 This lecture is titled Contemporary Indian Writers, The Search for Creativity. What we will do in this lecture is to again look at three facets of this phenomenon. In part one, we will look at post-colonial nationalist discourse and bring selected writings of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru in order to understand the ethos and also the contribution of this period. In the second part, we will examine Tagore's ideas in detail in order to give you a sense of his very, very capacious notion of creativity. And in the third part, we will briefly touch on ideas, relevant ideas of Gandhi and Nehru and provide some issues for reflection. So, this is how the lecture is structured. And now, let us look at what we mean by this period of search. Last time also in the last lecture, we touched on the whole intense sense of change that decolonization imposed on our consciousness. And what it did is to also bring alive plurality of voices and there were new kinds of paradigms that were generated in order to deal with this whole idea of the new nation. So, this was a sort of creativity of an epic proportions. And therefore, I think it is very important to locate ourselves in this phase and try and understand the paradoxes, the complexities and the problems that these ideas may have created and we are in a position to review them again. I would like to bring back a Shiva Vishwanathan's essay, which we had discussed in the last lecture and I had pointed out to you that I would really like you to read his a celebration of difference, science and democracy in India. It is a short essay, unlike his extensive studies. It will be easier for you to really understand the thrust of his arguments by looking at this essay. In this particular essay, he had also commented on the first phase of institutionalization of western science in India in 1784. And then he pointed out how the issues of Swadeshi, they brought in the questions of native indigenous problems and it became a very vibrant dialogue starting in the year 1904. And this continued to produce debates on science and democracy and it is the continuities and discontinuities of this debate that he is interested in. The reason we have brought this essay here once again and not in its totality though we have extrapolated part of his observation is related to what he provides by way of the excitement of this nationalist phase. He has labeled this segment living ecology of knowledge and let me read what he has to say. He says that what the Indian national movement did was to turn India into a theater or a series of thought experiments where modern western science would converse with other forms of knowledge. The debates about science he goes on to say in the nationalist era were debates about the politics of knowledge. It was a pursuit of cognitive justice that is of the right of different forms of knowledge to coexist without being marginalized by official state sponsored forms of knowledge. So it really does provide a very exciting framework and insight into what happened at that point and therefore what we will do now is to keep that backdrop in mind but at the same time begin to explore briefly though some of the memoirs and other writings and also you know essays from the postcolonial period. I have pointed out that postcolonial nationalist discourse you know if we try to understand it through the memoirs, letters and autobiographical writing and then add essays to that it provides a sense of how the self of the individual writer was invested in shaping the nation and between the sense of the self and the sense of public spaces or sense of the nation there is a seamless continuity and it is this aspect which provides a kind of epic sense of that framework that sense that something that was being created it had its sort of place in one's being also. So that was a very different climate and part of it is related to the pressures of decolonization where suddenly you are freed from a certain kind of bondage and now the whole field is you know available for new definitions. So let us see what we also have said earlier about certain forms of writing in the postcolonial period where not only are the memoirs interesting and important but there is a sense of this creation and construction of the self through fiction and other artistic forms including drama. And therefore, I would like you to again keep the discussion of Bildung's Roman in mind because again that is that sort of I think has a prominent place in the postcolonial experimental writing and therefore, we will try and place our discussion of memoirs and the essays within this framework because the quest for identity shaped by overcoming various audios which is one of the characteristic features of Bildung's Roman that actually colors this period in wide variety of very significant ways. So this is just to bring you back to the question of forms also because we have not lost track of what we set out to do. We are in quest of creativity, we want to see how different writers and thinkers undertook this journey and if at all there is something now new that we can add to the pool of ideas we have already generated about writers on writing. So the most interesting I think literary figure in the nationalist framework is Rabindranath Tagore who hardly needs any introduction but at the same time we just place some basic information for your you know clarity. