Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, the well-known scholar – critic who is undoubtedly the greatest among the pioneers of Indian-English studies was born on 17 April, 1908. He took his D.Litt from Madras and after a distinguished teaching career in colleges and Andhra University, rose to positions of distinction and honour — Vice-President and later Acting President of Sahitya Akademi, Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds, and Adhishthata of Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Delhi and so on. Also, the Modern Languages Association of America (M.L.A) has conferred on Dr. Iyengar an honorary membership and more recently the prestigious B.C. Roy Award for eminence in literature has been given to him.
A great Aurobindonian, Dr. Iyengar has published two very important books, Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History and On the Mother. His book Indian Writing in English remains even now an authoritative source book on the subject. No less again has been his contribution to studies relating to British and Commonwealth Literatures. Mention should be made in particular of the books, Shakespeare: His World and His Art, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francois Mauriac, The Adventure of Criticism, and Two Cheers for the Commonwealth.
Dr. Iyengar, though basically a scholar, teacher and critic, has in more recent years turned to creative writing and has published a number of poems. His Sitayana which may be considered as his magnum opus is a timely sequel to his earlier work, The Epic Beautiful: a Verse Rendering of the Sundara Kanda of Valmiki Ramayana (1983). Sitayana, Epic of the Earth Bom is a re-telling in verse of the Ramayana as “quintessentially Sita’s story”, for the work marks a shift from Rama to Sita.
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The shift has not been arbitary or prompted by a desire for novelty but the result of the conviction that in India ‘godhead has always been identified with the Eternal Feminine’ and that it is time to make a “conscious return to ancient verities”. The theme of this work which has been based on a number of sources other than Valmiki and Kamban too, is the inevitable Raina-Sita-Ravana theme but the ‘telling’ and the structure and organisation are different. The story begins with the “birth” of Sita and ends with the book Ashrama which in the author’s own words, “unfolds the supreme irony and supreme tragedy of the noon-time eclipse in Sita’s life, her twelve years in Muni Valmiki’s ashrama, the climactic second vindication and definitive withdrawal to her Earth-Mother, Madhavi”.
It should be said that Sitayana with all its other merits, makes a bid to take Indian English poetry to the Aurobindonian tradition in which poetry was ‘dhyanamantra’, a prayer and a fulfilment of one’s spiritual needs. To this extent it may be personal but the spiritual ecstasy offered by it is something which everyone can share.