Special Articles on Translation as Conversation Sankalapuram Nagarajan (1929 – 2014)
And we forget because we must
And not because we will.
– Matthew Arnold, “Absence.”
One feature of the modern sensibility is... the idea that what has
been forgotten is what forms our character, our personality, our
soul.
– Ian Hacking, “Memory Sciences, Memory Politics” (70)
Educated at Mysore, Nagpur, and Harvard, S. Nagarajan began teaching
English at an early age. His career started in Amravati and Bangalore (1948–
1953) but he later became an Assistant Professor in Jabalpur (? 1953–1961).
The then-Madhya Pradesh government insisted that all its employees pass
a basic literacy test in Hindi, a directive that caused him some hardship.
Nagarajan was however happy to leave his job for higher studies in the
United States. The US Fellowship, again, was hard-won, considering
Nagarajan’s insistence that he would accept it on condition that he be
permitted to work on a topic of his choice, viz., Shakespeare’s Problem
Plays, an insistence the Fulbright Foundation found rather difficult to
respect initially, given their commitment to promoting the study of
American literature and culture in India. Nagarajan’s repeated appearance
before the Foundation to explain his ideas not only won him the coveted
Smith-Mundt-Fulbright Scholarship (1958–60) and the Harvard University
Fellowship (1959– 60) but strengthened his life-long commitment to the
profession of English and American Studies in India, both specialties which
he pioneered and propagated in at least two leading Indian Universities for
more than three decades.
On his return from the US, Nagarajan joined the Poona University
English Department (Reader, 1961–64; Professor, 1964–77). He laid the
foundation for a full-fledged postgraduate research Department of English
at Poona and continued to be the ex officio Chair of its Board of Studies until
1977 and coordinated the English-teaching activities of its affiliated centres
and colleges for well over a decade. He was also the first Coordinator of
Summer Intensive Courses for English teachers (that somewhat forerun
the present Refresher Courses in the Academic Staff Colleges) for which
he sought funding from the American and British cultural agencies in
India. Among his other memorable contributions of those years include the
introduction of research in American, Indian-English, and Commonwealth
Literatures and Critical Theory; and the regular monitoring of updated
catalogues in the Humanities and the acquisition of cutting-edge books and
journals for the Jayakar Library. Very few students in India know that the
first dissertation on an Indian English topic and the most influential first
book on Indian English fiction were written under his supervision (in the
late 60’s/early 70’s) in Poona by Paul C. Verghese and Meenakshi Mukherjee
respectively. C. D. Narasimhaiah of Mysore University and Nagarajan
organized the first conference on Indian and Australian literatures under
the auspices of the ICSSR and edited its papers. They were also the
founding directors of the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad
(now called the Osmania University Centre for International Programmes).
Among his many academic honours, Nagarajan prized most his Clare
Hall Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge University (1987). The following
year, Clare Hall elected him a Life Member, a rare honour because the
membership was sponsored by the Estate of Professor I. A. Richards whose
special lectures Nagarajan had attended during the professor’s Harvard
visit in the early 60’s. Other honours had preceded Clare Hall – the
Fellowship of Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.; Leverhulme
Fellowship at the Australian National University, Canberra; Staff Fellowship
of the Association of Commonwealth Universities at the University of
Edinburgh; and the National Fellowship of the UGC, India. An unusually
incisive scholar and commentator, Nagarajan excelled in philological and
interpretive scholarship at once, a sampling of which would include his
masterful Signet Classic edition of Measure for Measure (1964; rev. 1990), and
his essays and notes in such esteemed journals as Shakespeare Quarterly,
Essays in Criticism, Ariel, The Sewanee Review, Modern Fiction Studies,
Comparative Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, College English,
Notes & Queries, American Transcendental Quarterly, World Literature Today,
The Arnoldian, etc. His papers have been widely cited and indexed in all the
Humanities Indices and reviews of English scholarship across the world.
***
Long before the English-in-India hands got going on its polemical
history, traditions and practice, Nagarajan wrote and lectured on
this subject through the mid-70’s, culminating in his much-cited and
controversial valedictory address at Poona University while relinquishing
his Chair in 1977. That address became the draft of his “Decline of English
in India: Some Historical Notes” (1981) excerpts and versions of which
later appeared in several Indian periodicals, and has ever since remained
central to our arguments for and against its thesis. To have initiated such
a discussion, and sustained it for well over three decades, is no vanity. He
was writing at a time when English was being reconfigured as a language,
discipline of thought, and an academic subject proffering supple confusions
of commitment to its students in most postcolonial centres and Englishspeaking
countries. Apart from enabling us to see that our departments
still do not seem to have reasons more compelling than T. B. Macaulay’s
to fashion an English curriculum for a country that badly needs courses
and programmes that would prepare young people to meet the challenges
of a new world and century, Nagarajan’s “Historical Notes” also gestured
toward possibilities within English that contextualized the ideological and
methodological biases it harbours. Wouldn’t the latter, by itself, form the
basis for a new course for advanced students of English? That question
probably prompted him to offer a compulsory course on “The Teaching of
English in India” for the fresh batches of M. Phil./ Ph. D. students at the
University of Hyderabad (UoH), 1986– ’89.
