Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf: Crossing Their Paths of Creativity

1. INTRODUCTION

Sigmund Freud commences his famous essay ―Creative Writers and Daydreaming‖ with his observation on creativity as follows: We laymen have always been curious to know from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable. Creativity, with respect to clinicians like James C Kaufman and scholars like Immanuel Kant, is a subject of investigations. The celebrated Nobel Laureate physicist S Chandrasekhar once looked at the conceivable examples of creativity in writers, researchers and specialists in his paper "Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven". One of the unmistakable observations of Chandrasekhar is that the creative yield of craftsmen and writers rises with their age, contrary to that of researchers, whose creative yield tops at an early time of twenties or thirties. For example, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, and so on had their way breaking revelations in their twenties (Chandrasekhar). Paul Dirac, another Nobel Laureate, gives a response to this issue by seeing that logical revelations are constantly approved against truth through experiments in the laboratory. Youthful personalities are not reluctant to question existing information. Anyway once they reveal a way breaking disclosure or invention, they are prone to worry under strain that anyone may negate their revelations whenever later on. On the other hand, a craftsman or an essayist is without such weight as their yield is simply a personal creation, therefore extraordinary, with no space for comparison. Their works need not be approved against any fact in any laboratory. The investigation of Freud's observation, as refered to before all else, comes to fruition in this foundation. Creative writers draw their crude materials from societal encounters. These crude materials (encounters) are refined into creative yields in the psyches of craftsmen and writers. The example of social elements affecting the creative personality decides the nature and nature of the yield. The more matured a craftsman or an essayist, the better is his/her creative yield as experience gathers in them. Furthermore, long periods of experience refine manner of thinking and response. Therefore it very well may be noticed that the artful culmination of creative personalities are never conceived.

As per the eminent Malayalam author, M T Vasudevan Nair, there are two different ways by which writers show human encounters in their compositions (Nair). Either they direct their mirror to the world and illustrate the reflections got in it or they look at the reflection of the universe wherein

minority of writers including the Malayalam author T A Rajalakshmi. It was this understanding augmented Rajalakshmi's despondency. One of her short stories In the Abode of God starts with the sentence, "All that I had endeavored to work during that time lay broke around me" (Rajalakshmi). The story is created with a similar theme verifiably contained in this sentence. Specialists and writers watch such fragments made by the complex elements of society and illustrate it in examples that a layman could never at any point long for. The brain of a creative craftsman resembles a kaleidoscope which produces large numbers of pictures. Kaleidoscope is a logical toy made of at least three mirrors joined to shape a cylinder in which the numerous reflections of shaded bits of glass produce changing examples upon turning the cylinder. The nature and complexity of the examples in this manner produced rely upon the quantity of glass pieces accessible inside the cylinder and number of mirrors used to construct the kaleidoscope. The fragments gathered from the general public enter the brain of a creative genius and produce comparable sorts of evolving designs. The character and the structure of social elements are critical in deciding the sort of examples produced in the multicolored personalities of craftsmen or writers. Similarly as in a kaleidoscope the perceiver envisions different examples without fail, so completes a peruser in perusing an exemplary work. Extraordinary works offer changed dimensions of examples in the peruser's brain on continued perusing. The inception of woman's rights in literature is said to be hailed off in the twentieth century in Western nations with the compositions of creators like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton leading the pack. In India, it was amid the 60s that female writers like K Saraswathi Amma, Lalithambika Antharjanam and T A Rajalakshmi showed up in the Malayalam scholarly scene. Of these three, the name of T A Rajalakshmi stands unapproachable as she belongs to the classification of writers beset with the Sylvia Plath Effect. Virginia Woolf likewise shown this affliction. The disease incited both T A Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf to that skirt of ending it all when they topped the rundown of top notch writers in their particular literatures A peruser experiences an astonishing background while examining the examples produced by creative personalities utilizing the fragments and pieces they get from the outside world. Like in a kaleidoscope, they make in their brains objects of esthetic intrigue with changed shades and structures. The colorful effect of social elements in creative personalities can be all around examined through the investigation of lives and works of writers. It is in this point of view that the lives and works of T A Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf are broke down. In spite of the fact