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913 and he wrote poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays and he talked to his students, he talked to leaders, he wrote letters to them and in fact all of that was seen as a way of shaping the destiny of this young free nation. We actually researched Tagore's writing extensively for this segment and based on this extensive reading and the confusion that it led to in our own minds I think what we have done is to provide you some sense of what we think he was trying to say. This is a field where we do not we are not Rabindranath scholars but at the same time I think you know in reading of translated texts does allow us to indulge in certain amount of understanding of what he was trying to do. Most notable aspect of his my life in my words is this particular excerpt where he talks about an epiphanic experience as a young man. So again we have not lost track of our perspective to be started with Shiv Vishwanathan and we are trying to understand what are the different kinds of ideas about knowledge about one's being, about shaping one's own being and shaping society which is at the back of this trajectory that we are building for you. So this epiphanic experience I will read this out because later on you see the persistence of this particular state of mind and an idea that you know colors his thinking and writing. He says and I am reading from my life in my words, a veil was suddenly withdrawn and everything became luminous. The whole scene was one of perfect music, one marvelous rhythm, the houses in the street, the men moving below, little children playing, all seem parts of one luminous whole inexpressibly glorious. That morning gave me inner vision and I have tried to explain it in my poems. The same sense of everything becoming luminous is actually developed further as a philosophical stance in his notion of creative unity. And again this is a short excerpt from that writing, philosophical writing but let us have a look at it. So from that epiphanic experience as a young person to this point of developing a whole ideology or a whole worldview, this is what we are moving towards and we will place some of his own engagement with knowledge systems within this framework. So he says and I am reading from the text, what is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance, not in the number of things but in their relatedness which neither can be counted nor measured nor abstracted. It is not in the materials which are many but in the expression which is one. Again it is not in the materials which are many but in the expression which is one. All of the knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the universe. In that relation which is truth, I am not trying to interpret but I am just trying to give the suggestive possibilities. He goes on to say and again I read from the text, a drop of water is not a particular assortment of elements, it is the miracle of a harmonious mutuality in which the two reveal the one. The joy of unity within ourselves seeking expression becomes creative. So again this particular idea, the joy of unity within ourselves seeking expression becomes creative. So this is his idea of creative unity and how it spurs an act of expression. So it is not really a passive activity, it is a state of mind but it is also a state of mind that leads you to self expression where again the territory that you would cover is unknown. So there are whole lot of complexities in this point of view but also we are not really engaging with philosophical debates per se at this point in time about what could be the problem area in understanding it in a very consistent fashion. Because I think what we have noticed is related to a kind of constant transformation and constant striving that you find in his whole outlook which actually also is a matter of great strength. So we have pointed out here that from the letters and essays of Tagore, one finds that the artist and the man constantly strove for better ways of self expression and self actualization. What he calls the fulfillment of the inner impulse whether in his poetry, plays, educational work or social service. Also in his search for what is creative, what works and what does not in art as well as in life. He was humble to admit his mistakes and always prepared to try out new ideas. This is our take based on the research that we undertook. His ideal of unity of all things and their interrelatedness went through transformations changing him in profound ways. So it is not like a very static position. It is as I said it is a position of striving and at the same time maintaining an ideal because that epiphenic experience that desire to find a certain kind of union and harmony and transcendence that seems to persist as a very, very important force in Tagore. The experiments in his writing and public participation both can be seen as extensions of his quest and he seems to have grappled with the paradoxes emerging from the gaps between his ideal and his experiences. It was not an easy situation at all. It is interesting to note and very important indeed not only just interesting. It is important to see that in 1901 he went on to create Shanti Niketan and he endlessly talked about the nurturance of creativity in the educational framework. So as he said in one of his statements, the main task of universities is to produce knowledge. Its dissemination is its secondary function. We must invite those intellectuals and scholars to our universities who are engaged in research, invention or creative activity. And one of the commentators you know who has looked at his writing from the educational perspective he has pointed out that Tagore wanted to be you know science to be taught along with India's own philosophical and spiritual knowledge at Indian universities. But he was also aware of the fact that science without the constraint of self knowledge it leads to an endless desire for material goods and well-being and the meaningless pursuit of the instruments of war and power which are often the origin of conflict between nations and end ultimately in the suppression of the weaker by the stronger. So again that sense of power politics, politics of knowledge that Vishwanathan talked about earlier he is very sharply aware of that also especially from a nationalist position and therefore then this commentator points out that