Marginalising The Self's Discourse

Marginalising the Self’s Discourse: The Fire of the Indian Mind1 H. P. Shukla2 What we think is obvious is so far beyond our comprehension. We are still dreaming even when we dream we are awake. (Hai ghaib-e-ghaib, jisko samajhate hain hum shuhood Hain khwab mein hunoz, jo jage hain khwab mein.) (Ghalib 38) Such an overwhelming response – 87 papers – to this seminar on Marginal Existence underscores the participants’ own suffering of living on the margins. M. K. Naik’s remark, made some thirty odd years ago, that “the post-independence Indian English teacher has […] no reason to underrate himself as a marginal man” (9) is fifteen years later given the lie by Paranjape’s observation: “How glibly the rhetoric of indoctrination flows: as I. A. Richards has shown; as Levi-Strauss suggests […]. On marches Logos, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing […]. We, the marginalized, neo-colonials watch with profound awe” (77). Quod erat demonstrandum: the prognosis stands confirmed. To speak of a marginalised lot is essentially to speak of suffering. Since there is no better model for understanding the nature and scope of human suffering than the indigenous Buddhistic paradigm of the fourfold Truth – that there is suffering (read, marginalisation of the Indian English teacher), a cause of that suffering, a possibility of its cessation, and a Way that leads to this cessation – the present paper structures its argument much on the similar lines. Quite in contrast, the conceptual thematic framework and motives of the present Seminar spring from a purely Western paradigm and appear, therefore, rather suspect and irrelevant in the Indian context:

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Published in Marginal Existence: New Trends in Literature. Ed. Anita Parihar and Anil Bisht. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2006. Professor of English, Kumaun University, Nainital

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All the Indian thinkers […] agree that suffering can be terminated, whereas Kristeva and Levinas suggest that there is no escape from suffering. […] Kristeva is more concerned with suffering inflicted by others upon a single person who becomes a marginal being in relationship to a dominant group. (Olson 275) Buddha or the West: the choice defines what we are and shall be!

II It is now a considered opinion among the Indian academics that the English Studies in India have lost direction and to a large degree have become otiose and meaningless. That such a state of affairs has reduced the Indian teacher of English to a tragicomic figure who has lost both his body and soul is equally obvious. He is doubly marginalised, here and elsewhere. He has become totally irrelevant to his own culture because he speaks the white man’s language, espouses the latter’s cause and world-view, and lives outside the sorrows and aspirations of his brethren who seem to him to be living in a dark and ancient world that knows nothing of the modern western light given to him. He is equally marginalised in the white man’s culture because he neither fully understands nor shares the core of his mentor’s burden. Quite logically, he is denied the status of a theorist or law-giver and has to remain content being a mere carrier and practitioner of the western view of Reality, his master’s beast of burden, nothing else. This eternal damnation is worse than death: why was he never told of Krishna’s warning in the Gita, “Better is one’s own law of works, swadharma, though in itself faulty than an alien law well wrought out; death in one’s own law of being – dharma – is better, perilous is it to follow an alien law” (III, 35)? The attending bewilderment is brought out with telling effects when a professor of English quotes Gandhi – “Let the world know that I don’t know English” – to suggest the

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‘abolition’ of English as the only way-out from our present predicament. Prof Singh in this otherwise brilliant review of literature gives a very cogent picture of the Englishman’s motives in introducing English language and education in India. This is what Macaulay wrote to his father: No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy; but many profess themselves pure Deists and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable class in Bengal thirty years hence. (qtd. in Singh 130) As part of the same sinister strategy the Indian educated elite was deliberately kept ignorant about their own ontology and epistemology. English language and education which was used to consolidate the old imperialistic order is even now being employed, more so with an added vigour, to strengthen the neo-imperialistic designs. Hence, there is no such thing as ‘postcolonial’, only the fact of neo-colonials. In the present scenario of cultural and economic warfare, the face of exploitation has changed but not its motive which has only become more subtle and sinister. But all this talk of Macaulay and colonial designs only tells the process and history of our enslavement. It hardly helps us towards empowerment and emancipation. The cause of suffering is inherent in the suffering itself. As a result of long years of conditioning, enslavement, and methodical brainwashing we have lost our ancestral face and become a third-rate Western clone in psyche and mind. Sisirkumar Ghose is quite unsparing in his remark: “the hybridism and parasitism […] has invaded the profession of Indian teachers of English who are often neither Indian nor, perhaps teachers of English” (194). The oftrepeated lament that there is hardly “a distinctively Indian school of criticism” (Naik 5)