Crafted by Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf end up being fragmented mirrors which mirror the assorted parts of their outlook Once in a while does it happen that scholarly creations are connected to their creators. There are very little works which look at Indian and English writers in this regard. No wonder in MT's comment that the characters made by Rajalakshmi produce strong and profound emotions in the brains of her perusers while the most extraordinary character being the creator herself (Nair). In Malayalam literature, there are instances of Edappalli Raghavan Pillai, who ended it all while he was at the peak of his creativity. Changampuzha Krishnapillai can likewise be considered to have ended it all as he readily gotten passing without curing for his illness of tuberculosis. Rajalakshmi belongs to this gathering, who, regardless of her creative possibility in literature and science, invited demise at an early age of 35. Her passing is as yet a conundrum. She blurred away leaving back a few lines conveying that "on the off chance that I live, I will compose stories. They may irritate others. So I pick to leave". This paper examines crafted by Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf to demonstrate the thesis of close family relationship between these two writers in regard of example of their creativity. The two have an extraordinary endowment of watching the outside world in moment subtleties which were utilized as the sceneries of their works. For instance, Rajalakshmi begins her novel A Path and Many Shadows with subtleties of the environment despite the fact that she only had a short spell of remain in the town. Her distinctive memory causes her to portray the outside world as follows in the above said novel. There was a small bamboo gate that allowed access to the top of the hill from the ‗thodi‘ on the eastern side of the house. It was through this side that the little girl came out, pushing the bamboo pole aside. With one hand, she pressed a bundle of books close to her chest. In the other she carried a lunch box. After climbing over to the other side, she placed the box and the bundle of books on the ground and pulled the bamboo pole back in place…… To reach the road from the house, you had to go up the hill and then down it. There was no other route….. A little to the south, there was a white oleander bush with a couple of granite blocks at its base. It was said to be the haunt of ‗bhootas‘. A ‗yakshi‘

went into her thick curly hair. The ‗kaavu‘ was on the other side of the hill. There was no inner sanctum or even a roof. Right in the middle of the four outer walls was a huge banyan tree. Beneath it sat the vengeful ‗Vanadurga‘, exposed to rain and sun. (Rajalakshmi) In the same line as that of Rajalakshmi, Virginia Woolf‘s mastery to use the images of the external world with a perception of the external world as a panoramic painting is seen in the opening of her novel The Waves. The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. As they never neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. ……an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold. (Woolf) Virginia Woolf‘s novel Jacob‘s Room is considered to be a turning point in her creativity. She describes Jacob‘s room just like a painting similar to Vincent Vangogh‘s painting The Room. Jacob‘s room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; … His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burnt to the water‘s rim. There were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua… One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there. (Woolf) The absence of Jacob‘s voice is so distinct that some critics take the lack of Jacob‘s narration as the crux of the novel as a whole. As one scholar of Jacob‘s Room argues: Jacob‘s Room abandons the project of developing its protagonist‘s voice altogether, and instead experiments with the voices of others speaking in his place, even down to the creaking of his empty chair. As Leonard Woolf (1957) reveals: [Virginia Woolf] wanted to take six persons, intimate friends, all different, and show their relations to the fundamental things in human existence: friendship, The Waves is one of the best novels composed by Virginia at the season of the pinnacle of her creativity. Similarly as Rajalakshmi's characters are diverse feature of a solitary character, the creator herself, six characters are distinctive points of perception of one single person. Characterization in The Waves resembles a white light (composite light) entering a glass crystal getting scattered into seven hues (VIBGYOR). Composite and complex parts of one person get scattered into six distinct characters by the creative personality of Virginia Woolf. Accepting sun as a substance making intermittent lights and shadows, waves shows everlasting restoration, "the unending ascent and fall and fall and rise once more". Inside everyone "the wave rises, swells, curves its back". Virginia Woolf concludes The Waves with one stroke: "The waves broke on the shore." It is a peculiar fortuitous event or a case of premonition that Virginia Woolf chose the method of her vanishing from the universe of presence by getting encompassed in herself, a wave in the waters of literature, by the floods of a waterway. The wave broke on the shore of Time. Both Rajalakshmi and Virginia Woolf experienced mental agony amid their childhoods which made a temperamental personality. The two can be considered to be sufferers of bipolar issue. For instance, Rajalakshmi's senior sister Saraswathi Amma and nephew Gopalan (Appu) affirmed her as a lively and friendly personality. While filling in as a teacher in school, kids were anxious to get her amid ends of the week. On the other hand, Rajalakshmi was depicted as an introvert absent much interaction with others both in inn just as in department. Amid night, she used to walk around obscurity mumbling to herself. She was incredibly affected by her exacting father while her mother did not have any state in raising kids amid their childhoods. Rajalakshmi had an additional agony concerning her unordinary physical appearance which made her to pull back herself inwards like a turtle subsiding itself to its thick shell. In one of her ballads she depicts an introvert young lady with the picture of such a turtle. Rajalakshmi was portrayed by her senior sister as a sensitive kid who can't withstand piercing sound and incensed conversations. She portrays an occurrence that took spot while Rajalaskhmi was a tyke. Amid the marriage of her senior sister, a man brought a few materials amid evening time and yelled to open the entryway. Rajalakshmi was unnerved with the sound and became ill for a long time. She was an insatiable peruser under the

