Let’s not miss the message in the dedications

The text of the special address by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, delivered at the Founders’ Day meeting of the Madras Book Club in November.

Et cetera is a word I adore. Why, I cannot really say. Perhaps the reason is that as the youngest of my siblings I have long had an et cetera feeling about myself. The last child of a series has to be the product, clearly, not of conjugal love or parental aspiration but of plain absent-mindedness.

Et in Latin means ‘and’. Cetera means ‘the rest’.

The et cetera-s in any situation or the side things, the unimportant and incidental have, as a result, fascinated me. At a lecture, I find the sleepiness of the chairman irresistible and invariably worthy of emulation. My intellectual deficits aid the process. At a concert, I cannot but be transfixed by the accompanying artists’ noiseless sign language directed at the mike operators asking them, without the chief musician’s noticing of it, to raise the volume of their personal mike. My ignorance of classical music doubtless enhances this attentiveness to the side transaction. At a dance recital, the fleeting glimpse of the artist in the wings, arguing with her assistant about the tightness or looseness of her anklets, is as riveting as her becoming, the very next moment, Andal or Sakuntala.At a walk, that increasingly essential form of exercise for a septuagenarian, I cannot but pick up nuggets of conversation with each other and on cell-phones from those I pass or who pass me.

Between their heavy breathing, walkers’ chats-bits have entered my mental archive with: “Last chance kodukkuren…innikku evening kulle baaki paisa vandudunon…”, “Veettile irukkumudiyale, mattupon tollai taangumudiyale…”, “…admission stageliye hospital oru latsham kekkurudummaa…engey pordu….”, “Sir… Sadashiva Brahmendrudaiya Manasa Sancharare irukke… adile Ramanikucha dukhha vihaare irukke…./ Saar, adu dukkha vihare ille adhu durga vihare…” And more recently “Konnuppottaan Nitish Kumar…” What is a mere walk before these accidental glimpses that walks yield into the human condition?

And so with books. Their ‘get up’, their feel, their fragrance impact on me no less and often much more than their contents. Cover designs hold me or repel me, blurbs grip me or make me run from their pasty vulgarity. And also things about their afterlife. Like the fact that twenty years elapsed before the first appearance in 1867 of Das Kapital in German and the first English Translation in 1887 of Marx’s benchmark tract, that Hitler’s Mein Kampf, written well before he became Chancellor sold so well that he built up an unpaid tax debt of 1.5 million dollars on earnings from it, which tax debt was waived by him to himself as Chancellor, that when Gandhi’s mentor Gokhale read Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, he told Gandhi the book was so crude that Gandhi would want to destroy it himself. Crude or not, it went on to sell so well and widely that Gandhi asked for the price of its original Madras edition – 8 annas – be downscaled to 4 annas at which price it sold more perhaps than any other title of its time.

Things around and about books tell us as much and sometimes more about the book and its authors as their content. High among these et cetera-s of a book are the dedications on one of what publishers call the book’s ‘prelims’. None of these three books by Marx, Hitler and Gandhi, respectively, essential to the understanding of their authors’ minds, carry any dedications. Those three gentlemen wanted to get the message across. Why should they want anything to distract the reader’s attention from that end?!

But many works of earnestness have dedicatory commencings. Asoka’s edicts were not books but then there having been no books as we know them in his time, they were authorial works. And they started with an introductory reference to himself – ‘Thus says Devanamapiya Piyadassi…’ by which Deva was invoked, albeit as one who loved the author of the edict, Piyadassi. A very deft combination of self-effacement and self-introduction. If, as is believed by many, Tiruvalluvar lived a century or two before Christ, we have in his one and only work that could have been contemporaneous with Asoka’s edicts, an invocatory reference to God, the only Sanskrit compound in The Kural, “…adi Bhagavan…” The Holy Quran begins very similar to The Kural, with “All praise is due to God, The Lord of The Universe”. Tulsidas’ Sriramacharitamanas written in beautiful Avadhi yet has a Sanskrit opening invocation, not unlikely to have been a later interpolation, to Sarasvati and Ganesa – Vande Vanivinayaki which also describes them, most interestingly, as the authors of “all letters and expressions, words and metres” – “rasanam, chhandasamapi…”

The Kama Sutra, none other, begins with a dedicatory invocation to Him. “In the beginning Brahma created men and women and in the form of commandments in one hundred thousand chapters laid down rules for regulating their existence with regard to Dharma, Artha and Kama.” To which one might say, cut Dharma and Artha out, come to the point.