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seems rather far-fetched if, as per Ghose’s vision of things, there be so few genuine ‘Indians’ amongst us. To trace the real nature of our suffering we need to understand the one that suffers and also the world in which he suffers. But the two may not be different. If the world and life be essentially a subjective experience then it is the sufferer who has created or partially coloured the plane of reality he inhabits. The subjective self is a creation of multiple modes of perception inherent or acquired in its process of growth, or of a living faith – shraddha – with which one is born and which evolves to a fuller manifestation in tune with the growth of its instrumental being (see the Gita XVII 3). To a large degree, the individual self is a product of history, culture and tradition – and tied to which, as if on the cross, it suffers the sins of many – and perhaps of karmas accumulated through many past births. A child and inhabitant of time, it inherits the whole of Time as a burdensome legacy. This self thus has no independent existence separate from the larger Self which shapes and informs it. Our suffering and angst that often speak in a subconscious language of dreams, fears and superstitions cannot be understood except in reference to the underlying structures of that larger Self. And thus we are forced to discover our own ontology of Being, for in that alone can be found the path to our salvation. All systems are merely applications of Theory and all theory only a mode of perception. Perception in its turn is rooted in the epistemology and ontology of Being which comes from the maturation of a people’s vision and experience through millennia. All together form an organic whole. When critics, reduced to a marginalised and futile existence, cry for reforming the educational system – curriculum et al. (Jain 11), they are ignoring an obvious fact that no thought-system – educational, economic, political, or any other – can ever be successfully planted on the soil of another culture. A thought-system or theory is a living organism that is

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continually renewing itself. The energy for this renewal, for this unbroken line of rebirths, comes from the reservoir of culture and tradition. In absence of this revitalising force the superimposed systems – however good and shapely when imported – wither, become stunted, or acquire distorted (even demoniac) shapes. In order to keep them in any tolerable health, one must continue importing fresh air, fresh soil from their parent land. One needs, in the Indian context, a regular dose of ‘international’ workshops, symposia, visits abroad for acquiring new terminology and jargon of ever mushrooming fads and isms in order to keep that imitation coat of westernisation ever shining. In such a state of culture one never knows where they started and whither now they move. The Indian English teacher, for example, can never have enough of Greece and medieval Europe together with the modern West in his blood to understand the finer ramifications of Lacan and Derrida. He also perforce lacks the total Western vision of things to see where he is being led. To top it all, the little smattering of the foreign culture he has mastered can be appreciated to his profit – financially or otherwise – only by the natives of that culture. Take the case of Arundhati Roy: she can be understood and appreciated only by a Chomsky – most Indian writers like Roy now carry on their blurb a certification or two from their more perceptive Angrez critics. Back home, C. D. Narasimhaiah, the doyen of Indian English criticism, finds Roy and many of her kin at their best disgusting and “worthless” (Inquiry 36-39). Another humiliating disability that dogs the Indian English teacher is his counterfeit status in the English literary tradition. No Indian critic, for example, can ever become acceptable enough to the mainstream English criticism to denounce the Romantics as Eliot did. The individual self, as noted earlier, is a part of and therefore never greater than the larger Self. Tradition therefore continually reviews its individual formations for a constant redefinition of itself. It is this that gives Eliot his status to review a Wordsworth or Shelley and which stands denied to an Indian or a non-white critic, the outsider. On the other hand,

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though unaware of this power bestowed upon him by tradition, any Ghore, Ghissu and Ghasi Lal can with perfect ease denounce a Shankara or Buddha. But when an Indian critic like Sri Aurobindo, transcending the limitations of East and West, attempts to give a new perspective to English poetry – The Future Poetry – his voice goes unnoticed even by his own countrymen. Late, very late did C. D. Narasimhaiah see a national blunder in our not timely appreciating this extraordinary work of criticism “which embodies the highest wisdom of a race and a people”: Let me repeat a claim I made at least a decade ago that Future Poetry contains in it lines of enquiry into English poetry what is very much worth pursuing in Indian Colleges and Universities […]. And in this respect, one is constrained to observe, not to have brought it to the attention of those engaged in English Studies is tantamount to an abdication of critical responsibility, a failure of critical function, for the work has enough clues […] which might have inaugurated an Indian School of Criticism in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century. Which means 70 years ago. (English Studies 99) That the Indian epistemology and ontology set us in our passions and aspirations wide apart – almost in another world on another plane of Reality – from the Western concerns and speculations, and that the two traditions are diametrically opposed and radically incompatible should be obvious to any sensitive Indian critic worth his salt. Indian perception of Reality is essentially – on an evolving scale – religious, spiritual and mystical. Here everything – a stone, a plant, a relationship – is a manifestation of the Divine Being: it is sacred, mystical and symbolic. Even the wife and children are dear not for their own sake but for the sake of the Divine, says the Upanishad. Similarly, literature, music and arts cannot be viewed any differently, cannot have any other motive and purpose. Sa vidya ya vimuktaye: knowledge which is also wisdom must culminate in Freedom, says the Upanishad. That this remains at

