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228
This is exactly the description of Dilip Roy's style. Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, however, eloquently justifies Roy's style thus:
A LOVER OF LIGHT AMONG LUMINARIES: Dilip Kumar Roy power. You try to replace quality by quantity, and forget that all quantities raised to an infinite power are the same."7
2.
You cannot say that Dr. Banerjee is wrong, and you have to admit that in Roy's excesses there is a kind of beauty we rarely encounter in the Indian English prose.
Notes:
3.
"A torrent of emotions, a tempest of phrases, tornado of images. and metaphors, a sweeping, impetuous energy of utterance can. alone drive home the shaft of the spiritual faith into the recalcitrant heart insulated against the mystery of Divinity. If, as Keats said, poetry should surprise by a fine excess, the spiritual idea should convince by a more absolute intoxication, a richer and rarer frenzy of mood. So it is out of a singularly appropriate sense of strategy that Dilip Kumar has pitched his key so high and laid on his colours so thick to convey the mystic thrill to unregenerate ears. Conard, a Pole naturalised in English literature, employed a style too colourful, emphatic and overwrought to transmit the romance of alien, far-away tropical seas. Dilip Kumar has used English somewhat with the same kind of over-laboured intensity to communicate the far more thrilling romance of the Divine mystery as visualised by Hindu religious masters. His supreme justification lies in his effectiveness, in the remarkable success with which he has carried out his crusading mission. The scripture, as interpreted by him, carries its own ineffable appeal to his Western readers as a memorable monument of the unfathomable sublimity and sheer loveliness of the Hindu conception of God."8
Refer to 'Appendix A', p. 236 of this book.
David Diaches, Critical Approaches to Literature (1956; rpt. London: Longmans, 1965), p.48. According to Longinus, (1) impressiveness of thought and (2) vehemence of emotion are the qualities of a good writer as a man, and (1) ability to handle "figures", (2) nobility of diction, and (3) the ability to put the whole composition together so as to produce dignity and elevation, are the artistic skills he is required to cultivate.
Refer to 'Appendix A', p. 234 of this book.
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