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Literary Review
Of secret odes to life and other things
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TGV's writing had the unstated lesson that one could love something as well as its opposite, with lucidity and reason, says KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH.
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BANGALORE is finally on the verge of rain after a particularly severe summer. Grim blue skies have softened under rain-bearing grey, the sun's golden glare is a leaden glow, the trees are gay.
I have just finished reading Mr. Naipaul's Round Trip and Other Essays — the new Penguin collection of the selected writings of T.G. Vaidyanathan, which should be extra special for readers of The Hindu, as many of them first appeared here — and I feel like I want to go up on the rooftops and tell everybody to celebrate.
Had TGV (as T.G. Vaidyanathan was known to friends and students) been alive now — and not dead a year and more — a day like this would have thrilled him; in his Rajajinagar house — with broad leaved badam trees in front — the magical light of rainy skies would have added wings to his words.
TGV loved rain; in "Umbrella Days" he wrote, "To each his own madness... mine is rain, say what you will. Nothing is going to keep me out of it, not even, I hope, my newly acquired umbrella."
Then why buy an umbrella?
Because, "An umbrella, especially when new, is a sheer joy to behold."
He was like that, TGV. And that is what makes his writing (some of the best of it lovingly and judiciously put together by two of his closest students — Pradeep Sebastian and Prasanna Chandrasekharan — in Mr.Naipaul's Round Trip) a treasure worth having. TGV's writing — as also his conversations — contain an unstated "lesson" — that you can love something as well as its opposite, and that you can do this lucidly and with reason rather than by negating/denying difference.
You can love rain and also love umbrellas, "I don't see why I am obliged to use an umbrella gainfully just because I happen to own one. I still love to get wet in the rain which I did almost as soon as I had made my purchase."
The five broad sections — cricket, films, English, Psychoanalysis and popular culture — of Mr. Naipaul's Round Trip indicate the variety of TGV's interests — he could write with as much perspicacity about Kushboo's fat as he could about Kakar's psychoanalysis, with as much lyricism about cricket as about dictionaries, with as much insight about Koestler's suicide as about Ray's cinema. The list could go on and on.
However, TGV is not to be mistaken for that species of writer who claims to be able to "write" about anything but in fact stops with observation. TGV could and did write about almost anything — he too observed, he also observed how others observed, he analysed observation itself and explored the motivations for all this observation, engaging with it in a kind of absolutist way and then saying something "different" (for otherwise why say it at all?). Different because he had arrived at it so singularly — from all sides, from underground, airborne, in dream, through conversations, from stray flashes of insights, through popular expressions and what not.
For instance, in writing of Sivaji Ganesan, TGV goes past the customary signposts of films like "Parashakti", "Sivaji" and "Manohara" and points to other deeper things, in "Sivaji Ganesan: Chevalier Extraordinaire"(p.88).
It is the remarkable series of films that he did with director Bhim Singh ... that will remain his lasting contribution to Tamil cinema... But these films... are decidedly unromantic ... he is the guardian of women, their saviour, rather than their lord and master. This rootedness in South Indian family values, where the honour and virginity of a sister are of paramount importance, is what makes films like Parashakti and Thirumbippar essential to our understanding of Sivaji's genius.
His physical endowments — that amorphous and sagging jawline and mouse-like, diminutive eyes — do not bespeak the poetry of stormy romance, they are the very prose of ordinary, South Indian life... we must look elsewhere to decipher the marks of his prowess as an actor. He had a ballet dancer's sense of timing... it is his walk, his carriage, that often comes to mind... he employs a casual, cowboy's gait, head archly tilted to the left, spring-heeled, lissome, the balance adroit, almost like a middle-weight boxer like Sugar Ray Robinson... the great swinging amplitudes of his magnificent voice that has carried him to the dizzying pinnacles of fame... in his hoarse fractured cry D-O-C-T-O-R, or in the half-mocking, half-despairing catch in the lower octaves of his rain-drenched voice...
