Measuring Dream by Dream

கனவைக் கனவால் அளத்தல்: https://www.jeyamohan.in/222948/

Jeyamohan's foreword on 'Everyday Yogi' - Translated by Subhasree Sundaram 

In 1989, when I was working in Palakodu, in Dharmapuri district, Pavannan, Tamilavan, P. Krishnasamy, and others organized a literary meet in Bangalore. They invited me, and I attended. It was not a crowded gathering; we sat and talked in the verandah behind a public building in Cubbon Park, Bangalore. Only eight people had come. “Even that is a lot,” they said.

H. S. Shivaprakash had come as the special guest for that event. Even then, he was a literary star in Kannada. In Karnataka, a hundred people would gather wherever he spoke. Yet he had come all the way to address those eight listeners. He spoke with great enthusiasm and assurance about modern literature and religious dogmatism. After the event, he himself said, “Let’s go somewhere, find a restaurant, and continue our conversation.” We walked, found a place, and talked some more; only in the evening did we finally part.

From that day on, H. S. Shivaprakash became a presence that captivated my soul. When he spoke that day, I witnessed in him a certain creative audacity and fearlessness that I had seen only in figures like P. K. Balakrishnan in Malayalam, and in Jayakanthan in Tamil—personalities that both exhilarate and draw one inward. In those days, I stood in awe of such upright artists. That day, what radiated from Sivaprakash was the modernist creator’s resistance to tradition—parody, a scornful irony toward convention, a piercing insistence on presenting his intellectual logic in its entirety, and a rare gift for selecting and preserving words for their own intrinsic value. I have heard him speak on many stages since then. I have traveled to Bangalore and Chennai three times just to listen to him. I have often marveled at how his personality completely envelops the venues where he speaks.

H. S. Shivaprakash is regarded as one of the foremost modern writers in Kannada literature. His contributions to poetry and drama are widely acknowledged, and he is known across India for his literary works in English as well. He has also served in significant roles within literary institutions of the Central Government.

In general, it is very rare for modern literary writers to write on subjects grounded in spirituality or meditation. Some are indeed interested in and trained in those traditions, yet they often feel that foregrounding such inward individuality would compromise the persona of the modern literary writer. Hence they too present only the image generally constructed here as that of a modern writer—one shaped, in the modernist period, by a negative view of history and by a distrust of the individual. Many creators of that period presented themselves as exponents of this outlook, even when, in their private lives, they remained theists.

H. S. Shivaprakash is a person of integrity in his inner quest. He possesses a distinctive fearlessness in articulating his ideas, which is why he is continually engaged in diverse debates. Having begun as a modernist, he later turned toward philosophical inquiry rooted in Indian and Saiva traditions, undertaking the study of yoga and meditation. This brief book is a record of that journey.

In this work, we witness a modernist writer crossing the limits that shaped him through an inner quest. H. S. Shivaprakash’s journey through the Saiva traditions of Karnataka, and the diverse paths of sādhana within them, may offer guidance to those engaged in such disciplines. For readers without that orientation, the work can still resonate deeply as the record of an artist’s inward journey.

In this book, H. S. Shivaprakash does not appear as one who simply accepts beliefs and rituals. Rather, he emerges as a thinker who continually observes and examines all that he knows with a keen logical intellect. This is the journey of a yogi whose path is shaped by intellectual self-assurance.

When a modern literary mind encounters the Indian contemplative tradition of meditation, it does not perceive many of the obstacles that others experience. First, it readily distinguishes the inner journey from religious belief and ritual. Second, it approaches profound archetypes and myths in their true grandeur, without simplifying them through worldly explanation. The literary artist’s inward journey is, in a sense, a measuring of dream by dream. Language—bounded and shaped—is the dream that becomes the instrument of measure; the boundless dream-space called the universe becomes that which is measured.

Yet such a mind arrives at two kinds of understanding. On the one hand, it stands astonished before its own depth. A mind that once regarded words as the sole expression of reality falls silent before what lies beyond words, withdraws to its familiar realm of language, tracing the contours of its own boundary. On the other hand, it redefines all that it has known until then—logically and symbolically.

This book, presenting the metaphysical journey of a modern writer, may be regarded as a new arrival in Tamil. Subhasree Sundaram has translated it in a language of effortless grace. My felicitations to her.