How did I get interested in literature? It needs some digging into memory and going back to the first—or probably among the first—books I started to read.
Coming from a provincial town, books were a rare thing because many people at home read only newspapers or journals. In high school, the non-detailed texts for English were regularly read aloud in class by my teachers, and sometimes enacted too.
We had some wonderful texts during those five years: Around the World in Eighty Days, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Captain Blood, The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Prisoner of Zenda. Somebody who designed the curriculum had packed the syllabus with texts abounding in adventure, thrill and action.
There were also short stories as part of the detailed texts, including Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, Neville Cardus’s Cricket, and stories by other eminent writers.
Although the non-detailed texts were abridged or condensed, these stories of action and adventure, along with mysterious tales such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, forged in me an attachment to reading a good story—which is perhaps what literature is all about at one level.
In the Intermediate classes, the obvious choice for me was Advanced English. It unfolded many more interesting books and plays, including The Little Man by John Galsworthy, about universal brotherhood, and a play called The Man in the Bowler Hat, a director’s spoof about a group of characters enacting his play. Many years later, my students enacted this play for a school anniversary.
More serious literature was not far away: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Walter Scott, Harper Lee, Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Daniel Defoe and many others.
My engagement with these great writers has been a riveting experience.
The introduction to literature is perhaps the most important part, and we had great teachers who could bring a text to life with their passion and dedication to the subject.
Literature is a sort of ambrosial well—excuse the hyperbole—and can keep giving entertainment, spirit and inspiration.