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K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar

It is good news that Prof. V.K. Gokak is the latest recipient of the prestigious Bharatiya Jnanapith Vagdevi award. In fact, Gokak should have received the award over a decade ago but for the fact he was himself for several years running president of the Jnanapith Award Selection Committee, which ruled out his own name from being consid­ered. He was then at the giving end, charged with tremendous responsibility; and he laid down and maintained exacting standards in the selection of the winner. It is now most gratifying that he is at the receiving end at last, and none deserves it more than the octogenarian Vinayak Krishna Gokak, a writer of distinction in both Kannada and English, a seasoned teacher and educationist, a thinker on his own, and the evangelist of harmony in Life.

We are almost of the same age (he is younger by less than a year), and I had read some of his contributions to Triveni in the early 1930’s before I went to Belgaum to teach at Lingaraj College. Already Gokak was a popular teacher at Fergusson College, Poona. We first met, I think, in 1936 at an Examiners� Meeting in the Bombay University, and our acquaintanceship soon ripened into friendship. This for over half a century I have been following Gokak’s career as Professsor of English at Poona and Hyderabad, as College Principal at Sangli, Visnagar, Kolhapur and Dharwar, as Director of the Central Institute of English (Hyderabad) and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla), as Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore University and Sri Satyasai Institute of Higher Learning, and as Vice-President and later President of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in short, as the complete educationist, and as a versatile man of letters, hard work, high seriousness, a disciplined analytical mind and a psychic sensibility that readily responds to a variety of opportunities and challenges are among the assets and driving forces that have conditioned Gokak’s evolution as a writer, as an influence, and even as an inspiration.

In my early years in Belgaum, I had opportunities of meeting and gaining the friendship of some of the prominent Kannada writers, notably B. M. Srikantia and Masti Venkatesa Iyengar among the seniors, and the ‘Geleyare Gumpu� of Dharwar, the moving spirits being B. R. Bendre, R. S. Mugali and V. K. Gokak. My colleagues at Lingaraj College S. C. Nandimath and S. S. Basawanal - were also Kannada scholars and writers of distinction. It is gratifying that if these Bendre, Masti, and now Gokak have all received national recognition and acclaim as Jnanapith Laureates.

It was in 1957 that, along with Gokak, Umashankar Joshi, Annada Sankar Rey, S. H. Vatsyayan, Jambunathan, Sophia Wadla and Kamala Dongerkery, I attended the P. E. N. Congress and UNESCO East-West Symposium in Tokyo-Kyoto. During our flight in an AIR India super constellation plane, Gokak and I occupied neighbouring seats; soon, exchanging his aisle seat for my window seat, he was like one lost in looking out and intently gazing at the meeting of the sky and the earth, with our own and the plane’s median flight embracing as it were both the infinities. Seated in the speeding aircraft, Gokak could alternately see heaven from the earth, and the earth from heaven, and could experience several new insights about the structure of the cosmos. I suppose this was how Gokak came to compose his Dyava-Prithvi, which duly won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1959.
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Gokak’s first major effort in Kannada was Samarasave Jeevana spread out in six parts and completed over a long period. Perhaps Gokak had Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for a distant model. Gokak’s latter-day novel in English, Narahari (1972) was both a summary and something of a sequel or fulfilment as well. Samarasave Jeevana had possibly its affiliations also with Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, and the hero, Narahari, is meant to symbolise ‘Harmony in Life�. In the English novel, Narahari now grown old heads his Ashrama, the Purna Jivan Kendra, and among the inmates is the civilian, Bheemu, who exposes himself to the other Ashramites one by one: Seenu, Ambadas, and Arthur and Edith James. As they remember things past-as they linger with gratitude upon the living present, Bheemu’s eyes are opened, chords long silent begin to vibrate, and he begins to perceive the innermost truth of things.