itself she showed ability recorded as a hard copy as affirmed by her instructors. In the wake of finishing BSc degree in Physics Rajalakshmi first attempted her karma in examining MA degree in Malayalam literature in University College, Thiruvananthapuram. This course was observed to be futile for her to get prepared as an essayist and left for Banaras Hindu University to get MSc degree in Physics. Subsequent to finishing her PG degree she returned and took up the activity of teacher in NSS College, Perunathanni, Trivandrum. This demonstration of Rajalakshmi not seeking after higher degrees in Physics can be considered as a proof of her first need being literature in comparison with science. Amid those occasions, Banaras University was considered to be one of the main focuses of information offering courses in different parts of science and innovation. Greater part of understudies from Kerala and other pieces of India finished their examinations in Banaras only in the wake of accepting a doctoral certificate. Her senior sister Saraswathi Amma herself finished doctoral qualification in Sanskrit from Banaras before taking up the activity of instructor in Bihar. The face that Rajalakshmi's need was literature can likewise be demonstrated by her wide readership in world literature. She was familiar with experts of world abstract scene like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen. It was very normal for her to choose books like Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and all works of Virginia Woolf. Her loving of Virginia Woolf is very obvious from a note she arranged for a discourse entitled "Still there are chains to break". The note starts as follows: ―A room of one‘s own and five hundred pounds a year‖- they are the most fundamental and important needs a woman who has instinct to write- that is what Virginia Woolf says. Along with her novels and in fact more interesting than some her novels which we can read is her book ―A room of one‘s own‖. Even if the works of fictions are not considered, Mrs Woolf can take pride of that one book she wrote. Rajalakshmi also was a keen follower of contemporary Malayalam and Western literature. She continues her note as follows: Our novels have grown only to the levels of 19th century novels of England or Russia. In fact it has to be possible only in that way. The present day scenario of social and economic conditions in our life is similar to those prevalent in those countries at that time. There is no room for a complaint along the line that why the experiments going on there are absent here. The foundation will become strong only after undergoing the hardships of crawling in four legs Rajalakshmi grumbled that no one in India can make due with pay from compositions alone and need to get a secondary line of work for that reason. This is in contrary to western writers. From where did Rajalakshmi draw crude materials for her creative work? As showed before, M T Vasudevan Nair portrayed Rajalakshmi as a main essayist contemporary to their lifetime. She drew crude materials for her fiction from pictures drew straightforwardly from the outside world without blending them with any additional components. This made her creative attempts to speak to cross sections of pervasive reality in the general public. A considerable lot of her companions and relatives saw themselves in the characters painted by Rajalakshmi in her fictional works. This made disagreeable situations when her works were distributed. While serializing her second novel The Noon Sun and Soft Moonlight (Uchaveyilum Ilamnilaavum) in Mathrubhumi Weekly, her companions and relatives including her sister Saraswathi Amma asked the editor to stop distributing the novel. Because of the excellent idea of the work, the editor endeavored to convince the distracters to coordinate with the publication. Bombing in this endeavor, Rajalakshmi over and over mentioned N V Krishna Warrier to stop the publication and to restore the manuscript. On getting back the manuscript, she wrecked it by consuming it totally. To the extent a creative essayist is concerned, this adds up to a suicide. One of her cohorts amid the Intermediate classes, Prof. M Leelavathi, who is a celebrated commentator in Malayalam literature, once opened up that she didn't know about any inborn scholarly ability in Rajalakshmi amid those days. Astonished with the brilliancy of the work, she enquired who Rajalakshmi was. She was dumbstruck to understand that the creator was a similar old colleague of hers. The story manages a young lady who relinquished her very own life to help her family including the education of her kin. M Leelavathi saw herself in the character made by Rajalakshmi. This is a testimony of the comprehensiveness of the topic treated by the novelist in her work. For the mind boggling depiction of characters, Rajalakshmi drew instances of occasions and personnel legitimately from the general public. Such an interaction of society with a creative personality is profoundly non-direct in character which winds up in eccentric future occasions. All things considered, situations the capriciousness of things to come condition of a general public is a direct result of such nonlinear entanglement among individuals and occasions. Consequences of things to come condition of the general public depend sensitively on starting conditions which may appear to be inconsequential by then of time. This irrelevant occasion gets intensified in future to

