Narla V R on Viswanatha Satyanarayana

V.R.Narla was always stood for human values and equality. He opposed casteism and reactionary attitudes in poetry and fiction. Thus he wrote scathing criticism against Viswanatha Satyanarayana. He even wrote editorials against him in Andhra Jyothi daily .The present article was published in Patriot ,English daily from Delhi.

Viswanatha Satyanarayana is undoubtedly a genius. For over four decades now he has been striding the Telugu literary scene like a Colossus. From the lyric poem to the grand epic, from the short story to the mighty saga, from the one-act play to the full – length drama, from the literary essay to the philosophical disquisition, there is no literary genre to which he has not contributed abundantly. He is, indeed, the most prolific of our front-rank writers. At a modest guess, his published works run into more than thirty thousand pages. And at what speed does he compose? A three hundred- page novel, he claims, takes him just one week’s dictation. He is equally quick in his output of poetry. After mental composition, he sets down on paper, again according to his own claim, a score or more of verses at a time. Even though he is now publishing much more than ever before. This is all the more amazing when we note the most of the other Telugu writers who started their literary careers along with Viswanatha in the twenties of this century have gone more or less dry quite along while ago. The versatile and prolific nature of the genius of Viswanatha has attracted to him a host of admirers. I too count myself as one among them, though unlike others I am rather critical of the abiding values and the ultimate worth of his contribution to modern Telugu literature. Torn by an inner conflict, though he might not himself admit it, Viswanatha’s literary career, after the first few years of youthful idealism and spontaneity, has taken a sharp turn towards what I am call a misguided classicism. His instincts are democratic and progressive, while his convictions are, by and large, based on revivalism, if not obscurantism. As one who has known Viswanatha intimately for over thirty years, I can say that he ceased to be his earlier natural self from the day he came under the spell of a Masulipatam College Lecturer, who in his middle age donned the ochre robe. This happened way back in 1930 or thereabouts. We may say that it marks a Great Divide in Viswanatha’s both life and works. Everything he wrote before that reflects the time spirit. It is contemporary not only in its content but also in its form. Fresh as the early morning sunbeam, sprightly as the mountain brook, brilliant as the autumnal lightning, his early poetry appealed to millions of heats. His Kinnera Saani paatalu and Kokilamma Pelli, which employ folk meters, are modern classics. Some of the lyrics which he produced during this period are comparable to the best of their kind anywhere in the world. Two volumes of verse devoted to the vanished glories of Andhra, and the romantic play, Anarkali, of the same period are of a high order. Their appeal is at once simple and profound. Their touch is sure and they are full of genuine poetic feeling. His early novel Ekavira, is of outstanding merit.
Viswnatha’s subsequent work is by contrast rather stilted, artificial, heavy and, what is infinitely more regrettable, retrograde. No doubt, he still shows his old grasp of the native idiom but it is vitiated by his inordinate love for obsolete expressions. His diction ha still more of its original cadence and power, but it is overshadowed by his new-found delight in using long, ugly and almost unmouthable word – compounds. (Rukmininatha Sastri, a parodist, has hailed Viswanatha as Paashaana Paaka – Prabhu, the Master of the Stony Diction.) Viswanatha’s initial love of progress still tries to break out of the heavy crust of his later convictions, but only with occasional success. As years passed, the belief’s instilled in him by his chosen spiritual guide have tented to blur the perceptions of Viswanatha, to produce la nostalgia in him for the dead past, and to make him a fervent advocate of an order of society that is fast disintegrating. This process being now almost complete, his world-view is severely limited, and this has made him a sectarian poet instead of the universal singer he should have been, judged by the excellence of his earlier work.
If we were to believe Viswanatha’s admirers of his poetical works, the Ramayana, and of his novels, the Veyipadagalu (Thousand Hoods), are his supreme achievements. They tell us that his Ramayana puts the old classic of Valmiki in the shade, and that his Veyipadagalu is far superior to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But to me and to people of my way of thinking, his Ramayana is “Valmiki Made Difficult”, As for his Veyipadagalu, it is the dying hiss of the thousand-hooded feudal society. The impending death of that society may bring tears to Viswanatha’s eyes. But should not all right-thinking people welcome its end? The sooner it is dead and buried, the better it is for India and the world.
His most recent volume of poetry, Viswanatha Madhyakkaralu, which has received the Sahitya Akademi Award for the best Telugu book in 1961-62, is in line with all his later work. Madhyakaralu is a difficult metric form. It has neither ease nor grace. We find it employed occasionally in our older works either to show the poet’s virtuosity or to achieve some variety in composition. No other poet has ever composed one hundred verses in it, let alone one thousand, as Viswanatha did in this award-winning book. It is at best a typical example of the metrical feats of which he is capable, while at its worst it is amongst the less readable of his compositions. Divided into ten sections, it sings the praise of the presiding deities of ten temples. Its philosophy, if it can be said to have a philosophy, is wholly conventional. At places, it certainly shows Viswanatha’s mastery of the idiom, but in my opinion it is not one of his best works. My deep regret that the all-round talents of this brilliant man are not put to use in the service of the progressive forces that are seeking to build a new society and to evolve a new culture and civilization is all the greater after the perusal of Madhyakkaralu. In justice to Viswanatha, I should, however, state that people whose values of life and literature are opposed to mine think that this book is the crowning achievement of his creative genius.
With his prodigious intellect, his rich imagination, his fine sensibility, and his quick responses, Viswanatha should have been a worthy claimant for wider fame, but narrow sectarianism and aggressive obscurantism have clipped his wings, preventing him from soaring ever higher into the empyrean heights. The loss is not his but that of modern Telugu literature.
It will not do to write off Viswanatha as an obscurantist and target about him. He is more than an individual; he is one of the more powerful leaders of religious and social reaction in India. Though his writings he opposes any deviation from what may be termed militant Hinduism. He pours ridicule and contempt on Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and the rest of the world religions. He upholds the caste system with all its gradations and degradations. He campaign for the restoration of the feudal order of society. He is dead set against modern science and technology, indeed, against modernism as such. It will be a bad day for India if on account of our complacency he and his reactionary ideas and ideals are allowed to prevail.
(Published in the Patriot daily, New Delhi in 1963)