274 Naipaul's denigration of India raised much controversy, but few critics have been able to pinpoint the true weakness of the book as Ezekiel has done, in short, sharp sentences: Honestly and frankly, he exposes his state of mine. I do not believe that in such a state of mine, truth can be discovered, The truth about Mr. Naipaul certainly, but not the whole truth about IndiBe2 This concise prose style helps Exekiel to analyse the drawbacks of other critics, Sri Aurobindo, for instancec In a short review of The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry^ Literature and Art^ Ezekiel achieves what admirers of the Indian sage and mystic have failed to do in voluminous tomes< The very concreteness and simplicity of his own prose make Ezekiel intolerant of all verbosityo One realizes that he is reacting not only to Aurobindo but to his coterie of admirers who uncritically laud him. He responds to Aurobindo's work in a wider context -- the Indian tendency to slip into transcendental terms, obscuring the specific and the concrete. He writes: Sri Aurobindo's views of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and other poets are expressed in that peculiarly vapid and windy idiom which intoxicates many Indian students of English literature. They think it matches the Master's mystical idealism. In reality, Sri Aurobindo*s literary ideas are commonplaces blown up like multicoloured balloons and let loose without restraint. A typical sentence: "The intellectual way of looking at things is being transcended or is raising itself to a power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind and reflective reason towards an intimate self-experience, from thought to vision, from life and nature as observed by the eye of the intellect in their appearance to life and nature as seen and felt by the soul in their spirit and reality.." This is the kind of Aurobindian profundity in the presence of which I begin to admire more keenly the precision of even run-of-the-mill English critics and reviewer.3 The scaling down of Aurobindo to his proper literary size reveals another facet of Ezekiel^ criticism: he is unimpressed by established reputationSo This is shown clearly in his comments on T» S. Eliot. Most Indian critics (perhaps flattered by Eliot's attention to Indian wisdom) unreservedly praise The Cocktail Party. They are so taken up with the Buddha and "work out your salvation with diligence" that they do not pause to examine the human significance of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly's advice. Ezekiel's brief note brings out the lack of vitality, of positive choice, involved in Edward and Lavinia's decision to go back to their former life, "Reilly's wisdom is lifeless like his eating and drinking, which are imitations of the real thing."4 And this, in a volume T. S. Eliot: A Tribute from India! The poet's sensitivity to words revolts against the triviality of the language of Eliot's three later plays, and he declares, after analysing a passage from The Cocktail Party 3 "There is a trivialisation here which is not only of language but of the spiritual concern from which the play is shaped."5