is why both spiritual and scientific knowledge are considered by Tagore as equally important. And by spiritual of course he meant knowledge related to the self. What we would like to do is to place some of only one recent piece of you know recent in the sense of recent translation of Tagore's short story in order to highlight some of the paradoxes and difficulties of dealing with ideas at an institutional level and at the level of creative writing. For that purpose it is also important to notice that in the process of colonization and decolonization the issue of mother tongue and English loomed large in these debates and Tagore himself had to deal with this issue because he wrote in Bengali and of course his you know Gitanjali was translated from Bengali to English. The fact is that Tagore had a tough time dealing with this issue of translation and at the same time he was very sharply aware of the role of English in a world where people needed to converse across differences. So he did see English as a window to the world which is also fairly nationalist position and he also saw English as the medium for imbibing western science at the same time for using the same language for reinventing the given definitions within our own different cultural context. So that is really a very complicated process but he continued to engage in debates and discussions to find a way out and to also assert Indian identity. Now within this I want to place a very very interesting conversation between Tagore and H. G. Wells because it also shows the kind of writers he was interested in talking to and also the content of that conversation enables one to see the visionary aspect of Tagore's thought process. He was not interested only in confining himself to national concerns but he wanted to talk about national identity and national issues to an international you know body of people to like minded people. I will once again not touch on some of the controversial aspects of Tagore's interaction with leaders of different nations but I would concentrate right now on what seems to be a very very even flow of his creative outlook. This conversation with H. G. Wells took place in Geneva and before I actually come to that conversation let me just point out that H. G. Wells of course you may already have read H. G. Wells he was an English author best known for his science fiction and political analysis. He was a socialist and a pacifist. The titles of his books they give an eloquent introduction to his outlook. For example, his notable non-fictionist title anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought which contains futuristic predictions about technology and communication in the year 2000. And he also wrote these scientific romances like the time machine, the island of Dr. Mario, the invisible man, the first man in the moon, the war of the worlds. So, this was a kind of very engaged very very sharp mind that again you know I think Tagore engaged in you know in literary conversations with. This particular meeting took place in June 1930 in Geneva and the two of them were talking about human civilization where Wells seemed to suggest that there is a kind of universality to of course many of the concerns and also he was a proponent of a universal civilization and Tagore immediately instinctively reacts to that idea in this conversation with Wells and he sort of tries to maintain that the uniqueness of different civilizations ought to be maintained and I think there is all that sense of also worry about what would happen to unequal political and economic stand of different nations because he was I think quick to see that this could be really really very problematic. And they go on to talk about reflections, their reflections on rapid changes in modes of communication and the futuristic possibilities of new languages of communication developing. So, the science fiction writer with the futuristic sense of what is going to happen and what can happen or should happen and Tagore the nationalist who is also interested in creating this kind of harmonious world. This is what Wells said to him on the issue of Supremacy of the West because as I said instinctively Tagore reacted to Wells's ideas. Wells says the Supremacy of the West is only a question of probably the past hundred years before the battle of Lipanto the Turks were dominating the West. The voyage of Columbus was undertaken to avoid the Turks, Elizabethan writers and even their successors were struck by the wealth and the high material standards of the East. The history of Western Excendency is very brief indeed and Tagore says and this is very very interesting. He says physical science of the 19th century probably has created the spirit of race superiority in the West. When the East assimilates this physical science the tide may turn and take a normal course. So, now you will see why we are actually emphasizing you know the scientific knowledge as a very very important aspect of the conversations of decolonization because right from Gyanprakash to Shiv Vishwanathan to Tagore and on to Gandhi and Nehru you will find that this is seen as a very key ingredient in the creative quest. So, in any case I think this particular line in fact it becomes quite problematic when you come to a recent sort of story that has been translated and this story is seen as the last notable short story of Tagore. So, again I am trying to show how this whole conversation around systems of knowledge between you know institutionalization of systems of knowledge and experiencing these systems. So, to say in one's own being these are two different things. On the one hand between the self and also the public space there seems to be a seamless kind of connection in the nationalist period. But when we begin to look at the you know debates around ideas we notice the pressures and also the problems of these attempts to grasp and grapple with the