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NARRATIVES
195 “The artist and the devotee dwell here side by side and the passage from one to the other is easy. A great intellectual turns a real bhakta and speaks of a world where communion with Godhead is a fact of indubitable, vivid experience. The reader is overwhelmed by the simple expression of faith and does not
stop to question its authenticity."24 Srikumar Banerjee in his essay, "Dilip Kumar's Mystic Novels” noted:
"It is in its singular contemporaneous appropriateness that the rare merit of Dilip Kumar's book lies. He has revealed the mystery of the Divine presence in the familiar setting of Modern life and amidst the tortuous mental processes of the selfconscious modern man ...... Dilip Kumar has wonderfully recaptured the heart-beats of the past without producing its distended heart. Never has there been such a deft combination of trenchant logic with soaring faith, and never the inner history of spiritual sadhana with its conflicts and contradictions, been brought home so intimately to the rationalising spirit of the age. 25
On the whole, it can be seen that Miracles Do Still Happen is different from Roy's general work. It illustrates his love of the wonderful and the incredible. In fact, all along it attracted him more. He never said it explicitly, that miracles are the part of spirituality, but he always expected them. This shows a streak of childishness in his character, you may say, a love of magic and fairy tales. In terms of Indian Poetics, you may say, there is in this novel the Adbhut Ras in plenty. We have little reason to contradict a sincere person like Dilip Roy when he says that he is simply reporting what he saw, and he is not concocting tales. But the iniracles strain our credibility and we should rather suspend our judgement about their veracity. Aristotle's advice is that the content of literature should be probable and necessary. In loose works of the sort Dilip Roy is writing, we cannot expect the observance of the law of necessity, for there is hardly anything like artistic plot or pattern. But an enlightened reader would want that the law of probability should be followed, and see great sense in the Aristotelian adage that likely impossibility is preferable to improbable possibility. Dilip Roy disregards this advice. In fact, he has little reason to think of it when he knows that he is freely, in a rambling style, expressing himself and narrating what he saw, and not writing what we call literature. It is we who discover some elements of literature in his writing and expect more of them from him. What we find is life and superlife and want of art in the sense of careful weaving and designing. Yet, in our response, we cannot but note that the miraculous is rather irksome to us. We do not doubt the integrity of the author, but we also know that he is likely to see
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