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the centre of Indian life has very clearly been pointed out by Kapoor: “Command of both literature and language leads to moksa, liberation from the self, for all knowledge is a form of meditation […] (10). C. D. Narasimhaiah quotes from Sabdamanidarpana: The science of grammar brings the benefit of words, padasiddhi; padasiddhi brings artha vicara, inquiry into meaning which, in its turn brings tatvajñana, philosophical knowledge which results in the much desired Moksha, selfrealization, the ultimate goal of earthly endeavour. And then goes on to comment, “I mention this to stress how everything is geared to the recognition of the spiritual behind the material in Indian life” (English Studies 268). Assigning therefore a temporal purpose to literature and arts can be for an Indian a temporary aberration or convenience, a scratching of the surface to relieve an itching, no other. Indian tradition has always placed the crown of manhood on its seers and Rishis, and given a mere second rank of honour to the greatest of its mathematicians, grammarians and analytical thinkers: those writers of marvellous samhitas and smritis. It looks upon its poetry – the Vedas, the Upanishads and Epics – as the vehicle of highest Truth. ‘Kavayah satyasrutah’ – poets are hearers of Truth, proclaim the Vedas. It is in this tradition that even a 19th century Indian poet like Ghalib can aver that the Transcendent is the source of his poetry and in his compositions are heard the footsteps of Divinity – Aate hain ghaib se ye mazami khayal mein / Ghalib sareere khama nawaye surosh hai. In sheer contrast, the West not only thought of banishing the poet from its ideal republic and castigated art as an imitation doubly removed from reality, but it actually persecuted and punished with death its seers of truth: Socrates, Christ, Galileo …, ever pushed its mystics to the margins of society, degraded mystical art to cult, magic and witchcraft, and burnt its practitioners on the stake. Western Romanticism which alone bears some affinity to the Indian vision of Reality has always, in varying degrees and forms,

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existed on the margins of the Western society. Truth is always dangerous to society, for the latter is a construct built methodically on numerous falsehoods. Darkness cannot stand and cries foul of light: it is in this sense that Plato very wisely banished the poet, as did Wordsworth by recanting from certain authentic experiences in the “Immortality Ode” on embracing the orthodoxy. To quote C. D. Narasimhaiah again, “An important facet to which no one seems to have paid any attention is to remember that the Western mode is empirical – Aristotle being the original sinner!” (English Studies 267). Needless to say, the Indian mode at the opposite end is essentially mystical and transcendental. It is this difference in the essence (soul) and not only in the existent (self) between the two cultures that makes India and the West totally incompatible with each other. As equals the two can have a mutual appreciation, but an intermingling of visions and values is perforce beyond the natural order of things. The West from Kipling down to their present day critics has always been aware of this truth. While Olson, for example, finds the West totally irrelevant to India – “From Sankara’s [read Indian] perspective, the philosophies of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan are radically finite and thisworldly, and they provide no attempt to solve the fundamental problems of human existence” (285) – another American critic, William Barrett, who has largely been responsible for introducing Buddhism to American academia, would prefer towards the end of his career to stay away from anything Eastern: The marvelous images from Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which seduce us into the quietude of Being, cannot be a permanent halting place for the Westerner. Between myself and them are interposed the Bible and the Russian novel, from whose grip I can never free myself. (343) If only we could see that between us and all the Derridas and Chomskies lies the great Being of the Vedas and Upanishads, that would be our salvation. Om Tat Sat iti Brahman: the

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Supreme Reality is that That alone is Real – the nature of This is not much worth discussion. The Path of liberation from our present bondage lies in the direction where the great ones amongst us – K.R.S. Iyengar, Sisirkumar Ghose, C. D. Narasimhaiah, to name a few – have gone before. We need to stand up with a spinal cord somewhere and gather courage for paying the rightful homage to “the highest wisdom of a race and a people” (112) and to put the Angrez in his proper perspective: Aurobindo could write a great epic like Savitri, opening it disarmingly with: ‘It was the hour before the Gods awake’ (as against the orotundity of Milton’s invocation in the Paradise Lost), and left unsurpassed criticism with clinching observations, for instance, in holding that Milton’s epic design to ‘justify the ways of God to man’ is not poet’s province: it belongs to theology. (Narasimhaiah, English Studies 79) Incidentally, the two poets – Sri Aurobindo and Milton – went to the same school, St. Paul’s, London!

