The critic is one who has so attuned himself to the world around him, to the sounds of the objects around him and their pure co-relationships, to the tanmantras of the words—the critic must be able to hear the inaudible, the almost unimaginable, but the utterly concrete. If he cannot hear what cannot be heard, then he cannot know. For knowledge arises in the immediate immensities of inner spaces, in antar-akasha, where alone one breathes truly. The critic has a more arduous existence than the poet. The poet names the gifts, the critic has to know the gift which is the pure gift, not that which is borrowed, spat out, manoeuvred: in a barren land, for example, barren by the lack of water, a giraffe lifts its head and tries to eat even the thorns of a tree, because the tree is more or less dead. There are many writers who live on such thorns—there where the desert spreads and the rains do not fall. (Here the critic might sometimes become compassionate. Then he smothers the victim, he kills the ‘poet’ with praise.) Others sail out in floods—the hog, the ox, the camel float down: these are smashed against the rocks. The critic sees them and is shocked, gasps in horror. He cannot bear the smell of carcasses. The critic then returns to his solitude. He cannot speak.

The poet and the critic are like the two birds in the Upanishads. One speaks, the other does not, or one does not and the other does.

The critic knows the alive, the fully palpitant or the sick, the dying, he the physician of the word: sabda bhisaja. He renders breath back to the moribund word, heals the wounds, or even helps in the outcoming of birth, the child does not cry. As the astrologer does, the wise man—like Asita did—he names the child, Gautama, the Sakyan. He will, says the wise man, the child will be a prince or a mendicant, a raja or a parivrajaka. For, ultimately, they belong to the same kingdom—they shine, rajathi. Gautama, the Sakyan, becomes the Buddha. Wisdom is indivisible—like word and meaning.

The great French poet, Paul Valéry has said, he, the true writer, he who bears the critic within himself. One could also add: he the true critic who has the poet within himself. Such, I think, is C.D. Narasimhaiah.1

In a world where great kings, maharajas reigned, he would have been invited to the court, and while the king of kings comes down his leonine seat, the trumpets would blare, and as the Vedic chants rise, the sovereign would offer a shawl and copper-plate inscription, calling this deep-seeing critic a vangmaya-raja.2

Alas, such days are gone. Most words today wander like isolated wild elephants, pulling down trees, in anguished thirst and anger—and depart. The rains must come, someday.

14

The Writer and the Word