A tribute to Namwar Singh: If only he had written more

Namwar Singh was a towering presence not only in Hindi criticism, but in Indian public sphere as such. He was a literary critic as well as a public intellectual; and in both of these roles won respect and admiration. His public lectures attracted large audiences adulating as well as sharply interrogating.

His literary criticism was free on one hand from the self-conscious claims of ‘theory formation’; and on the other from being merely book- reviews. His articles and lectures carried the constant awareness that all philosophy and desire to change things emanate from criticism. That is why, a critical engagement is crucial to literature, and also to life in general. Being a Marxist, Namwar Singh was constantly aware of the need for ‘criticism of all that exists’.

Criticism implies value judgement rooted in a certain point of departure. This needs to be reminded and reiterated in this era of post-modernist cultural and moral relativism, when all kind of practices are justified as ‘identity assertions’ and as ‘valid in themselves’. The insistence on universality of certain values has been made suspect, and naturally enough in literature value-free ‘reading’ has replaced rigorous, value based criticism.

From his early critical interventions in the fifties to his classic ‘Kavita ke Naye Pratiman’ (New Norms of Poetry, 1968) to the very end of his journey, Namwar Singh consistently fought for what he called the ‘Swadharma’ of literary criticism that is insisting on value based evaluation of any literary text and resisting the plethora of subjective, arbitrary ‘readings’. Ironically, for some people, his left credentials became suspect as even while placing literary evaluation in the context of a general value system, Namwar Singh argued for the autonomy of literature and other creative expressions.

Bhamah the great acharya of Indian poetics says ‘there is no branch of human knowledge, that is irrelevant to a literary practitioner.’ Namwar Singh’s range of scholarship was inspiringly multidisciplinary. His lectures and writings were interspersed with quotations, references and allusions from Sanskrit, Apbhramsha, Prakrit, Urdu, Bengali and English. His thirst for knowledge and his memory was a stuff of legends. He could have and did say something thought-provoking, imaginative and often ‘controversial’ about ‘Prithviraj Raso’ on one hand and about the work of the youngest poet writing today on the other.

In fact, controversy was the middle name of Namwar Singh. He caused some very serious and meaningful ones and some rather trivial. In fact, each utterance of Namwar Singh had news value. He was fond of quoting Mallinath -the famed commentator on Kalidasa who maintained that he never wrote anything without any basis.

Namwar Singh had the intellectual wherewithal to justify anything he said. Such justifications were on some occasion were just that—mere justifications. Inspite of some such deviations, the fact however remains that Namwar Singh took a position in writing after careful consideration and with intellectual rigour.

He was committed to the leftist world-view, still was insistent on autonomy of literature. There were traces of inconsistency. But only within the realm of the ‘spoken word’. In writing, he was very careful in taking a position, howsoever controversial it might be.

Another aspect of his personality was revealed only to lucky ones like me who got an opportunity to attend his class room lectures. In these lectures, he was never sarcastic and dismissive of the purva-paksha (the opposite opinion). He wanted his students to understand an argument in its best avatar and then to engage with it. He constantly referred to Indian tradition of shastratha (intellectual disputation) as well as to Gramsci’s advice of ‘taking on the ideological opponent on his best ground’.

Some of his friends and admirers rationalised his preference for ‘speaking’ as an attempt to reach out to the people. He was called a mobile encyclopaedia or even a university. Happily, many of his lectures have been collected in a number of volumes.

The fact however remains that public speaking can hardly replace the act of writing. Even the most accomplished speaker, to some extent responds to the immediate audience. The writing is about reflections over arguments and counter arguments in your private moments. Namwar Singh published his last systematically written book, Doosari Parampara ki Khoj ( in search of other tradition) way back in 1979. After that, it was mainly the speech-act.

I requested him 1979 onwards repeatedly to focus more on writing than speaking, and Gurudev always showed apparent agreement and happily went on doing what he loved to do—delivering lectures and speeches all over the country.

How fervently I wish, I were able to ‘force’ him to listen to my request. Well, it is only a fantasy, he was not a person to be ‘forced’.

In his passing away, the intellectual and academic scene in Hindi has lost a lot, which will be literally impossible to compensate for.