritus:

“The first principles of the Universe are atoms and empty space, everything else is merely human thought. Worlds such as this are unlimited in number. They come into being, and perish. But nothing can come into being from that which is not, or pass away into what is not. Further, the essential atoms are without limit in size and number and they make of the universe a vortex in which all composite things are generated–fire, water, air, earth.”

“The cause of the coming into being of all things is the ceaseless whirl, which I can call necessity, and everything happens according to necessity. Thus, creation is constantly created and re-created.”

“As Cyrus Spitama was beginning to suspect, if not believe, there is neither a beginning nor an end to creation, which exists in a state of flux in a time that is truly infinite.”

An interesting theory of creation – as good as any you could think of. But is it more convincing than the observations of the Buddha or Mahavira, Confucius or Lao-Tse?

Be that as it may, the novel itself is a brilliant piece of creation and re-creation, construction and reconstruction. Extremely readable, it is a sustained work of research, well-documented, but vivid in its detail, with no concession to the trivial and titillating, but with a fine sense of the ludicrous no less than the profound. Not that voyages of intellectual discovery are altogether absent in our own age, though they might be rare. There is, at any rate, no dearth of academic philosophers, for whom the teaching of philosophy is a profession, and quite a lucrative profession at that. Most of our universities are full of such professors of philosophy. But there are professors and professors.

Professor T. M. P. Mahadevan is one in a million. Philosophy is not a mere career for him. It is a mission to which he has dedicated his life. He is a philosopher in the etymological sense of the word which means: “Lover of Wisdom.” He interprets wisdom as the direct knowledge of the Truth. Identifying Truth with the Self in the tradition of Acharya Adi Sankara (as explained in his Brahma-Sutra-bhashya), Professor Mahadevan says: “It is as a seeker of the Self that I have all along attempted to shape my life. In this attempt I have all along been receiving abundant grace and guidance from sages and saints.”

Notable among the sages he has in mind is the Sage of Kanchi, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, the senior pontiff, and among the saints was the Saint of Arunachala, Sri Ramana Maharshi. He makes repeated mention of these two, and amply acknowledges his debt of gratitude to them in his autobiography, recently brought out by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. There are also others like Swami Rajeswarananda of the Sri Ramakrishna Mission, who had played their role in bringing up this promising lad.

Aptly entitled, “A Philosopher Looks ” Prof. Mahadevan’s autobiography is more than a recollection of the main events of his life. It is rather a testament of faith, recording his commitment to the message of Advaita.

“Advaita, to the exposition of which I have dedicated my entire life, is not a school of philosophy, nor can it be limited by what we nowadays call ‘philosophy’. Advaita is a symbolic name for the principle of non-duality.”

“To the understanding and exposition of this experience, which is the culmination of all inquity and research, I have offered all my attention, be it academic, human or spiritual. It is that which sustains me’.’ he adds in conclusion.

In saying these words, Professor Mahadevan is stating only the bare fact, which speaks volumes for his integrity of purpose and single-minded devotion. No one who had seen him in person and heard him speak on the subject at least once, can fail to be impressed by his profundity as an academic thinker, lucidity as an expositor and humility as a man and as an Advaitin. His critical detachment and absolute objectivity as an analyst and interpreter of other schools of thought stand out as much by their genuineness as by their rarity.

All these qualities are reflected in his autobiography, which is written with simplicity, accuracy and restraint. If there is one characteristic that dominates the personality of Prof. Mahadevan it is his tranquility. It is no less true of his book–the style as well as the substance. For, was it not Montaigne who said that Style is the Man?

If Advaita, or the principle of non-duality, could be accepted as the main characteristic of the Indian philosophical tradition, it could, with some justification, be extended to the Indian cultural tradition as well. It is well-known that Pandit Nehru in The Discovery of India spoke of the principle of unity in diversity as underlying the progress of Indian culture through the ages. By an understandable extension of the idea to the literary situation, which forms part of the cultural, Prof. Umashankar Joshi, eminent Gujarati poet and Jnan Pith award-winner, now President of the Sahitya Akademi, thought of the proposition’ “Indian literature is one, though written in many languages.” It has a curious felicity of expression (curiosa felicitas) about it and can hardly be improved upon for its aptness and simplicity. Small wonder then that it has long since been adopted by the Sahitya Akademi as its motto.