***
By the time Nagarajan retired from active teaching in 1989, a small
revolution in taste and address was already under way both within the
departments of English and universities across the country. Who hadn’t
either heard, written, or spoken about the university in ruins, inhospitable
academies, and the contest of faculties before they moved on to matters
more pedestrian that cried for urgent attention such as the incrementally
larger student intake every year, poor quality of the intake, faculty attrition
levels, career advancement, ‘functional’ and ‘remedial’ English modules,
API scores, etc.? Even when nothing actually changed the constitution and
constituency of English in India, there always were harbingers of revolution
who imagined communities and were surprised by sin. No one I know
however was disillusioned by English to be fooled even by the illusion of
being disillusioned. Even so, Nagarajan’s view that English in India showed
signs of decline ruffled feathers. Roughly, his decline was taken to mean poor
business, or no business at all, in showrooms where English was displayed
as an exclusive commodity. He was however speaking only for himself, as
one who belonged to a class and generation, to a hyper-degree oral and
literate in equal measure, now unimaginable to most of us. His peers began
reading young, and were nourished by the unusually wide indigenous folk
wisdom, the local narrative traditions, some classical lore, and English – a
heady cocktail of the marga and desi that made A. K. Ramanujan wonder
whether there is (still?) an Indian way of thinking, a uniform civil code of
‘historical sense’ to which the Indians could complacently defer. Nagarajan
was so familiar with the unfamiliar (even of the most bizarre kind) in
cultures so unlike his that, like Ramanujan, he was perfectly at home in the
translated (and so ‘lost’) worlds of demons and gods, supernatural legends
and heroic exploits, spectral and spectatorial objects.1 The mythological rock
upon which such readers built their huts and castles with equal aplomb is
virtually lost to those of us who grew up reading Robert Graves and Joseph
Campbell, and perhaps completely lost now to the later and younger
Wikipedists. Nagarajan’s contemporaries benefited from reading what they
loved reading, or would have read anyway. In the culture of books they
grew up, they sought minimal but generous help from their ever-obliging
mentors who prescribed texts they had always loved for the ‘knowledge’
found essential for “a literary education.” In contrast, our students now
might be building on loose sand, when they are building at all, for if they
do not so much as glance at Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (2000) in order to
take their spare minds off the Harry Potter series, they will, I hope, realize
in time that a limited imagination is certainly a limitation even for a SAT or
GRE.
***
At the UoH, Nagarajan left lasting imprint on systems and matters as
various and demanding as administrative reforms, university governance,
welfare schemes, library management, the professional advancement
and training of teaching and non-teaching employees, bringing within
the ambit of university administration the Campus School, the Day-care
and Health Centres. Equality meant for him, equality of opportunity, a
fair chance to succeed and even excel (for everyone, the teachers and the
taught) in a system that makes human and material resources accessible at
affordable costs for every stakeholder of the university. Equality however
meant nothing, he used to insist, unless quality was pursued by individuals
with equal and sustained rigour. If it was the academy that was responsible
for ensuring equal opportunity for all within its fold, quality ought to be the
prime concern of those of us who would “gladly teach and gladly learn.”2
The Humanities curricular reforms, always uppermost in his mind, were
guided by this principle. So were matters pertaining to such fledgling
centres as the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL) which he helped
build and nurture through his very last years in the UoH.
Even during the most exacting days he had served as the Dean of the
School of Humanities and Vice Chancellor of the University, Nagarajan was
never known to have reneged on his teaching, missed crucial academic
assignments such as giving lectures as the first UGC National Lecturer in
English, Wilson Philological Lectures at Bombay, the Nag Memorial Lectures
at Banaras Hindu University, the Malegaonkar Lectures on Shakespeare at
Poona besides sending quarterly reports and annual bibliographical input
from India to the International Society of Shakespeare of which he was an
honorary life-member.
***
It is not unusual for a largely uneducated bureaucracy to wonder
why the English-Philosophy buildings should occupy so much floor-space
and who should pay for their recurrent up-keep costs. The Humanities
are poor earners anyway and ought not to ask for more at least until the
newer Plan period. From what I could gather, Dean Nagarajan had fought
some pitched battles with the UoH administration but never had had to
hurtfully trim his budget or cut back the Humanities spending on books
and periodicals. The advantage, Nagarajan once confided in me, was that
crucial budgetary matters finally ended up on a sensible Scientist’s desk
(as all our Vice Chancellors with the exception of one have been scientists)
where costs will be compared and found still to be on the lower side. After
all, the ‘Unassigned Grants’ upon which so much of our slender Humanities
Wheelbarrow depends bespeak woefully unprofessional planning and
budgeting of precious public money. Good Science/ Sense will not let the
Humanities down, and ask that it play the anachronistically entertaining
clown, unless the Humanists volunteer, as some of them regrettably do,
to play such roles. Who doesn’t love, he used to ask smilingly, a wellcrafted
sentence?3 The one time he seemed to have real trouble as I recall
was in convincing a Humanist Vice Chancellor who asked him why English
continued to subscribe to series that no one read – for example, The Dickensian.
