BOOK REVIEWS 81 in the company ofAgyeya once again, that "we make the ever-changing outer reality by our own constant poetic efforts, our own infernal reality" (page 26). The culture that comes to a writer in a long, unending, unbroken process and which is constantly internalised by him (even if through poetic effort) is a culture that carries within it the seeds of an ultimate mental passivity. The writer with such a training can be an onlooker, a lone passive sufferer, a regular internaliser of "ever-changing outer reality" from one end, and a regular externaliser of the internalised reality, after properly embellishing it with literary form and polish, from the other; in short, such a writer ends up with the habit of churning out phoney, mechanical assertions. As we become aware of this factor in Namwar Singh's apprehension of the mental process of a writer, we can well see why the poetry of Raghuvir Sahai, Shrikant Varma and other writers of the brand, can find such a high placing in his literary evaluation. A critic, to whom a writer is not a part of a living society where sides are taken for or against a just social order envisioned on the basis of a realistic appraisal of historical conditions, and a relentless struggle is waged in the pursuit of that goal, would find it extremely easy and convenient, like Namwar Singh, to^stop to appreciate minor imiginative flashes in the writings of the otherwise apologists of the status quo. The logical extension of this thinking is seen in Namwar's dualistic judgement on Agyeya. Agyeya shifted slowly and gradually from the commitment to depiction of reality to the depiction of the theme of being true to himself, in the wake of the change which gradually occured in the mind of the Hindi writer under Nehru's inspiration, Nehru being influenced from the pre-war to the post-independence period by the rising Indian capitalist class. And the same Agyeya about whom Namwar makes this point is a matter of absolute reference in the case of quite a few vital literary assertions. On one side, Namwar accepts basically Muktibodh's dialectical method which was used by him (Mukti-bodh) to strengthen his profound social commitment to creative writing and to evolve objective standards of judgement in criticism. On the other, he gives a large acceptance to Agyeya, Raghuvir Sahai and Shrikant Varma, whose poetry is inspired by their individualism and cynicism, and whose criticism is motivated by their subjective aesthetic standards. From one to the other is a fantastic leap backward. Can we hope that Namwar Singh would subject his critical formulations to a rigorous re-examination and eliminate factors that have diluted his objective concern for purposive writing ? ANAND PRAKASH