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I.K. Sharma. O.P. Bhatnagar: The Ccritic With A Significant Heart. ( Jaipur : Rachana Prakashan, 2006). Webpages xviii +164, Price tag Rs.325/-. ISBN 81-89228-13-7
I experienced regarded O.P. Bhatnagar for several years as a poet with eyesight, in search of reality, exploring truth, suggesting new streets. He was always eager to regenerate gentleman and humanity, demolishing fossil values, and looking for a substitute for the illusions of light. His innovative and essential writings appeared to me as a spur to collective action.
But when I read his past collection of poems, Cooling Flames of Darkness (2001), I was stunned to uncover him unusually destructive, dejected, and hopeless probably, above-possessed by “fossilized summing up of life.” However, he sounded real when he opined: “We have a historical past and numerous are the knots/Ahead of an Indian poet in English/Like an Eskimo trapped in desert” (Cooling Flames, p.61). Some of these knots he had earlier mirrored in essays like ‘East-West Experience in Indian Poetry in English’, ‘New Indian English Poetry Today’, and ‘Death and the Poetry of Sarojini Naidu.’
Bhatnagar was truly involved with the strength and long run of Indian English poetry and was without a doubt its critic with a huge coronary heart, as I.K. Sharma would like to contact him. O. P. Bhatnagtar: The Critic with a Huge Coronary heart is Sharma’s tribute to the genius of O.P. Bhatnagar, whose literary eyesight, targeted on lots of a new poet, fictioneer and dramatist with promise, accorded authenticity and electric power to submit-Ezekiel Indian English creating. (cf. ‘New Indian English Poetry Today’). O.P. Bhatnagar also explored article-independence authors and critics to highlight their contributions in perspective.
While it is unfortunate that the “proven” set of poets and critics denied recognition to O.P. Bhatnagar for endorsing the induce of marginalized voices, I.K. Sharma, evoking fond memories of his contacts with O.P. Bhatnagar, demonstrates the late poet-critic’s internal power “to nourish the frequent grass” without the need of denigrating any person (p.xvii).
As an empathetic reader, and critic, Sharma collects 10 earlier printed significant content articles by O.P. Bhatnagar to make this reserve. His introductory touches “the deepest chords in our psychological remaining,” as Prema Nandakumar, to whom he dedicates the ebook, observes.
I fully concur with what I.K. Sharma writes about OP’s lifestyle in Amaravati and Delhi on pp. xiv-xv: Not only experienced his health developed darkness all around him but also the academia in Delhi that ditched him to death. None bothered to consider take note of him.
I.K. Sharma seeks to current O.P. Bhatnagar as “a critic with a uncommon generosity of knowledge,” to estimate Prema Nandakumar (from her letter to him). In the initially essay, Bhatnagar convinces us that poets these kinds of as Toru Dutt, Aru Dutt, Romesh Chander Dutt and Manmohan Ghose wrote with Indian heritage and culture wedded into their medium. Tagore and Sri Aurobindo have been eager about their poetic information relatively than the medium, and without any affectation or perception of alienation, “exile or labored-up nostalgia for the nation or language or loss of identification” observed in Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasarathy or A.K. Ramanujan. Poets this kind of as Kamala Das, I.K. Sharma, Narsingh Srivastava and Jayanta Mahapatra write with a perception of “participation in the imaginative act” fairly than demonstration of “western attitudes”, mode or style of expression.
In the next essay, Bhatnagar refers to naturalization of English, or what Braj B. Kachru phone calls, nativization of English, by various new poets “of unspoilt sensibilities” this kind of as Baldev Mirza, I.K. Sharma, Pravin A. Parikh, R.K.Singh, T.R. Srinivas, Mukund R. Dave, Niranjan Mohanty, Krishna Srinivas, Mahanand Sharma, D.V.K. Raghvachrayulu and a lot of some others. These “who are in touch with this big mass of new Indian English poetry nowadays will not falter in recognizing its linguistic and aesthetic dynamics as legitimate and purely natural,” points out O.P. Bhatnatar (p.43).
The 3rd essay offers with ‘death’, a significant preoccupation in Bhatnagar’s very own poetry. Here the critic displays on loss of life in the poetry of Sarojini Naidu vis-à-vis Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke and Adriene Abundant. Sarojini Naidu makes use of dying impersonally as a plea for everyday living (p.51). As he points out: “Hers was the poetry of rejection of demise in a politico-metaphysical philosophy of self-sacrifice, surrender and struggling for a better bring about major to a defeat of mutability and unity with the Infinite and the higher becoming” (p.54).