III If the earlier section exemplified the self’s discourse with all its pain and anguish, polemics and dialectics, and the intellect’s search for a possible way out from our present bondage, this section puts the cries of the little self on the fading margins of a resplendent vision that effectually liberates us into the freedom of the Wholeness of Being. The paradigm that emerges now is no longer Buddhistic but one that springs directly from the text taken up here to further our thesis: “The Triple Soul-Forces”, Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, Book Seven, Canto IV. The Mystic’s sight in Savitri puts to sleep the last Romantic’s troubled dream of the self’s triumph over the soul (Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”). In “The Triple Soul-

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Forces” the soul and self rise up in simultaneity as in Yeats’s poem, except that here is no possibility of a dialogue. Dialogue presupposes a somewhat equality of status and also a willingness to listen to each other. Here the self and soul are not only built of entirely different stuff, but the self at the same time is deaf to the soul’s voice and the soul quite unwilling to pay any heed to the self’s clamour. Such is the total reversal of the Yeatsian vision – or the Western, shall we say – here in this ancient and timeless land of Savitri. In Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri is the incarnation of Mahashakti who has taken upon her the burden of a material body in order to fight Man’s battle for deliverance from mortality and ignorance. Satyavan, embodying the aspiring human soul, is foredoomed to be swallowed by the ultimate dark denial of Death. An infinite, all pervading darkness that spreads its wings from the nethermost Inconscient to cover even the liberating heights of Nirvana is the body and voice of Death. The little battlefield of “The Triple Soul-Forces” is but a tiny ground that builds up the argument for the epic finale, the Armageddon. And yet, all human achievement, all that man cherishes is at stake in this marshalling of forces. As the fated hour of Satyavan’s death approaches, Savitri, according to the legend in the Mahabharata, undertakes a tri-ratri vrata to gather her powers for the decisive confrontation with Death. In Sri Aurobindo’s hands, the three-night vow becomes an elaborate and massive “Book of Yoga” – about 100 pages long and comprising 3172 lines. “The Triple Soul-Forces” is the longest of the seven cantos that make up this Book. Savitri in her quest needs to find the originating source of Reality and become one with it – yoga means union – if she is to demolish the supreme Falsehood that is Death. She needs to go beyond the known and realised heights of her Soul to bring down the dynamic Force of the supreme Mystery, for that alone can successfully handle the crisis she faces. The present canto is about the first significant movement of her journey and a resultant psychological victory that propel her out of the earth’s gravitational domain of Ignorance. She

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stands here in an almost twilight zone between light and darkness, between the Triple SoulForces and their warped shadows. It is the rise of Soul, a dynamic spiritual awareness, which marks a decisive beginning of Quest. It brings at the same time our first clear perception of the plane of reality we happen to inhabit. It lights for us the maze of our trap and opens the possibility of our escape. “The Mother of the Seven Sorrows,” the first of the soul-forces to arise, is a being of pity and compassion who, even as she is fully aware of all our existential suffering, finds the very nature of existence rather questionable. Despite the first rays of dawn, the night is still thick with a miasmic shroud of darkness. This is our first awareness of another dimension of Being, Arjuna’s Vishad Yoga – the first of the eighteen ascending steps in the Gita’s ladder of Yoga – and the Keatsian cry, “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” The soul in its initial glimmering is as yet only the first frontal “portion” of a much larger Being. Its sight obviously is that of the outermost inner mind which gropes for the informing principle behind the plurality of appearances. But somewhere aware of its source, of an immense Unknown in its depths, the soul still with a blind faith – or more truly perhaps, with a genuine shraddha – awaits patiently for the birth of a greater dynamics of Truth, I carry the fire that never can be quenched And the compassion that supports the suns. I am the hope that looks towards my God, [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] I know that one day he shall come at last.” (505) If Soul is the Spirit’s conscious awareness of itself, the self is the world’s native understanding of its structural complexity. But Matter from which the apparent artefact of our world derives its form lies in a state of inconscient sleep, oblivious of the Spirit involved in it. The shadow, therefore, that rises from below in response to the Light above, the Soul-Forces,

