A presentation by Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan to the Royal Commonwealth Society, Canberra, on 4 October 2019, Kingston, ACT.
Literature grows out of life: therein lies its universal appeal, its personal moral particularities and passions. It’s our story. Narratives of all kinds are around us: in forms, faces and places, visible and invisible. Above all, in words, both spoken and written. It’s as multitudinous as living, ever in a continuous flux. It flows like a river with innumerable sources.
A function of literature is to convert those life-stories, the debris and detritus, into the imaginative truths of our daily bread.
For the past fifty odd years, literature for me has been a most sustaining, creative force of my roller-coaster ride through politics and poetry, travelling and talking, history and memory, homes lost, memories recovered, reading and writing in a language far from my mother’s tongue.
To me English has been the great gift. English alone, I think, is the global language as soccer is the only truly global game. Of course communities have their own passions for rugby, AFL, and the Ashes, and their own languages, literatures.
Writing is really very young but it has changed our sense of the world more dramatically than any technology. Perhaps because language is genetically transmitted in us : we haven’t yet found a tribe that is without a language. And every child is capable of mastering the grammar of his or her mother tongue by the age of five.
Writing, of course, is a recent invention. And it has shaped and reconstructed our structures of Reality, both within and without, physical and metaphysical.
Today, however, I’m concerned with a literary culture, commonly known as Commonwealth Literature with English as the binding vine or the golden thread.
I read my first English book when I was sixteen years old: it was a simplified version of The Treasure Island : many years later I visited R L Stevenson’s grave at Vailima, in Western Samoa, on top of a mountain: it was a hard climb; luckily I was with three other younger writers. They pulled and pushed me uphill to the top of the mountain.
‘Top of the Mountain!’ as a character exclaims elatedly in the film The Exotic Marigold Hotel.
The next novel I read in its original version of 424 pages, Collins pocket edition, was Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities . It was prescribed for the ubiquitous Senior Cambridge examination: I almost learnt it by rote; certain passages I can recite even now.
Exactly forty years later I was briefly a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge: after a talk I gave to postgraduate students, one of the scholars took me to a building where my Literature paper must have been marked, decades ago.
I’d got only a credit for it! But it gave a direction to my life. One might say it shaped my destiny when I joined a NZ university entrance class: I was taught by one Mr F E Joyce, a Kiwi, who gave me three novels to read: Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, How Green was my Valley, and The Cruel Sea , among a couple of poets. I also began writing for our school magazine, named The Tatler.
That was my introduction to English Literature. Then at Delhi I studied nothing but English Literature, 8 papers, from Shakespeare to the poems of Tennyson on a scholarship valued today at $4 dollars a month, the price of a cup of coffee at Bitter-Sweet café, next door. For me, then, it was a fortune.
I read William Wordsworth’s healing power of Nature when the hot winds swept across this ancient, dusty, desert city, full of the remnants of ruins.
Then one studied Will Shakespeare: once you’ve read Shakespeare, taught by a Shakespearean scholar who edits the only journal in the world on a single play, called Hamlet Studies, nothing is ever the same: Professor R W Desai has been doing that for the past 50 years from Delhi.
Through a bit of acting, I met Jyoti on the stage! Play within plays.
On our visits to Delhi Jyoti and I meet Rupin Desai for High Tea at the India International Centre.
But once you’ve read Shakespeare, and the poets of Lake District, nothing can diminish your affections of the mind for a culture that has given us two priceless gifts: Parliamentary democracy and English poetry.
William Wordsworth became my favourite poet: the melancholy imagination of Wordsworth, the verbal virtuosity of Shakespeare, created wordsmiths of many a Commonwealth writer. Who can ever forget the golden daffodils even in Canberra!
Both are more meaningful today than ever, whether one explores Nature or human nature.
They have been the creative wellsprings of my life: they have shaped my journeys. You’ll find a more detailed account of these journeys in a long essay in my recently launched book Gandhianjali.
But it was in the early 1970s that my wife and our three children travelled to Leeds on a Commonwealth fellowship. Here I was introduced in my second Masters to Commonwealth Literature. To my knowledge it was the first course in the world which was designed towards a postgraduate degree in Commonwealth Literature.
It was in this course that I read Patrick White taught by Professor William Walsh, the first Professor of Commonwealth Literature in the world.
I’ve dedicated one of my edited books on Commonwealth Literature to three Professors who taught me this extraordinary literary harvest: one English, one Indian, and one Australian. They all had their Leeds connections.
What emerges in these literary journeys is the intense interest in English as a medium for creative writing, giving a latent linguistic unity to a great diversity of cultures from which the writers emerged, touched by English texts.