In "Sivaji Ganesan: Chevalier Extraordinaire", as in the best of his writing, TGV — with the self-composed flourish of a seasoned wizard — joins familiarity (one of TGV's oft repeated lines to his students was "know your text") to insight and creates a piece of writing that is inspired, lyrical and analytical. And commas, hyphens, semi-colons and all manner of punctuation were familiar spirits waiting on the wizardry of TGV's words.
TGV's analyses often led to his saying things that were against the trend — though mostly far less startling than his defence of Hitler! — his writing on V.S. Naipaul or on Koestler's suicide, both sound a different note on the topic. Likewise, TGV's reading of the film "Darr", in the context of adolescent sexuality, or of "Monsoon Wedding" as a flawed film whose potential went unrealised because it refuses to give the working class any substance.
If you don't know TGV at all or his writing, turn to the longish Introduction to Mr. Naipaul's Round Trip, which gives tantalising glimpses of what TGV was like as a person and writer and also provided a loving but precise overview of the terrain of some of his best writing.
Here we learn that "For TGV, one had to connect the prose and the passion of one's life... . this intellectual held fast to democracy in thought and hierarchy in feeling... He worked at being a `critical insider' because he felt that his early immersion in Western thought had alienated him from his own culture."
The tributes in Mr. Naipaul's Round Trip — from friends and students — add their own bits and are a testament to the brilliance and humanity of a man (too little celebrated publicly), who stirred both mind and heart, whose words, ideas and writing inspired, tantalised and guided several generations of students and friends, regardless of who they were, what they did or where they came from.
Nirmala Lakshman of The Hindu writes of TGV's unfailing desire to have perfect copy, while Ashish and Uma Nandy talk of him as representative of a dying breed of intellectuals, and Sudhir Kakar's deeply personal piece talks of the spell of TGV's intellectual passion. Two old students C.K. Meena and Chandra Siddan write of being moulded by TGV, arriving at the same point through different routes — the former, in a typically Indian preference, consigning TGV's "faults" to the background, while the latter's leather skirt individualism does the reverse.
There are two essays in Mr.Naipaul's Round Trip — "Authority and Identity in India", and "The Indian Approach to Psychoanalysis" — which are indicative of the direction that TGV was leaning in the closing years of his life. Both essays are to do with what it means to be Indian — while the latter was part of a larger engagement with writing (including that of Sudhir Kakar), on and about India, the former was the beginning of a sort of reformulation of old convictions, beliefs — a movement towards understanding his own Indianness and of his life's work as part of this "Indian" identity.
In the last five or six years, TGV often spoke of how, in India, what made sense was the notion of "appropriateness" (which he said he had found in A.K. Ramanujan, perhaps in "Is There an Indian Way of Thought?"), rather than of "right" opposed to "wrong". One of his last conversations echoed what "Authority and Identity in India" proposed — that, like it or not, "the disoriented modern Indian is... in need of a guru" — when he conceded to an old student that he was like a guru, and that "only in India can someone like me make sense to all of you."
In "Authority and Identity in India", TGV wrote, "The Indian is seldom, if ever, completely alone but surrounds himself with congenial others — his immediate family usually, or, when this is unavailable, a cluster of friends with whom his relationships are invariably familial. He is, then, not so much an `individual' in the accepted Western sense of the term with its attendant corollaries of `identity', `self-hood', `moral choice', `growth' and so on, but extraordinarily `dividual'".
In real life, TGV was surrounded by concentric circles of people who drew life from him as he from them; to those nearest to him, he made himself indispensable (how many times one of us working on something was woken up at unearthly hours because he'd just has an idea that we could use?). To those closest to him, he was not abashed to take the wheel or say things that might to others sound aphoristic and a bit blasé, such as when he said, "There are three things that are indispensable for a full life — humility, self-knowledge and motivation."
Readers of The Hindu will be touched to know that TGV's last visit ever, was to its Bangalore office, where he, accompanied by a student, sat with Assistant Editor Viju Oommen, incandescent almost with high spirits, and that the last thing he "wrote" was a note to be sent to Nirmala Lakshman at The Hindu's Chennai office.
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