AMBEDKAR AND GANDHI

Since July 25 1990 when the Sensex reached the magical four figure mark for the first time ever heralding the advent of global power and cultural hegemony which saw an inexorable decline in the concept of a welfare state, the discourses of Gandhi and Ambedkar have become rallying points in the Indian political and cultural space. The nationalistic spectrum with them was never as discursive as it has been over these years without them!

One does feel in the larger context of socio-cultural and political ambience an urgency to relocate the two and their ideology as different paradigms opposed to one another and fix them in disparate slots so that they remain mutually exclusive.

The reasons are obvious. The social and private worlds refuse to take up the dalit question. One tends to believe that Gandhian discourse which anchors the self, but not the 'other' is largely emaciated as it does not address the dalit issue in the changing circumstances as an inevitable route to build an egalitarian society. Dalits continue to remain outside the historical process and a political and cultural aesthetics for them is stymied by their presence only on the fringes.

It is true that both these leaders carved a niche for both what they were, and what they were not and again have given themselves an inviolable space in the present for what they are, and what they are not! They opposed colonialist discourses in their own ways and both imbibed the west after their own fashion. Ambedkar was not a die hard ideologue and Gandhi was a bit of a romantic. But both triggered a non violent approach to end the British Raj. They had the same end in view though their ways were practically divergent.

To be clad in suit was not a habit to mime the west. It was a semiotic necessity with significations of an outward text of a dress. Ambedkar was an iconic hero with a style imitable and substance unique. His colonial outfit was not a result of an unconscious mind, but a very well perceived and practiced signifier. Gandhi clad in loin cloth and a shawl draped across his body placed himself in perspective as an authentic server of what he called 'daridra narayan' who was always his spiritual guru. He could invent a native sign to preempt the exotic and deconstruct an existing political and cultural metaphysics. Ambedkar disowned whatever was native. He could transplant an exotic heart into a native body which was again masquerading in an exotic gloss of a dress. A timid body covered in the wistfulness of the west also hid a heart which was to put into practice colonial metaphors of politics and culture against themselves. This was a paradox very ingenuously practiced by him. Gandhi baked the west in native fire and Ambedkar tried to warm the indigenous in the flames of the west though he was not completely enamoured of it. Ambedkar 'othered' the self and Gandhi, quite the opposite! But conceived as images the hermeneutics practiced by them had transcendental reverberations.

An indignant Ambedkar wanted the British to remain till the emancipation of dalits was complete. For Gandhi India's freedom meant freedom from all kinds of oppression from within as also without. Gandhi worked in this wider canvas of political and social determinism which he practiced by inventing his own tools of culture as abstract as truth and as concrete as non-violence with 'Charaka' being a seminal counter discourse to technology. Gandhi was against all great narratives and as such he didn't want the freedom struggle to become one. He embossed every single narrative of protest against caste and class on the larger text of freedom movement. Even Ramayana and Mahabharata from which he drew copiously were conglomerates of little narratives for him.

But Ambedkar's doubts were absolutely genuine. A freedom without the freedom from all macabre inequalities was only an achievement of inequity, but not justice. Freedom sans justice was an egregious act of self-deceit and 'harakiri'. The narrative of freedom would not accompany that of an individual unless the true Indian free of all servitudes was discovered in that narrative. The idea of freedom for him was a veritable discovery of the 'other' which he impeccably sought to achieve.

Gandhi's idea was abstract and heavily nuanced. He wanted to discover the 'other' through his self. The 'other' became his self in the process. Anchoring one led to nourishing the other. But the 'other' was an indefatigably nurtured ego in Ambedkar, but badly needed for the self proclamation of the dalit identity. Swathed in the eclectic and elitist, he smothered the pastness of a past which history was to replace once the British left. Ambedkar historicised the textuality of a past with a futurist agenda indentured on the modern, yet not utopian, and on a premeditated non-existential ethos. He represented the 'angst' of his people which as a predator was ruining the very fabric of their being. He countered this 'angst' and also the past trying to replace it with a history of dalit aesthetics of politics and culture.

