Wish-Full Thinking

Scholarly and entertaining, Prabhakara’s is an eclectic range.


Many read to get “something practical and utilitarian out of the reading as, for instance, is the case when one reads a railway timetable”. A smaller number read, says M.S. Prabhakara in Words and Ideas, “simply for the joy of reading, for the pleasure the reader gets by re-articulating in the unspoken language of the mind and the heart that unique arrangement of words and ideas of the writer.” Prabhakara himself belongs to the minority who not only read extensively but also an amazingly eclectic range of books.
Immersed in books
The short articles on books put together in this collection — which do not belong to the boring category of “reviews” — show a man who has immersed himself in books for a lifetime, devouring everything that comes his way, from detective fiction to lexicons of the most esoteric kind.
Each essay packs in an outline of the book under consideration, gives a quick overview of the writer’s oeuvre and provides tantalising bits of information that will enthuse a reader to go seeking the book. While they are marked by brevity, the essays also place every book in a larger social context. For example, the essay on K.T. Achiah’s two books on food open an interesting debate on the fallacious link often made between Indian diet and vegetarianism, especially with reference to beef eating.
Another remarkable feature is Prabhakara’s sharp eye for details that may go unnoticed by a casual reader. In “An Old Bird Difficult to Catch” on the biography of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, one of the early communists of India, he picks out a certain Mandyam Prativaadi Bhayankara Tirumalacharya who “flits across” the narrative. Talking about Tirumalacharya, associated with the founding of the Communist Party of India outside the country, he notes that the man had “a uniquely apposite name for a communist revolutionary who after all is constantly engaged in ideological disputations.”
A reader cannot miss Prabhakara’s fascination for words, phrases and the entire histories that lie hidden behind every cluster of letters.
Some of the books Prabhakara refers are either rare or no longer available, which makes this slim volume all the more valuable. The book he writes about in the last essay, for instance, “The Scientific Lady in England”, is about how the gentlewomen of the late 17th and early 18th century were fascinated by telescope and microscope, and through them, drawn to science as a discipline!
Lucidity
Above all, this book is a worthy read for its sheer lucidity. Consider this excerpt from “The Mask Behind the Mask”: “…There is that ‘half a square inch of space within one’s heart’ that is never accessible to anyone, not even to one’s closest companions, not to the lover, not to the husband or the wife. Therein lies security; therein too lies the loneliness of all human beings.”
What Prabhakara says about K.T. Achiah’s style of writing — “scholarship carried lightly and not in the least intimidating, entertainingly written and most comprehensively informative” — could well be said of his own.
If there is a complaint, it is that Prabhakara rarely ever breaks his vow of not “succumbing to the ever present temptation and danger of indulging in anecdotes, that first in the irreversible path to senility that elderly writers should resist”. He breaks it only once to write about the subtle ways in which apartheid works in South African liquor shops, leaving one wishing he had made more such digressions. Let’s hope he writes an entire book of anecdotes next.