For years, a great majority of undergraduate students of Allahabad University had a fatal infatuation for ‘English Literature’, as distinct from another difficult and demanding but compulsory subject (for all courses), ‘General English’. The English department had to be the biggest of them all in Allahabad University, with a formidable faculty, whose members had all-India standings — the Deb brothers, the Sahay brothers (the elder being Firaq Gorakhpuri), Dastur, Harbans Rai Bachchan, Malhotra, et al.
The reasons put forward by some undergraduates for picking up the challenging and taxing ‘English Literature’ were characteristically and vexatiously nebulous. Was it for self-glorification? Why did they walk in a pompous manner? In my own case, there was definitely a slight touch of foolhardiness.
In British India, the academic milieu was such that undergraduate students of English poetry were brought up on the Romantics and the Victorians. The universities, generally, stopped with the Victorians. But Allahabad had already included modern poetry. To the list of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Mathew Arnold were added the names of Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Bridges, Masefield, and others.
For two years, a smart and well-dressed young teacher, by the name of Harbans Rai Bachchan, taught the works of all these poets to our section (there were several of them) of the B.A. class. He had already created an important niche for himself in Hindi literature, by producing in 1935 a long poem, Madhushala, of 135 stanzas.
He came to the class armed only with a small attendance register, a copy of Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, when he was delivering lectures on the Romantics and Victorians, and later on, a copy of an anthology of modern poetry, edited by Prof Amarnath Jha, vice-chancellor of the university and the doyen of English studies in British India.
Bachchan’s lectures at the beginning of my first academic year of B.A. were general in nature — a sweeping history of English poetry, a rapid passage from old to new, at times, trespassing on such territories as prose, drama (he was not teaching them) and American literature, which was heresy in British India. And yet he spoke about Walt Whitman’s poem Passage to India (1871), which exclusively panegyrized imperialists and their works, and compared it with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which was also principally about men. Mathew Arnold reminded Bachchan of Oakfield or Fellowship in the East (1853), an autobiographical novel by Arnold’s younger brother, William Arnold, who became the first director of public instruction in the Punjab. Though Bachchan found Fielding in A Passage to India most nearly comparable to William Arnold’s Oakfield, he also thought that Mathew Arnold sketched a part of his younger brother’s character in The Scholar Gipsy.
During one such general lecture, a back-bench student surprised us when he asked Bachchan to comment on Shelley’s long 100-page poem (in 12 cantos, arranged in Spenserian stanzas), titled The Revolt of Islam. Taken aback, Bachchan parried it by saying that since it was not included in the syllabus, he would not comment on it, but hurriedly added that the poem celebrated the French Revolution in Gothic and Orientalist strains!
When he started his regular lectures, one could feel and see the romantic Bachchan in his elements. He saw beauty in the meanest flower, even in a stony place, and the earth laughed in flowers. For him, romanticism was, as he said, the unearthiness of Blake, the earthiness of Crabbe, the democracy of Burn, the feudalism of Scott, the faith of Wordsworth, the skepticism of Byron, the liberalism of Thomas, and the ideal landscape of Shelley. Though like the Romantics, the days of his youth were the days of his glory, Bachchan intently heard the still, sad music of humanity. Like one of the romantic poets, he frequently lamented, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!”
Though the works of the Victorians appealed to the people, Bachchan was not enamoured by them. Their tales were of little meaning though the words were strong, and they pleaded, “We have children, we have wives.” Their memory was restricted, “Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, and dear the last embraces of our wives.”
During the reading of modern poetry, Bachchan’s face had a strange radiance, and brought uncommon light in his eyes, which we had never seen before. Though Kipling was usually known as the poet of imperialism, Bachchan thought that his appreciation of English landscape like Sussex (as Bachchan put it, ‘What Hardy did for Wessex, Kipling did for Sussex’) and his devotional poetry such as A Dedication showed that he was capable of higher and loftier moods, and was also a great poet of life and nature.
Even after writing many novels, Thomas Hardy, according to Bachchan, was at heart always a poet, who was more apt to find sorrow, pain and cruelty in external nature than joy and kindness, and it was not easy for him to hold the faith of Wordsworth that “even a flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It was W.B. Yeats who lifted Bachchan’s spirits from the grass. He tried to absorb Yeats’ occultism and ancient wisdom. That enabled him to open out for us the heart of Yeats’ difficult poems.
After graduation (on the eve of independence), I found it difficult to keep track of Bachchan’s career, and follow his metamorphosis from Harbans Rai Bachchan to Dr Harivansh Rai Bachchan. But news did filter down that he received a Ph.D. in English (Yeats and Occultism) from Cambridge, that he left Allahabad to head the research section in the Indian Foreign Office, and wrote his autobiography, In the Afternoon of Time.
When, recently, Bachchan “went into the world of Light”, I was reminded of some of the last lines of Shelley’s Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, which Bachchan, oft and on, referred to in his lectures: “...Till death like sleep might steal on me, / And I might feel in the warm air / My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea / Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Did Bachchan have some kind of premonition? And way back in mid-1940s? He died in the seaside city of Bombay.
For years, a great majority of undergraduate students of Allahabad University had a fatal infatuation for ‘English Literature’, as distinct from another difficult and demanding but compulsory subject (for all courses), ‘General English’. The English department had to be the biggest of them all in Allahabad University, with a formidable faculty, whose members had all-India standings — the Deb brothers, the Sahay brothers (the elder being Firaq Gorakhpuri), Dastur, Harbans Rai Bachchan, Malhotra, et al.
