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 Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature
PP Raveendran

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191967801 Print ISBN: 9780192871558

FRONT MATTER

Copyright Page 
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.002.0003 Page iv
Published: February 2023

Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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 Preface

This book is an outcome of my long-​standing interest in Indian litera-

ture and modernity studies, areas that have engaged my focused atten-
tion particularly over the past two decades. Its origin is as a collection
of independent essays, some of them written as papers for seminars and
conferences organized by universities and other institutions such as the
Sahitya Akademi. However, even as separate essays, they are connected
by a common logic—​a counter-​logic, perhaps—​that is also shared by
a number of scholars from diverse Indian bhashas working in the field
of Indian literature today. I have certainly benefited from my inter-
action with some of them during the long period of the book’s gesta-
tion. I know that it is not possible to name all the colleagues and fellow
scholars who responded to my arguments when they were first presented
at conferences. Let me, however, acknowledge the role of a few scholar
friends who, either as organizers of conferences or as editors of publi-
cations, provided the initial impetus that led to the writing of the earlier
versions of some of the chapters: Ipshita Chanda, Subha Chakrabarty
Dasgupta, Amiya Dev, P.C. Kar, Mini Krishnan, Udaya Kumar, Jayanta
Mahapatra, E.V. Ramakrishnan, K. Satchidanandan, and Harish Trivedi.
Let me also remember two scholar friends who are no longer with us
today: Meena Alexander and Avadhesh Kumar Singh. I am also thankful
to P. Madhavan, K.M. Krishnan, and K.M. Seethi for reading and com-
menting on some of the chapters. I am thankful to E.V. Fathima whose
draft translation of an essay that I originally wrote in Malayalam formed
the basis for the analysis in one of the chapters. Most chapters are devel-
oped from critical essays written over the years, some of them published,
some unpublished. Some of the material assembled in the book was col-
lected while I was holding a UGC Emeritus Fellowship (2014–​2016) at
the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University. I am thankful to the
successive generations of postgraduate and research students of the past
few years at the School of Letters, who formed the initial audiences for
the ideas presented here. Several of the Malayalam books listed in the
viii Preface
bibliography were ferreted out for me by Mini G. Pillai and R. Saritha
from the collections of rare books in the Mahatma Gandhi University
Library. I am also thankful to the three unknown readers from the Oxford
University Press who had provided useful comments on the book. The
bibliography is an indication of my appreciation of the strong tradition
of scholarship on Indian literature and modernity studies, to which I am
indeed in great debt.
As always, Sherine has been the first to read this book, which she did
with her sharp critical gaze. I am thankful to her as well as to Aparna
for meticulously going through the typescript before it was sent to the
printer.
Because of the book’s origin as a collection of essays written over a pe-
riod of time, it would be natural and inevitable for certain key ideas to be
repeated in parts of the work. Though caution has been taken at the time
of editing to erase repetitions, I would not be surprised if the reader still
comes across a few instances of arguments being repeated over chapters. I
crave the reader’s indulgence in this matter. As regards the quotations ap-
pearing in the book, whenever I cite works from Indian languages other
than Malayalam, I have taken care to use standard translations available.
As for the translations from Malayalam, they are invariably mine, except
where I have specifically mentioned other translators.

P.P. Raveendran
 Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature
PP Raveendran

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191967801 Prin BN: 9780192871558

FRONT MATTER

Acknowledgements 
Published: February 2023

Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

The author wishes to acknowledge the following publications in which lier versions of some of the
chapters were printed, as detailed below:

Chapter 5: Methodology in Translating Pre-modern Texts, ed. C. Nagan Bengaluru: Sahitya Akademi,
2017. (The essay originally titled ‘Translation as Rewriting: Coloniali , Modernity and the Idea of
Literature’)

Chapter 6: Indian Literature, No. 252 (July–August 2009) (The essay o inally titled ‘Decolonization and
the Dynamics of Translation: An Essay in Historical Poetics’)

Chapter 10: Literary Criticism in India: Texts, Trends and Trajectories, ed V Ramakrishnan. New Delhi:
Sahitya Akademi, 2021. (The essay originally titled ‘Modernity and I anence: The Contexts of Kesari
Balakrishna Pillai’)

Chapter 11: Chandrabhaga, No. 16 (2018) (The essay originally titled ‘ ere is Bharatvarsha? Region and
Nation in Indian Poetry’)

Chapter 12: Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 14 (2014) (The ess originally titled ‘Bilingualism and
the Everyday: Bhakti and Vibhakti in Indian Writing in English’)

Chapter 16: S.K. Pottekkat, The Story of the Time-piece: A Collection of S rt Stories. Trans. Venugopal
Menon. New Delhi: Niyogi Books. (Foreword titled ‘SK Pottekkat: Writing as Fantasy Travel’)

Chapter 18: Rajelakshmy, A Path and Many Shadows and Twelve Stories. Trans. RK Jayasree. Hyderabad:
Orient BlackSwan. (Introduction titled ‘Rajelakshmy: The Tale and the Teller’)

p. x
 Introduction: Bhasha in Focus

This is a study of Indian literature in the context of recent discussions

on modernity and its theoretical extensions such as the everyday and
the social and historical imaginary. The book in essence is an analysis of
the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian
bhasha literatures of the past two centuries. Exploring the trajectory of
modernity after Indian literature came into contact with colonialism in
the early nineteenth century is indeed the primary object of the book,
though the intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated
questions clustering around such concepts as the literary, the historical,
and the social as part of the encounter receive more focused attention in
the enquiry. Though the work acknowledges the European provenance
of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the inherent com-
plexity of the concept and its uneven and equivocal connotations when
used with reference to particular cultures outside Europe, especially with
reference to the bhasha communities in India. Theoretical issues debated
in relation to modernity such as its conceptual affinities with the western
enlightenment project, its ideological investment in European aesthetics,
and its implication for the evolution and development of Indian litera-
tures are important for the study. The work also examines the local and
regional strengths of the literary imagination that turns everyday ex-
periences into aesthetically significant bhasha events. The critique of the
idea of the aesthetic—​hermetic aesthetic, as it is sometimes described
in these pages—​in this process, undergoes a radical transformation that
assigns a new political force to the act of writing. Although the book is
concerned with issues pertaining to Indian literatures in general, the the-
oretical postulates undergirding it are illustrated with the help primarily
of Malayalam literature, with supplementary inputs from other bhasha
literatures and Indian English literature.

