Similarities to Hindu thought in Dante's "The Divine Comedy"

The "Panchakosha" (five sheaths) are mentioned in the Taitteriya Upanishad of Krishna Yajurveda. These are supposed to cover the "Atman" (soul) & comprise:

1. Annamaya Kosha (Food sheath)
2. Pranamaya Kosha (Breath sheath)
3. Manomaya Kosha (Mind sheath)
4. Vijnanamaya Kosha (Intellect sheath)
5. Anandamaya Kosha (Bliss sheath)

It is instructive to compare this with the Canto IV of Purgatorio of Dante's "The Divine Comedy", where the Aristotelian theory that man possesses three souls (the soul definition in the western sense being quite different to the Hindu meaning), the vegetative (physical), the sensitive (feeling), & the intellectual (reason). These may compare respectively to the Annamaya Kosha, Manomaya Kosha & Vijnanamaya Kosha mentioned above.

Of course, if one dissects a cadaver, one finds only the Annamaya Kosha. Rene Descartes postulated the (artificial) separation of the body & mind. But Leonardo da Vinci was the first to discover the "holistic science" & considered them inseparable. In the twentieth century, the physicist Fritjof Capra demonstrated that most illnesses are psychosomatic in origin, finally dispelling the Cartesian dichotomy between body & mind. This may be considered to integrate the first three koshas, even if only the first is perceived by the senses.

As Virgil explains in Purgatorio, Canto XVII, Love, rightly directed towards God, or in moderation (this cannot be emphasised too much), towards temporal things, is the basis of all human action. But love may take wrong paths like Perverted love, (i.e., Pride, Envy & Wrath), Defective love (Sloth) & Excessive love (i.e., Avarice, Gluttony, Lust). These are similar to the eight evils (arishadvarga) of Hindu Philosophy.  Also the danger in free will is balanced by God's other gift of reason, which makes it possible for man to make right decisions & raise himself above animals.

In Canto XX, Dante & Virgil hear praises of Poverty, citing the poverty of Mary; of Fabricius, the Roman Consul who refused both gifts & bribes; & of St. Nicholas (Santa Claus), whose legendary generosity has made him a symbol of Christmas giving.

Here it may be mentioned in passing that the Roman Catholic monastic ideas are very similar to the sannyasin ideas of not only Hinduism but other religions like Buddhism & Jainism, where renunciation of all physical comforts & voluntary poverty are the bedrocks of the spiritual life. In fact, in Hinduism it is mandatory for every person to become a monastic at the end of their life.

So in Dante also man's spiritual progress is charted very similarly to Hindu thought. John Bunyan also in his "Pilgrim's Progress", likened normal worldly life as an intolerable burden on one.

Kannadiga of Global Calibre

Dr. D. V. Gundappa (1887 - 1975), fondly known as "DVG" was a Kannada man of letters who wrote on many topics. His works have been compiled in 11 volumes.

The first volume contains works in aesthetics, literature, poetics, belief, culture, atheism, truth & religion. Incidentally he was one of the first Kannada writers, along with Kuvempu (Dr. K. V. Puttappa) who wrote on aesthetics, paving the way for the later Dr. S. L. Bhyrappa's doctoral dissertation "Truth & Beauty."

The second volume contains his detailed commentary on the Bhagawad Gita, emphasising excellence in work.

The third volume contains the following plays, both translated & originals.

1. A translation of Lord Tennyson's "The Cup." 
2. Original mythological play, "Thilothama" about a celestial dancer.
3. Translation of "Macbeth."
4. Original play about Vidyaranya, mentor of the founder kings of Vijayanagar.
5. Selected verse translation of Kalidasa's "Shakuntala."
6. Original play on Parashurama.
7. Three short humorous pieces, one on a Shakespearean character, Jack Cade, one titled "Elections" & another "Donkey's Victory."

The fourth volume contains biographies of Diwan Rangacharlu, Gopala Krishna Gokhale & Dadabhai Naoroji. Also included are the times of Vidyaranya, his contemporaries & an account of the coronation of King George. To round up the volume are a few children's stories.