No one but Nagarajan could explain with such astonishing scholarly acuity
the value of this journal in the study of Victorian and Modern societies,
the one continuing well into the other as was evident in the uniformed
query about The Dickensian. The single-author/ single-themed journals, he
reminded us, “were not only on this author or that theme but on a world
in which they lived and flourished, on the circumambient relations and
receptions of which readers would otherwise be unaware.” I am not sure
the Benthamite obstructionists ever understand the simple logic that while
it might be smart to make the academy account for what it spends, it is plain
silly to give it nothing to account for. Students of English at Hyderabad are
still brought up to deal with such stringent conditions but yield first-rate
work, comparable in quality and scope to the best of other disciplines.
***
Nagarajan has written on his first exposure to comparative studies
involving literatures, societies and religious matters in Daniel Ingalls’s
Sanskrit classes at Harvard during the late 1950s. “It was not only nostalgia
but a natural inclination that prompted me to take courses on Religion
and Literature in Sixteenth-century England,” observes Nagarajan in fond
reminiscence, “Meditative Poetry (with David Perkins), Burke and Johnson
(with Walter Jackson Bate), Nature and Grace in English Poetry (with
Herschel Baker) and of course Shakespeare (with Alfred Harbage).”4 In an
official record of his curricular life he had once submitted to the Personnel
Section of the UoH, Nagarajan mentions no modern Indian language as
his, but counts Sanskrit among the “classical” languages known to him. I
have often been intrigued by the isolated superiority of this comparatist
who spoke at least two South Indian languages with ease (Kannada and
Telugu) and managed to speak some Hindi, but never feeling comfortable
enough to read or write any of the modern Indian languages, and still
seemed quite at home in pursuing comparative studies in English. The CCL
at the UoH owes its first reading list and courses to Nagarajan’s enviable
command of the discipline and his vision of its progress in the present
century. Was he not in some sense anticipating and functioning within the
translation zone of Emily Apter’s formulation where failure, disruption, and
the misery of communication affects those who have either no language of
their own or the languages of translation do not reach them in good time?
Did not this zonal habitus of sorts make him somewhat of the unassimilable
stranger (in such radically dissimilar locales as Mysore, Amravati, Jabalpur,
Harvard, Poona, Hyderabad, Mauritius...) that he was? I have known no
other teacher of comparative literature in India evolve as critically sensitive
a curriculum as Nagarajan’s – a curriculum for the initiates that sought to
pre-empt groundless comparisons, those predictable equations between
South Asian modes and genres that ground the figures in an English
vacuum. At any rate, Nagarajan’s courses served as a prophylactic against
sloppy reading and sloppier conclusions cub-comparatists are prone to
upon first looking into a translation. In the initial round of CCL Board
of Studies meetings to which I was a reluctant conscript in the late ’80s, I
recall Nagarajan explain patiently to his colleagues from the departments
of Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies (whose
help he had solicited every semester to run the Centre’s programmes) that
the grounds of comparison (pace Harry Levin) ought to be transparent in
the methods and materials we harnessed in comparison. Stationed among
the Indian languages of great discrepancy, he was the only full-time teacher
at the Centre wholly responsible for the pre-doctoral M. Phil. and Ph. D.
programmes to which annual admissions had been mandatory. I do not
think anyone appreciated his single-minded devotion to the task at hand
– designing and managing to keep the coursework going semester after
semester; teaching English-in-Comparison-and-Comparison-in-English to
students whose basic skills in their languages (and English in particular)
were quite below par. In one of those meetings, I once distinctly heard
him say, for want of a plainer word, nirddaksinya (without the faintest
compunction) that epitomised both his vexation and commitment, hardly
ever appreciated by his colleagues in English or the bhasa. As it happened,
his Sanskrit, not his learned English, effortlessly crossed difficult borders
and closed wide gulfs of incomprehension.
***
In an inconclusive discussion I had once begun with Nagarajan in
the mid-90’s, I discovered that he never thought of Culture as Anarchy’s
simplistic antithesis, or as the inevitable alternative in Matthew Arnold’s
fancy, but as one feeding the other by way of routine subsistence, or even
sustenance. Read in that shrewdly dialectical light, Culture and Anarchy has
sometimes struck me as a prose-villanelle of sorts, somewhat recursive
and iterative of the Culture whose loss it mourns, while denying the loss it
mourns by confronting the Anarchy that affirms it.5 This Arnoldian classic
was not to be seen for the putative elitism it canvasses in a stingy monistic
view (one which Nagarajan was so keen to correct and I would readily
endorse by citing close parallels from Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur) but for
seriously debating and reformulating its assumptions in cultures that must
not only tolerate but welcome and protect strangers’ explicit minoritarian
or native regionalisms. This discussion in some ways explained Nagarajan’s
interest in the Kathakali Shakespeares of which he grew so fond during
our conversations. Indeed his curiosity even extended to chutti, the highly
Sankalapuram Nagarajan (1929 – 2014) 119
intricate and complicated make-up of the Kathakali artistes whose facial
interpretation of the rasas fascinated him to no end. Would he care to
travel with me to Kerala to watch the Margi or Kalamandalam shows?