Under the Bhasha Gaze. PP Raveendran, Oxford University Press. © PP Raveendran 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192871558.003.0001
2 Under the Bhasha Gaze
‘Modernity’ is understood here not as a singular event, but as a com-
plex and layered phenomenon that manifests across languages, both
in India and abroad, in multiple forms. Traditionally, especially in the
European context, modernity used to be identified with the breakdown of
the feudal order and the emergence of new social formations in the wake
of large-​scale industrialization. It is this understanding of modernity
that Anthony Giddens draws upon when he formulates a preliminary
definition for it: ‘Modernity refers to modes of social life or organiza-
tion which emerged in Europe from around the seventeenth century on-
wards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their
influence’ (1990: 1). The assumption here is that modernity is a universal
state of being towards which all cultures travel, discarding past beliefs.
This monolithic view of modernity certainly is important in the history
of contemporary social theory. However, one cannot ignore the fact that
this view is under challenge from various quarters today, both on account
of its Euro-​centric bias and its positivistic orientation. On the one hand,
while there are important thinkers such as Perry Anderson (1984) and
Bruno Latour (1993) who consider modernity more as a matter of faith
or misrecognition and who question its conceptual and historical bases,
there are also writers like K.M. Panikkar (1953), Walter Rodney (1972),
and Eduardo Galeano (1973) who, on the other hand, draw attention to
the grave injustice it has perpetrated on the people of Asia, Africa, and
South America. Besides, as argued by scholars like Shmuel Eisenstadt
and Lawrence Grossberg who talk about multiple and, especially non-​
western, modernities, while one is justified in granting ‘historical prece-
dence’ and status as a point of reference to the western form, it can by
no means be regarded as the only ‘authentic’ version of modernity today
(Eisenstadt 2000: 2–​3). Modernity can manifest in diverse forms across
cultures, and it is not imperative that it should have an adversarial relation
with tradition in all societies. There could be interpenetrations between
the values connected with tradition and modernity in specific societies,
situations that might prompt one to be suspicious of simplistic definitions
that consider ‘modern’ to be wholly and exclusively non-​traditional and
‘traditional’ as everything that is dated and obsolete. One might do well
to remember in this context that the social awakening in India associated
with such ‘traditional’ figures as the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, the poets affili-
ated to the medieval Bhakti movement, or saints of modern times like Sri
 Introduction 3
Narayana Guru can also be regarded as constituting important moments
in the evolution of distinctively Indian versions of modernity.
The present study, therefore, adopts the idea of a proliferation of mod-
ernities as a way of dealing with the concept’s nuanced, contested, and
contradictory character. While modernity’s leverage as a desirable term
for a mindset promoting liberal, enlightened, and scientific vision is in-
deed valuable, it is impossible to ignore its negative meaning as a rep-
resentation of the language of ‘tyranny’ associated with the discourse
of western rationality. This is where one feels compelled to talk about
an Indian context for modernity in which concepts such as ‘everyday’,
‘worldliness’, ‘sociality’, ‘secularism’, ‘bilingualism’, ‘polyphony’, ‘democ-
racy’, ‘resistance’, ‘nationalism’, and so on gain varied and vibrant reson-
ances. These and other terms are used in this study not in any narrowly
defined sense in which specific theorists might have used them in their
formulations, but are deployed in a larger, often non-​European, context
where one can interweave questions of history, culture, and politics with
literary texts. The idea of the historical and the social in this context can
be seen entering into a critical dialogue with concepts such as ‘ideology’,
‘hegemony’, ‘habitus’, and ‘social imaginary’ as well as with their more re-
cent variants appearing in the writings of such social thinkers as Michel
Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Romila Thapar, Partha
Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Charles Taylor, Edward Said, Arjun
Appadurai, and several others.
The concept of the ‘everyday’ that figures prominently in these pages,
though borrowed from the social theory of Henri Lefebvre, is used here
to describe bhasha literatures’ interest not only in the ordinary and the
non-​elite, but in forms and structures that would allow a sense of this-​
worldliness to be worked into the conception of literature. Though
the principles of art as handed down to Indian literary scholarship by
western aesthetics leave little room for an understanding of literature in
non-​esoteric terms, it is art’s turn to the social and the everyday that has
arguably allowed bhasha literatures to weave new forms of critical con-
sciousness into the experience of literature at various stages of the evo-
lution of modernity in India. It is in this sense that the everyday signals
the advent of a new epistemology concerned with the representation of
immanent objects rather than of a transcendent reality, and implies the
emergence of a new aesthetic that is geared to a radical understanding of
4 Under the Bhasha Gaze
culture. Lefebvre makes a distinction between ‘everyday’ and ‘daily life’,
and alludes, echoing in some sense Baudelaire’s definition of the ‘modern’,
to the transience and impermanence of the mundane and the common-
place. The everyday, as he sees it, is what is excluded from philosophy, and
it is this exclusion that accounts for its departure from elite responses and
forms of thought, including art and literature of the esoteric kind. This is
what makes modernity’s relation with high art and elite literature a matter
of concern in considerations of the sociology of writing. Also, while the
everyday represents the quotidian at the temporal level, it can also get
spatialized in artworks and literary pieces to include the minor and the
marginalized. Art and literature in the past revelled in epic and philo-
sophical themes expressed in a grand, secure, and self-​assured language,
but the advent of modernity in the alternative sense cited here appeared
to pose severe threats to this security and self-​assurance.
The theoretically sensitive cultural deliberation that the book repre-
sents cannot be divorced from the postcolonial and comparative reading
of texts and trends from diverse Indian bhashas being carried out by
countless scholars in Indian languages today. In that sense, the book may
also be regarded as an attempt at formulating a new critical paradigm
for the study of Indian literature from a comparative and interliterary
perspective. The repeated references made herein to the bilingualism
and multilingualism inherent to the Indian literary ethos would per-
haps require further comment. Though one might differ on the precise
ways in which the presence of multilingualism in the literary imagin-
ation was theorized in ancient days, no one would dare to contest, in the
face of historical evidence unearthed from both literary and non-​literary
sources, that exchanges between languages and literatures in India in the
past were considerable. Such exchanges indeed went beyond instances
of women and the working-​class speaking Prakrit in ancient Sanskrit
drama, or of the manifestations of linguistic hybridity in medieval and
early modern South Indian literatures, especially Malayalam literature,
whose Manipravalam traditions are being subjected to fresh critical scru-
tiny by cultural studies scholars today. It seems to have been natural for
an Indian text in the past to move from one language to another in the
form of what we today broadly describe as ‘translation’, but which circu-
lated through narrative reconstructions realized, sometimes in the name
of literature, but more often in the name of devotional songs, oral tales,
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 Introduction 5