Where as Gandhi grounded his metaphysics on the past trying to desilt it of its dregs of all hierarchies. He was an apologist of tradition, but he fawned on the limited space, tradition had offered dalits by founding his theory on the grid of self belief and practising it with the virtue of a saint. He wanted this self belief to be a trait in every dalit.

Gandhi was a diehard practitioner of truth whatever it might have meant in the given context of time and space. If he ever were to choose between truth and non-violence, the twin facets of his metaphysics, he would have stood by the former. He had such a conviction of mind and heart that 'Satya' and 'Ahimsa' were always inclusive and inseparable. His intermittent acts of fasting were committing violence on his own body to spread the message of truth. Jeopardising neither, enroute to freedom from the manacles of British imperialism and also from class and caste oppressions existing within, Gandhi had embarked upon a relentless soul searching endeavour at the same time. His sleeping with naked women was only a grain in an avalanche of self beliefs. He sought to purify himself and also the politics and culture of a nation that was impoverished by centuries of colonial rule. His atavistic candour had the assiduousness of a saint which he directed against himself and a past that had created him.

Ambedkar at another end riveted his energy on the dynamics of caste and creed and the whole apparatus of an oppressive system in vogue for centuries. He was always despaired to predict that such a deeply sunk ‘colonization’ inside India would sour fruits of freedom. The nation had to be rid of an exploitative ‘regimen’ doled out by upper caste hegemony. He didn’t want this to exacerbate with power in the hands of upper caste and class. Only then would he visualize a free India.

For which the country was still unprepared when the British finally left. The seething turmoil of caste and class was a worrying factor for Ambedkar. His distaste for past and tradition was a direct corollary of this.

Gandhi too knew this – the dalit ignominy and upper caste hegemony. His was a multi-pronged approach simultaneously carried out. He conceived India not only as a state but also a society at the same time. They were not different categories to be treated differently. A strong state for him was as important as a well knit society. He remained in Naukali trying to bury communal pathos following partition when the transfer of power was taking place at New Delhi.

In the context of a world order, the talk of welfare state, national identity and boundaries, empowering the dalits and the impermeable nature of the self have all become atrophied. Retrieving Gandhi and Ambedkar and restructuring a post colonial discourse on their coexistent philosophies seems inevitable.

But then the sameness and differences in Gandhi and Ambedkar have to be dealt with together. The complex and profound dialectics between them can be understood only then but not when one is foregrounded ahead of the other. In fact, they enrich and complement each other. If we traverse along one leaving the other by way side, we would pathologise all our discourses and lose both.

Both of them were against elite caste and class being the sole custodians of the new hegemony of power in independent India, even as Gandhi’s naming Nehru as the first Prime Minister of India drew flak from many quarters. The current scenario wants them more for the same reason. The country is not poorer without them, but richer than when they came to inhabit it years ago.
The Sensex, a powerful signifier of nation’s development rises and falls, but the poor man’s plight seems to never end.

This is the truth.

Season of Fruits - NATURE V/S CULTURE

Years ago, every summer, the major part of Malnad used to replicate fleshy smells of fruits and berries. Your nostrils would dilate and your tongue feel to relish the sweet and sour delicacy disseminated through its odour in the ambience.

No part of the year was as revealing to our senses as this one was. In England and for Eliot, yes ‘April is the cruelest month breeding lilacs’. As a contrast, seasonal as also civilizational, April and a couple of months following had been the most cherishable, the sweltering heat not withstanding.

For Keats, the autumn was ‘the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. As a transferred epithet, it would be in this part of the world ‘a season of fruits and mellowmistfulness’ as the mist of winter would have dwindled into its mellowing best, grayish blue shades of it still witnessed in early morning till the ball of fire swallowed it up!

Shakespeare’s Lear might say after all his egregious tantrums, ‘Ripeness is all’ realizing his folly in the end and perishing in avuncular pride. But ripeness in Malnad could be a pseudonym for summer which had ripeness writ large till many years ago and has since ceased to be so!

These days, thanks mainly to a jackfruit tree in my back yard still majestically held from inside the terracotta layer of earth, I wake up each morning to a very pleasant jackfruit smell which erases my cultural memories for the sake of the natural. It promises a great day, I would think. The very next moment I am nostalgic.