occasions. For her, life is a one-dimensional way shadowed by characters of the past. As a lonely voyager, this direct way gets shut fleetingly at various purposes of reality. It is such transient intersections of the ways which create different beginning conditions structuring the future course. After the occasion of consuming the manuscript of her novel, Rajalakshmi stopped composition for a long time. Unfit to live without composing she composed several sonnets in pseudonyms. As Virginia Woolf expresses: "Undoubtedly, I would dare to figure that Anon, who composed such huge numbers of sonnets without marking them, was frequently a lady". Rajalakshmi likewise composed a novel Self-Conceit (Njanenna Bhavam) which was additionally took up by Mathrubhumi Weekly to serialize. Unfit to withstand the reactions and objections from her companions and relatives, she took back the manuscript from the editor and rebuilt the last part by ruining its auxiliary and scholarly fineness. Before finishing the publication of this work in the magazine she ended it all. The demonstration of suicide by Rajalakshmi continues to be a mystery even today. Regardless of her physical aberration a person was prepared to wed her. Her father protested the marriage since on looking at their horoscope he was exhorted by the crystal gazer that Rajalakshmi will have a short life expectancy. He imagined that this outcomes from the marriage. This occasion in her personal life made a personal anguish in Rajalakshmi. Unfit to withstand the weight of not having the capacity to continue with the composition and different occasions of personal misfortunes Rajalakshmi ended it all leaving a note: "I attempted two years without composing novels. I can't continue without composing. On the off chance that I live absolutely I will compose novels. That may hurt others. So I abandon." (Self-deciphered) Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century. For her, words are like living organisms and it is not a word until it‘s a part of a sentence. Words belong to each other through a mysterious entanglement amongst themselves. Words do not live in dictionaries but in mind. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as These words mirror the creative adaptability of Virginia Woolf like the story of Michelangelo. At the point when Michelangelo was gotten some information about how he shapes wonderful statues like David out of a bit of marble, he answered, "David is now there in the marble. I simply expelled every one of those pieces of the marble which don't belong to David". The dictionary resembles a bit of marble in which there are creations lying torpid in it. A creative personality will choose them fittingly to make a masterpiece. For instance, a robot or a prepared chimpanzee can deal with words indiscriminately from a dictionary. Anyway such a collection of words won't frame a creative work since words live in the psyche. Words make distinctive importance to various personalities regardless of whether in the surface they may resemble the other alike. It was Max Born, a Nobel laureate in Physics who said that we as a whole realize the leaves are green in shading yet the greenness in the psyche of a person An isn't a similar greenness as in the brain of B. This is on the grounds that words enter the psyche and gets transmuted into various character dependent on the creative soul of the brain. Every one of the one can say about words is they appear to like individuals to think before they use them and feel before they use them yet to ponder them however about something other than what's expected. In her exposition A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf portrays fiction as a bug catching network's that has likely, maybe, yet at the same time joined to life at all four corners. That is the reason she gripes in her 1919 article "Present day Fiction" that "Edwardians (like H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy) neglect to catch the quintessence of character, she whines; 'life escapes' their literature". For her primary target of creativity is to record complex examples of contributions through those five windows got scattered by the consciousness. She, through her works attempts to make an ideal models move in the realm of literature by disposing of the considerable number of curios and reproduce the true, unadulterated, and crude state of human idea. Virginia Woolf is one of the initiators of the story strategy, continuous flow. This method made a change in outlook in the realm of Modern literature. For the most part utilized in novels, the procedure is the creator's endeavor to impersonate the manner by which human personality functions how it freely bounces starting with one idea then onto the next. Continuous flow, in which the character tends to his own self, is in sharp contrast with the traditional story of soliloquy, in which the character tends to the group of onlookers. As per Woolf