moral fables, and hagiographies. This certainly was a question that Indian
scholars such as Buddhadev Bose, Sisir Kumar Das, Sujit Mukherjee,
A.K. Ramanujan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Namvar
Singh, and Ayyappa Paniker who did pioneering work in comparative lit-
erature in the past were serious about, but who, in the absence of material
evidence from individual languages, apparently could not make much
headway in their efforts. The situation, to be sure, has improved in re-
cent days, primarily because of the significant work that is being done in
several bhashas today, not by literary scholars alone, but by historians,
social scientists, folklorists, and cultural studies specialists as well. In the
light of the new developments, one might feel compelled to reimagine the
literary landscape of premodern and modern India as a dynamic terrain
marked by interliterary exchanges and the circulation of texts and ideas
across cultures. One might also be persuaded to consider the polyphonic
culture associated with the Indian creative mind as an integral character-
istic of Indian modernity.
No exaggerated significance needs to be read into the use of the word
bhasha in the title or in the text. It is significant to the extent that bhasha,
its root sense of expressive lucidity apart, is the common word for ‘speech’
or ‘a regional dialect’ in most Indian languages, especially when used in
opposition to the hegemonic language of Sanskrit. Sometimes the term
is used as an affix to indicate the translation in the regional language of
a well-​known text in Sanskrit as, for example, in Bhasha Kautaliyam, the
twelfth-​century Malayalam rewriting of Kautilya’s Arthasasthra. In pre-
modern times, when the word appears prefixed or suffixed to the title of
a literary work, it invariably means a non-​Sanskritic work as in Bhasha
Bhushan, the seventeenth century Hindi treatise on poetics by Jaswant
Singh, Gita-​govinda Bhasha, the seventeenth-​century Maithili trans-
lation of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, or Bhasha Naishadham Champu,
the eighteenth-​century Malayalam retelling of the story of Nala by
Mazhamangalath Nampoothiri. The word indeed is of Sanskrit origin,
though its anti-​hegemonic thrust in the Indian linguistic context con-
fers on it a degree of political power. There are a few more implications
that the word has gained from its historically evolving semantic environ-
ment that might further deepen its political potential. One of these is that
the word is sometimes used in opposition to chandah or a Vedic verse,
and in that sense, enjoys a lowly status in the hierarchically organized
6 Under the Bhasha Gaze
order of linguistic practice in past societies. It is possible that the inferior
status of bhasha in relation to Sanskrit as a language is an extension of
this. Added to this is the fact that the corresponding word for bhasha that
the colonial officers used in the imperial days was ‘vernacular’, a word
that originally signified a Latinate dialect spoken by domestic slaves in
ancient Roman provinces. In the past, bhashas often implied languages
used by the common people both for day-​to-​day communication and
for the oral rendering of tales and narratives in a multilingual ambience,
for which the dominant languages of Sanskrit, and later, English, had
remained unavailable. Bhasha can also signify the possibility of inter-
pretive plurality, especially in the expression bhashya, where it suggests
a ‘vernacular’ reading of a master text in Sanskrit. Perhaps it was the pol-
itical significance that the word acquired from these and other aspects
of its semantic context that prompted Indian scholars critical of the he-
gemony of Sanskrit to use the word bhasha with reference to the litera-
ture written in the regional languages. ‘With such happenings a profound
egalitarian impulse entered the hegemonic structure of Indian society’,
says Ananthamurthy, one of the earliest to use the word in this sense
(2014: 81). It is the subaltern and resistance potential implied by the term
bhasha that this book seeks to draw upon in talking about bhasha litera-
ture and the bhasha gaze.
The perspective outlined here should certainly provide a new critical
angle to the scholar engaged in the study of the interaction between lan-
guage, history, identity, power, subjectivity, culture, genre, gender, region,
nation, tradition, fantasy, and imagination—​elements that contribute to-
wards the making of the ideology of a people. Questions pertaining to
the social, the marginal, the literary, the colonial, and the postcolonial,
when deployed in the specific context of the construction and evolution
of literary cultures in Indian bhashas will also be viewed differently in
the altered environment. Inasmuch as the matter impinges on the im-
aginary constitution of the Indian nation with its inevitable entangle-
ments with the larger, international world, this is not merely a literary
question, but is one that is deeply political in import. It is this import that
scholars like A.K. Ramanujan, Amiya Dev, Bhalchandra Nemade, Ngugi
wa Thiong’O, Ganesh Devy, and others recognize when they choose to
talk critically about the border-​crossing function of literature, whether
the concept debated is Indian literature or world literature. The kind of
 Introduction 7
aesthetic abstraction that accompanies the iconization and canonization
of literary texts, in this context, perhaps cannot be looked upon as the
norm in Indian literature. Though such abstractions and iconizations
might suit the tyrannical purposes of colonial modernity, what manifests
in Indian bhasha literatures of the modern period, enriched as they are
with the culture of polyphony as well as the architecture of the social and
the everyday, is a drift away from aesthetic abstraction towards a more
concrete and politically significant articulation of experience.
It is as an expression of the understanding of the literary process
described above that the present book has been conceived and de-
signed. Though the chapters that constitute the study have their
origin as independent essays written over the past decade, they are
held together in the present volume by the subtle political connec-
tion mentioned above. All the chapters have been reworked thor-
oughly for the present publication, so that their originals exist only
as spectral presences in them. The book itself is divided into three
sections, the first two consisting of seven chapters and the third of
six chapters: Section I: Historicizing Bhasha Literature; Section
II: Border-​Crossing Bhasha Literature; and Section III: Six Ways of
Being Modern: Reading a Bhasha Canon.
The key concepts around which the discussion in the book turns have
been broached and elaborated in the chapters forming Section I. The ar-
guments here seek to historicize bhasha literatures, and are set against a
broad canvas. The section establishes the book’s general perspective on
Indian literature and inquires into the various ways in which bhasha lit-
eratures engaged with modernity both as a concept and as an aspect of
reality during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The deliberations
carried out, however, are not exclusively theoretical, because what the
chapters in this section attempt to do in essence is throw open the con-
ceptual world, before letting it fuse gently with the larger literary cosmos
of Indian bhashas. Specimens from Indian literature come alive in these
chapters against the dynamic background of a world of cultural inter-
action where concepts like the everyday, the social imaginary, the her-
metic aesthetic, translation, decolonization, literary history, and so on
cease to be articulations of pure theory with no connection with lived
and imagined reality. Thus in the first three chapters titled ‘Modernity
and Indian Literature’, ‘The Everyday as Modernity’, and ‘Print Capitalism
8 Under the Bhasha Gaze
and Modernity’, the bhasha-​centred resonances associated with specific
concepts are illustrated with copious examples from Indian literatures,
especially from the Malayalam missionary literature of the nineteenth
century, as well as from writings and translations from Malayalam and
Indian English. Chapters 1 and 2 try to make sense of Indian modernity