The fifth volume contains two exhaustive treatises on Political Science, including a world-view of systems elsewhere at the time of writing.

The sixth, seventh & eighth volumes contain his most accessible writings, being pen pictures of men in public life, musicians, dancers, literary men, divans, traditionalists, large hearted men & assorted other personalities. These evocative writings remind one of similar writings by Addison, Steele, Lamb & others. The latter part of the eighth volume also contains the prefaces he wrote for other books.

The ninth volume comprises his poetry collections "Vasantha Kusumanjali", "Nivedana", "Ketakivana", "Sri Chennakeshava Anthahapurageethe" & most importantly his philosophic poems "Manku Thimmana Kagga" & "Maralu Muniyana Kagga."

The tenth volume begins with a Kannada translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubiyat & continues with "Sri Rama Pareekshanam", "Shringara Mangalam", "Sri Krishna Pareekshanam" & ending with miscellaneous writings.

The eleventh & last volume has writings on "Purushasukta", "Ishopanishad", "Ethics in public life", Journalism, & a yearbook of Mysore for the year 1915.

To sum up, his writings make one proud to have been a Kannadiga to read & enjoy them.

Proustian Repast & Literature

"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me & I stopped, intent of upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me."

This immortal "madeleine (French scalloped sponge cake) & tea" episode started one of twentieth century's literary masterpieces "Remembrance of Things Past" a seven volume, more than 4000 pages long epic by Marcel Proust, which also fetched him the Nobel Prize.

This above mentioned episode reminded Proust of the cake which his aunt Leonie used to offer to him long ago & reanimates his impressions of a French town Combray with its infinite nuances & gradations of colour.

Such triggering of memories by sensual impressions were also found in Ruskin & Chateaubriand. Dickens' contemporary, Wilkie Collins wrote a story "A Terribly Strange Bed" in which he notes that "The moonlight shining into the room reminded me of a certain moonlit night in England & every incident of the drive came back into my remembrance."

Also Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist..." is transformed by his moment of vision of the girl on the beach. Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" is transformed by his vision as he lies swooning in the snow as Marcel is transformed by the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea.

Proust was a "possessive son" in his childhood, getting attacks of asthma, when his mother missed coming to say goodnight at his bedtimes. After being a "social lion" as a young man, he became a recluse, in his soundproof, darkened study & created his masterpiece.

When Satyajit Ray first met Bollywood

In 1962, after finishing "Kanchenjunga" set in colourful Darjeeling featuring an aristocratic society, Ray plunged into the black & white (in both senses) world of taxi drivers, smugglers & kept women in his "Abhijan." He wanted Waheeda Rehman for the main female role, but her usual compensation was equal to the whole budget of the Ray film! However, she agreed for a lesser amount & the film was made. Ray himself says "The film was a tremendous success, bigger even in the suburbs than before. It was an all-round box-office success." However, film critic & fellow film maker Chidananda Das Gupta (Aparna Sen's father) grumbled that the film was banal & Soumitra Chaterjee was miscast as the taxi driver.

The hero is a misogynistic Rajput Narsingh, proud of his ancestry, though fallen on bad times. He accidentally meets a very pious but fully unscrupulous Marwari smuggler, (with a keep named Gulabi) who recognising his driving skills & courage, wants to use him for his drug smuggling activities. He helps him with a loan, & when Narsingh returns the loan, refuses to accept it by quoting Sri Ramakrishna, "Money is mud & Mud is money!" Later, the Marwari offers him a partnership in his transport company, again quoting Sri Ramakrishna in reverse, (like the devil quoting the scripture) saying "You are a young man & will get both money & women with this!" (Ray had designed the covers for a 4 volume biography of Sri Ramakrishna in Bengali.)

The film is replete with car races (Narsingh's taxi being a 1930 Chrysler), racing with trains, buses, fisticuffs & even two song & dance numbers, one in a tent cinema & one a private one by Gulabi for Narsingh! All in all, a good entertainer made with the impeccable Ray technique.

