Rantings of an English Major

A few days back, as I was appeasing a deranged friend of mine while he thought the equations of physics were going to eat him up, and sharing my own agony of the upcoming finals, he snidely remarked, “What are you getting worried about? You’re a student of English Honours. All you guys have to do is study a few poems. That’s so easy!” Knowing better than to argue with a silly, little boy’s ignorance, I laughed and said, “Yes, it’s easy indeed.”

Of course it’s easy. Being a student of English Literature is the easiest thing in the world.

Delving into Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Inferno and Odyssey only to find that they are either 12,000 lines long or are skillfully divided into a dozen books. Oh, and they’re written in dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter and God-knows-what-efftameter. Your pick.

What’s the difference between a synecdoche and a metonymy, you ask me? I’ll answer that from beyond my grave.

Explain Rhetoric and Prosody? Maybe a few lifetimes later, when I’m reborn as Dryden’s great-great-super great granddaughter.

Enduring hours and mega-hours of lectures on the apparently acute yet crucial difference between Colonialism and Postcolonialism, Modernism and Postmodernism, Classicism and Neoclassicism.

Remembering which plays do Ophelia, Portia, Emilia and Hippolyta belong to. Keeping in mind that Cesario is actually Viola in disguise, who, by the way, is Sebastian’s twin sister. Not to forget people constantly referring to Shakespeare as a ‘novelist’, and claiming that Romeo and Juliet is the best love story they’ve ever read. Try reading his sonnets cryptically dedicated to The Dark Lady and The Fair Youth. Easy breezy.

Deciphering the stubborn mess initiated by Plato and Aristotle, and carried forward by the rebellious Byron and Shelley. Did you think Keats’ romantic poems bear any similarity with Lang Leav’s limericks? Think again.

Rowling’s Harry and John Green’s Hazel are brave, yes. And so were Shaw’s Eliza and Salinger’s Holden.

No, feminism wasn’t portrayed only in Queen and Kahaani; it’s engraved in Plath’s bold revelations and Austen’s subtle sarcasm.  

Fitzgerald knew we’re all drunk on love, Hemingway knew better than to glorify war, and Eliot knew this world is a big waste land.  

Epics, dramas, classics, contemporaries.

Poets, writers, prophets, idealists.

Mark Twain’s American Dream, Chinua Achebe’s African Literature, Toni Morisson’s Slave Narrative.

Salman Rushdie’s Magical Realism, Amitav Ghosh’s Partition Literature, Vijay Tendulkar’s political satires.

Literature is vast. Literature is an ocean. Literature is decades and galaxies of stories and imagination and reality and possibilities compressed and wrapped in the form of a subject; an institution. And another thing Literature is? It’s easy. Easy for those who love it. Easy for those who treasure it and nourish it and worship it and live it.

And the easiest thing of them all? To smile and pretend it’s easy.