by scrutinizing the signals of everydayness animating the specimens of
bhasha writing and by analysing the spirit of pluralism and secularism
that they are imbued with. Chapter 3 takes up the question of the evolu-
tion of printed prose as a medium of creative communication in Indian
languages in the nineteenth century which, even as it can be interpreted
as a process marking the passage from the traditional to the modern,
can also be construed as indicating the advent of a logic that disregards
the emotional make-​up of the colonized subject. Chapter 4, titled ‘The
Literary Process and the Social Imaginary’ critically examines the evolu-
tion of twentieth-​century Malayalam poetry as a prototype of the history
of modern Indian literature. The chapter reveals that the successive stages
of nationalist-​progressive writing, modernist writing, and postmodernist
writing, which are stereotypically represented as following one after the
other in literary history are to be viewed in fact as expressions of contests
and contradictions within the social imaginary surrounding the Indian
literary mind. Though literary history in a narrowly defined sense cannot
be considered the main focus of attention in these four chapters, their
implication in the debates on the literary evolution of India can hardly
be overlooked. Questions concerning literary history loom large in the
remaining chapters of the section too. The principles underlying transla-
tion in Indian literary history are debated in all their inherent complexity
in Chapters 5 and 6, titled, respectively, ‘Translation and Literary History’
and ‘Decolonizing Translation’. These two chapters chart the epistemo-
logical connection between modernity and translation. Inasmuch as
translation is understood as a matter concerning truth, the two chapters
examine how re-​writing truth in diverse ways has been of prime concern
to literary traditions in bhashas. There certainly is the dominant view that
the Indian novels and prose translations of the nineteenth century were
merely translating western modernity into the language of the colonized.
On the other hand, one might also look upon these specimens as con-
tinuing the practices and traditions of literary re-​writing that were strong
in several Indian languages from the days of antiquity. These and other
 Introduction 9
reflections on the dynamics of translation directed at an expansion of
the universe of literary experience might also warrant a rethinking of the
idea of world literature, which is carried out in Chapter 7, titled ‘Bhasha
Writing as World Literature’.
Section II examines Indian literature from a comparativist per-
spective. The chapters forming this section are text-​and-​author-​based
readings rather than concept-​based analyses, and they discuss the is-
sues raised in the earlier section from a more closely focused, albeit
pan-​Indian, perspective. The section opens with Chapter 8, ‘Towards a
Comparative Indian Literature’, which initiates a discussion of the gen-
eral problems connected with reading bhasha literatures in comparison.
The chapter examines the radical ways in which the idea of comparative
literature has been rethought in recent days to incorporate into it the les-
sons of the cultural turn that of late has overtaken literary studies. The
approach certainly is important for the study of Indian literature with
its ambivalent attitude to colonial modernity and its inbuilt polyphonic
dynamic. The finer details of this are explored in the subsequent chap-
ters. Chapters 9, ‘Realism in the Bhasha Novel: The Case of Paraja’, and
Chapter 10, ‘Modernity and Kesari’s Ambivalences’ dealing, respect-
ively, with Gopinath Mohanty’s pre-​Independence Odia novel Paraja
and Malayalam scholar Kesari Balakrishna Pillai’s critical essays of the
same period, are particularly significant in this regard, for the reason
that they both illustrate the schism and divide in the modern Indian
psyche through their ambivalent attitudes to colonial modernity. The
ambivalence is evident in the writers’ attitude to progress and their vi-
sion, of the future in the case of Mohanty and of the present in the case
of Kesari. Mohanty repudiates the Progressive Writers’ Association’s
official interpretation of progress, while Kesari endorses it through his
acquiescence in the idea of modernity-​as-​the-​present. Both writers in
this sense throw light on the divide in the idea of modernity. Versions
of the divide continue to persist in the post-​Independence Indian mind,
as is demonstrated by the discussion in Chapter 11, titled ‘Region and
Nation in Bhasha Poetry’ that follows. The chapter provides an analysis
of the conflicted relationship between the nation and the region as it ap-
pears in selected bhasha poems from the languages of the Northeast as
well as from Bengali, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam. Though modernity’s
schism is what surfaces as the rift between the local and the national in
10 Under the Bhasha Gaze
the poems reviewed in this chapter, the discussion also demonstrates
that the democratic and egalitarian spirit that underlies bhasha litera-
tures is strong enough to thwart attempts at cultural tyranny by the ad-
vocates of hyper-​nationalism. Chapter 12, titled ‘The Bilingual Everyday
in Bhasha Literature’, examines the issue of bilingualism in relation to
Indian literatures as they attempt to articulate questions concerning the
everyday. The chapter has a special focus on Indian English writing, as
it is the literature written in the English language that often raises the
question of bilingualism as a point of debate. This chapter also deals in
a sense with the schism discussed, as crucial to the debate carried out
here is the identification of a maimed language that is directly con-
nected to English’s emotional aloofness from Indian bhashas. The
bhashas are quite fortunate in this respect because of the innately multi-
lingual contexts in which they thrive. They enrich each other by a mu-
tual interanimation of the rhythms and cadences of individual bhashas.
Chapter 13, titled ‘Modernity and Literary Historiography’, is an attempt
to explore the possibilities of conceiving a critical literary historiography
that would stay clear of the colonial cultural baggage that trammels
available models of non-​western literary historiography. Chapter 14, ‘A
Latin American Moment in Indian Fiction’, again, is an examination of
selected works from Indian literature read in comparison with a selec-
tion of Latin American writing. The method of reading texts in com-
parison adopted in this chapter indeed has been the main burden of the
discussions carried out in Section II as a whole.
The chapters in Section III are attempts at revisiting a bhasha canon,
which in the present instance happens to be the Malayalam literary canon
of the twentieth century. Six authors are examined in this section, each
representing a seminal aspect of Indian modernity that has not been dis-
cussed in detail in the previous sections. The authors discussed are M.T.
Vasudevan Nair, S.K. Pottekkat, O.V. Vijayan, Rajelakshmy, Ayyappa
Paniker, and Madhavikkutty/​Kamala Das, all canonical figures, whose
works exemplify the strengths and weaknesses as well as the conflicts and
contradictions that are identified as markers of modern Indian litera-
ture. Each chapter, even as it enumerates the salient characteristics of an
author’s output that might persuade one to place him/​her in what can be
described the ‘modern’ tradition in the language, also aims at a compre-
hensive assessment of the writer as a bhasha artist. The Epilogue, a kind
 Introduction 11
of coda to the volume, is a two-​pronged reminder to the reader: a fairly
sober reminder to the general reader of the fact that no ‘literary’ question
can stay purely literary forever and, more particularly, a somewhat grim
reminder specifically to the Indian reader of the troubled modern times
in which she lives. The moral that one might draw from the Epilogue is
clear: perhaps the calm confidence regarding the almost absolute impos-
sibility of the emergence of linguistic fascism in the multilingual Indian
context might appear to be illusory, given the fact of the more direct
threat that the idea of Indian modernity is facing at the cultural–​political
level today.
 1
Modernity and Indian Literature

