Crisscrossing Through Afro-Asian Literature

Rustica C. Carpio

• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• ISBN:
  9789712729195
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Crisscrossing Through Afro-Asian Literature is intended to give the reader varied views of life in the Afro-Asian sphere.

It hopes to help the reader capture the nuances of the human experience that well from the vast wealth of wisdom and culture in these countries.

Fiction

Man and his world surface prominently in the literary creations of fictionists. Reflected in their art is society, its many fabrics, its varied textures for it is “a mirror carried along a highroad. One moment it will reflect into your eyes the azure of heaven; the next, mire in the potholes along the road.”

The virtual universe of a fictionist is a recreation of his external world. Thus, he articulates in his art factors generally circumscribed by his social milieu. Underpinning his works is a concern to grasp reality—the global upheavals, a group’s striving for societal change, an individual’s yearnings for life’s little joys or upward mobility—now resounding with success, now muted by failures. But continuously delineating the constant flux is an effort to make his prose cavort with the solid facts.

Always, the fictionist, be he a novelist or a short story writer, aims to realistically spotlight life’s nettled complexities, the erratic changeable hues tinting the sphere, of man, the barometric ups and downs of his feelings congealed by deep seated socio-cultural disparities or ignited by his inner civil strifes. The writer while giving expression to his own personal world, creates and molds for us a world based on our actual world. Our understanding of the interpenetration of this triad of worlds triggers our appreciation of fiction. We respond to a piece of fiction if we are able to crouch out of our shell and inhabit, however momentarily, the imaginative world fashioned by the author. So, one world must relate to the other to be meaningful, one world must have relevance to the other to be comprehended and understood.

Consequently, the interweaving of persons, places, and actions in fiction is flashed to us through the eyes of the writer in a first-person point of view or through the observation of another, at times in a photographic manner, capturing whatever is registered by the camera eye at times in an omniscient stance, but as a third person, an outsider looking in.

Through those authorial handlings, our reflections are stamped in the created verbal microcosm. Our own struggles, our clashes of interests, our friendly ties, even the biting coldness of indifference, we in turn relish as we follow them wending their way into the interstices of the narrative. We are lured to tears, to laughter, to anger, to fear. Because we enjoy what we read, because we bend to the truth of fiction.

This truth, so aptly delineated by Brooks and Warren, involves the consistency and comprehensibility of character, the motivation and credibility of action, the acceptability of the total meaning.

Truly, fiction is not just a melange of words and people and places. Neither is it a filigreed web of events and happenings springing forward at the magic touch of the writer’s pen. It is more than these. For it has to be moored to the world of our experience.

Who people our day-to-day world? A congeries of men—each one distinctly different from the other, We know them by their language, their gestures, their facades and integument. We recognize them through their venues and surroundings, their goals or purposes in living and the corresponding outcomes. In fiction’s domain, these are grasped dramatically by the writer who is ever observant of the whimsicalities of human nature.

Like life, the story or the novel is tenuous without conflict. It is this force, this tug-of-war, this collision, this instability that makes man aware of what it means to live, what it is to triumph or to suffer. Weed out struggle from man and he is transmogrified to a robot. Life pales to the insipidness of existence. Delete tension from the story and the plot falls limp, lifeless, no matter how inextricably knit is the concatenation of characters and movements.

Then again, interlacing the limitations of the short story or the novel’s epic proportion is an encompassing vision of life that lends full meaning and significance to the human experience. While moralizing is not always given overt primacy in fiction for it likewise enriches us with fun and pleasure and guffaws, at the end, even in comedy, there seeps through man’s frailties, through his striated roughness, a glimmer of human values.

All these are spread before us through the short story’s organic unity evolving one single impression, attitude or idea despite its brevity. The novel, with its panoramic scope, carries the burden of the universe in its chapters and episodes welded together by cohesiveness of ties and links.

These we realize even as we trail the progress of the narrative from the exposition to the motivation, petering out the rising action which swells to the complication. Suspense checkers the way to the tautness of the climax and finally the tousled situation is unravelled in the denouement.

As we read a story in its entirety or a novel from cover to cover, several things may markedly arrest our attention and in varying degrees. It may be the winsome coyness of a young Japanese girl or the strained, unrelieved atmosphere of an African setting. Or the strange satirical twists distilled from a Turkish humorous experience. The poetic prose that breathes life into an Arab encounter or an unnerving Asian family squabble.

Indeed, reading a novel or a story is leaving our world and entering the world of fiction. It is an exploration and a discovery.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE was born in Calcutta, State of Bengal, India in 1861 to a family known for wealth, position, learning and culture. Genius, mystic, poet, painter, composer, short story writer, novelist, playwright, actor, champion to the cause of modern science, he spearheaded the Indian Renaissance Movement which led to the attainment of independence. He was founder of Viswa Bharati University in Shantiniketan. Indians look up to Tagore as a cultural and national symbol, and his political philosophy is self-reliance. In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although a humanist and an internationalist, Tagore showed extreme nationalism for his country. He says, “I shall be born in India again and again with all her poverty, misery and wretchedness, I love India best.”

MAHAMAYA

by Rabindranath Tagore

They met together in a ruined temple on the river bank: Mahamaya and Rajib. In silence she cast her naturally grave look at Rajib with a tinge of reproach. It meant to say: “How durst you call me here at this unusual hour today? You have ventured to do it only because I have so long obeyed you in all things!”

Rajib had a little awe of Mahamaya at all times, and now this look of hers thoroughly upset him. He at once gave up his fondly conceived plan of making a set speech to her. And yet he had to give quickly some reason for this interview. So, he hurriedly blurted out, “I say, let us run away from this place and marry.” True, Rajib thus delivered himself of what he had in his mind; but, the preface he had silently composed was lost. His speech sounded very dry and bald—even absurd. He himself felt confused after saying it, and had no power left in him to add some words to modify its effect. The fool! After calling Mahamaya to that ruined temple by the river side at midday, he could only tell her “Come, let us marry!