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– for it is the light that brings into being the illusion of a non-existent shadow – is the anguished cry of a blind Beast who unaware of its dubious origins is both the cause and the recipient of a vast reign of cruelty: “I am the Man of Sorrows, I am he / Who is nailed on the wide cross of the universe.” But he is much more – he is a sadist, a frightened sensualist, and confessedly evil: “I was made for evil, evil is my lot; / Evil I must be and by evil live.” He is also perhaps the ‘postcolonial’ Indian professor of English: I loosen with my blood my servitude's seal And shake from my aching neck the oppressor's knees Only to seat new tyrants on my back: My teachers lesson me in slavery (506) “People endure misery by lack of imagination,” says Lewis Thompson. “Many of them make the crucified Christ a symbol of this attitude. They have entirely exchanged Christ for crucifixion” (137-38). Lack of imagination is precisely an incapacity for experiencing the other dimensions of Being. Such is the crude superficial nature of human existence, inner and outer. Perhaps the first flight is always dogged by a foundational inertia in the nature of things, a predominance of tamas, according to the Indian theory of gunas. Thus even the seeker in his first illumination, in his soul of compassion is merely a sadhu, and not a Rishi. In Savitri’s response to the two voices – Soul and self – we find one of the most powerful teachings of Sri Aurobindo, our first armour and weapon in our battle against the seize of Falsehood: And Savitri heard the voice, the echo heard And turning to her being of pity spoke (507) In this choice that comes from a total understanding of the nature of Reality and is no mere ignorant belief – for Savitri’s is a much larger seeing, definitely greater than those of all the goddesses she meets on the way – can be seen the fulfilment of the primordial Indian

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aspiration, asato ma sadgamaya. We have our roots in the Being, and our suffering in the world of becoming. The ‘echo,’ as also the phenomenal world of the self or ego, is a diminutive, shadowy reflection which mirrors the distortions of the reflecting medium more than its originating vibrations. Not unaware, therefore, of the world below the navel, of the lower charkas, the fire of the Indian mind, devouring all darkness en route, rises upward to the ultimate Being, to the source of Light and Truth. To the ancients this was known as Nachiketas’ Fire, to the moderns Sri Aurobindo brings it again, more potent and effulgent, as Savitri Fire. Since the purpose here is to suggest a path and not to give a whole road-map of the journey, a detailed analysis of the text is beyond the scope of this paper. To give the remaining outline, as we rise higher we meet the second of the Soul-Forces, “The Mother of Might,” who partially redeems this shadowy world of suffering and leads it to the possibility of a selective redemption. The higher fulfils and completes the lower. What follows the compassion born of necessary understanding is the courage and attendant power to change this world nearer to its secret truth-image. The Soul now no longer looks from the inner world of Mind but stands in full possession of its powers: August on her seat in the inner world of Mind, The Mother of Might looked down on passing things, [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] And heard the thunder of the march of God. (508) Seen from here, the world of becoming, though still a transitory phenomenon, acquires an actuality and significance. This is the world of Durga, Kali and Lakshmi where “a million goblin obstacles” as they raise their head are ruthlessly destroyed, and the fair and fortunate are granted their coveted rewards. This is also the fountainhead of spiritual courage that creates a Gandhi and all our heroes and saviours:

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I guide man to the path of the Divine And guard him from the red Wolf and the Snake. (510) Down below in the shadowy realm, our world, the self covetously holds on to a refracted reflection of power – an illusion possessed of yet another illusion – and dreams of using it to its own intents. This is the troubled world of Desire, the world of George Bush and Bill Gates: Of the dwarf-Titan, the deformed chained god Who strives to master his nature's rebel stuff And make the universe his instrument. (510-11) Savitri, as earlier, is contemptuously dismissive of the self’s discourse of airy nothing. If the first of the soul-forces had “power to solace, not to save,” and needed “strength” for a more complete realisation, the mighty second was found lacking in “wisdom” and could not therefore “build the extreme eternal things.” The third ascent takes Savitri beyond Mind to the realm of Overmind, the same on which Plato somehow stumbled in his speculations and misperceived it as the world of eternal ideas and forms. More truly, this is the plane of creative Light, the source of Manifestation, where, according to Sri Aurobindo, all the gods and goddesses are born and have their being. Here, “A nearness thrilled of the spirit to its source / And deepest things seemed obvious, close and true” (514). The Soul now stands revealed of its Qualities which when formed wear the appearances of Gods, and it is her privilege and secret purpose to use these Powers to create a heaven on earth. Though “a wide tower of vision whence all could be seen” and the source of “intuitive light,” the Overmind is also the originating point of the error of Duality, the Ground of all creation. Hence all the efforts of Gods, sages and prophets have failed to bring about any radical mutation in the essential structure of Nature, and the world has gone on unredeemed on its dark road to nowhere. Much later in the epic, Savitri’s quest for a Truth beyond the