He wouldn’t commit but he seemed curious about the Kathakali artistes’
faces, gestures and poses that effortlessly interpreted a whole gamut of
emotions in lengthy silent sequences of dialogue, description, explanation,
and commentary. I would hazard weird guesses in parallels to which he
might easily connect – such as Gordon Craig’s masks – in order to distract
him but he would still be intrigued by Kathakali Shakespeares of which he
had read about in journals. Probably he came very near to admiring the
‘comfort’ the Kathakali actors felt playing Othello and Iago, or, strangely,
the Fool and Poor Tom (in King Lear), a bold step indeed for a ‘small’ culture
to take in order to consort with a ‘big’ one, interpreting anarchy in ways
unforeseen by Arnold. To all this he might have given a tolerant nod, but he
seemed agreeable somehow to the idea that Kathakali parodied the English
stage (in a radical postcolonial gesture?) when I once mentioned to him
that John Russell Brown and Ralph Yarrow among others were great fans
of the Malayali temple-arts and that they marvelled at our native ‘readings’
of the Western stage. One never came away from Nagarajan without seeing
how literature ‘knows,’ and knows deeply – rather, seeing that he had been
there long before we have ever known it.6
In a way this also allowed me to see why Nagarajan worried about
the mismatch between the English curriculum and the postgraduate scene
in India. While his rectitude in such matters restrained him from publicly
airing unpopular views, it certainly commended him to a few of us in the
profession. Nagarajan’s views however were often not heard for what they
really were, or were misheard as betraying his disapproval of, or apathy
towards, the latest fads in pedagogical and cultural theory. No one however
needed to ever seriously doubt where he lived and what he lived for in
matters of serious academic business; he made himself clear in the most
decent ways imaginable in scenarios where it was not uncommon for his
high-minded colleagues to become unrecognizable travesties of themselves.
An earnest questioner and an astute analyst of reasoned arguments,
Nagarajan attended seminars and workshops where an interlocutor’s
elegance and dignity showed most favourably during discussions. I clearly
recall one such at an open forum on Orientalism, probably to mark its tenth
year of publication, organized jointly by the Schools of Humanities and
Social Sciences at the University of Hyderabad. After listening to a handful
of disputatious papers by the younger faculty, he put matters in most
helpful perspective by saying that Edward Said’s book is only beginning to
study the polemics it had then inaugurated, and if one were to go by Said’s
‘political’ scholarship, the rumblings of the debate are unlikely to die away
soon. The Middle East will always be in turmoil for some more decades, and
as long as the turmoil is the politics that gets played out on the various fora
of international relations and cultural studies, the Orientalist theme will
engage literary scholars for a long time indeed. Nagarajan insisted however
that Said, whom he knew personally as his contemporary at Harvard, was
not as radically anti-canonical a scholar as was projected by some panelists
there. His point, unless mistaken once again, was not that Said was not
radical or anti-canonical enough but that his ‘radicalism’ was surely not
of a kind that would remain as such forever to be potentially canonical,
as some discussants seemed dangerously close to suggesting. Of course
anyone who cared to understand Said’s contrapuntal reading beyond mere
glossary descriptions will know from Culture and Imperialism (1994) that
Nagarajan couldn’t have been any fairer or more prescient than that in 1988.
***
On committees where Nagarajan and I happened to work together, I
had probably been remiss sometimes by keenly observing his ways rather
than attending to our business at hand. He was a peculiar delight to watch
and listen to at interviews (especially when I was not the interviewee)
when he directed some remark or the other, an after-thought perhaps,
at the candidates, when everyone would think that the session had
practically ended. As far as I could recall, his questions were hardly ever
of the information-seeking or superficially-probing kind. They always had
had the ring of observations that relegated simple-minded questions to the
irrelevant margins of future dissertations. For us, at any rate, they afforded
some glimpse of his pedagogical gestures and Socratic poses for which he
was renowned, his ‘strategy’ rather of neither giving away nor holding
back too much by way of ‘guidance’ that he guessed the young scholars
would find anyway on their own. His observations either opened up
stunningly new possibilities or likelier alternatives for all of us to ponder,
or at least enabled us to see the ‘problem’ in a new light altogether. One
example: to a brilliant applicant for M. Phil. whose proposal for collecting
appropriate English texts for working-class children, Nagarajan wondered
what the Bible – better still, the Biblical Blake – thought of children, what
passages from the Wisdom Books she might pick, were she to be offered
that choice. Of course she had not considered this, but she acknowledged
the world of difference the teasing pertinacity of this suggestion had made
to her working habits ever since as a college teacher and a devout Christian.