Living away from the hustle and bustle of the town, I was a privileged soul. As a school boy, I was wont to wander aimlessly like a cloud listening to uncadenced voices of birds and lilting Koels inside forests. Laced with Nature’s symphony the scent of honey combs would strike my nostrils. The swarming bees regaling their summer would put a sting into this intruder who was out to usurp their territory. I wouldn’t mind even the sudden appearance of a cobra raising its hood. I would dart off striding down the undulating terrains.

In such a jaunt, I would be Blake’s school boy enjoying every moment outside school gates. To say I was on cloud nine was too obvious. I was on bees knees!

Do not speak of goose berries as they had already joined the most cultivated band of fruits in a city culture space. More precious to my eyes was the sight of black berries known as ‘Kavale Hannu’ grown on spinous shrubs in bunches. They would taste better than grapes and would seem a camouflage of black grapes equally determinant in size and hue.

White barriers were a distinct lot not by their diminutive size but by their collective assemblage on the stalks as if in a queue, a discipline which smacks of school girls. May not be as elegant, but inarguably the best recipe for vacuous bellies on a summer noon!

Then there were champaka berries masquerading as tiny crimson balls of fire, more sour than sweet. The tongue would twitch tasting them and the teeth would trip biting. Yet in the end the fruits would leave a tinge to be savoured for hours.

Butter fruits were a rare variety, innocuous to the tongue as also to the glands. Chip them off at the top, take the seeds out, put a little sugar if you would so desire and empty the fleshy green inner layers with a spoon or gulp enmass, ah! It would taste gorgeous.

Very tiny black and purple berries grown on equally tiny nondescript plants christened ‘Kaki Hannu’ in the native tongue would always be a source of delight to the on looking hawk eyes of children. Just pluck them by feather touch and munch - your mouth ulcers wouldn’t need a better cure!

The list is endless. Two months into the cruel heat of the season with intermittent showers invigorating a deadened earth, there appeared on trees a kind of black berries, jet black sometimes visible to the naked eye from a distance as chandelier type bunches dangling from amidst light green leaved stalks, knitted almost grape like, they were difficult to access unless you climbed the tree and plucked them. But alas! You shot an arrow or threw a stone aiming at them from below; you would be belittling those berries and your efforts. Instead you would climb onto the tree gently and pluck. Put them in, roll with your tongue separating the dark skinny layer from the seed which you would omit, the fleshy mash would turn your mouth purple. You would look like a demon personified along side your taste buds enjoying each bit of it.

And finally, the Jackfruit whose smell stirs me each morning. Indeed the jackfruit is the king, a capacious repository of all fruits! As now it didn’t have many takers those days. Its elliptical but voluminous size would be forbidding in itself. It is one fruit you would not eat as you would a mango! Knives and sickles and a dab and deft hand using them to perfection would do the trick. An entire morning newspaper to erase the gums and very skilled and supple hands to slice, the flakes would seem in pristine yellow. Nothing could be more tempting. Take a flake, chip it at the top, get the seed out, put a drop or two of coconut oil and devour the whole flake. You would feel having eaten nothing like this before! Not just one, a plenty to follow and fill to the brim. You wouldn’t need a meal for days! Pity the king is dethroned!

In hindsight, I look at them as if in a reverie. Those fruits and my favourite haunt of forests are history now. Nature has succumbed and fruits of culture have begun to throng the market place. Gumless jackfruit is only one of many cultural variants. Fruits have made themselves a global route. The native varieties are gleefully discarded. Only the designer fruits best suited for the modern man’s palate, remain. As the timbered voices have obfuscated uncadenced notes, fruits of culture have bedeviled those of nature!

Gone are those days. So also the forests. You would find no shrubs swathed in their berries. No ambience awash with little tunes. Birds have had their last migration, perhaps and little bees are being cultivated in man made gardens.

We are impoverished. So are our tastes.