Modernity is a complex concept that subsumes within itself a number of

conflicting and contradictory ideas. At a preliminary level, it signifies the
condition of being new and radically up-​to-​date, making one feel aloof in
time from one’s past. Defined historically and somewhat narrowly, it is a
term that refers to diverse aspects of the physical and mental architecture
of the new world that emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century,
and then spread to the rest of the world in subsequent centuries. In this
sense, the term would cover both the technological developments of the
period and the advances in knowledge and worldview made by society,
and would imply an individual mindset that promotes the positive values
of humanism, liberalism, enlightenment, scientificity, and secularism.
The rise of urban and industrial culture, expansion of capitalism and co-
lonialism, proliferation of the human sciences, and the evolution of bur-
eaucracy would also be treated as part of the development of modernity.
As a corollary to all this, the term has also acquired a mildly negative
connotation as suggesting the language of ‘tyranny’ connected with the
western discourse of rationality. Its association with temporal conscious-
ness further alludes to its distance from tradition, generally counted as
its opposite. Tradition and modernity, however, cannot be regarded as
absolute and incompatible ideas that exclude each other, and it is this
interconnection that makes modernity a complex phenomenon. As was
pointed out in the Introduction, there is a clear interdependence of the
values connected with tradition and modernity in concrete situations,
prompting one to be suspicious of naive definitions that consider the
‘modern’ as wholly and exclusively non-​traditional and the ‘traditional’ as
everything that is obsolete and unmodern. One can be modern without
being non-​traditional, an idea that is being increasingly pursued in dis-
cussions of non-​western, indigenous, and alternative versions of mod-
ernity. There is a good deal of published scholarship on this question in

Under the Bhasha Gaze. PP Raveendran, Oxford University Press. © PP Raveendran 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192871558.003.0002
16 Under the Bhasha Gaze
circulation today, with reference especially to history and literature (e.g.,
Chatterjee 1997; Eisenstadt 2000; Chakrabarty 2001; Mohanty 2011).
Though the Europeanizing impulse underlying the colonial mod-
ernity project has been the focus of attention in debates on modernity,
one must be sensitive to the presence of premodern, non-​European tra-
ditions of radical social reform that can only be interpreted in terms of
the aforementioned alternative versions, whose tenets run counter to the
idea of a monolithic modernity project. No serious social theorist would
nowadays talk about ‘a singular modernity’, though the theorist of post-
modernity who used that phrase as the title of his work on modernity is
fully aware of the complexity of the issue (Jameson 2002). ‘Modernity
is a historical fact, but each culture has its own native modernity, a desi
modernity’, writes Bhalchandra Nemade (2009: 14). ‘To think through
the possibilities of refusing euro-​modernity’, according to Lawrence
Grossberg, has become a primary concern of much of the non-​European
world today (2012: 73). Making his case for a precolonial bhasha mod-
ernity without actually naming it so, G.N. Devy suggests, choosing his
words cautiously and quoting critic R.B. Patankar, that ‘India might have
brought itself to the threshold of modernity even without the British im-
pact’ (1992: 56). Most alternative theories are capable of unsettling the
central principles undergirding western modernity, whose discourse is
being critically scrutinized for emblems that invoke its implication in
the imperialist ideology. Scholars are also becoming increasingly aware
of Europe’s continuing efforts at appropriating historiography in a glo-
balized environment where, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, Europe has
for long been geographically ‘provincialized’ by history (Chakrabarty
2001: 3). Even models of ‘rational’ language, of the finest order, can be
shown to have existed in the non-​European world. An example is that of
the fourteenth–​fifteenth century Malayalam mathematician Jyeshtadeva,
whose Yuktibhasha (Rational Language) is today regarded as ‘the first
book of calculus in the world’ (Gurukkal 2019: 95). In this context, the
ideas of ‘reason’, ‘enlightenment’, and ‘renaissance’, sometimes proffered
as the distinguishing characteristics of western modernity, may acquire
new resonances in relation to the social trends in non-​European cultures
as, for example, in relation to the cultural awakening in India at the time
of the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, Basavanna, or Tukaram.
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 Modernity and Indian Literature 17
What this points to is the difficulty in treating modernity as an idea
exclusively connected with the ‘modernization’ efforts initiated by the co-
lonial forces. However, we should not also ignore the hegemonic form
of modernity that exerted tremendous influence on the constitution of
the idea of Indian literature. The Euro-​centric sense in which the term
has generally been used in scholarly discussions till recently also cannot
be overlooked. Because of the ‘universalizing’ tendency associated with
dominant versions of modernity, we see an open contradiction, an in-
ternal divide develops within the concept when we propose an Indian
version of it.1 The hegemonic version would not, theoretically at least,
allow for other roads to modernity, other than what has been prescribed
by the dominant European form, and any deviation from this would ap-
pear to be a methodological flaw. Hence the divide in the conception of
modernity, which appears as a schism between a few binaries—​between
the global and the national, the national and the regional, the abstract
and the concrete, the secular and the non-​secular, the eternal and the
everyday, and the elite and the popular. Perhaps the schism itself is a
primary characteristic of Indian modernity, suspended as it is between
a monolithically organized power and a heterogeneously distributed
agency. Indigenous ideas force themselves into Indian modernity
through this schism and serve as an effective agency, resisting the powers
of Euro-​centrism and colonial domination. Modernity in the European
context, after all, implies a social upheaval arising from a repudiation of
the past, whereas the multiple forms of Indian modernity, even as they
aim at a total overhauling of the culture by rejecting what is unhealthy
in the past, also attempt to reconstitute the self by recovering from the
past the memory of their struggles over history and cultural identity. As
Walter Benjamin said in a famous passage, retrieving the past historic-
ally would mean recapturing ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger’ (1973: 257). This is a difficult process, a process marked by ten-
sions and contradictions, and taking place, especially in the contem-
porary world situation, in a site that is shared by cultural agencies with

1 The position on modernity outlined here is developed from the arguments given in the

Introduction to my Texts, Histories, Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (Raveendran