The literature of England has been in the making for almost 600 years: Commonwealth Literature, as a body of works in a Discipline, is barely sixty years old.
The first conference on Commonwealth Literature was held in the School of English, University of Leeds, in September 1964.
In Commonwealth Literature we do not include English, Irish and American Literatures, although Ireland and America were early colonies and went on to energise English Literature. But both established their powerful distinctive literary identities, using English.
A distinctive aspect of Commonwealth Literature is that while the creative medium is English, the sensibilities it embodies are not traditionally English. While English Literature in its forms and frameworks affect Commonwealth Literature, it in turn has affected the teaching and study in the Departments of English, worldwide.
Today it is perhaps the most popular literary studies under a variety of disguises: New Literatures in English, World Literatures in English, Postcolonial Literatures, Literatures in English, Cultural Literary Studies, New Writings in English, Global Literatures in a Global Language, Third World Literature --its changing definition is the sign of it vitality, variety and colourful complexity. It also poses a few problems of defining an elephant, or at least the elephant in many an academic room.
But for some, there’s nothing called Commonwealth Literature. Writers like Salman Rushdie and Amitabh Ghosh deny its existence. I, of course, do not agree with their contention. Writers, especially writers, have a right to hold their wrong opinions like some politicians! I’ve been both.
There are three major sources of Commonwealth Literature: those from Australia, Canada, New Zealand are, one might say, extensions of the same cultural themes and mythology--some benign, some brutal - exploring new landscapes away from the motherland, with their variations: for example French in Canada; however, English is the creative medium and the literature springs outside the UK on distant shores, across many seas but with subterranean connections, to the mother country. Even at the ANU, we’ve had Professors of English, but not of a Professor of Australian Literature. Not yet, anyway.
I think we should have one in Commonwealth Literature in the Commonwealth of Australia.
Then there are writers say from the Indian subcontinent, who write in English but against a profoundly rich and varied literary traditions on their own native land older than even English . But the novelistic form or the autobiography, for example, is not indigenous to India; epics are. Indians, however, have excelled in fashioning some of our contemporary world’s finest novels and autobiographies: Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi changed the British public opinion about India’s struggle for freedom through their autobiographies; Nirad Chaudhari’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is regarded as ‘the greatest autobiography of the twentieth century’. It’s the great encounter of Indian and English sensibilities. Fictions from R K Narayan to Salman Rushdie are part of that creativity. It’s significant that after Tagore’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the Nobel Prize for Literature to another person with Indian roots was awarded in 2001 to V S Naipaul, a descendant of indentured Indian labourers from Trinidad. Here the Indian Diaspora has added another branch to Commonwealth Literature.
The third category I’d suggest is the variety of harvest from cultures close to our own lives where there’s a richness of oral traditions but scarcely any writing was done before European exploration and colonization: nothing was written in our part of the Pacific until little over 200 years ago; the first novel in English published in Africa was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958: sixty years ago. Closer home we can now read many challenging texts by our own Aboriginal writers.
There’s another level of contribution by Commonwealth Writing that I feel is not given adequate attention. It’s through Commonwealth Literature that the processes of writing have been significant and give salience to the acts of creation. Writers of the Commonwealth have generally given us some understanding of how they came to create poetry and prose: their ordinary experience touched by words like the colours of a rainbow, so to speak, in drops of rain refracted by rays of light: they make us see the colours of our once dreary lives, not worthy of being written about. Think of Mr Mohun Biswas or the characters that inhabit the little town of Malgudi.
Both the individual and the town are today part of our literary heritage, more recognizable than what we generally term reality. Or Derek Walcott’s poetry from the Caribbean seas, a mixture of many worlds, where there was decimation of native peoples and the introduction of slavery and indenture: An absence of a mother-tongue created almost a new language of psychic expression.
This creative contact between literature and life are mutually deepening and the reader-writer, like the travelers of yore, carry their world of experience and literary imaginings in their holdalls wherever they travel: and home becomes an imaginative construct, bearable even in exile. Some of our finest Commonwealth writers have lived, loved and created literature in Exile, remembering their lost landscapes and loves with greater intensity than their mundane lives. Imagine what we’ve done from South Africa to the South Pacific in the name of authenticity and identity, not to mention the extremities of indigeneity. Sometimes Literature alone seems to give some balance to our sense of common humanity, a common home, a scarred landscape of shared history.
This quest and questioning remain for me the deepest journey within these imagined worlds. Literary globalization is a gift.