new ideas. The story in is a title laboratory and as I said and this is actually to repeat a phrase from Tapobrath Ghosh who has given comments on this collection brought out recently by Sukanta Chaudhary containing many more short stories of Tagore that have been that he has commissioned for translation or he has collected it from different sources. This particular story has been translated by Madhu Chanda Karlekar and it really gripped our attention because in our attempt to understand Tagore and place some of the key elements of Tagore's creative outlook we were very puzzled by this story which portrays the complex aspirations of a scientist cum engineer in pre-independence India. While it reflects Tagore's belief that scientific knowledge was a key ingredient in freeing Indian imagination yet the story evokes really many, many ambivalent issues. In fact there are so many issues that need to be confronted in reading the story that we have decided that we will place it for detailed reading in module 4 when we look at short stories. But at this point also one would briefly like to point out that the protagonist of course in some ways gives you a sense of importance that was given to scientific quest. Although he is an immoral person but he aspires to build new India through his scientific knowledge. So I will briefly read part of this portrayal of this complex rounded character and at the same time you know I think I will place some of the difficulties in reading this mainly from the point of view of Tagore's relationship to scientific endeavor. So I will only briefly read parts of it. So he is described, his name is Nanda Kishore, he is the protagonist and this is how he is described. He did however build a massive mention for scientific research. Now this however is actually related to the fact that he used to work for the British railway system as an engineer and he was extremely capable, one of the best that they had and he has no qualms in collecting money in a fairly illegal fashion while working as an engineer because that seemed to be a way of life at that time also. And therefore what he does is to collect this money and then he goes on to build scientific research and development outfit through his own personal money and this is how Tagore describes him. So preoccupied was he with this hobby that he paid no heed when tongues started wagging, where did this skyscraper come from, where did he find Aladdin's lamp, Tagore goes on to say, some hobbies can become obsessive like an alcoholic addiction. One pays no heed to what people might be saying, Nanda Kishore had a curious cast of mind. He was crazy about science. He would flip through the pages of a scientific catalog and clutch the arms of his chair in shivers of excitement. He would order such expensive instruments from Germany and America as were not to be found even in the big universities of India. It was this that most saddened the seeker after knowledge. This poor country had to survive on the leftovers from the feast of learning. Not having the opportunity to use the fine equipment available abroad, our young people had to make do with scraps of knowledge out of dry textbooks. We are not short of brains, we are simply short of money. He would roar. His life's ambition was to open up the highway of science to our young men. Now, in this story, Nanda Kishore not only builds this lab, but he also finds a very unconventional partner who helped him actually build on his strengths. That is Sohini, a young woman he meets during a visit to Punjab. What Sohini does is to really understand something which again creates the kind of ambivalence that I was talking about because she is not educated and at the same time she watches Nanda Kishore's interaction with business people. Now, it seems that he continued to have business ties related to his scientific work and then this is what she has to say in a very instinctive, street smart manner. So, this is a brief, you know, reference to interaction between Nanda Kishore and Sohini, the young girl from Punjab whom he goes on to marry. Nanda Kishore was truly amazed. The girl continued, do not mind my saying so, Babu, but you have the devil's inspiration too, so you are bound to succeed. And this sort of this reference, she makes, you know, in terms of, you have the devil's inspiration too. This reference is to the Britishers who she felt were also full of devilish ways because of which they actually had greater power and they were able to rule us for such a long time. And she begins to see the same streak in Nanda Kishore. That is why I pointed out that there is a lot of ambivalence in Tagore about the kind of consciousness that Nanda Kishore, the scientist, represents. On the one hand, this scientific lab that he constructs, it becomes a sort of legitimating sort of sign to use Gyanprakash's phrase of, I would say, amoral cognitive pursuits because this is at any cost. And the costs are very high because he first of all dies during this particular experiment. The experiments and the scientific details are not explained in any detail. So one can only speculate that it could be chemical experiment or an electrical engineering experiment because the lab that is described seems more like a physics lab but also a wing which is devoted to chemistry. So it is really not clear what exactly was going on in that lab. It is shown in the early part of the story that Nanda Kishore dies while performing a scientific experiment. And then it is left to Sohini, his wife, to really find a suitable successor to carry out Nanda Kishore's scientific legacy. Now this struggle to keep the lab despite any cost, this becomes a passion that governs Sohini to the extent that she is willing to sacrifice her own daughter Neela in order to save the lab and also ensure that scientific work would continue in that lab. So she hires a young man, Rebuti in order to carry