2009a: 1–​12) and the essay ‘Modernity and Knowledge Production: Malayalam Thought
Processes in the Modern Period’, in Science, Literature and Aesthetics, (ed.) Amiya Dev
(Raveendran 2009b: 744–​767).
18 Under the Bhasha Gaze
diverse, even antagonistic, ideological, and economic interests. It is the
schism in modernity mentioned above that acts as a sort of buffer against
the pressure emanating from these tensions and antagonisms. One might
attempt to gauge the intensity of this schism as it narrows down in the
Indian context, particularly at the site where colonial modernity comes
into contact with literature and aesthetics.
There is ample reason for conceiving an Indian version of modernity
as a heterogeneous compendium of pluralistic cultural strands. One of
the pre-​eminent senses in which modernity as a concept has been under-
stood is as a secularizing process, where secularism carries with it the
suggestion of a belief in the worldliness of experience as opposed to the
hope for a transcendental resolution. The notion of this-​worldliness is
important in unravelling Indian modernity because of the pivotal role
that the decentred cluster of cultural symbols and images drawn from
diverse material constituents can play in a secular society’s imagination.
Where Indian modernity differs from its western counterpart, basically,
is in the way it maintains a critical relation with a pluralistic tradition of
values as an aspect of the modernity project itself. If the cultural tyranny
associated with western modernity appears somewhat impotent in the
Indian context, it is essentially because of the recognition of the country’s
inbuilt cultural pluralism, a characteristic that constitutes the modern
Indian nation as well as the social imaginary surrounding the Indian lit-
erary mind.
One will have to consider, along with the internal schism that is part
of the modernity project in India, the ‘dialectic’ of modernity that has
shaped the logic of its progress in the present-​day world (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2002). The operation of this dialectic has been very crucial
in the constitution of the modern Indian subject practising literature.
The important point to note here is that it is an already fractured sub-
ject that gains entry into the texts of Indian bhasha literatures. The con-
crete manifestations of this fracture are multiform, as indicated by the
powerful articulations of feminist, Dalit, folk, and tribal consciousness
in the bhasha literary scene today. Inasmuch as modernity in its vintage
form swore by a monolithic literary experience that was autonomous
and self-​validating, the emergence of Dalit, folk, and feminist expressive
forms that validated themselves with reference to ‘extra-​literary’ experi-
ences could be regarded as a manifestation of modernity’s dialectic that
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Title: Sunfire!

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72181]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1962

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUNFIRE! ***

 SUNFIRE!

By EDMOND HAMILTON

Illustrated by FINLAY

He was walking in the pine grove, with

the resinous smell of the trees in his
nostrils. Once he had met a smell
vaguely like it, far away from Earth.
Forget about that, a voice said in his
mind, but he would never forget.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Everything in the old house seemed just the same as it had been
before he went to space.
It was incredible, thought Hugh Kellard, standing in the front hall and
looking around the silent, sunlit rooms, how little it had changed. The
life was gone out of it now, all the people and voices and the comings
and goings when his grandfather still lived and he had visited here.
But that had been long ago, and he was amazed that so much
remained still untouched.
"Like travelling into the past," thought Kellard, "to come back to this
part of Earth."
He was tired, in body and mind and nerve, and he stood for a while,
just staring. The agent who cared for the old place had let him in and
gone away, and there was not a sound in the house. He walked into
the living-room where his grandfather's desk still stood beneath a
window, and looked out. The window faced northward, along the
California coastal cliffs that run north along Morro Bay to Big Sur. The
Pacific foamed and surged against the huge broken stones beneath
the cliffs, and the hills, somber now with a tinge of autumn,
shouldered massively up toward the east from the cliff road. It all
looked as lonely as ever, no other houses in sight but this gray,
weatherbeaten house that had faced the sea-wind and the sea-fog for
over a hundred years.
Kellard walked back along the hall. On its walls still hung the ornately
framed family photographs which his grandfather had stubbornly kept
in place. His great-grandfather, and his great-aunt something, and all
the rest of them, on back into the shadows. They were all there, they
had not been touched, nothing in the house had been touched, just
as his grandfather's will had enjoined. Keep the old house, he had
said. Some of the family will be back some day.
The old man had been right, he thought. One of the family had come
back at last, one who had roamed farther than almost anybody on
Earth.
"But that's all done with," he told himself. "Here I am, and here I stay.
I'm through with space."

He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and

air. The furniture was faded and old-fashioned, but the place was not
dusty, the agent had seen that it was kept in shape. Kellard picked
one of the big upstairs bedrooms for himself, and brought in the
blankets and cartons and luggage from the car. He went into the
utility room and turned on the power-unit, remembering as he did so
how his grandfather had disliked and distrusted the unit, how he had
refused to have one until the electric wires were all gone and there
was no other way to get power. He checked the stove and freezer,
shoved his cartons of food into the latter, and then looked around and
wondered what to do next.
Standing in the silent house, he wondered suddenly if he had been
foolish to quit everything and come back to Earth and this old place?
No, he thought heavily. Mercury ended it for me. I made my decision
and that is that. Forget it.
He strode abruptly out of the house and started walking. And after a
little while the dark weight in his mind, the somber knowledge, faded
and receded in the new-found, old-remembered interest of the things
about him.
His way took him across the road, past the shabby barns and up
sloping pastures where once his grandfather had kept the fine horses
he bred. Then he was in among the pines, climbing more steeply, with
the resinous smell of the trees strong in his nostrils. That smell he
had never forgotten, and once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far
away from Earth—
Forget all that, Kellard.
The trees took him in and he walked through a dapple of sun and
shadows. A deer slipped away through the pines ahead of him, and
quail burst up from almost under his feet. He remembered a grove of
bigger pines farther up the slope, and an old man and a boy walking
up to them. How long ago was that? He had been fifteen—and he
was thirty-two now. Seventeen years. Still, he thought he could find
the place.
He found it. The big pines were still there, for people did not use
wood much any more. The rough dark giants stood at dignified
intervals from each other, and he sat down with his back against the
massive trunk of the biggest.
Funny, he thought. When I was a boy sitting here dreaming about the
future and what I was going to do, I never once imagined that some
things would stay much the same. The whole world would somehow
be miraculously transformed—but it wasn't. This tree was here when
men first reached the Moon, and Mars, and Venus and the rest, but it
didn't know about that, it didn't change because of it.

Kellard sat for a long time, still wrapped in a gray weariness, his
emotions in a numb trance. He sat listening to the distant, uneasy
murmur of the sea, until the sunset light shafting through the trees
dazzled his eyes, and then he got up and went back down to the
house. He heated food, ate it, and then went out to the porch in front
of the house and sat watching the sun sink toward the vast golden
sheet of the Pacific. He thought of the little dot close to the sun that
he could not see, the little world and the strange, terrible place upon it
where Morse and Binetti had died.
The telephone rang.
Kellard did not stir, and it rang and rang again.
Go ahead and ring your head off, he thought. You're not getting me
back. I told you. I've had it.
The ringing stopped. The sun sank and darkness came with the hosts
of wheeling stars, and there was no sound but the vast voices rolling
in from sea, as Kellard sat staring and drinking.
He finally got up, as the fog started coming in. He moved with gravity,
feeling much better. He went in and turned on the lights, and then
looked at the faces that stared from the long row of framed
photographs.
He raised the bottle to them in a gesture of salutation.
"You see, Kellards, that your prodigal son—or great-grandson—has
come home again from space."
He gravely drank, and continued to stand looking along the faded
faces.
"You were lucky—you know that? Back in your time, there were
hopes, and dreams, and man's road would go on forever, from
triumph to triumph everlasting. But that road was a blind alley, all the
time, even if I'm the only one who knows it."
The faces looked back at him, unchanging, but he read reproach in
their steady gaze, their lined features.
"I'm sorry," said Kellard. "You had your own troubles, I know. I
apologize, Kellards. I am very tired and a little drunk, and I am going
to bed."

