INDIC SENSIBILITIES IN T.S.ELIOT
K. SUNDARARAMAN

   This paper proposes to study the impact of Indic sensibilities on T.S.Eliot, a poet, playwright and critic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

   India was always open to invaders of both thought and domain. As an open casket full of wisdom, both secular and spiritual, she had never exercised restraint in giving. It was not the question of how much she had given them but how much they had taken.

   Since the time of Macedonian invasion, ideas began to flow from India along with her silk and spices. The cardinal concepts of Vedanta can be discovered in Plato, Pythogoras and the neo-platonists.

   l8th century A.D. was the momentous period in the Orient-Occident encounter. Serious and substantial Indological study started with Sir William Jones (1746-94), the first President of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, who is considered the father of English Oriental study. He was followed by Sir Charles Wilkins (1750-1833), H.T.Colebrook and others. They translated and interpreted the Vedas, the Upanishads, The Bagavadgita, The Vishnu Purana, The Hitopadesa etc., to the west.

   Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833) did his pioneering work in the study of comparative religions besides his translations of several principal Indian classics.

   The contributions of the German Orientalists like Schelegal, Schopenhauer and Paul Deussen are none the less.

   The English Romanticists of the l8th century Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth were attracted to Indic thoughts.

   The Indian thoughts later crossed the Atlantic and reached the shores of America in the l8th century. The great exponents of Indic thoughts in American Transcendentalism were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Alcott.

   With such a rich legacy was born T.S. Eliot in America in the year 1888 and educated in Harvard. Later he migrated to England in search of his vocation as a poet and playwright. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali in Hatvard under Irving Babbitt, Charles Larunan and James Wood. He was fascinated by Deusen's Sixty Upanishads of the Vedas and James Wood's translations of Yogasutras of Patanjali. He considered the Bhagavadgita along with The Divine Comedy as the great philosophical poet of the world. Eliot has made profuse use of Vedantic concepts of temporal, time, timeless and eternity; cyclic nature of Creation, flux and illusion, asceticism, self-denial and detachment; stillness and withdrawal etc., in his poems The Waste Land, Choruses from 'The Rock', Four Quartets and in his verse-play The Murder in the Cathedral. These Vedantic concepts elevated the quality of his poetry with a transcendental touch and philosophic poise.

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