Mahamaya was a kulin’s daughter, twenty-four years old—in the full bloom of her youth and beauty, like an image of pure gold, of the hue of the early autumn sunlight; radiant and still as that sunshine, with a gaze free and fearless as daylight itself.

She was an orphan. Her elder brother, Bhavanicharan Chattopadhyay, looked after her. The two were of the same mould—taciturn, but possessing a force of character which burnt silently like the midday sun. People feared Bhavanicharan without knowing why.

Rajib had come there from afar with the Burra Sahib of the silk factory of the place. His father had served this Sahib, and when he died, the Sahib undertook to bring up his orphan boy and took him with himself to this Bamanhati factory. In those early days such instances of sympathy were frequent among the Sahibs. The boy was accompanied by his loving aunt, and they lived in Bhavanicharan’s neighbourhood. Mahamaya was Rajib’s playmate in childhood, and was dearly loved by his aunt.

Rajib grew up to be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and even nineteen; and yet, in spite of his aunt’s constant urging, he refused to marry. The Sahib was highly pleased to hear of this uncommon instance of good sense in a Bengali youth, and imagined that Rajib had taken him as his ideal in life. I may here add that the Sahib was a bachelor. The aunt died soon after.

For Mahamaya, too, no bride groom of an equal grade of blue blood could be secured except for an impossible dowry. She steadily grew up in maidenhood.

The reader hardly needs to be told that though the god who ties the marriage-knot had so long been ignoring this young couple, the god who forms the bond of love had not been idle all this time. While old Prajapati was dozing, young Kandarpa was very much awake.

Kandarpa’s influence shows itself differently in different persons. Under his inspiration, Rajib constantly sought for a chance of whispering his heart’s longings, but Mahamaya never gave him such an opportunity; her silent and grave look sent a chill of fear through the wild heart of Rajib.

Today he had, by a hundred solemn entreaties and conjurations, at last succeeded in bringing her to this ruined temple. He had planned that he would today freely tell her all that he had to say and thereafter there would be for him either life-long happiness or death in life. Yet at this crisis of his fate Rajib could only—say, “Come, let us go and marry,” and then he stood confused and silent like a boy who had forgotten his lesson.

For a long while she did not reply, as if she had never expected such a proposal from Rajib.

The noontide has many undefined plaintive notes of its own; these began to make themselves heard in the midst of that stillness. The broken door of the temple, half detached from its hinge, began at times to open and to close in the wind with a low wailing creak. The pigeon, perched on the temple window, began its deep booming. The woodpecker kept up its monotonous noise as it sat working on the shimul branch outside. The lizard darted through the heaps of dry leaves with a rustling sound. A sudden gust of warm wind blowing from the fields paused through the trees, making all their foliage whistle. Of a sudden, the river waters woke into ripple and lapped on the broken steps of the ghat. Amidst these stray, languid sounds came the rustic notes of a cow-boy’s flute from a far-off tree-shade. Rajib stood reclining against the ruinous plinth of the temple like a tired dreamer, gazing at the river; he had not the spirit to look Mahamaya in the face.

After a while he turned his head and again cast a supplicating glance at Mahamaya’s face. She shook her head and replied, “No, it can’t be.”

At once the whole fabric of his hopes was dashed to the ground; for he knew that when Mahamaya shook her head it was through her own convictions, and nobody else in the world could bend her to his own will. The high pride of pedigree had run in the blood of Mahamaya’s family for untold generations—could she ever consent to marry a Brahmin of low pedigree like Rajib? To love is one thing, and to marry quite another. She, however, now realized that her own thoughtless conduct in the past had encouraged Rajib to hope so audaciously; and at once she prepared to leave the temple.

Rajib understood her, and quickly broke in with “I am leaving these parts tomorrow.”

At first she thought of appearing indifferent to the news but she could not. Her feet did not move when she wanted to depart. Calmly she asked, “Why?” Rajib replied, “My Sahib has been transferred from here to the Sonapur factory, and he is taking me with him.” Again she stood in long silence, musing thus: ‘Our lives are moving in two contrary directions. I cannot hope to keep a man a prisoner of my eyes for ever.’ So she opened her compressed lips a little and said, “Very well.” It sounded rather like a deep sigh.

With these words only, she was again about to leave, when Rajib started up with the whisper “your brother!”

She looked out and saw her brother coming towards the temple, and she knew that he had found out their assignation. Rajib, fearing to place Mahamaya in a false position, tried to escape by jumping out of the hole in the temple wall, but Mahamaya seized his arm and kept him back by main force. Bhavanicharan entered the temple and only cast one silent and placid glance at the pair.

Mahamaya looked at Rajib and said with an unruffled voice, “Yes, I will go to your house, Rajib. Do you wait for me?”

Silently Bhavanicharan left the temple, and Mahamaya followed him as silently. And Rajib? He stood amazed as if he had been doomed to death.

2

That very night Bhavanicharan gave a crimson silk sari to Mahamaya and told her to put it on at once. Then he said, “Follow me.” Nobody had ever disobeyed Bhavanicharan’s bidding or even his hint; Mahamaya herself was no exception to it.

That night the two walked to the burning-place on the river-bank, not far from their home. There in the hut for sheltering dying men brought to the holy river’s side, an old Brahmin was lying in expectation of death. The two went up to his bedside. A Brahmin priest was present in one corner of the room; Bhavanicharan beckoned to him. The priest quickly got his things read...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prefatory Note
• 1 Fiction
• 2. Poetry
• 3. Drama
• 4. The Essay