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unitive planes will lead her to the Supramental One. But as of now she has found the roots of human and earthly failure – man, unmindful of his heavenly riches, will not let go his puerile attachment to his foster mother, the cosmic Ignorance: Yet is he visited by intuitive light And inspiration comes from the Unknown; But only reason and sense he feels as sure, They only are his trusted witnesses. Thus is he baulked, his splendid effort vain; His knowledge scans bright pebbles on the shore Of the huge ocean of his ignorance. (517) The echo that rises from our shadowy world is “a voice of the sense-shackled human mind” which comes from the illusorily illumined cave of Plato down to Derrida. Unlike the earlier echoes, it is dispassionately aware of its exactitude and limitations and knows what lies within its scope and what without. But in spite of all its ‘enlightenment’ there is no wide release within the self’s discourse, nor is there a hidden clue or secret path that can lead us beyond this prison house to Freedom and Infinity. The light of ignorance only makes the night still more subtle and sinister. This black magic of ‘illumination’ blinds us even to the fact of darkness. Inextricably woven within the matrix of shadows, we seem to be going round in circles and the trap becomes more excruciating and deadly. For that wide release, for the truth-light that shall make us whole, that shall liberate us from our present state of helpless thraldom, we must look homeward to the Indian discourse of Soul, of Savitri, Nachiketas and Buddha where there is no such thing as a pre or postcolonial agenda and as such perhaps no place for the warped voices of the Indian English teacher either. The Fire of the Indian Mind rages against the arch-enemy of falsehood, ignorance and death, unheedful of shadows and minor irritants like a ‘postcolonial

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predicament.’ Savitri, not forgetting Plato’s Academy, quite ironically anticipates the Academic’s uneasy response to its Call: A high insanity, a chimaera is this, To think that God lives hidden in the clay And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time, [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] This wizard gods may dream, not thinking men. (520) The choice before us is not much: it is either to join the immortal Race of wizard gods, of Buddha and Savitri or else to remain with the ephemeral tribe of English teachers, Indian or otherwise!

Works Cited Aurobindo, Sri. Savitri. 4th rev. ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993. - - -. The Future Poetry. 2nd ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1985. Barrett, William. The Illusion of Technique. New York: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1978. Ghalib, Mirza. The lightning should have fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib. Trans. Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta. New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2001. Ghose, Sisirkumar. Modern and Otherwise. New Delhi: D. K. Publishing House, 1974. Jain, Jasbir. “From Macaulay to Mandal: The (Un) Changing Contours of a Discipline.” Kushwaha 11-18. Kapoor, Kapil. Literary Theory: Indian Conceptual Framework. New Delhi: Affiliated EastWest Press Private Limited, 1998. Kushwaha, M. S. et al. eds. English Studies in India: A Post-Colonial Review and Agenda. Lucknow: Print House, 1996.

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Naik, M. K. “The Role of English Teacher in India: Retrospect and Prospect.” Kushwaha 110. (On internal evidence, the article appears to have been written in the early 1970s) Narasimhaiah, C. D. An Inquiry into the Indianness of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2003. - - -. English Studies in India: Widening Horizons. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2002. Olson, Carl. Indian Philosophers and Postmodern Thinkers. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Paranjape, Makarand R. “The Invasion of ‘Theory’: An Indian Response.” The Indian Journal of English Studies 28 (1989) 74-82. Singh, Avadhesh Kumar. “Decolonizing English Studies in India.” Decolonisation: A Search for Alternatives. Ed. Adesh Pal et al. New Delhi: Creative Books. 122-46. Thompson, Lewis. Mirror to the Light: Reflections on consciousness and experience. Ed. Richard Lannoy. London: Coventure, 1984. *************