Nagarajan, to my mind, was that unusual teacher who was capable of
instantly defamiliarizing the scriptures – his style, if you like, of calling
essentialist thinking into question – while still keeping us deeply engaged
with them. At the very least, he might persuade you to revise a lazy thought
or hold it within the firm brackets of clear sense.
***
Most of us can only marvel at Nagarajan’s scholarly acumen and
pedagogical intent that met each other on perfectly equitable grounds. He
chose for example not to offer tiresome interpretations of Shakespearean
moments and patterns or seek sources far away and long ago to establish
the age of Chaucer’s Clerk. In a deceptively modest (even pedestrian,
if misleadingly titled) essay, “The Teaching of Shakespeare in India,”
Nagarajan once played the proverbial eiron to (what would now appear
to us) the postcolonial alazons by looking at two old colonial ‘projects’ of
oversimplifying and retelling Shakespeare for the benefit of nineteenthcentury
Indian students. The ever-obliging publishers who executed these
‘projects’ were Srinivasa Varadachary and Blackie & Sons. Nagarajan
wouldn’t tell us in so many words that the roots of our “Postcolonial
Melancholia” 7 may be traced to such ‘projects’ of the English teachers of
yore who also set questions for our students that made Shakespeare Indiafriendly
in mind and art. But his painstaking collection and collation of
student-editions of Shakespeare annotated by J. S. Armour and J. H. Stone,
as well as the questions on major Shakespeare texts for the three Presidency,
and the Punjab and Allahabad universities in the nineteenth century are
worth consulting once again if only to reassure ourselves that, pace Auden,
“About suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters...”. For the fault
with such benign gestures of colonialism, according to Nagarajan, was not
that some do-gooder editor/publisher had watered down Shakespeare for
our ancestors whose low intellectual equipment was blithely presumed
by them, but that they killed the Indian subjects with too much kindness,
as bombs overkill when dropped. Nagarajan’s essay cites some passages,
among illuminating asides on the profession, to show us that those
English teachers who supplied paraphrases and practically rewrote all
of the well-edited Warwick Shakespeare texts were poor in scholarship
and imagination, pretty much the same thing when it comes to editing
textbooks or setting questions for examinations. “In hundreds of classrooms
in India today,” begins Nagarajan ruefully, “Shakespeare... is perishing –
... for not being understood. But because he is Shakespeare... and we are
Indians – ‘the Hindoo,’ reads the title of a Ramanujan poem, ‘does not hurt
a Fly or a Spider, either’ – he will never wholly die and we shall never kill
him” (1978: 239). He might have equally been outraged by the American
seminars on Othello that drift off inevitably toward the O. J. Simpson case,
a ‘tragedy’ involving a black villain-hero. The essay also reflects on the
harm such models of textbook writing have done to the current crop of
Indian editions that supply us with reach-me-down solutions, not so much
because anyone requires them as because once begun, such practices are
hard to leave undone. No badly edited Shakespeare, alas, was ever banned
in independent India by a Board of Studies on the left or right.
Long before the masks of conquest were ripped off the colonial faces,
Nagarajan had shown us the way to unmask ideologies that purveyed
intellectual nutrition to the Indians at affordable costs, especially to those
who were not quite starving. Only that his example was Shakespeare,
not always considered ‘safe’ by the conformists and rebels alike because
122 Journal of Contemporary Thought
canonical drama, as some of them wrongly believe, cannot always be
harnessed to retail chloroforming ideologies. To Nagarajan this belief
mattered the least, for he was only interested in showing that the Indians
were not compelled to acquire any other education in life or literature than
they wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than they wanted it. Quite
simply, the intellectual independence of India had very little to do with the
political, a proposition at least as arguable as its opposite. Wouldn’t it be
senseless to count the conspiracies before they are hatched?8
***
It was indeed a matter of deep regret for him (and huge disappointment
for many scholars oriented towards bibliographical and textual criticism)
that two of Nagarajan’s cherished projects had to be abandoned either
because of official apathy or unavailability of continued financial and
logistical support on which much of his later work depended. The first was
the Union Catalogue Project funded initially by the Government of India’s
Ministry of Education and Culture. At least three years of unremitting hard
work by way of coordinating, monitoring, and chasing fugitive books and
monographs in English and American Literatures catalogued in the three
Presidency Universities yielded some bibliographically rich fascicles and
files of cyclostyled correspondence but no complete, usable, and accessible
record of materials students could reliably consult from afar, the prime
objective of the Project. The core idea here (to publish what Nagarajan
called “a Finding List” of research materials in English available in locations
unknown to a seeker who, presumably, has had access to an international
bibliography such as New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature) is
believed to have tantalized Jadavpur and Delhi, comparably equipped
Departments of English like ours, to take it up from where Nagarajan had
left off, but few scholars today would dare to rush in there, their e-knowhow
and material resources notwithstanding.9 The other project that Nagarajan
had to abandon on account of intermittent ill-health and poor connectivity
was a study of I. A. Richards’s unpublished papers deposited at Houghton
Library, Harvard and Magdalene College, Cambridge.10 Here, again, he had
made some headway, but he was no longer the good old researcher, at once
“a hedgehog and a fox” among the archival records and memorabilia.11 He
made notes in longhand, kept old filing cabinets and vertical files, wrote and
rewrote his work, and slow-mailed his letters, tirelessly and conscientiously.