NINASAM ‘Thirugata’

NINASAM’s one of most celebrated projects, its theatre repertory, nicknamed Thirugata is a unique feat in the history of any theatre movement. Always alive to an imposing reality of our times, but not over zealous in only staging the plays of the present, Thirugata has come of age. For over two decades now, its presence along the length and breadth of Karnataka has evoked considerable enthusiasm and appreciation - as much for the quality of production as also for the selection of plays which, is determined in essence by ongoing debates on culture and society, there transformation and transmuting syndromes and more importantly the politics of life itself. Thirugata would produce past plays with the same urgency it would bring on to the stage the present ones.

No theatre can exist in vacuum. It should respond to issues which are both individual and collective; imminent and immanent. But then, Thirugata is never a political theater which then would become propagandist sans its aesthetic and literary merits.

No theatre is apolitical either. In fact no art, as no man is as such. Including our careless swatting at the flies!

Thirugata needs to be located I this context. Since its inception in 1985, not amidst fanfare, but in a modest way which in itself reflects a cultural ethos of its own, simplicity and grace, this repertory of NINASAM has always tried to deconstruct a raging world order which thrives on prosperity and progress alone.

No gloss nor glamour; no irritable presence of technology in its productions; none of the corporate jamboree that sponsors theatre in cities. No, Thirugata would have none of these. Even a far cry from yuppies who believe life sans theatre is as much worth living!

Yes, life is larger than art with its varied manifestations. But faint and feeble voice of theatre can morph our life from its lavish buccaneering before mega ‘texts’ of globalization.

Thirugata is political in this regard. In its developing an antithetical view to overriding influences of a hegemonical system not just of the exotic, but also of the indigenous revivalist interests. Laced with this is the twin message of democracy and decentralization any NINASAM activity seems to embody. Thirugata has become highly evolved over the years in disseminating ideas of self rule and a decentred world order.

In the beginning Thirugata used to stage four plays - one from Kannada and another from outside it; one from the west and another for children. By and by, the lack of human resource and managerial logistics forced Thirugata to have only two plays.

Thirugata begins its peregrination with its premier shows at Heggodu every October on the occasion of a culture course NINASAM organizes, with a specific thrust area which gets reflected though slantly in the plays chosen for Thirugata.

Two plays this year with a thrust area at the backdrop being ‘A new idiom for the new century’ – interrogating intellectual certitudes; critique the existing order in contrasting styles and substance. A chalk and cheese variety in short.

An ensemble of seven one act plays by P.Lankesh, ‘Ee Naraka Ee Pulaka’ directed by Raghunandana with his self indulgent sullenness is a tough and serious watch. Jarring music and an unintelligible philosophy would make the audience aghast and perspire. But then, it is a philosophical variant Raghu tries to communicate which our minds refuse to appreciate. The seven Lankesh plays as seven ambiguous types depict typical middleclass ‘angst’ and its desires and illusions.

The production problamatizes the split in the individual self relocating it in the larger context of the politics of a new order. Thereby the Lankesh plays acquire a new semantics and vocabulary to contend with the mesmerizing presence of an exclusivist global culture. It uncovers an enigma; of a generic kind given us by our own seething discontent at the values we anchor and cherish the fatigue it brings out and a sense of spiritual debility too. In the end a feeling of vacuousness sinks in amid ruins of glory. Something that occurs to Lear and Macbeth after their committing an egregious act.

Lokottame a play adapted from Lycistrata, a comedy written during fifth century B.C by a Greek playwright Aristophanes directed by Chennakeshava contemporizes an ancient, but a very practical wisdom of an approach to war and peace.

Hatred divides, but grief unites. Women of two Greek states make a common cause, their grief over their spouses involvement in a war against each other. This leaves them in constant peril and sexual atrophy making them languish on their beds. A peace in not a sight. The two women of the two states come together even as their partners are waging a needless war. They want to force them to recognizing their rights to marital bliss and familial attachment, as also to political governance. There is no course left over to them! Except swearing they would not sleep with them unless they stopped war. The spouses relent and return to their beds!

The production translates a tragic melodrama into a delightful comedy even as the original play puts in perspective an ‘innovative’ route to end war. Lokottame subsumes a vocabulary of resistance and rebellion in a low mimetic mode which at the same time underscores horrors of war and attrition.