But the world we know has changed more radically in the past 600 years than in the 6 million years before that. Commonwealth literature cross-fertilized our lives and living in the world of English. To give you one example: if you read the list of literary Nobel Prize winners in Literature, an amazing number have come out of the Commonwealth countries.
And this is true of the Booker Prize winners too. So Commonwealth Literature has been a truly creative catalyst.
It has brought us closer together with a deeper understanding of our interaction as human beings with new environments which challenge old mythologies and prompt us towards the creation of new realities.
The first collection of essays from the first conference on Commonwealth Literature was published in 1965. It’s titled simply Commonwealth Literature , edited by John Press. Its first essay is ‘Literature and Environment: Inheritance and Adaptation’ and the last is ‘The Novelist as a Teacher’ by the late Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe.
Between these two challenging, changing themes we exist and continue to make some sense of our several lives in many incarnations.
Let me briefly take one of our own: Patrick White. In 1958, as a teenager, I passed through Sydney, towards Delhi; White wrote an essay titled ‘The Prodigal Son’. He’d returned, aged 46, after spending 20 years overseas, to Australia from England; at the same age Gandhi had returned, after 20 years in South Africa, to India. Both coincidentally died at 78 in different circumstances, forty years apart, except that White knew Gandhi better than most Australians. His first book Happy Valley , published in 1939, has an epigraph from Gandhi’s writings.
If Gandhi reconfigured the political map of the subcontinent with many tragic consequences, White changed the interior landscape of this island continent and made it part of the literary crucible of the world.
In his seminal essay-manifesto White makes several assertions that bear directly on Commonwealth Literature.
Brought up to believe in the maxim only the British can be right, White wrote, it took him a long time to think his own thoughts. In London, he began experiencing the first sensations of rootlessness. He longed to return to the scenes of childhood, the purest well from which a creative artist draws. If he found England after the war a spiritual graveyard, he saw in Australia in all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness.
The exaltation of the average disturbed him and he set out to discover through the lives of an ordinary man and woman the extraordinary, the mystery and poetry which alone could make bearable the lives of such people. So he wrote The Tree of Man which I read in the summer of 1971 in a London hotel, named Cambridge, run by a Pakistani. And Jyoti and I are here today because of that single book read in London. And three of us, in my family of five, have doctoral degrees in Commonwealth Literature.
Last month I reread the novel here in Canberra. Then he wrote Voss .
Patrick White set out to people the great Australian landscape with memorable characters: Stan Parker and Amy Parker, Voss and Laura, are mythic figures in Australian literature, epical in dimensions against the epic grandeur of Australia: its vast deserts as if still the prophets come from the deserts through its fires and floods, and the soul-wrenching droughts.
Although one must admit deserts also come from some prophets!
In a state of simplicity and humility, through rocks and sticks of words, he began seeing Australia with a fresh, spiritual imagination. Even boredom and frustration presented avenues of endless exploration: Australian life acquired a meaning, a beauty beyond the mundane, below the Equator.
There was a possibility of communication between human beings, articulating areas of hidden silences. There is a possibility, wrote White, that one may be helping to people a barely inhabited country with a race possessed of understanding, even as the White Australia policy was in bloom like cacti flowering in a deserts of our prejudices and fears.
This possession of understanding is what the Commonwealth writer has attempted to do through Commonwealth Literature. Today if we’ve an understanding of the Aboriginal world, how much of it has come from poets and writers, including journalists and scholars, readers and researchers not unlike ourselves.
This is precisely what has been done through Commonwealth Literature by writers from Africa, Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and Australasia, to mention a few areas of which I’ve some knowledge. The world of difference is no longer an indifferent universe.
Of course they use the English Language. This has been a great gift to the writer. The world language gave access to literatures of the world in translations also. Linguistic or literary nationalism is not the healthiest thing for literature or human beings because literature must always attempt to transcend national barbed wired boundaries for it explores the interior landscapes of our hearts and souls. There are no borders there.
The soul of literature is always another country. Read Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains and you may appreciate my point of view.
Besides, if dictators and tyrants, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, use western weapon to imprison their peoples, why not use the gift of a western language to free your people, or at least give them features and voices, colors and cultures, ideas of freedom, where they can see birds fly in the sky under one sky.
Commonwealth literature challenges us to develop supranational qualities. These writers appeal to us not only because they reveal to the readers new realities but the way they handle language and meaning, giving local life a habitation and a name, showing us new ways of apprehending our world.
Good writing, as was said in the first conference in 1964, transcends borders, whether local or national or regional, whether of mind or of spirit.
