Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 185

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Leela Arjunwadkar
Makaranda
Moreover, it is not unlikely that we Indians have started taking the attitude of man and nature as something different from each other since Western influences have started gathering around us. During the last 200 years in general and last 50 in particular, our life and attitudes have changed enormously. Our thinking patterns, attitudes, lifestyles have become more and more West-oriented-more specially with the thrust of industrialization, urbanization, and population explosion.
The Greek and Roman cultures were born and brought up within the ramparted cities of Athens and Rome. Indian culture, on the other hand, was born and nurtured on the lap of Mother Nature. And hence, nature always had an inseparable and vibrant share in the Indian ethos, though affluent citylife was not unknown. We have vivid descriptions of big cities humming with various activities, crowded with people from all directions and resounding with tenfold sounds. Even today several rites and austerities are centered around trees and creepers, birds and mountains and rivers. A tulsi plant is a must in every Indian home. Pilgrimages to holy places that are mostly situated in natural surroundings hold an attraction for an Indian. Anchorite life has always fascinated Indian mind. In fact scriptures ordain it as the third stage in the life of every Hindu.
The thought that there is a very intimate relationship between nature and man appeared in English literature as late as Wordsworth and Coleridge in the first generation and Keats, Shelley and Byron in the second. It is these poets that ushered in the era of Romanticism and in it there was a profound shift in sensibility. These poets had an altogether new intuition for the primal power of the wild landscape, the spiritual correspondence between man and nature. They displayed an immense sense of the Infinite and the Transcendental.
Prior to that, Greek thought held its sway. Europe, following the Greek thought, had always felt a great attraction for tragedy in literature, where the hero is always in conflict with his surroundings. A culture that fights with its environment creates tragedies, while a culture that has a harmonious relationship with its environment has a liking for comedies, or rather happy endings in a drama. Following this pattern of thought a new branch of literary