‘Ee naraka…’ dramatizes the squalor of modern man alienated from yet, connected to the outside world which flatters to deceive. Better, we call this production ‘e- naraka, e- pulaka' to be able to further negotiate with our netted pursuits.

Lokkottame is a collective search for indoctrinating the grammar of war. It tickles us and teases. Men would search their hearts and women, reclaim their invincible arms of rejection. The sun wryly smiles on us!

One uncovers the facsimilies of our bliss and the other, the impermeable nature of our obsession with the absurd and the abstract; one through seriously questioning and the other through regaling to a point where the truth begins to dawn on us. Watching them refreshes us and in the Brechtian terms instructs us.

(NINASAM is a cultural organisation located in the village of Heggodu in Sagar Taluk of the Shivamogga district in the state of Karnataka, India. Ninasam (also spelt as Neenasam) is the short form of Sri Neelakanteshwara Naatyaseva Sangha, an organsiation dedicated to the growth of drama, films and publishing. Ninasam was the brainchild of the renowned dramatist and Magsaysay award winner, K V Subbanna. It is currently headed by K V Akshara, the son of Subbanna.)

Udaya Kalavidaru – Taking Theatre to People

Where is the theatre today heading? Has the corporate culture sung the final psalms on it in a choric dirge? Has the media gloss and glamour moved away people from it? Where is the cultural variant for people if theatre in the contemporary world has ceased to be of any relevance?

‘Udaya Kalavidaru’, Sagar (Shimoga district) try to answer. They are a motley theatre group of amateurs engaged in a quiet theatre revolution in the last 60 years. A precocious, but a passionate blend of young and old this theatre group was in the beginning, developed over a period of time into a mature array of artists whose mainstay was not theatre, but varied professional practices. Being highly devout custodians of theatre fascination, they would spend off hours for theatre activities like producing and staging plays alongside discoursing on matters of the very mundane and ordinary.

Under theatre director late N. R. Masur, they had specialized in staging plays by Sri Ranga. Though unique, in the history of theatre in the whole of India, to translate a single playwright’s texts into unforgettable theatre performances, for many many years, such an uncanny act had distilled off a myth that they could bring only Sri Ranga on stage ! Nonetheless, Sri Ranga’s plays had such an endearing oeuvre reaching out to small groups of theatre lovers in the vicinity. Through Sri Ranga, they had trained themselves in theatre appreciation by decoding theatre language into infinite possibilities of life itself!

In course of time, this minority of theatre goers had enlarged their space. Now they were being treated to plays by as disparate and different play wrights as Shakespeare, Brecht, Kailasam, Lankesh, Kambar, Karnad and others who formed an intrepid galaxy of dramatists produced on the stage by another renowned theatre director Dr Guru Rao Bapat, basically an English teacher.

60 years hence, theatre world over is not the same unenviable experience it was. Corporate bonhomie has appropriated art and its production. And media doles out capsules of Art for instant consumption. The gorgeous ‘other’ has abridged and obfuscated the miniature ‘self’ and in the circumstances theatre has become a corporate component of elite exclusiveness!

Taking theatre to people
To retrieve theatre from the stranglehold of the global elite whose mega replications of theatre appreciation are seen only in epic grandeurs, is an urgent issue to be addressed. The inveterate ideological moorings of the theatre past in being post-colonial and anti-establishment have to be recovered and relocated in a counter discourse of theatre.

‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ have precisely started this alternative discourse of theatre by taking it to people and modifying their space away from digital surveillance.

‘Mane Mane Mathu’ is how it has all begun. And then it has reoriented itself into ‘Mane Mane Nataka’. One’s urge to become just professionals and nothing else and succeede in life is always a sterile course of creativity. ‘Mane Mane Nataka’ should alter this course.

Theatre situated to do just this can always believe it can restart a dialogue with a myopic mass of people and open their eyes to different possibilities of life. Theatre in the post modern world is a remedial exercise for them.

‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ choose to do just this. But how?

