We tend to forget a very significant need that literature fulfills. From the time of Horace there has been a tendency to highlight the dual function of literature to teach and delight. These are of course two primary purposes for which literature gets created. Then, others point out other functions of literature. Arnold stresses the fact that poetry carries ideas as opposed to the facts of science. Fine. There can be so many other functions attributed to literature. But it is very important not to forget that literature is a storehouse of human emotions.

With time we are becoming more and more mechanical and less human. Our science and technology, our jobs and professional ethics, our laws, our social conventions, our shopping mauls, our restaurants and our increasingly public modes of existence make us shun what is most natural to us, being emotional. In less developed societies people can still be more emotional and therefore fit to take on bigger setbacks and disappointments. They have more avenues of venting out what will cause stress, depression and disease. They can speak out their grievances or exult in their little excitements without the consciousness of disturbing others or being thought less civilized.

For contemporary life literature can become like a surrogate for what must have been dabbling in emotions in earlier times. Though T. S. Eliot maintained, for some strategic reasons, that poetry is an escape from emotions and personality, anyone closely associated with literary reading or writing would know how much of an emotional affair the literary enterprise is. There is always the need for getting emotional. Crying, laughing loudly, sulking, feeling intensely, wallowing in nostalgia, and sinking into the inner recesses of our beings while experiencing some emotion, all these are the most natural things for human beings to do. But society, civilization and culture have labeled these as not the most ideal things expected from us. We have been forced to go against our basic natures for the sake of social convenience.

Literature is made up of the happy and sad moments of people, either the author or the characters created. It encapsulates the tragic and the comic, and frames these into beautiful pictures that store these for those that would like to return to the basic needs that our systems require. There will always be interest in the novel, the play and the poem that can fulfill this requirement. When I wrote my novel, The Tailor’s Needle, I was most conscious of this need of the contemporary reader.