He continued with the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” – his
favourite phrase from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – “happily,” according to
him, until the very last conversation I have had with him on phone. Very
few among the English teachers I have known used to keep their erasers
in order as did Nagarajan. Fewer still would have known their uses, even if
they had them ready at hand.
***
Speaking of the ‘unfinished Nagarajan,’ one almost commits oneself to
certain errata of conscience, if one still believes in academic colleagueship,
the honour Humanities professedly afford those who embrace them. How
often do we pass each other by like ships in the night and still fancy that
we ‘know’ one another quite well? Have we not sometimes wondered
what Emily Dickinson made those dashes for before marking “internal
difference – Where Meanings, are – ”? I have often shared the sadness of
many students and colleagues of this distinguished teacher that he was not
publicly honoured even once by a state or the union government, or by
the Indian intellectual or cultural academies putatively devoted to sahitya,
education, or public service. The university communities that routinely
inflict encomiastic papers on us in order to mark the superannuation of
teachers undiscriminatingly, or signpost their three scores and four scores
for dubious reasons, did not think it decent to honour Nagarajan with a
handsome festschrift to which, I am sure, very distinguished colleagues
and students from the world over would have unreservedly and proudly
contributed. A grand felicitation on Nagarajan’s 75th year by a group of
his former students and colleagues at Poona was therefore somewhat of a
belated gesture but nonetheless decorous and appreciable for that – from
what I have heard of his fond recollection of that event. A related matter
of regret is the non-availability of a collection, a gathering of fugitives, as
Lionel Trilling once called his, of the essays and notes Nagarajan wrote with
as much devoted attention as he had given his lectures and addresses before
various audiences here and abroad. I have sometimes wondered what was it
that he had cared, if at all, to be remembered for – his scholarly work, or the
excitement his classes and public addresses generated. Above all, there was
that unofficial self of his, not easily discernible then but always returning
in memory to his admiring students and colleagues, a self of which even he
was only dimly aware, a brilliant and genial conversationalist best suited
for ‘table-talk,’ a dying art in the academy. (What preoccupied Nagarajan,
and how he conducted himself, beyond what the American lawyers call
the “billable hours” might interest those of us who believe that a teacher’s
work-audit must also count the time not taken to teach. That perhaps made
all the difference to most of his earnest students, by a curiously Frostian
logic?) While that part is uncollectible, what the UGC-funded Special
Assistance Project of the UoH English Department ought to do is to collect
Nagarajan’s fugitive pieces before long.12 (Certainly a digitized folder of
his papers would be a bonus, if younger students find the collection hard
copy indeed.) That would be, I believe, a modest tribute to his memory, an
acknowledgement of his distinguished colleagueship in the Department he
helped found and nurture in the dozen years he had remained its bestknown
and most respected teacher.
Perhaps it was Nagarajan’s considered judgement not to teach English
either to privilege a great tradition or to neglect a small one but to see that
those who read anything at all, read responsibly and never felt drawn to
politics of divisiveness and rancour. He knew that there would be nothing
comforting and easy for anyone in the scholarly pursuits they choose for
themselves. The trouble with habitually seeing the Humanities ‘in crisis,’
he once observed, was in deluding ourselves that the Humanities traded in
low-cost, easy-of-access goods and services for a largely benighted people
irretrievably lost to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” (To the Nabakovain
monkey, whose story is mockingly told in Lolita, the world is a cage, the
reason it chose to paint the bars of a cage when it was given an easel and
paints.) No wonder Nagarajan scorned the teacherly expression “covering
the portions in class,” wondering what it meant, pretty much like Said’s
remonstrance at covering Islam. The phrase probably had the vulgar ring
of a trade-off which he had rather not discuss in faculty meetings. Did it
mean redrawing the borders of excolonial spaces by leaving out the minds
of those who want to draw them? A teacher ought to uncover the portions,
he would say, not quite concealing his disapproval of readings and readers
that proffered solutions and settled disputes to everyone’s satisfaction, or
those that confirmed the (Oscar) Wilde’s Law that Wordsworth found the
sermons in stones he had already hidden there. What fascinated readers
most, he believed, were texts that opened up the abyss, and conducted them
through potentially violent and disruptive passages.13 To my mind, this
connects in some way with his early insistence on reading Shakespeare’s
Problem Plays for an advanced degree.
“Life only avails,” remarked Emerson in utmost exasperation, “not the
having lived” (52). What we are sure to miss are not merely Nagarajan’s
acts of reading and teaching but this humane educator’s live colleagueship
for which he was remembered and revered. A complete faith in the human
idiom, and a culture that strengthened and sustained it, perhaps made his
generation of teachers quite distinct from others, made it less cynical and
more professionally generous than the best of ours. The problem has rarely
been with the lessons but with the teaching – the way we interpret the
lessons. We have perhaps forgotten to ask those exemplary interpreters
how they managed to execute such a difficult job so splendidly, effortlessly.