Two short productions of just 45 minutes each, one Russian and another Kannada staged in an intimate theatre ambience using very simple tools of theatre like music and sound which are most sober and apt; cast and costume which are as revealing as they are distinct and; light, which is just the bare minimum, are being staged in small halls with a seating capacity of just over 20 and in corners of streets to where people can have access from just outside their homes. Theatre would become education and experience, both.

‘Kadu Manushya’ (adopted from Chekhov’s One Act Play The Bear) directed by Dr. Guru Rao Bapat is a play that exposes the duplicity of the bourgeois class of people whose love and hate are easily swapped. Poovamma, who is a widow of dimpled cheeks still anchors her looks as a supplement of her avowed grief over her husband’s death offers her love in the end to escape repaying the loan her late husband is alleged to have borrowed from Poonacha. Poonacha too, a conceited lover, doesn’t ask for more!

It is an abject revelation of our times when all relations are commodities and when emotions that peel as in an onion without pact or commitment make little impact on our torn selves.

The play ‘Kunta Kunta Kuravatthi’ written by Champa and directed by Manjunatha Jedikuni shows our timid selves in absurd manifestations only to further depict how we try to create an inviolable space to conceal our weak links. Locked in a triangular web, a blind, a lame and a deaf improvise all canons of speech to deny themselves a pre destined world of being. Their absurd world makes a mockery of a cherished goal and purpose we have given ourselves. Their inimitable styles of bothering one another are a slant demonstration of the world we inhabit.

The two plays should help eschew our ego. We inhabit both the worlds - the bourgeois, masking deceitfully our indulgent pursuits of bliss and the ordinary, trying to define our destiny in the new global world order. ‘Kadu Manushya’ and ‘Kunta Kunta ……’ annihilate both the worlds and make us look inwards.

Selecting these two plays to take them to people is only to make people realize the absurdity of being as also the elusive nature of space into which they try to prompt themselves.
‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ plan to take these plays to different audiences in different cultural milieu which the corporate world tries to homogenize.

Vaidehi : A Reluctant Feminist

During the 70’s when feminism in Europe had reached its zenith morphing phenomenally literary and cultural ambience, a writer in Kannada a quiet ‘crusader’ was doing her bit interrogating mildly the patriarchal text within the remnants of tradition. A sustained story teller with a penchant for uncovering the hidden agenda of patriarchy; an author who would subsume in her tales a wry sense of memoir; a soul of a writer who knew her effort was to sneak into mysterious and enigmatic domain of women with a language rich in regional moorings and a style which was to later establish her as almost a ‘cult’ figure in matters of defining women’s role inside a rigorous text of tradition.

Vaidehi is too renowned to need a fact file; any history of Kannada literature would remain impoverished without foregrounding her contribution. The range of her stories may not be very vast. But then she creates little texts of women whose woes have a morbidity of being gender specific.

She didn’t intend to create history of women and of women’s writing with an ideological indebtedness. Nor did Vaidehi have an exclusive aesthetic for women in mind. These were the marked features of European feminism.

Her stories might display a lack of awareness of where Feminism in Europe was heading from an innocuous and revisionary readings of male texts to an extremely radical and revolutionary text of lesbianism. Vaidehi wouldn’t question male hegemony to an extent that it would itself generate a crisis. She chose to be different.

Womanhood for her is a concealed text vis – a – vis the dominant text of patriarchy. Timid and shy, her women characters know they are women and recognized as such by established norms. No one is born a woman, feminists might say. She is made one and constructed how she should be!

Vaidehi is perceptively different. Womanhood is not a troublesome virtue nor is it a deplorable gender category either. She wouldn’t create male or female incarnations of the ‘other’. She would not even create a ‘Durgi’, a female incarnation of masculinity in her subtle narratives. Masculinity for her is not an answer to feminine pathos.

Her tales differ – from the preoccupations of a conscious philosophical and ideological frame of the feminism of the west as also from the mythical and the legendary past of the east. Though myth is not what it is in its ‘original’ text!

The texts she weaves in her tales are typically contemporary - both in spirit and time. Also in the way they negotiate a space for women amid an ever deferring peroration of male hegemony.