God, whether out of formality, custom or fear of divine retribution was a hardy perennial as an invocate or dedicatee. But is now no longer so. The world likes to think of itself as liberated from the need of divine protection. Dedications have, for almost the whole of what in historical terms is called the Modern Age, are not to the divine but to mortals. This started with that branch of mortals who may have been considered by the authors to be invested with some moral weight. Subrahmania Bharati for instance dedicated two of his first books to Sister Nivedita. And Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, with the dedicatee’s permission, dedicated his commentary on The Bhagavad Gita, simply and movingly, to Mahatma Gandhi. Sarvepalli Gopal tells us in his biography of his father that Gandhiji at first remonstrated: “Who am I? What is my service? You are my Krishna, I am your Arjuna.” Fortunately for book dedications, Radhakrishnan had his way.

Rabindranath Tagore’s dedications are a fascination and merit a separate study in themselves. Dr Uma Das Gupta has helped me with references to a few of them. They belong to all categories, if you might call them that, of book dedications. There are those to family, such as Naibedya (1901) to his father Debendranath Tagore: Ei kabyo grontho parompujyapad pitrideb er shricharane utsargo korlam. And in a different vein, of his 1945 Essays to ‘Gandhi Maharaj’. He has dedicated other works of his to his son, his nephews but most notably to his friends, C F Andrews and the Argentinian poet Victoria Ocampo, who got his poems in Purabi (1925) dedicated with the words ‘Bijoya (the name he gave her) Korokomoleshu’.

Parallel to this was the tradition of dedicating books to patrons. Dickens having “Affectionately inscribed” David Copperfield to “The Hon. Mr and Mrs Richard Watson of Rockingham, Northamptonshire”, it was only natural that someone like Nirad C. Chaudhuri should dedicate his autobiography
To The Memory Of The British Empire In India
Which Conferred Subjecthood On Us
But Witheld Citizenship
To which Yet Everyone Of Us Threw Out The Challenge
‘Civis Brittanicus Sum’
Because All That Was Good And Living Within Us
Was Made, Shaped, and Quickened By The Same British Rule.

Dedicating books to concepts and causes has been with us as notably as the one that is personal to people. Professor A.R. Venkatachalapathy has very kindly apprised me of Bharati’s dedication of one of his works to “Pallars, Paraiyars and other Vaisya brothers who produce food”, a formulation that is as earnest as it is disarmingly idealistic. Such dedications were offerings to a cause, a commitment.

The tradition of book dedications as offerings has given way to book dedications as giftings, the printed form of a hand-written inscription.

There are, even in this, some exceptional authors who can be lofty even on terra firma.
A truly wonderful autobiography, A Moment In Time (1974), carries a dedication by the author Apa Pant, Prince of Aundh, diplomat who served as Nehru’s ambassador in Africa and Europe, scholar and authority on the Surya Namaskar. His dedication is three and a half pages long and has 11 paras. It takes several moments to read. It cannot be accused of over-modesty. I will abbreviate it:

“To the proud and poor people of Aundh.

To the smell and sound of fresh rain…on the soil of Maharashtra.
To the rivers, lakes and waterfalls, to Nile, Zambezi, Teesta, Ganga, Krishna, Koyna, Thames.
To the Himalaya, Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro.
To all those birds, beasts and humans wherever destiny led me.
To Bapu the Mahatma who gave me a social conscience, to Panditji who brought me into international life.
To my dear brother, sister, their children.
To my children.
And to the one who brought me all the luck and the good fortune, without whose constant help I could not ever have attempted to emerge…Nalini.”

How similar and yet how totally different is the following dedication from another autobiography – Long Walk To Freedom, by Nelson Mandela:

“I dedicate this book to my six children, Madiba and Makaziwe (my first daughter) who are now deceased, and to Mabgatho, Makaziwe, Zenani and Zindzi, whose support and love I treasure, to my twenty-six grand children who give me the greatest pleasure, and to all my comrades, friends and fellow South Africans, whose courage, determination and patriotism remain my source of inspiration.” It is noteworthy that he does not refer to his second wife Winnie Mandela from who he was clearly estranged by the time the book was written. But she figures in it of course, with the breakdown of their relationship described without any damage to Winnie’s personality.