Perhaps, not unlike that not-waving-but-drowning chap in Stevie Smith’s
poem, they have been telling us only that, and all along, but we were not
quite listening.
Notes
I wish to thank Sachidananda Mohanty for lending me a copy of In Search of
Wonder. Vijaya Shankar, Leela Prasad and L. Rajendra Goud gave me on request
some crucial information for this essay. I regret of course my own errors of fact
and poor memory in most other details.
1 Given these shared affinities of temper and cultural background, it seems
odd that Nagarajan wrote on A. K. Ramanujan’s poetry with some reservations
Sankalapuram Nagarajan (1929 – 2014) 125
in Quest (1972), conceding however that the poet’s “real forte is translation” (18).
Although he has written on Indian English poets only sparingly, and the Quest
article is likely to be the only one of its kind, he had known most of The Striders
and some of Relations and occasionally referred to some lines or titles from them
in passing. I have known no other Indian English poet of whom he spoke with
at least this much regard.
2 “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.” “Prologue,” The Canterbury
Tales, line 308.
3 Nagarajan, I discovered, was somewhat of a legend in the corridors of the
University secretariat for his very crisp notes and queries. The secret, as one of
his trusted lieutenants told me, was that he offered the most lucid summary of
a highly complicated ‘case’ under review, while he pronounced his verdict on
it in neatly phrased unambiguous paragraphs. The file-handlers down the line
had only to record their amen in some clerical code. His most favourite adjective,
though sparingly used, for reasonable claims, agreeable demands and such was
respectable.
4 Nagarajan in Mohanty 1997: 79
5 To I. A. Richards’s course on poetics at Harvard, Nagarajan gained admission
despite its limited enrolment by writing an essay on William Empson’s “Missing
Dates.” The villanelle had since then caught his fancy as the gain a poem makes
by grieving loss. See Nagarajan in Mohanty 78.
6 Nagarajan’s curiosity about Kathakali Shakespeare productions was
probably ignited by a penetrating interpretive analysis of the highly imaginative
use to which the actors put very ordinary props in James Roose-Evans (1970)
besides the excellent articles by Phillip B. Zarrilli, especially those collected in his
Kathakali Dance -Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play (2000). Quite apart
from this, he seemed eager to watch Nalacaritam (the famous Kathakali drama
of Unnayi Varier) at my suggestion that Nala’s leave-taking scene is considered
the most heart-wrenching by the Malayali audience when seasoned actors
perform. Nagarajan’s “An Indian Allusion in Alun Lewis” (1980) had pointed
out how Lewis’s “Hospital in Poona” recalls the Nala-Damayanti episode of the
Mahabharata. A translated text of Nalacaritam Attakatha appeared in the Journal
of South Asian Literature in the mid-1970. Nagarajan was probably aware of this
as well.
7 I allude here to the discussion of this phrase in an eponymous article by Eli
Sorensen who credits Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks with this idea and argument (see
Sorensen 2007). Incidentally, Kalpana Seshadri wrote her M. Phil. dissertation
in Hyderabad under Nagarajan’s supervision.
8 It is interesting to read Nagarajan’s essay in a context specific to a minor
but once-fashionable genre of work by English teachers of the late 1960s who
periodically used to reflect on what D. J. Enright so pithily styled as “Eng. Lit.
Abroad.” “Shakespeare Overseas,” quite typical of this genre, by Enright himself,
is now collected in his Conspirators and Poets (1966: 229– 239). That the middleaged
Nagarajan was among the very few Indian teachers who had offered such
powerful and amusing counterstatements to balance Anglo-American views
and correct some perspectival errors, without grinding his ideological axes too
noisily, speaks for his scholarly maturity and sensitivity.
9 The advisory board for this Project consisted of one eminent librarian
(Arvind C. Tikekar) and two distinguished professors of English (Kitty Scoular
Datta and S. Viswanathan). “Dozens of fascicles have been published in
cyclostyled form,” wrote Nagarajan in an unpublished memorandum. “When
the fascicles are put together and published, the Finding List will help to locate
needed materials; identify gaps in the holdings; suggest acquisitions; bring out
the wealth of the country’s holdings of rare and scarce materials and encourage
a proper conservation policy.”
10I am sure that Nagarajan was familiar with John Paul Russo’s
Complementarities: Uncollected Essays of I. A. Richards (Carcanet, 1977) but he had
probably chanced upon other, as-yet-uncollected, or unpublished papers.
11A line from Archilochus’s fragments, made famous by Isaiah Berlin: “The
fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.”