And we seek to understand what makes us human often in inhumane environments.
A great gift of any literature, big and small, ancient and modern, is that it brings lives distant and different from our own into our consciousness and may even make us see that the Other as really our brother (and sister).
It takes us out of our lives into other relationships with empathy and imagination; the exotic, the exilic morph into a home, extending our sympathies for strangers and dispossessed.
Books can be disturbing: soul-troubling narratives. Think for a moment of The Satanic Verses , published in 1988.
Literature has profound consequences. It makes us see and perceive truth through fiction.
It may even tell us that a bomb dropped in the deserts of Iraq, for instance, can make boats sail across our seas nearer home; an indifference to the slow sinking of Tuvalu could tomorrow make canoes come to the shores of our island-continent.
Commonwealth Literature has opened the unwritten universe with verse and prose that is ennobling and uplifting, disturbing and distressing. The exotic writings of the conquests today can be seen and understood in what these writers tell of our history, memory and future problems and possibilities. One is no longer an observer; one becomes a participant. This is the freedom of the imagination. It’s no wonder that the book that shook the world in our lifetime was written by a Commonwealth writer.
That is why I put in ‘freedom of the imagination and creativity’ in Fiji’s new constitution much to the consternation of a couple of members of the Fiji Constitution Committee. The phrase is still there in the Revised Version of Fiji’s fourth constitution after four coups in 30 years.
Much was later changed: but this remains intact and I feel its value and validity are incalculable for writers and poets in the country of my birth. One’s umbilical cord may be buried in one village; one’s grave could be in another city. In between we exist.
And to think if I hadn’t read Commonwealth Literature, the phrase wouldn’t have occurred to me for Fiji’s constitution alone has this specific provision in the written constitutional document of any nation.
All literature in a sense springs from the ground beneath our feet. That is the most creative ground we have. And that remains our deepest challenge in legislative creativity and literary innovation. How can we be a race possessed of understanding, if we’re not able to understand that below our feet, there are other footprints, some thousands of years old.
I’m more than aware that the mythology my illiterate ancestors carried as indentured labourers to Fiji, often prevented them from seeing another reality. Their mythology was too powerful and they were wrapped in them. We paid a heavy price for that lack of communication.
It’s a challenge that to my mind is part of what Commonwealth Literature has done to my way of thinking and writing and talking. If I hadn’t read this new literature, I would have little understanding of the old world below my feet. It decolonized my imagination more radically than the Indian epics or English Literature, the far-fetched facts that needed to be transformed into realities in front of our eyes.
More than ever, Australia offers us that opportunity for we live between two oceans, below the equator unlike the US, and we’ve the oldest continuous living culture pulsating in the air we inhale to heal the hurts of history.
If today one reads the works of Commonwealth literary creations, one is astonished by the variety, richness and variations of the human and natural world, so varied, so marvelous and so close to the marrow of our bones, sometimes as close as our eyes, sometimes as distant as the stars.
Imagine for instance when I was a school student barely 17 years old, a Kiwi teacher gave me books to read, established a magazine in which I wrote a few articles which he published. It took me 20 years to publish my first book of poems, 58 pages, and it was the first book of poems published in English in Fiji.
And it was written in Canberra just as Walter Burley Griffin is buried in Lucknow from where my indentured grandparents were cozened and transported to Fiji. There are connections, hidden in the hinges of history.
If you read Gandhianjali , you’ll find this narration in an essay in my 20th book.
For Commonwealth Literature made us read and explore other worlds but most importantly made us create a literary culture where for thousands of years nothing was written. If an Irish writer wanted to forge the conscience of his race, the Commonwealth writer is involved in forging a new consciousness with old routes and roots in the so-called the New World with ancient echoes.
In all the imperial hubris of history, what remains is the small kindnesses of our daily lives, those acts of grace, grit and generosity that we encounter daily and which give meaning to our lives.
How writing structures our sense of reality, our interrelationships, what journeys we make daily into ourselves is a wondrous thing. We develop a particular grandeur in our shared but unfinished humanity.
It is in that sense Art truly makes Life: the unbearable become bearable, even beautiful, as if touched by the love of words and the wonder of the world hidden and revealed in words.
We see it at every Spring in Canberra’s transplanted trees but often only after a bitter winter with blossoms fallen in the dust and in the flight of colorful birds in a cloudless sky, sunlight slanting on the ghostly gums.
One has to discover the world below the concrete: the illusions of literature illuminate our lives with common words we share like the daily bread, or a cup of coffee with Colin in his Commonwealth home.
Satendra.Nandan@gmail.com