forward the work. But as I said that the point about this immorality emerges from Sohini's take on the lab, she of course gets educated meanwhile. So she understands that work of great importance is being carried out in this lab but she begins to treat it like a temple. And in fact she describes it as a temple which would lead to the salvation of the individual and also the nation. She repeats the words of Nanda Kishore actually in order to reaffirm this point of view. So it sort of this story leaves us with a sense of surprise as to what sort of position Tagore had taken in this story about the pursuit of science and it hardly matches up with the kind of ideal that he has posited in his conversation with Ejjivels where he felt that this you know doing of science would actually free the Indian mind because then it would be able to apply its ideas and concepts to the Indian situation. But instead here you have a fairly amoral quest and I think we therefore need to think a little more about what was happening with these ideas. What were the problem areas, were they repressed or were they sort of engaged with? I have still not made up my mind as you know I am not able to really fully deal with his philosophical ideas on the one hand and see this particular story which of course he wrote towards the last phase of his writing career. But I think we need to read this story and try and understand the nationalist framework through its problematization and its problems also. And therefore I think one way of doing this would be to also try and understand that science and technology both these terms are really not simple terms to begin with because they also contain many connotations. In the nationalist fervor I think science was being actually you know internalized sometimes in a limited way, sometimes without really relating it to the deeper issues of values that it also contained. But in any case I think we will briefly look at Williams and what he had to say about the term science and how it came into English in the 14th century. You can have a look at the slide here where I pointed out that it was based on Raymond Williams' observations in Keywords. The science came into English in 14th century from the word scienceia which meant knowledge. So, it had a greater sense of a knowledge system and not a very restrictive sense of only the natural or the physical sciences. Although he also goes on to say with reference to technology that a characteristic definition of technology was a description of arts especially the mechanical. And then he adds that it was mainly in the 19th century that technology became fully specialized to the practical arts. This is also the period of technologist. The newly specialized sense of science and scientist open the way to a familiar modern distinction between knowledge that is science and its practical application that is technology within the selected field. So, it is I think these terms have been you know undergoing lot of changes and what perhaps we can now do is to again bring back Shiv Mishwanathan for our help in understanding these issues better. So, he goes on to place Gandhi within the debates about science in the nationalist era and he goes on to portray Gandhi as you know he says that he goes on to say that to portray Gandhi as anti-science or lewdite as the technocrats of the Nairobian era did is superficial. So, I am moving from Tagore to Gandhi now in order to point out that this discourse around creativity, around ideas related to knowledge systems, ideas related to the whole sense of the indigenous versus the western. All these were extremely complicated issues and therefore, we need the help of you know scholars who have devoted time and attention to these debates and he points out that if we look at Gandhi who often is labeled as anti-science or lewdite as the technocrats of the Nairobian era labeled him as that is a superficial enterprise. Because just as Tagore found it difficult to reconcile science within the framework of these characters similarly, there is a different kind of issue that emerges when we look at Gandhi's Hind Swaraj which was written in 1908 as he says that it is one of the great critiques of science and technology. It was an attempt to create a technological and scientific conscience for Nehru's India very very important word I would say. It was an attempt to create a technological and scientific conscience was for Nehru's India which had no sense of the roots and tensions within modern western science. I think we can contrast Gandhi's ideas with Pandit Nehru's ideas and leave you for certain thoughts for reflection. In 1920s and 30s when these memoirs were written I think that they do show this engagement of thinkers, writers with you know institutionalization of ideas also. So this is what Gandhi ji had to say by way of clarifying his position vis-a-vis technology that is application of scientific knowledge. So we have taken this excerpt from the preface to the new edition by Mahadev Desai where he tried to see Gandhi ji's clarification on technology related observations made earlier. This preface is titled the attack on machinery and civilization and this is what Gandhi ji had to say while replying to a question whether he was against all machinery. He says how can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery. The spinning wheel is a machine, a little toothpick is a machine. What I object to is the craze for machinery. The craze is for what they call labor saving machinery. Men go on saving labor till thousands are without work and thrown on the open street to die of starvation. I want to save time and labor not for a fraction of mankind but for all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labor but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might. The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to atrophy the limbs of man. For instance, I would