Listening first to Seenu’s anabasis from the ‘Gobi desert of the intellect� to the plenitudes of realisation at the marble altar of the Kendra, Bheemu feels fascinated, the scales fall from his eyes, and it is as though he is on the threshold of a new life. Ambadas - a Titan or Olympian - affects Bheemu no less profoundly, for he has lately come out of the dark into new light, and has turned from cynicism to singing songs of hope and delight. Bheemu’s encounter with the Jameses is even more rewarding, for Edith’s paintings of the world’s spiritual landscape and Arthur’s inspired elucidations help to coax a new dawn on Bheemu’s horizon. The inner cure, the conversion, is complete at last, and eventually he returns to his chief Secretaryship, now ready and able to make his official work the field of his Sadhana. His power for doing good is much greater than before, and he is able to do his mite when the Chinese invasion paralyses all thinking for a while. And Narahari himself holds his own as the prophet of New India.

The projection of Narahari’s personality in Kannada as well as English is clearly a significant achievement. But late in life, Gokak’s vision and creative impulse embarked on yet another adventure, Bharat Sindhu Rashmi, a mega-epic in about 35,000 lines. It was published in 1982, and was at once lauded as an epic of sweeping comprehension and impressive articulation. For the benefit of readers ignorant of Kannada, Gokak produced in 1984 a working summary in English along with a seminal translated extract in verse. As compared with the original 1276 pages, the English reader.

Bharat Sindjhu Rashmi is about Bharat, India, and is divided, following the example of Paradise Lost and Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, into XII Books as under:

I.                    The Book of Preliminaries;
II.                 The Book of the Ascent of Ayasya and Martanda;
III.               The Book of Vaivasvata Manu;
IV.              The Book of Visvaratha, the Nostalgic Traveller;
V.                 The Book of Beginnings and Ends;
VI.              The Book of Hermitages;
VII.            The Book of the Battle of Kings;
VIII.         The Book of the Horse Sacrifice;
IX.              The Book of the Expansion of Bharat Varsha;
X.                 The Book of Alienation and Evolution;
XI.              The Book of the Integral Vision;
XII.            The Book of a Hundred Autumns.

“This epic�, says Abhyasi, “is the story of the Vedic renaissance and of the blending of Aryan and Dravidian cultures into a new synthesis.� The Epic scene is peopled with a variety of characters, prophets, Rishis, kings, commoners, and famed couples like Vasishta and Arundhati, Agastya and Lopamudra, Jamadagni and Renuka. And King Sudesa is advised and assisted by Visvamitra during the Battle of the Ten kings to forge out of the war a durable unity in Bharata Varsha. But of course Visvamitra is the muscle, mind, heart and soul of Bharat Sindhu Rashmi, and as for its Message, let me take my cue from Abhyasi again:

1. It is through the constant grapple of good with evil that the world evolves towards perfection;
2. It is well within one’s means either to rise to the heights or to plummet to the depths;
3. A renascent epoch in human nature, although stirring from the grass-roots, aspires for and attains the greatest heights;
4. All human aspirations and achievements are yet grounded in Nature, its beauty, terror and sublimity; and
5. Always fare forward with hope of sure victory in the end.

Also this seminal message of a nectarea hope for the future, as spoken by Visvamitra:

Some day, when earth
Is the Truth - Would, each man an Avtar,
Conscious, the Finite clasps the Infinite
And both redeem each other for all time
And the Immortal imbues each form of clay ...

A choice of Gokak’s English poems (original mainly, and a few translations from his own Kannada) is included in The Song of Life (1947) and In Life’s Temple (1965). Gokak has also brought out an excellent anthology, The golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry: 1828-1965, now in its seventh printing. His critical studies in English, his monographs on Sri Aurobindo and Sri Satyasai Baba, and the recently collected lectures ‘Pathways to the Unity of Indian Literature; these and other writings, whether in Kannada or English, are the result of long years of scholarship and experiential wisdom. Three hearty cheers indeed to the Jnanapith Laureate, the Hero as poet and teacher and man of letters.