The wife and rather less so, the husband, have been and continue to be the staple of book dedications. There is tenderness and pathos in this, especially when the dedication is posthumous. Nehru’s dedicating of his autobiography (1936) ‘To Kamala Who Is No More’, is deeply moving, as are R K Narayan’s words at the start of his autobiographical novel, An English Teacher (1946): “Dedicated to my wife, Rajam”. Radhakrishnan’s enigmatic dedication of An Idealist View of Life ‘To SRK’ is believed to be to his wife Sivakamu.

The dedication of books to the wife or husband, as I said, remains a hallmark and is likely so to be forever for the reason that major time apportionment for writing by a man or woman (the first, more so) is by its nature at the cost of home time. A successful book is more often or not the fruit of a huge accommodation at home, a huge sacrifice for which the very least that can be done is stating that in so many words or by implication, ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’. There is an honesty, as also a matter of conscience, in an author’s dedicating a book to his or her partner.

It is of course also true that books get to be written, honest, good and successful ones at that, not in the perfumes of marital accord but from out of the fumes of marital discord. Mandela’s being a case in point, the honest thing to do there is to make no such false and hollow acknowledgment, give no quarter to the hypocrisy of convention or conformism. The PJ had to come of the book that the man dedicated to his wife “without whose presence this work would have been finished two years ago”. This condition is of course, needless to say, truer of books written by women who have had a husband with shirt buttons constantly needing her sewing hand, children with PTA meetings to attend, in-laws with doctors’ appointments to be arranged because the Swami is “busy”.

Authors of multiple books have an advantage over the singletons because they can then spread their accrediting civility over a larger field. My deeply valued friend and senior, the sociologist Professor Andre Beteille has dedicated his several books to his wife, to each of his two daughters separately and jointly, to his colleagues and to those he has looked up to. My younger friend, the historian Ramachandra Guha whose productivity in book writing is only matched by his prodigious column writing, has done a similar thing and, to my agreeable astonishment, I have been a beneficiary of his warmth. Dedications are written once the book is done, the manuscript all but sent to the publishers, when the tension of writing has given place to the relief and emptiness of completion. The mind travels back then, to times before and beyond the book, in a mood of latitude and mellowness. Relationships emerge from the mist of calm repose and suggest a gesture in handsomeness. And unexpected results occur.

Vikram Seth has dedicated his many books over a swathe of associations: A Suitable Boy to My Father and Mother and to the memory of Amma. The Humble Administrator’s Garden To My Family, Pictured Within. But, most memorably, The Golden Gate thus:

Dedication
To Tom
So here they are, the chapters ready
And, half against my will,
I’m free

A couple of clear new trends began emerging in the later part of the last century. More authors began dedicating their books to friends and colleagues. R.K. Narayan dedicated The Financial Expert (1958) To The Memory Of A Very Dear Friend, Kittu R. Purna and The Maneater of Malgudi (1962) To Graham Green to Mark (More Than) A Quarter Century Of Friendship. Romila Thapar’s pioneering book A History of India (1966) is dedicated, simply, To Sergei.

Apart from expressing love, gratitude and admiration in one or other of their myriad indefinable forms, book dedications can also play an ideational role. We have seen the Bharati and Nirad Chaudhuri examples. A more recent example is provided by Rajmohan Gandhi in his dedication in Revenge and Reconciliation (1999): ‘To South Asia’s Abruptly Orphaned Children And Violently Bereaved Women And Men’. That is in telegraphese the essence of the book, its message and intent. The dedication leads the reader into the book’s soul.

T.J.S. George in his biography of M.S. Subbulakshmi dedicates the book to The Trinity. But not the Trinity of Tiruvarur, another one, wholly female – Veena Dhanammal, Bangalore Nagaratnammal and Tanjore Balasarasvati. I may say By George! Now that is some statement. He has by that stroke set the pace for the book. He almost says it all there and yet says it as an aperitif, creating an appetite and giving us a foretaste of what is to follow.

I will conclude by saying that book dedications are more, much more, than ‘side things’. And though I said I am gripped by what happens on the side, my interest in book dedications is not a side thing. It is in fact so strong that very often I remember the dedication when I have forgotten the argument of the book. But there too I know I have ‘got’ the author. When Tagore calls Gandhi ‘Maharaj’ and places his book of poems in Victoria’s “lotus hands” addressing her as ‘Bijoya’, have I not reached his soul?

Let us read books with rapture, disdain or boredom. But let us not miss the message in their dedications.