6 OCTOBER 2009, NEW DELHI

The Honourable President of India, friends and lovers of literature present on the dais and in the audience…

It is a memorable experience for me to be addressing you on this occasion. I express my sincere thanks to Bharatiya Jnanpith for this esteemed honour. It is a matter of added joy for me that the Jnanpith award has come to Hindi after years. I consider it my duty that the faith placed in my writings, that echoes in this award, is kept alive. I have always treated awards and honours as social debts that I have to pay back through my writings.

A common question that I had to face after the award was announced was ‘how did I feel about it?’ My feelings were mixed. I was happy of course; but reading and writing for me have always been a matter of deep conviction in literature and prompted by inner imperatives such that, more than getting something, it has been the spirit of giving that has always seemed more appealing. As far as has been possible, I have tried to use whatever means I had to further the cause of literature and its value for life, and I hope to be sensitive about employing this honour in the same spirit too.

There are many valuable efforts of society that have to be saved diligently. Market logic does not apply to them. It is the primary responsibility of an enlightened world and of an educated people that their precious cultural efforts and heritage are not allowed to perish. It is also a historical truth that in hard times enlightened rulers, merchant communities and sensitive citizens have often played a decisive role in the collective protection of literatures and the arts.

Hindi is one of the major languages of the world today. Excellent literature is being created in Hindi and in several other Indian languages. Many small languages of the world too are giving world-class literature, which is reaching all through English. This linguistic facility should also be naturally available to Indian literatures. And it is essential that the English speaking sections of our society and the English media is more sensitive to the range of our authentic literatures and litterateurs.

I would like to say a few words about my writings now.

In my poetry, overall ‘human’ concerns have been noted. I have tried to connect some of their more enduring contexts to the larger and practical realities of life. By itself, the ‘human’ has such a general and vague status that it implies very little unless conjoined with visible human characteristics. So that their definite presence is felt, I have not limited my sense of time to the present but tried to expand it into the past and into the future. Given a wider time-perspective, a continuum of unbroken life-values becomes more visible. This visibility is important, which poetry in its own way tries to achieve.

Two major movements in the world concerned with the ‘human’ and the humanist come to mind. The European Renaissance in the fifteenth century and, almost at the same time, the Indian devotional poetic movement at its mature peak. Both also connect, essentially, to ‘modernity’ in literature and the arts, reminding us that without stable life-values ‘modernity’ too can go awry and meaningless. This is just as true today.

I have looked at modernity mainly from an Indian point of view. Ancient and Greco-Roman Europe were closer to the Asian and North African countries than to ‘Western’ Europe – politically and commercially and, therefore, also culturally. Influences of this closeness are obvious not only on the architecture of the period but also on the literatures and the other arts.

The life and works of the Indian saint poets can also be thought of in such a way that, rejecting the high life of royal courts, they lived a fabulously rich life of literature and music, and went on to immortalise an exceptional ideal that the pursuit of wealth, fame and power was not all. This was a great moral revolution that left a lasting impression on the psyche of the Indian people and from which, later, a movement like Satyagraha derived strength.

It is important to properly understand the intimate relationships between words and life. Words never die: that is why they are called ‘a-kshar’ (non-decaying). It is because of wrong conduct and misuse that their meanings lose their lustre. It is possible to ‘recover’ these meanings. In many ages, this has become possible in miraculous ways. But this is not just linguistic dexterity: it happens essentially in a paradigmatic way. An ancient word like ‘non-violence’ acquired a new vigour and will-power from Gandhian conduct to come alive in life and language again, and then went on illumining an entire tradition of non-violence a long way ahead.

Ever since I started writing – around 1950 – my name got associated with the ‘New Poetry Movement’ in Hindi. The truth is that I never felt very easy with movements. From the very beginning, I had qualms that the ‘new’ and ‘old’ did not have the same implications in literature as they had in science and technology. A major task of literature is also to preserve values tested and proven by time; to re-energise them and to re-habilitate them in language. They are the enduring bases of a civilised life. This is why the quality of classics or ‘timeless’ literature that most attracted me is their endurance and insuperable life-force, comparable to human fortitude and the spiritual will to resist decay and death. In history too, I have tried to experience that same energy that resides in the world of words and the arts. It is from the world-view of literatures and the arts too that the most human image of global identity evolves and emerges.

Poetry is the world of my heart and mind. I wish to keep it immense in which there is enough space for the joys and sorrows of all. Literature for me does not mean just mental indulgence; it is a very big reality and also a wonder of life. This thought has given me courage and self-confidence. I wish to keep expanding and enriching this world of mine – not on military strength but on the strength of a tiny word like love.

With changing times, my language and concerns too have seen changes. Fully aware of these, I have tried to carefully create space for contemporariness. When doubts are raised today about the need and survival of poetry in this age, I feel neither perturbed nor provoked. In the totality of life-reality, these doubts seem to me to be wrongly placed and wrongly posed. Poetry and the arts are an indivisible part of our being – especially of that creative will that despite all odds and setbacks finds ways to keep our faith in life alive inside us.

I shall conclude with one more thought.

Literature’s world-view tries to look at the total reality, in which the social and the individual are not split but conjoined entities that complement each other. Literature is an attempt at a direct discourse with this unified consciousness of humankind. Different disciplines try to see and understand life and things in their own different ways. Keeping interconnected with them too, literature tries to give life its own kind of languages and definitions. It creates its own unique identity while keeping connected to all kinds of wisdoms. That this being and identity is kept intact is of importance not just for literature but also for all humankind.

(Trans. Apurva Narain)