Critics are not, of course, wanting who take the extreme position that we have not one Indian literature, but many–Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil and so on. The differences are no doubt important, for the student of literature, even more so for the student of social anthropology, but they can easily be magnified. The danger is that one might often miss the wood for the trees.

It would easily be granted that Tamil literature retains a uniqueness of appeal, because of its antiquity and its autochthonous character. While most of the Indian languages (and literatures) in the Indo-Aryan family, owe a lot to Sanskrit in their evolution and development, Tamil alone, among the major languages, could claim to stand on its own. For the simple reason that it belongs to the Indo-Dravidian family. From which assumption it by no means follows that Tamil and Sanskrit grew completely apart and had nothing to do with each other at any point of time or stage in their development. A substantial extent of give-and-take, in vocabulary as well as in literary forms, can hardly be ruled out. There must have been a lot of give and take at various stages and different levels in literature, latter-day exercises in Purism and attempts at bowdlerisation notwithstanding.

The International Institute of Tamil Studies, Adyar, functioning for about a decade-and-a-half now, has to its credit a number of research and other publications focussing attention on the various facets of Tamil language and literature. Of the forty or so titles now available, nearly ten of them are in English, so that the heritage of the Tamils as rich and varied as any in this country or elsewhere, might be projected on the world screen, for the benefit of the non-Tamil-knowing public at home and abroad.

The sumptuous volume on Literary Heritage of the Tamils, edited by the Director of the Institute, Dr. S. V. Subramanian, and his colleague, Dr. N. Ghadigachalam, is comprehensive in its scope, methodical in its approach and detailed in its treatment. It brings together forty-odd papers on a variety of subjects, presented at a Seminar towards the end of 1978. Divided into a dozen sections, it covers over two thousand years of literature from the Sangam Age to the contemporary times, including Puranas, Prabandhas and commentaries, drama, poetry, fiction, folklore, etc.

The panel of learned contributors, each a specialist in his or her own field, includes: Dr. V. S. P. Manickam Aham), Dr. S. V. Subramaniam (medieval epics), Dr. R. Vijayalakshmi (earlier epics). Mr. M. Arunachalam (Saiva Literature), Mr. S. Sivapatha Sundaram (Fiction) and a host of other scholars.

Applicable to this, as to other situations, is the observation of Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, who said in the summing-up of his key-note address:

“...interdependence and deeper unity are the law of life, and the aim of the great poet or novelist or dramatist is to show how aberrations in human relationships only mean a temporary disturbance in the web of existence, and the cardinal objective should be to rectify the distortions and restore wholeness and wholesomeness. If literature is to serve society, give it the blessing of sweetness and light...literature should be viewed and cultivated and enjoyed as a living and growing human concern, as the evolving and fulfilling expression of the collective Tamil mind, itself a part of the collective human mind ever exceeding itself and racing towards the beckoning frontiers of the future.”

The volume on Tamil Drama–Origin and Development, by Dr. A. N. Perumal, is a painstaking working, well-documented, with an exhaustive list of plays–ancient and modern.

In the Cultural Heritage of the Tamils, a companion volume, Dr. V. C. Kulandaisamy has some pertinent remarks to make on the aims of research, as it ought to be:

“We should look for truth as it exists and not as we would like to have it. It needs a scientific approach with a high level of objectivity....in the field of language studies, in India, objectivity is not a strong point. Very often, pre-conceived notions dominate and efforts are made to find only such facts as may support a fond belief. Nothing could be more inimical to research than this approach.”

A timely and much-needed warning to all research-scholars, irrespective of the language in which they are interested.

One of the modern European scholars, specialising in Dravidian Studies, with a scientific approach, is Dr. Kamil V. Zvelebil, whose lectures on the cult of Muruga are published in book-form by the Institute. He makes an earnest attempt at tracing the impact of the Tamil tradition on the worship of Tirumurugan and his fellow deities. His original approach, based on historical and archetypal analysis, has yielded him new insights–favouring the greater antiquity and superior merit of the indigenous Murugan cult to the Sanskritised Skanda Tradition. It certainly provides the interested student with a lot of food for thought.

In the task of recapturing the multi-faceted heritage of the Tamils, it is satisfying to note that the Institute not onlylooks with pride on the past, but looks forward with hope and confidence to the future.