Great books with poor sequels

John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress", though written for theological reasons, remains a literary masterpiece, rich in imagination with a gallery of appropriately named characters & places, which have become intertwined with the usage of the English language. But the sequel, dealing with Christiana's following of her husband Christian's journey with her children, is not so exciting, neither has it so many memorable encounters as in the first part.

Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" was a "tour de force" at the very beginning of the novel writing era of English literature, with a meticulous reconstruction of how a single man can survive alone with minimal impedimenta & maximum ingenuity for many years. But the sequel, in which he revisits his island, degenerates into a familiar story of western conversion & colonialism going hand in hand. The saving grace is the first part is available as a stand-alone edition.

Louisa May Alcott's classic "Little Women" is a timeless novel of four differently talented sisters coming of age in late 19th century U.S.A. But it's sequel "Good wives", unfortunately mostly issued along with the first part, deals with the prosaic, unnecessarily detailed account of them getting married & carrying on humdrum lives.

George MacDonald, a childhood favourite of both Tolkien & Lewis, wrote a marvelous fairy tale of "The Princess & the Goblin." But the sequel, which makes the miner's son Curdie deservedly marrying the Princess, also invests him with a special power of divining the inner nature of people whose hands he touches. Shockingly for a children's book, he finds most of his subjects corrupt. Also at the end of the book, the Royal couple die childless & the empire is destroyed in a dystopian ending.

Books & Films based on them

C. S. Lewis in his essay "Why movies sometimes ruin books", writes about seeing a film of "King Solomon's Mines" & how it ruined his pleasure of previously having read the book. He bemoans the fact of extraneous characters being introduced & especially a scene near the end, where in order to inject more excitement, drastic changes were made in the film, which ruined it in his eyes.

(Incidentally three of his popular Narnia novels have been made into films.)

On the contrary, the legendary film director Satyajit Ray, (who made many films on well known literary works), writes in his book "Speaking of Films" that the two are as different as chalk & cheese, & the film reflects the director's vision. He hits the nail right on the head when he says that only those who are really interested read books, attend classical music concerts & visit art galleries, whereas any one with the money to buy a ticket & a couple of hours to spare, (in the pre-internet age of course) can watch a film. He also adds, that any one who has seen good films, cannot be assumed to automatically appreciate them, incidentally underscoring the importance of film appreciation courses in our curriculum. Knowledge of at least the elements of film grammar like tracking shots, panning shots, dissolves, cuts, montage, & use of background music are absolutely essential before one ventures to speak about a film.

It can be also mentioned in this context, that especially nowadays, films are made for an audience with a lower cultural quotient compared to those who patronise other arts. That is probably why even acclaimed films like "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy can never bring out the glory & magnificence of Tolkien's prose & imagination.

"The Pilgrim's Progress's influence on "Little women"

Very few books have characters' whose lives are profoundly inspired by a book as the lives of the mother & four daughters of "Little Women" are shaped by "The Pilgrim's Progress." Even as young children, the sisters played with a burden on their back like Christian in the book. On Christmas at the beginning of the novel, each of the sisters receives a different coloured (cover) copy of Bunyan's book. Even in their domestic conversation, they talk about the pilgrim's  journey, his trouble at the "Slough of Despond" etc.

Three successive chapters at the beginning of "Little Women" are entitled "Amy's Valley of Humiliation", "Jo meets Apollyon" & "Meg goes to Vanity Fair", in direct evocation of the relevant sections of Bunyan's book. When their mother has to travel to be with her ailing husband's bedside, an acquaintance & well-wisher, who accompanies her is compared to Mr. Greatheart, who escorts Christiana, the wife of Christian to the Celestial City.

In the chapter, "Castles in the air", of "Little Women", the four sisters sitting outside their house on a hillock, joined by their neighbour Laurie, call the hillock,  "The Delectable Mountain". They also comment on "Coming to the Celestial City" also later.

