A Journal of Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya

of hatred towards the old and terminally
ill Selma, but Selma is full of love for
Yoke and wants from the core of her
heart to remove the fear of death from
Yoke’s mind: “How one could live with
absolute outside fear?’’ In addition, Yoke
imagines arrival of the ‘satan’ in lieu of
Saint Nicholas while Selma, forgetting the
nearing death, awakes and sings to celebrate
Christmas but becomes sad when her cry
during singing is recognized. Interestingly,
Selma asks Yoke as to why the latter always
concentrates on death. When Selma sings
at the time of birth of the god-child, Yoke
feels appearance of death. Undoubtedly
this is a symptom of existential psychology.
Selma’s following words are quite
perceptive. ‘‘You think yourself free, that
is the root of all difficulties. Neither we
are alone, nor free. Rather we are not
alone and can’t be alone, so are not free...
and therefore the right to choose or decide
is not ours...Imaginations of all such
freedoms are mere ego...’’ These are
existential issues. One day Selma expresses
her desire to marry Yan and executes
a will for all her property in his name.
To Selma, other’s presence itself is like
God’s presence. Finally, Yoke accepts her
defeat and wants to commit suicide by
addressing this world as bastard. Thus
there are two perspectives about death—
are these two perspectives Indian and
European in essence? Chandrakant
Bandivadekar considers such categorization
as simplification. However, there is no
doubt that this novel is existential
individualistic and more artistic than real.
Thus in these three novels Agyeya
has opposed Marxist classist view of reality.
Though he averred that a writer may get
inspiration from even small things or events
but in practice he made the range and
depth of lives of elites as the final theme
of his writings. He did not see the labour
class as revolutionary, hence his
perspective to social reality differs from
that of Marx and Gandhi who provided
a central place to the common man. All
these novels have preference for individual
characters to social system. That is, there
is less sociality in these novels, though
these are full of artistry, poetics and
literariness. On the other hand, in Nagarjun’s
novels, especially in ‘Balchanma’, there
is more sociality than artistry, poetics
and literariness and as such he is more
realistic than Agyeya. The famous
sociologist C. Wright Mills talks of
‘sociological imagination’ with three aspects
of life : biography, history and society—
and these have dialectical and dynamic
relationship with one another. But
unfortunately in these novels of Agyeya
there is only expressive biography; actually
history and society are missing. At the
most there is a concern for inter-personal
relationships among some characters but
society is much more than the sum total
of individuals. The process of socialisation
starts in the family since one’s birth and
ends only with the death through various
norms and values. That is why C. Wright
Mills rightly observes that ‘private troubles’
of individuals are not of much concern,
rather only when private troubles become
‘public issues’, these are the real collective
concerns of the society, hence more
60 :: January-March 2012