12 I would list the essays in the following journals/collections as likely to
be more inaccessible for future readers, given the disparate history of their
publication: The Literary Criterion (1978); The Aligarh Journal of English Studies
(1979); Journal of Literary Studies (1981); World Literature Today (1988); Mohanty
(1997); Chandran (2001). The fall of Hyderabad libraries is a topic on which I am
tempted to write, but the urgency of preserving valuable historical memorabilia
and documents in English India too serious a professional issue to be just
lamented, soon to be forgotten again. None of the items on this list was to
hand easily and assuredly in the libraries and special collections I consulted. If
someone finds this neglect of our precious resources to be symptomatic of our
cultural studies, that would indeed be a good beginning.
13 Again, a striking parallel in Edward Said: “In reading a text one must
open [the text] out to what went into it and what its author excluded. Each
cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must juxtapose that vision with
the various visions it later provoked...” (67).
Works Cited
Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006.
Enright, D. J. Conspirators and Poets. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966.
Emerson, R. W. Essays. Boston: A. L. Burt, n. d.
Hacking, Ian. “Memory Sciences, Memory Politics.” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, 1996: 67– 87.
Nagarajan, S. “A. K. Ramanujan.” Quest (Incorporating Humanist Review). 74.
1972:18– 21.
—. “The Teaching of Shakespeare in India.” Indian Writing in English: Papers...
The Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, July 1972.
Ed. Ramesh Mohan. Bombay & Madras: Orient Longman, 1978. 239– 251.
Sankalapuram Nagarajan (1929 – 2014) 127
—.“The Englishman as a Teacher of English Literature Abroad.” The Literary
Criterion, 14. 3. 1979: 64– 84.
—.“Macaulay’s Literary Theory and Shakespeare Criticism.” The Aligarh Journal
of English Studies, 4. 2. 1979: 142– 155.
—.“Shakespeare and the Nature of Politics: The Example of Coriolanus.” Journal
of Literary Studies, 4. 1. 1981: 11– 22.
—.“Decline of English in India: Some Historical Notes.” College English, 43. 7.
1981: 663–70.
—.“An Indian Allusion in Alun Lewis.” Notes & Queries, ns. 27. 3. 1980: 240-241.
—.“Little Mother in The Serpent and the Rope.” World Literature Today, 62. 4. 1988:
609– 611.
—.“Shakespeare at Harvard.” In Search of Wonder: Understanding Cultural
Exchange. Ed. Sachidananda Mohanty. New Delhi: USEFI/ Vision, 1997. 74–
80.
—.“First Encounter with The Waste Land.” DA/ Datta: Teaching The Waste Land.
Ed. K. Narayana Chandran. Hyderabad: CIEFL Bulletin, 2001. 243– 248.
Roose-Evans, James. Experimental Theatre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Sorensen, Eli. “Postcolonial Melancholia.” Paragraph, 30. 2. 2007: 65– 81.
Varryar, Unnayi [sic]. Nala Caritam Attakatha. Trans. and Introd. V. Subramanya
Iyer, Journal of South Asian Literature, 10.2-4. 1975: 211-248.
Zarrilli, Phillip B. Kathakali Dance -Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play.
London: Routledge, 2000.
Notes on Contributors
Drew J. Thomases is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at
Columbia University, studying the religious traditions of South Asia. (Email:
Fred Dallmayr is Emeritus Packey J. Dee Professor in Political Theory at
University of Notre Dame, USA. His recent publication is: In Search of the
Good Life: A Pedagogy for Troubled Times (2007). Email: (Fred.R.Dallmayr@1end.
edu, fdallmay@nd.edu)
Indrani Mukherjee is a Professor at the Center of Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian and Latin American Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. The last book which she authored is Latin American Narrative of the
Latter Half of the Twentieth Century: Beyond the Boom (New Delhi: Northern
Books, 2012). (Email: indrani.manshobhat@gmail.com)
K. Narayana Chandran is Professor of English in the School of Humanities,
the University of Hyderabad. His latest publication, Why Stories? (2014) is
a research monograph of the DRS-SAP Department of English, Sambalpur
University. (Email: narayana.chandran@gmail.com)
Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, performance studies scholar and artist,
directs Folded Paper Dance. She will be joining the Theatre and Dance faculty
at Macalester College in Fall 2014. (Email: kanta.kochhar123@gmail.com)
Omendra Kumar Singh teaches English in Govt. P. G. College, Dausa,
Rajasthan, India. (Email: oksrathore@gmail.com)
Rana Nayar is Professor in the Department of English & Cultural Studies,
Panjab University, Chandigarh. A practising translator of repute (Charles
Wallace India Trust Fellow & Sahitya Akademi Prize Winner), he has
rendered around eleven modern classics of Punjabi into English. (Email:
Satu Ranta-Tyrkkö is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the social work
program of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of
Tampere, Finland. (Email: satu.ranta-tyrkko@uta.fi)
Shonaleeka Kaul is Assistant Professor in the Department of History,
University of Delhi. She is the author of Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and
the City in Early India and editor of Cultural History of Early South Asia.
(Email: shonaleeka@gmail.com)
Vipan Pal Singh is Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Brijindra College,
Faridkot, Punjab, India. (Email: vipanpal@gmail.com)
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