Encouraged by their estimable mother, the sisters consciously try to identify their faults like vanity, temper, selfishness etc., & try to overcome them. Even in their future life, they do not aspire to great wealth or status, but be content to what Providence provides for them & lead peaceful useful lives.

Great Allegories in Literature

An allegory is a literary form which expresses complex abstract ideas in a reader-friendly comprehensible format.

Probably the greatest allegory in English literature is John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" which shows the protagonist Christian's spiritual journey towards the Celestial City as an actual journey with many hazards on the way, each of them anthropomorphised like "Giant" Despair. It is sad to see a great piece of literature being marginalised now to theological studies, depriving many of savouring Bunyan's great imagination. George Bernard Shaw thought so highly of this work, that he proved Bunyan greater than even Shakespeare by many quoted examples.

A similar spiritual journey, shown as a real physical one with even geographical landmarks, was Dante's "The Divine Comedy", showing the soul's ascent to Paradise through Hell & Purgatory.

Hermann Melville's "Moby Dick", with its copious digressions on the technicalities of whaling, is also not just an obsessive, maimed Captain Ahab's vindictive chase of an albino whale, but something much more deeper in the human condition.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", which many consider the most perfectly constructed novel, is also an allegory of sin & redemption, with Pearl, child of an adulterous union, being dressed in finery by her mother.

George Orwell's "Animal Farm" was a thinly disguised depiction of the early days of Communist Russia.

Even the children's novel, Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden" is an allegorical depiction of an abandoned garden becoming a redemptive symbol for three children.

To sum up, allegorical novels add additional levels of meaning to seemingly simple narratives, transforming them to richly layered works of Art.

The "Gothic" novel

This is a genre of literature which deals with a secret, probably horrific, inside the novel. This trend was started by Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Haunted castles, strange noises & acceptance of the supernatural are the hallmarks of this work.

Later other authors, known for their literary acumen, also occasionally indulged themselves in writing such novels. Notably Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" is also an example. Her sister, Charlotte's masterpiece, "Jane Eyre" also can be considered one, because Mr. Rochester's first wife, insane, is locked up secretly in his house, because of which he cannot marry the heroine Jane.

Such was the prevalence of these novels, that much earlier than the Brontes, Jane Austen parodied the genre in her "Northanger Abbey", whose protagonist, Catherine Morland, when invited to the Abbey, let her imagination run wild to find a (non-existent) Gothic secret hidden there, only to be put right by her host later.

Even children's literature has examples of  this type as can be evinced from Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden." The garden, though secret & hidden, is not the Gothic element, but a small boy, hidden in the house by his indifferent father & cupidinous uncle.

Daphne du Maurier's classic "Rebecca" has also the past itself as a horrific secret which casts it's ominous shadow over the present.

The trend continues even now as evinced by the issue of the Reader's Digest "A Gothic Treasure Trove" omnibus volume containing six novels by modern lady practitioners like Madeline Brent, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Dorothy Eden & Jessica North.

Many charms of Epistolary novels

These, written comprising only of letters from persons to persons, do offer many attractions compared to normal novels. They offer multiple points of view of events as seen through the eyes of the different writers.

One of the earliest was Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa", which also has the distinction of being one of the longest novels in the English language, running to more than 1500 pages. It is the tragic story of the eponymous heroine's family being her worst persecutors.

One of Jane Austen's earlier works, "Lady Susan", deals with the beautiful, unscrupulous, Ladyship's manipulations to secure a rich, titled son-in-law through her plain daughter. Whatever the critics' carping, it remains a highly entertaining account because it is a reversal of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew". Here, even though forewarned & convinced of her chicanery, a man becomes so enamored of her ladyship that he defends her against all critics! For her, it is just a game to change completely the bad opinion of a man towards herself & she does not enslave him further.

Another very unusual work of this genre is "Daddy Longlegs", which curiously presents a single viewpoint in spite of the epistolary form, because one of the preconditions imposed on the letter-writing girl (to sponsor her college education) by the man nicknamed in the title, is that there will be no replies!