make for intelligent exceptions, take the case of the singer's sewing machine. It is one of the few useful things ever invented and there is a romance about the device itself. Actually, this conversation goes on and I think it would be very beneficial to read in the Swaraj and also these further clarifications that Gandhiji provided to Mahadev the Sai. All of this is available in fairly cheap editions, so do read it sometime. He concludes this statement by saying, ideally I would like to rule out all machinery even as I would reject this very body which is not helpful to salvation and seek the absolute liberation of the soul. From that point of view I would reject all machinery but machines will remain because like the body they are inevitable. The body itself is the purest piece of mechanism but if it is a hindrance to the highest flights of the soul it has to be rejected. So it sort of takes a very, very different philosophical turn and as we find in Tagore also that is the strong desire to maintain a philosophical outlook and the growing reality slips out of control because the two really are very, very contrasting events but at the same time they really show the acute nature and intense nature of the dialogue that unfolded during this period. The other very short piece that I want to refer to is a letter that Pandit Nedu wrote to his daughter and the reason I have chosen this letter as against his autobiography or also his speeches or his other public statements although I have touched on one or two briefly but the letter seems to be of utmost importance because I can actually see this as a classic narrative as it represents typical parental advice to their children in modern India. So let me read from this letter that Pandit Nedu so very lovingly wrote to his daughter Indira. In this letter let me also just add that he tries to show the importance of science in education of the individual and also the role of science in economic development so that sense of the self and the sense of the society at large, the nation at large he connects it to scientific learning and this is what we are also interested in understanding these relationships or the fissures also. So this is what Pandit Nedu has to say to his daughter but art and general culture without anything else are able to make us rather helpless persons in the present day world to understand it we have to possess technical knowledge for the modern world is based on science and technical appliances no person can call himself educated today unless he or she knows something of science and economics and technology goes on to say it was because of this reason I suggested you are taking up two science subjects chemistry and another physics is the oldest of sciences the basic one then comes chemistry and then biology which is popular now we should know something of all three of these it is my belief that a person who does not know something about science is incomplete in the modern world is incomplete in the modern world very strong intense passionate statement that and the passion is very clear in the public documentation or public statements and utterances also especially what catches one's attention is the 1958 presentation to the parliament and this is titled nations declaration of faith in science not only Pandit Nedu's but nations declaration of faith in science the scientific policy resolutions a fascinating document and it also you know the eloquence of this is really unmatched and also you know the belief in scientific systems and he is also tried to enumerate different aspects of it for the purpose of policy and its implementation. So, of course, I am not going to look at that right now but what concerns one is the institutionalization of Nehruvian vision which has also led to the formation of IIT's for example, in the you know 1956 act of parliament the Indian Institute of Technology was given the status of institutes of national importance and in the first convocation address of IIT Kharagpur this is what Pandit Nehruv said here in the place of that Hijli detention camp stands the fine monument of India representing India's urges India's future in the making this picture seems to me symbolical of the changes that are coming to India. We have taken the statement from the IIT Kharagpur website now I want to place this eloquence and this passion with what Vishwanathan has to say about the institutionalization process in post independence India which he describes as status science. He says that the symphony of pluralistic debates on science declined with independence in 1947 Nehruvian India was committed to a civics of development industrialization and eventually the national security state the Indian pursuit of scientific knowledge became bureaucratic and science became a positivism without a sense of his genealogies or doubts. Each statement of Vishwanathan is very weighty and I really think we need to think a lot about it I like to bring back our earlier discussion regarding middle class obsession with engineering education in general and the IIT brand in particular for your reflection. I would also like to acknowledge the work of manual castles which we have also referred to earlier where we do recognize that when we locate ourselves in the present day world we do have to understand the technological transitions from industrial age to the information age brought about by communication and biological technologies and according to castles these technologies and how any nation deals with it it does show the survival potential of those societies because it is tied to technological applications. So we do understand its importance but at the same time I think what is important is the imaginative pursuit of science and technology and I think that issue becomes even more acute today and therefore also the representational and aesthetic challenges multiply our search continues. Thank you.