another sort of literature that catches clear mental experience. In Malayalam literature this demonstration of revolution in creativity was started by Rajalakshmi. It took numerous years to distinguish this part of Rajalakshmi's works which got slept till the presence of proper atmosphere. M Leelavathi calls attention to the viability of lyrics of Rajalakshmi composed without holding fast to any conventional systems, including metrical examples. Leelavathi illustrates this viewpoint by revamping one of her verse into a conventional metrical structure or example demonstrating the adequacy of the verse utilized by the strategy of Rajalakshmi. In one of her short stories, In the Abode of God, there are looks at the nearness of continuous flow at whatever point the essayist needs to uncover the internal contemplations of the character.

The common social structure in India, in general and Kerala, specifically was totally extraordinary as on account of western. One of the fundamental constituents of society in Kerala was a well-weave group of compound structure. Everyone in the family will work for the betterment of the family. Amid 60s, when Rajalakshmi and her contemporaries began their scholarly vocation, there was a social reformation brought out by the government through land changes. The zamindari framework began disintegrating down amid those periods. The possessions of the land were exchanged to inhabitants establishing a government rule. This acquainted confusions driving with choppiness in the way of life of zamindar family. The effect of this social dynamics came about into creative works in different branches like literature and film. One of the best instances of this is the film Padher Panchali of Satyajit Ray which made another reasonableness in film making in India. Novels of Rajalakshmi and M T Vasudevan Nair are best precedents reflecting such a change in outlook in the social dynamics. This part of society is well brought out in Rajalakshmi's work Uchaveyilum Ilam nilavum in which the protagonist Vimala goes to their occupant's home to ask for rice and vegetables in order to sustain her family. In contrast to a large number of M T's characters, Rajalakshmi made her characters drawing straightforwardly from the quick surroundings in reality. Like in crafted by Virginia Woolf nature assumes a focal role in Rajalakshmi's fictions. Her first novel A Path and Many Shadows is the best case of this viewpoint. Despite the fact that Rajalakshmi moved her habitation from country part in Palakkad to the city life of Ernakulam, her beloved recollections were very striking which come about into better description The grievous end of Virginia Woolf's life is generally because of her personal stresses and her bipolar issue though on account of Rajalakshmi, this is basically because of a greater amount of social conditions than of personal viewpoints. The bipolar like issue shown by Rajalakshmi was predominantly because of pervasive social customs than her personal issues. Practically the entirety of her fictions depict characters containing certain measure of autobiographical elements. One can think about the picture of Rajalakshmi getting reflected in these characters simply like numerous pictures are shaped in broke bits of mirrors. It was because of this perspective that M T Vasudevan Nair commented that the characters made by Rajalakshmi produce strong and profound emotions in the psyches of her perusers while the most remarkable character being the creator herself. Budgetary issues will influence one's scholarly vocation. That is certain. Under the current conditions to live with even a base dimension of status, one ought to get prepared in some other activity separated from composing. Make acquiring to support life is the most imperative fundamental need. It isn't the profession of composing however the other activity is the life continuing one. Then the scholarly and physical aptitudes must be flown in that direction. Amid the hardship of executing the activity to satisfaction, one needs to gather those carried moments got by victimizing and by theft so as to spend for the work that is considered at the inward heart as the most critical. On the off chance that this condition must be changed, time needs to come when the individuals who pay attention to composing and on the off chance that one is very fit for it, with that alone living in status is conceivable. Our novels have become only to the dimensions of nineteenth century novels of England or Russia. Truth be told it must be conceivable only in that way. The present day situation of social and economic conditions throughout our life is like those predominant in those nations around then. There is no space for a grumbling along the line that why the experiments going on there are missing here. The foundation will wind up strong only in the wake of experiencing the hardships of slithering in four legs pursued by remaining with a help and making relentlessly one stage after one to walk. What is the utilization in the event that we buy a readymade culture from the west? Is it not the truth behind the way that even in the wake of building up numerous national laboratories, nothing genuinely is going on here? Only where Amperes and Lavoisiers, have thrived, will Einsteins and de

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