These stories2 were written mainly in France, and at the time when Valéry and Gide dominated the literary universe. A south Indian Brahmin, nineteen, spoon-fed on English, with just enough Sanskrit to know I knew so little, with an indiscrete education in Kannada, my mother tongue, the French literary scene overpowered me. If I wanted to write, the problem was, what should be the appropriate language of expression, and what my structural models. Sanskrit contained the vastest riches of any, both in terms of style and word wealth, and the most natural to my needs, yet it was beyond my competence to use. To marry Sanskrit and Gide in Kannada, and go further, would have demanded an immense stretch of time, and I was despairingly impatient. French, only next to Sanskrit, seemed the language most befitting my demands, but then it’s like a harp (or vina); its delicacy needed an excellence of instinct and knowledge that seemed well-nigh terrifying. English remained the one language, with its great tradition (if only of Shakespeare) and its unexplored riches, capable of catalysing my impulses, and giving them a near-native sound and structure. ‘I will not write like the English,’ 1 was to write in an introduction to Kanthapura, ‘I can only write as an Indian.’ I will have to write my English, yet English after all—and how soon we forget this—is an Indo-Aryan tongue. Thus to stretch the English idiom to suit my needs seemed heroic enough for my urgentmost demands. The Irish, remember, had done it, not only with Yeats, but again with Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. Further, Joyce had broken in, as it were, from the side wings, giving us sound and symbol structures that seemed made for almost the unsayable. So why not Sanskritic (or if you will, Indian) English?

In such a world of linguistic ferment, at that time there were also going on experiments with form, Kafka had broken the crust of realism and given fabled meanings to man’s fears. The Surrealists having abolished the natural as the concrete gave earth wings upwards, and even more, bore blindfold downwards into subterranean fires. And suddenly Malraux burst in on the scene, upsetting all intellectual stratagems, and giving the world an international dialect of, as it were, pure gesture and metaphysic meaning. For an Indian therefore who wanted to forget Tagore, in a manner, (but not Gandhi), to integrate the Sanskrit tradition with contemporary intellectual heroism seemed a noble experiment to undertake.

Thus both in terms of language and of structure, I had to find my way, whatever the results. And I continued the adventure in lone desperation. I was now truly in search of—my bride.

13

The Shy Bride