The next morning he was making coffee when there came a banging
of the old-fashioned knocker on the front door. A certain tightness
came into Kellard's face. He had expected them to send some one.
He had not expected the man who stood at the door. He was not in
Survey uniform, although he was the highest brass there was. He
was a big, slow-moving man with a heavy face and blue eyes that
seemed mild if you didn't know him.
"Well," said Kellard. And after a moment, "Come on in."
Halfrich came in. He sat down and looked interestedly around at the
old room and furniture.
"Nice," he murmured. Then he looked at Kellard and said, "All right,
let's have it. Why did you quit?"
Kellard shrugged. "It was all in my letter of resignation. I'm getting a
bit old and tired for Survey, I—"
"Bull," said Halfrich. "It was something about that crack-up on
Sunside, wasn't it?"
Kellard said slowly, "Yes. The deaths of Binetti and Morse, and the
after-effects of that shock, made me feel I didn't have it any more."
Halfrich looked at him. "You've had crack-ups before. You've seen
men die. You've had almost as many years in Survey as I have, and
you've taken as many jolts. You're lying, Kellard."
Kellard got up, and walked a few steps and swung around again.
"So I'm lying. I want out, and what difference does it make why?"
"It makes a difference," Halfrich said grimly. "I remember from away
back at Academy, even though you were two years after me. You
were the space-craziest cadet there was. You spouted the glories of
the conquest of space until we were all sick of it. You haven't
changed in all the years in Survey—until now. I want to know what
can change a man like that."
Kellard said nothing. He went to the window and looked out at the
long rollers coming endlessly in and crashing against the rocks.
"What did you see on Sunside, Kellard?"
He turned around sharply at that.
"What do you mean? What would there be to see there, but hot rocks
and volcanoes and a cross-section of hell generally? It's all in my
report."
Halfrich sat like a judge, and spoke like one pronouncing sentence.
"You saw something, you met something there. You covered by
tearing out the film of the automatic sweep-camera. Whatever it had
recorded, you didn't want us to see, did you?"
Kellard came toward him and spoke angrily and rapidly. "Do you
realize that we flamed out and crashed there? A crash like that can
do damage. It killed Binetti and mortally injured Morse, and smashed
the sweep-camera."
Halfrich nodded. "That's what we thought, at first. But the radar-
sweep had an automatic recorder too. It was something new. Binetti
knew about it, as communications officer, but I guess he hadn't told
you, or you'd have smashed it too. Its record shows something."

A cold feeling came over Kellard. He had thought that he had covered
everything, but he had calculated from insufficient data.
He kept his nerve. A radar record was not like a photograph, they
couldn't prove much from that, they certainly couldn't guess the truth
from it. They must not guess the truth.
He laughed mirthlessly. "A radar record made on Sunside isn't worth
the paper it's on. The storms of radiation there make radar practically
unreliable."
Halfrich was watching him keenly. "But not entirely. And over and
above the static and the fake bogies, the record shows quite clearly
that you went outside the ship after the crash, that you walked about
a thousand yards, and that you were approached by some things that
register vaguely but unmistakably."
He paused and then he asked, "Who—or what—did you meet there,
Kellard?"
Kellard was cold inside, but all the same he made a disgusted sound
that he hoped was convincing.
"Who would I meet on Sunside? Beautiful lightly-clad maidens? After
all, you know, it's only four hundred degrees Centigrade there, and
practically no atmosphere, and nothing much else but solar radiation
and hot rock and volcanoes. I tell you, the radar record is worthless."
Halfrich was studying him with that mild estimating look that Kellard
knew well, and didn't like at all. It was the look that came into
Halfrich's face when friendship didn't matter and the good of the
Survey did.
"You're still lying," he said. "You met or saw something there. And it
did something to you—something that made you resign. Something
that's taken all the life and eagerness out of you."
"Oh, hell, be reasonable!" said Kellard angrily. "You know no kind of
life can exist on Sunside. My mission was the second time even
Survey has landed there. Pavlik's mission, the first, didn't see
anything. Neither did I. Quit dreaming it up. Go back to Mojave and
your job, and leave me be."

Halfrich rose. "All right," he said. "I'll go back to the base. And you're
going with me."
"Oh, no," said Kellard. "I'm through, quit, resigned."
"Your resignation has not been accepted," Halfrich told him. "You're
still liable to Survey discipline. You'll obey orders just as you always
did, or you'll go up before a court-martial."
"So that's it," said Kellard.
Halfrich nodded. "That is it. I don't like to do this. You're an old friend.
But—"
"But the Survey comes first," Kellard said, between his teeth.
"The Survey," said Halfrich, "comes first. It has to. It's why we've got
stations on Venus and Mars and Ganymede, not to say the Moon. It's
why we'll someday be able to hit for deep space and the starworlds.
And when one of my best officers suddenly goes off the deep end
and won't say why, I'll damn well wring it out of him. Whatever you
found on Mercury doesn't belong to you, it belongs to us, and we'll
have it."
Kellard looked at him and started to say something and didn't, and
then turned his back on Halfrich and looked out the window at the
sea. In a low voice he said,
"Let it be, John. I'm telling you now, you'll be sorry if you don't."
There was no answer to that at all, and the silence was his answer.
He turned back around.
"All right, you have a rope around my neck. I'll go back to base with
you. I'll tell you not one thing more than here."
"In which case," Halfrich said, "we'll go on out to Sunside, and you'll
go right along with us."
A rage born of desperation came to Kellard. He had tried to spare
people this—Halfrich, the Survey, the whole human race. But they
would not let it be so. Damn them, he thought, if they must do this,
they have it coming to them.
"All right," he said flatly. "I'll get my jacket. I take it that you have a flier
waiting."