The backdrop is traditional; but the treatment cultural and societal; the stance is of a liberal humanist; but the trait, softly rebellious. The texture of her tales is a web of both the mellifluous and melancholic. Yet they betray a sense of political correctness.
In matters of morals and matrimony, Vaidehi wouldn’t ‘transgress’ lores of tradition. Most of her early tales are situated in the institutional text of marriage. A woman losing her husband early, one remaining unmarried for long and the married living in a deheded ‘paradise’ constitute macabre texts of the tales of woe. But then her narratives are not tear jerkers. A tradition that ‘others’ these woman is only frowned at. Not edged out as tenacious and an unaccommodating. Yes, tradition is a negotiable space for Vaidehi. But not at the cost of dignity and self - respect of woman.

A young woman becomes a widow in ‘Bedakata Badukella’ inside just six months of her marriage. She is destined to be so unless the fate would have it otherwise. The text of ‘widowhood ‘ is enough pretext for tradition to blame it on destiny and fate further isolating and enervating her. A woman in ‘O! Jagatthe’ is orphaned in the loss of her son. There is another world, of the rich untouched by the gruesome irony.

Vaidehi exposes the turbid and mean, defines a hierarchical structure by relocating women’s position in which women become aware albeit implicitly of a dominant discourse. Of patriarchy that hegemonises tradition.

Suma, a timid girl understands how she is left out of the ‘ceremonial’ text of marriage into which she is still uninitiated. Yet she tries to partake of the insidious rich and powerful who prescribe an ordinary woman’s role in the texts of ceremonies and occasions.

Women in Vaidehi’s fiction are a ‘muted’ lot. Their silent zones provide Vaidehi with a creative oeuvre. Their isolated spaces inside the oppressor’s territory send her coded signals to be tapped in the linguistic and cultural archiving.

Archiving hapless women’s psyche is a formidable repertoire in Vaidehi. Not vocal, but always reflexive such women would try beneath their conscience to unleash themselves from the tether of a prescriptive tradition.

Yashee in ‘Chippu’ wants to wriggle out of the cocoon, a metaphor for tradition. Out of which she peeps reflecting if the change in her marital status would alter her matrix of an imagined bliss.

Achala in ‘Antharangada Putagalu’ is unmarried. Subbi too is unmarried, but a mother. Subbi demythifies the text of marriage and Achala can only try to textualise its myth. For Subbi, marriage is a myth and for Achala a text. An indispensable text to be possessed and if possible ‘read’! Morals and mores of tradition don’t really bother Subbi. Subbi and Achala represent varied zones of marriage and their interactive impact.

Like wise Boby and Kusum in another tale of woe reexamine codes of marital life. Considered the sole text of a woman’s happiness, marriage is only a common space between man and woman whether the woman is guaranteed a blissful zone in marriage is trivial.

Marriage is a signification - a sign of a secure well being. Bobby is eager to marry off her daughter. Kusum has left her husband behind. The dialectical is very intriguing. Both are desperate. One to get inside the text of marriage and the other to deflect from it. One feels the agony and pain of being married and the other wants to discover the pleasures though she had none, in her daughter marrying. One registers a break and the other expands the texts of tradition.

Vaidehi too needed a break. A break from revealing intrepid versions of tradition with woman used as cultural and social practitioners of it. Mapping woes and worries of women inside a rigid text of tradition would have famished her creative potential.

Vaidehi would now tap abstract spaces in women’s texts for a possible invariant in story telling. Her narratavising would change. From the matter of fact to the lyrical and poetic. Women’s voices become ‘asides’, their roles symbolic and suggestive. They would arraign themselves in their inner being even as a ‘meandering’ tone would try to possibly subvert and effectively dislodge a tradition that has always consigned them to their fractions periphery.

‘Gola’ and ‘Tarangagalu’ are stories featured in this mould. Shakunthale is a character, though not created in the mythic ‘time’, but indentured in an emotional past. She wants to be recognized in this past. A past that Dushyantha in his ‘mythical playfulness’ has ignored. A myth is recreated. Which sustains Shakunthala’s deeply held feelings.

