Every significant writer is inevitably influenced by the race, the milieu and the moment of his actuality, and his writing is bound to be his sensitive response, evoking the cultural specifics of his race. But a durable writer can and ought to rise above the immediacies of reality, and can envision and present through his literary constructs the universal and the timeless in human imagination. Two writers, separated by vastly variant cultures and climesIndia and Nigeria and a 20-year time differencein their novels Kanthapura (1938) and Things Fall Apart (1958), articulate their passionate attachment to their specific native culture, and yet reach out to cultural universals, which invests their work with durable significance and timeless relevance. The paper, analyzing the cultural analogies in the works of the two undisputed masters from India and Nigeria, is a modest homage to the Literary Titan of the Indian Literature in English, Raja Rao, the man of silence, who was stilled into eternal silence on July 8, 2006 at Austin, USA.
No
writer works in isolation. He is inevitably influenced by what Taine called `race,
milieu and moment'. He is, by and large, a product of his age, cultural environment
and ethical ethos. He draws his basic literary material and value system from
his society. Even the most subjective romantic too starts with the real before
he takes off, on his ethereal flights to the"Nowhere World ". It is
the intense and agonized awareness of the unedifying reality that provides the
fundamental inputs for his literary productivity. But a durable writer does not
end up with the present and the immediate. He transcends the temporal and spatial
constraints and soars to the timeless and the universal in human imagination.
That is why the sorrow of Kanwa while sending even his adopted child to the house
of the in-laws or the dilemma of Hamlet "to be or not to be" tends to
be of timeless and universal emotional appeal.
This
paper seeks to examine the "cultural specifics" and "cultural universals"
in Things Fall Apart, a poignant novel by the distinguished Nigerian novelist,
Chinua Achebe and in Kanthapura by Raja Rao, the celebrated Indian novelist
in English. Though both Raja Rao and Achebe had their higher education abroad—France
and England—they had an intense, passionate attachment to their native religious
and cultural values, which they portrayed in their novels. It is argued that,
though they powerfully evoked the richness of the specific cultural mores of their
nations, they could yet reach out to cultural universals. Kanthapura (1938)
and Things Fall Apart (1958) present the dislocation of the age-old traditional
system resulting from the inroads of the alien (colonial) mores, and yet suggests
the durable in human preoccupations. |
