Dear Mrs.Nandakumar,
Namaskaram for both you and Sri.Nandakumar,
Thank you for the long letter. I read with interest.
Soon after I left to attend a Poland Festival in India held at the Bangalore Alliance Franchise. It came as a revelation to me to know how the Polish nation and the Polish people were brutalised in the two world wars and even before. The current Polish Ambassador and the former Polish Ambassador who was incidentally a great Sanskrit scholar and who studied in Benares, and other Polish scholars spoke with great insights into the German and Russian brutalities and they said compared with their experience Indians were lucky to have the British as their masters and rulers etc.
And much more important came to be as a revelation was the fact that since Poland was wiped out of the map for some 126 years, the Polish people relied on their culture only, their arts, language, literature.
So, Polish poetry got two Nobel Prizes within 16 years of each other! Polish poetry was all about the darkness and their suppression of man while, said one participant, in the South of India, we never had any war experience nor any brutality of politics and hence our literature and our poetry is all so shallow and even silly enough! Anyway, I wanted to incorporate this point in my introduction which I sent you the other day.
Now, Shenbi and Kartik, after we visited you have mooted the idea of you write a monograph on our family, not on me alone, they say! They will in their own manner would talk with you.
As for me, this much I wanted to share with you here.
You may or may not know how my life had gone through! I went to Oxford with great idealistic fervour! That fervour had been in a way, the source of all my troubles and tribulations in my life path!
I became attracted by Pandit Nehru since my Santiniketan days, Nehru used to come to Santiniketan every years, all the four years I was there and so I became closely drawn to his personality.
So, at Oxford I became easily attracted by politics and that is how I debated at the Oxford Debating Union, befriended Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New statesman weekly and so on and so forth.
When Indians before and after me and even in my times, were always drawn towards service in the government I rejected and chose for a radical heroic activities. That of course had its ups and downs and of course my becoming the MLC was the high point and becoming closer to Kamaraj till his last days was also a consolation.
Now, what I have achieved?
I had tried to be different from the generation of Indians who went to England, trained as barriers or ICS and became servants of the government. This I defied.
Now, even after me when Kartik went to Oxford and when he came back I was very keen that he pursues an independent entrepreneur career so that he retains his independence and does much public service.
Also, knowing our social background, I mean both the Tamil society mentality, we somehow pretend to know many things but remain subservient to superiors, when the Whiteman ruled we were happy to master their language and serve them, now after they left a new type subservience has overtaken us.
So, if you see my writings, journalism or poetry or any other, in English and Tamil, you can see this struggle to free myself from my countrymen’s syndrome. I have paid a very high price for all this pursuits.
May be you can study my writings from this point of view and when you write you might bring this side of my personality.
May be there is no one at present as you are to know me through my writings and activities.
May be we may sit for more meetings and exchange views and then you might be able to concentrate on this side of my thinking and activities. I have strayed far from what I came to say! Now let us take leave.
Goodbye!
With warm regards,
Yours sincerely,
V.Isvarmurti.