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SAMBODHI
twentieth century K. M. Munshi shared Narmada's views. However, Munshi is less sympathetic. He dubs Akho as a poet who preached the gospel of other worldliness, simply because he was steaped in the tradition of Vedānta, which, according to Munshi, considered the world as an illusion.27
In fact, Akho's Vedānta was not a system of particular philosophy or thought. He opposed all systems of thought which conditioned the mind. He even did not want to be conditioned by the very structure of the language in which he expressed his views. In one of his chappās he comments, "Language is simply a network of the fifty two letters of the alphabet, and the real substance lies in the fifty-third thing; where language ends, substance begins.28 Thus, as a true econoclast he does not want to entertain any image or thought which may condition his direct perception of concreate reality. This would be as good as an intelletual death for one who carries certain image of man of his miliew. Obviously intelletuals like K. M. Munshi would not like to venture into this realism. It is interesting to compare Akho's approach with a French philosopher, Michel Foucault. While commenting on the limitations of the concept of 'modern man' as an individual he wrote : "From within language experienced and traversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their furthest point, what emerges is that man has come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where throught is extinguished, where the premise of the origin interminably recedes."29
Thus for Akho Vedānta was not an intellecual occuption. Even when he used certain Vedāntic terms, which were also used by others, he asserted that he did not imitate any body.30 He wanted to see and feel life afresh. Akho stared at life squarely in its concretion and discovered the wrong pursuits being made by his society. This brought a radical change in his priorities. K. M. Munshi and many other scholars who view pre-modern society as a society of make-believe, living in superstition and lacking individual freedom and equality, should for a moment suspend their image of a modern man as an individual, and try to understand sympathetically the structure of social relationship which also allows a rebel like Akho to express his views. With his altered priorities Akho sought the freedom which his society could not give. On the contrary, his urban society tried to enslave him through its competitive worldly ways. Akho refused to be obliged. He lived in that very society, but he lived like a bird on its flight, whose shadow though fell on the net (of te society), was not caught in it. 31.
We do not have any information about how Akho's chappās were received by his society. He does not seem to have been ostracized by the society despite his scathing remarks against the religious priests. On the contrary he seems to have touched the right cord of the society (which otherwise continued its traditional forms of religious and social relatioship). If it were not so his chappas would not have enjoyed such immense popularity among the masses till today, as the social anomalies which Akho tried to expose were neither new to his society nor are they irrelevant to us.
