Questions and Answer
Task - 1 Three Prose writers
1 ) According to Radhakrishnan what is the function of philosophy ?
Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was born on September 5, 1888 at Tiruttani (Madras Presidency), a noted pilgrim centre in South India. At the Madras Christian College when he was hesitant about the choice of his subject, a cousin of him, who took a degree that year, gave him his textbooks of philosophy.
This helped Radhakrishnan to decide his future vocation. He served his apprenticeship as a Professor of Philosophy and he worked hard with his Sanskrit scholars. His success as a teacher was due to his great learning and his gift of lucid exposition. From Mysore, he went to Calcutta to hold one of the most highly prized University assignments – the King George V Chair of Mental & Moral Philosophy. For more than 20 years he was closely associated with the Calcutta University.
2) write a note on S Radhakrishnan 's perspective on Hinduism .
Radhakrishnan starts off by confronting the classic question of what Hinduism actually is. This, he does not answer directly, for a very good reason: Hinduism isn’t an internally recognized word, but a name given to the sub-continent of India by outsiders. Later, it was recognized by Hindus as being a practicable working name. This was because India, despite being diverse, had a common history, literature and civilization.
The backbone of Hindu culture and beliefs is the Vedas. Faith is the vision of the soul where the spiritual part of the world is apprehended, just as the material world is apprehended via the physical senses. The mind has two powers, reason and intuition. Reason correlates with the physical senses, intuition with faith. The Vedas are a collection of the intuitions of the soul, which became the spiritual intuitions which founded the cohesive Hinduism we now know. These intuitions have a perennial value because “the truths revealed in the Vedas are capable of being re-experienced on compliance with ascertained conditions
Hindus believe that there are different paths to God, and each individual has their own path. This is one of the reasons why there are many different books to learn from, not just the Vedas, but the Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, to name a few. The reason why it is thought that each person has their own path to God is that religious experience cannot be made objective. Instead, our path to God is crafted from how we are disposed to experience God, therefore we all have a different experience of what God is, and a different path to God.
Task - 2 New poets
1) write a note on how Kaikini differs from other Indian poets in his poems
In an introduction to Dots and Lines, an English translation of Kaikini’s short stories, critic C.N. Ramachandran writes, “To understand Jayant’s works, we have to situate him in the literary context of the last two decades of the 20th century. During that period, there arose a group of writers who consciously differed from both the earlier Modernist writers (called Navya in Kannada) and those contemporaneous to them, the Writers of Protest (called Bandaya in Kannada) and Dalit writers. They did not subscribe to any particular philosophical or political system of thinking – be it Existentialism of the Modernists or the Leftist ideologies of the Dalit and Protest writers. On the other hand, what they wished to do was to select precise and authentic details of daily life and organise them in such a way as to culminate in a particular experience . . . Generally, their style was comic-ironic; and the language they used was the spoken language of day-to-day life. They were neither idealists nor cynics; they just wished to observe the life around them – generally mediocre – to register all the fleeting details that marked an ordinary man’s daily routine, and lead up to an experience rich in connotations. Jayant was a major figure in this group of writers who, loosely, can be called ‘post-modernist’.”
The selection of poems in this edition brings to my mind a certain affinity with the work of the late bilingual poet, Arun Kolatkar. There is a similar use of an incisive non-decorative idiom, a keen observation of the singular, the quotidian and the unremarkable
2 ) write a critical note on the poems by Nissim Ezekiel
Nissim Ezekiel's collected poems were first anthologized in 1992 by Oxford India Paperbacks. Since then, Oxford University Press has published three impressions and two editions of the anthology. The second edition, published in 2007, contains a preface by Leela Gandhi and an introduction by John Thieme. The collection contains all of Ezekiel's major published work from 1952 to 1988. The anthology includes every work that Ezekiel has published in those years, including the collections A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1958), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Latter-Day Psalms (1982). The Collected Poems also include poems from stretches of time in which Ezekiel did not publish his poetry in specific collections: Poems (1965-1974), Poems Written in 1974, and Poems (1983-1988).
When read from cover to cover, the Collected Poems show Ezekiel's evolution as a poet from the ages of 28 to 62. Ezekiel's early work is very concerned with form and contains strict rhyme and meter schemes. Additionally, they are all written in "proper" English and place themselves witwrihin a Western literary tradition. As Ezekiel aged, his focus shifted towards his home country, India, and his poems become much more local and specific. Additionally, about halfway through his career, Ezekiel made the choice to move away from using strict poetic form in his poetry. As the form loosened in his poems, so did the register. Ezekiel's free verse flows with ease and confidence in his later work.
Task - 3 conclusion
1) write a note on the changing treads in post independence Indian writing in English
Post-Independence Indian English fiction is virtually synonymous with Post-colonial Indian English fiction. The visibility of Indian English fiction dates back to the fourth decade of the twentieth century when Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao published their novels in English.
Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and Bachelor of Arts (1936) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) are the pioneering Indian English novels based on socio-political realism. Then came the partition of the sub-continent and a number of significant novels on the theme of partition were published. They include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), B.Rajan’s The Dark Dancer (1959), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964)
If we take a look at the trends in Indian English fiction, we will be struck by realism that underlies this genre in the post-Independence period. We come across five broad types of realism – social realism, psychological realism, historical realism, mythical realism and magic realism in Indian English fiction. Women novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sehgal and Shashi Deshpande lay emphasis on social realism and family relationship. Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and A Handful of Rice deal with stark social realism depicting how the transition in the society affects family relationship. The women in women’s fiction seeks an identity of her own, independent of her husband. Shiv K. Kumar has rightly observed this with reference to Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence
In That Long Silence, Jaya the protagonist, resents the image of a wife ‘yoked’ to her husband – ‘a pair of bullocks yoked together’. This is the image that haunts her all the time. So married to Mohan – a sedate, well-placed business executive – she secretly wishes to savour existential freedom through some disaster befalling him. So she feels ‘relieved’ when he is charged with embezzlement and they have to live in a sort of hide-out. She now feels redeemed as a woman with an identity of her own, seeing her husband rudderless and pathetically dependent upon her – this man whose ‘fastidiousness, passion for neatness and order had amazed me when married
2 ) How do the writers of post independence Indian writing in English try to project the image of mother India or national identity in their writings ?
Indian English literature also referred to as Indian Writing in English is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.[citation needed] R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s.[1] It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with Anglo-Indian). Although some Indo-Anglian works may be classified under the genre of postcolonial literature, the repertoire of Indian English literature encompasses a wide variety of themes and ideologies, from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, and thereby eludes easy categorization.