The fast flier, less than an hour later, whizzed down over the gaunt
mountains and across the desert, and the glitter and splendor of
Mojave Base sprang up to meet them. The tall ships shone like silver,
and something about them, something about the feel of the place,
made you think that this bit of desert did not belong to Earth at all but
was part of space, a way-station, the first way-station of all, to the
stars.
That, thought Kellard, was what he had thought when he had first
come here, years ago. And it had not been just a youngster's passing
enthusiasm, it had deepened and strengthened through all the years
of work and danger—until Sunside. And oh God, he thought, why did
I have to go there, at that place, at that moment. I could have lived
my whole life and done my work, all of us could have, without ever
dreaming the truth.
He knew now that he had no choice. He must go back to Sunside
with them. For even if he told them the truth, they would not believe,
they would insist on going to see for themselves. He would keep
silent, and that was all he could do now.
Four days later a Y-90 experimental cruiser, outfitted for space
research and with full anti-heater equipment, took off from Mojave.
Kellard had kept silent. And still silent he sat in his recoil-harness and
took the jolts, and heard Halfrich grunting beside him, and viciously
hoped that that he was not liking it.
Halfrich had brought along a consulting biophysicist, a keen-faced
man of middle age named Morgenson, who did not look as though he
was enjoying the mission either. But the three-man crew of the little Y-
90 were young men in their twenties. They spoke to Halfrich and to
Kellard as though they were heroes out of legend, for in the Survey
twelve to fifteen years of space-missions was an age.
It was only after they had gone a long way and a long time through
the sunwashed spaces that one of the three, Shay, the navigator,
ventured to put a question to Kellard.
"You were with the first mission to Ganymede, sir, weren't you?"
Kellard nodded. "Yes, I was."
"Wouldn't that have been something!" said Shay. "I mean, to be the
first."
"It was something," said Kellard.
"Maybe someday I——" Shay began, and broke off and then went on,
"I mean, if the star-drive is perfected as soon as some people say it
will be, I could maybe be one of the first ones out there? Sir?"
"You could be," said Kellard. "Someone's going to be first. The stars
are waiting. All we have to do is go out there and keep going, and the
stars will be ours, just like the planets here are, all ours, forever and
amen."
Shay looked at him puzzledly, and shuffled, and then went away.
Halfrich had been listening, and watching. He said, "Did you have to
slap the kid's face?"
Kellard shrugged. "What did I say? I was merely repeating what
everyone feels, these days. The glory of the conquest of space."
"I'd give a lot," Halfrich said, "to know what's riding you. We'll soon
reach Sunside and we'll find out, but I wish you'd tell me now."
"All right," said Kellard. "I'll tell you. I've been disinherited. That's
what's wrong with me."

He would say nothing more, nor did Halfrich ask him another
question, until the Y-90 was far in past the orbit of Venus and going
into its pattern of approach.
"I assume," said Halfrich, "that you bear none of us any personal ill-
will. If there is anything dangerous awaiting us, now would be the
time to tell us."
Kellard considered. "You're going to land, I suppose, at the same spot
where we crashed."
"Of course."
"Then land," said Kellard. "As far as I know, there is not a thing there
to harm you."
In the scanner, he watched Mercury swing slowly toward them, a tiny
crescent of white that was hard to see against the Sun. For here the
Sun was a monster thing, fringed with writhing flames, paling the
stars, drenching this whole area with radiation that already would
have killed them but for the ship's anti-heaters.
Kellard remembered that when he had come this way before, Binetti
had quoted something, a line from William Blake's poems, he had
said. "The desire of the moth for the star." And that was what we
were, he thought. Three little moths, going right into the furnace, and I
was the only one to get out of it, but now I'm going back.
The Y-90 went into its landing pattern. It skimmed over the dark side
of Mercury, the black cliffs and peaks and chasms that never saw the
Sun, and then light seemed to burst ragingly up from all the horizon
ahead of them, and they were over Sunside.
In old days this little world had been called "the moon of the Sun,"
and it looked like it, the same stark, lifeless rock plains and ridges
and cracks, the fang-like look of pinnacles in a place where no
atmosphere eroded anything. But the Moon was cold and still,
whereas Sunside seemed to throb with sullen hidden fires. Volcanoes
spewed ash and lava, and the infernal storm of radiation from
overhead made everything quiver in a shimmering haze. The
indicator board told them that the temperature of the outside hull was
climbing to four hundred as the Y-90 went down.
And the wide valley that haunted his dreams opened up ahead.
Across it the squat volcanic cones still dribbled ash and dust and it
was all just as it had been when he had last looked back from the
relief cruiser that had come from Venus Station to take him off. And
there gleamed bright on its floor the crumpled wreck in which Binetti
and then Morse had died.
Kellard's gaze flew to the place north of the wreck, the tumbled, odd-
shaped rocks. He felt his palms sweating. Maybe there would be
nothing. After all, could it all happen again?
They set down, and after the crashing rocket uproar, the steady throb
of the anti-heaters was an anti-climactic sound.
"You've got the armor ready?" Halfrich asked of Morgenson.
The biophysicist nodded nervously. "Three suits, with their anti-heater
equipment tested on and off all the way out."
"One suit stays here, for emergencies," Halfrich said. "Kellard and I
will go out, when there's something to go out for. First, we'll make
observations."

The recording telescope-cameras and the radar, Halfrich ordered

focused on the place of the odd-shaped rocks. And then, sitting there
on Sunside, they watched. They waited.
Nothing.
Kellard's hopes began to rise. He was right, he told himself, it couldn't
happen again.
"How long," he asked, "are we going to sit waiting for nothing
because a radar made a screwy record? If those anti-heaters quit for
five minutes, we're fried."
Halfrich looked at him bleakly. "I'll tell you how long. Till you tell the
truth, and we see the truth for ourselves. That's how long."
Kellard shrugged. "If that's the way you want it. I would tell you to go
to hell except that we're already there."
They watched and waited some more.
Morgenson said, on a rising note of excitement, "There's something
——"
Halfrich got to the 'scope fast. Kellard, looking through the scanner,
saw the geyser of flame that was beginning to pour up from the rocks.
It grew slowly, but steadily, in height.
"What is it?" Halfrich asked him.
"Can't you see for yourself?" said Kellard. "There's a blowhole out
there and it throws off burning gases from the interior. It did it twice
while I was waiting in the wreck."
Halfrich said, "It's in the same location where radar recorded you
before, with those other blips. There's something about this—We'll go
have a look."
"If you must," said Kellard. "You'll find it's just what I've said."
They got into the heat-armor. It was a clumsy outfit, for it had to have
room for an efficient anti-heater, and the long tube of the heat-
discharge was a nuisance. Kellard had spent days in one of these
suits, waiting for the relief ship after the crack-up, and he did not like
the feel of it at all.
Halfrich tested the radio and then said, "All right, Shay, lock us out
and stand by. Morgenson, you keep watching."
They stepped upon Sunside.
There beat down upon them such a storm of radiation, such cataracts
of heat and light, that instinctively they bowed their heads as before a
deluge. It took an effort of will to step forward through that tempest,
but Halfrich made it. They walked, slowly and heavily, and at first they
saw only the blackened rocks beneath their feet, and the little puddles
and rivulets of molten lead, and their own massive armored feet
plodding.
Then, as they went forward, they straightened against the impact.
Through the face-plate of his armor, dimmed by the many-layered
filters, Kellard saw the column of flame ahead. It was a hundred feet
high now, and growing higher, and though there was no air-borne
sound on this almost airless world, the sound of it came through the
rocks and the soles of their feet, a throbbing and roaring that quivered
through all their bodies.

They reached the tumbled rocks, and stopped. And now the fire-
fountain was so lofty that they had to lean back their heads to look at
its topmost crest. Some unthinkable diastole and systole of the fiery
planet was at work, and this periodic geyser of flame was its result.
The rocks shook and roared, and the fires raged higher, and Kellard
thought again, what devil is in the blood of our race that drives us to
places like this where we should not be?