The fourth essay examines the Indian political novels in English “against the logic of its own political heritage and expansion” (p.58). He discusses K.S. Venkatramani’s Murugan The Tiller (1927), which presents for the initially time the Gandhian best of rural reconstruction and rural economics. Bhatnagar also mentions Venkatramani’s other novel, Kandan the Patriot (1932), which improvements the Gandhian ideology or Satyagrah, ahead of he displays on Raja Rao’s Kanthapura , Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud and The Sword and the Sickle, R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, and B Rajan’s The Dark Dancer (1958), which provides politics as a way of existence and conviction. These novelists existing a contrast to other folks who had been moved by the tragedy of India’s partition. Important among them are Khushwant Singh’s Prepare to Pakistan and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi.
Bhatnagar also demonstrates on the drop in Gandhian values with absence of political order, as manifested in the narratives of Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, and Nayantara Sahgal’s Strom in Chandigarh. The Indian political novelists have been conscious of the ” pitiabale politics of the bad politicians” just as they have identified sense in Gandhi’s humanism and secularism (p.77).
Bhatnagar’s scrutiny of about a dozen novelists is deep and thorough. As 1 would recognize in his appreciation of Manorama Modak’s Solitary is the Wheel, which is the topic of his exploration in the fifth essay, O.P. Bhatnagar reads the novelist with empathy and a perception of historical past. His review of V.A. Shahane’s Prajapati from the standpoint of the “picture of India”, the sixth essay, is thought-provoking in that the narrative seeks to reconstruct the spirit and vision of the unity of India irrespective of its caste-ridden social structure and disappointing modern day realities. The irony is: As from the mythical prajapati, the modern day prajapatis are energy-seekers, indulging in violence of all sorts. Having said that, I agree with Bhatnagar’s observations on internet pages 107-109: Shahane’s humanism is doubtful.
The seventh essay examines Indian limited stories in English from the phenomenon of “colonial come across” as presented by Mulk Raj Anand, Manohar Malgaonkar, Raja Rao and Ruth Prawer Jhabwala.
In the future essay, O.P. Bhatnagar details out that Jawaharlal Nehru unsuccessful to encourage literary creativeness, even if Shahane’s Prajapati seemed to have been structured right after the vision of Nehru. ‘Nehru and Indian Novel in English’, a person of the most effective essays in the volume, is an extension of the sixth essay, cleverly placed just before ‘Gandhi in Indian Drama in English.’
In truth, Gandhi has a substantial presence in Indian English fiction, but one rarely will come across Gandhi in drama. (I want O.P. Bhatnagar were being alive to look at Gandhigiri in Lage Raho Munnabhai!) The earliest image of Gandhi seems in Bharati Sarabhai’s poetic engage in, The Effectively of People (1943), which is adopted by K.S. Rangappa’s Gandhiji’s Sadhana, eleven years immediately after the Mahatma’s dying. Gandhian thoughts are also offered by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in Barrister at Law, Asif Currimbhoy in An Experiment with Fact, Lakhan Deb in Murder at the Prayer Conference, Shiv Kumar Joshi in He Never Slept Also Long, R. Javanthinathan in Guardianship of India, M.V. Rama Sarma in The Mahatma, and Gian Singh Mann in Truth of the matter and Tears. All these playwrights current Gandhi “not in the extraordinary but in the absolute image of fact, goodness, bravery, justice, non-violence, abstinence, compassion, religion, sacrifice and common wisdom” (p.150). The final essay can make a comparative examine among Lakhan Deb’s Murder at the Prayer Conference and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, emphasizing that the Indian dramatist provides a much better design of perform in human values than T.S. Eliot.
The quantity really imaginatively designed as it is, presents O.P. Bhatnagar as a pillar of Indian English Crafting, with intrinsic religion in Indian English authors. His de texte essential analyses, devoid of intolerance of others’ sights, are quite logically formulated and convincingly offered with a ahead-searching mentality. His contribution to the lead to of Indian English Crafting will generally be remembered as positive, forceful, and precious. I.K. Sharma justifies kudos for his nonetheless a different important contribution, as editor, to Indian English Composing.
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Source by Ram Krishna Singh