The advent of modernity situates Vaidehi in the third phase of her writing. From the realistic to the poetic and lyrical and now to the discursive.

The patriarchy shifts its emphasis in the modern paradigm. Relationships too shift. From the social and cultural to the economic and material. Modernity is believed to enhance woman’s idea of freedom. But then it is a connivance. Between this text and an avuncular patriarchy. Only to delimit a woman’s conscience.

Vaidehi portrays Sougandhi ( ‘Sougandhiya Swagathagalu’ ) a woman who is initiated into the modern ‘text’. She gets a transfer to a different place of work of her own volition. Away from her parents but into the care of a woman substituting as parents. When this woman too goes away, Sougandhi would not take leave to back home. A day’s off work and away from the parental care would have given ages to brood over her liberty. But opening the door, she finds her parents standing at the threshold. Sougandhi too for her sake stands ‘muted’ on the threshold between modernity and tradition! She is a lone incumbent of the two conniving texts! Which claim equal shares of her body and mind. She is not only detextualised, but ‘detextured’ too!

‘Gulabi Talkies’ presents a different paradigm. Of modernity which sees in woman a real proclivity for change. From the male dominion which had obfuscated women territory. Arrival of cinema ushers in an indulgent pursuit of life restructured by modern glamour and glory. It sets in a glut of exigencies of desires and fulfillments. It crates for them a fairy land. It distills in them a hopeful morrow from a silted past. A coded life of tradition is thrown open like ‘magic casements on perilous seas’.

Vaidehi may have refused time and again to be called a feminist. She is not a stilted reader of tradition and culture either; but a firmly footed exponent of woman’s texts. She may not be a feminist in the western theoretical mould. Yet feminism is ingrained in her texts. She may not have been consciously creating history of woman and of women’s writing. But beneath her tales is a vision of the mundane and ordinary. She may not have developed an exclusive aesthetics for women’s writing. Yet her tales exhibit a rare linguistic oeuvre.

Ideology and politics are far off. Her diagnostics of culture and society are rooted in her moorings. Feminism may be a loaded term to describe her tales. But calling her a feminist would accord her fiction political correctness. Read as discourses her texts would assume the ideological and philosophical.

My Maths Teacher

He retired in the mid nineties. He wasn't too traditional a teacher to create pallid faces in the class. He wasn't too modern either to enthuse dullards and make them come out of their stupor. Neither was he staid and pedantic. But then he would non-challantly admit, a teacher's job was not just in being sincere and honest, but in being rigorous enough to dodge complacency and contentment among the learning elites. He would go the whole hog and say, mathematics is one unfathomable discipline making one feel its hegemonical importance. Having sat in his class for five long years, I could discover, here was a teacher not very genius though, human and amiable, trying to communicate intricacies of a subject as also intriguing poise necessary to learn it which most would hate and not even dream of learning.

Known among his students and colleagues alike as HLS, he would take it as a joke and heartily laugh if anybody insisted saying he was LHS meaning he stood on the left hand side of the class as his left eye was slightly squinted. He too would crack jokes and joke cracks as he had many up his sleeve!

HLS went on to become a Professor hardly a few years before he retired. He would not blame it on the system which saw him languish just as a lecturer for more than two decades. He didn't hanker after power or position. It was enough he thought, if he was a minion among his students.

Teaching mathematics was not one linear process, he always believed. His lectures were not boring for one thing that he tempered them with tales of life of his own which made a telling effect on us. Born and brought up in a poor Brahmin family, he could convert his colossal disadvantage into an equally daring feat of having to leave his life with only courage and conviction. He could not make both ends meet most of the time. He learnt to persevere and was successful in the end.

His maths classes were one long anecdotal journey through his past and the pastness of it alongside his usual and sometimes casual discursive analyses of theorems and equations. He didn't have examination as an end in view, nor did he use to deliver very perceptive lectures. But then HLS would teach mathematics as he would teach himself life and its myriad sudden twists and turns. To immaculately prepare and come to the class was not his forte. He would read mathematical texts as story books asking us to think there and then on plausible derivations and proofs. He did not spoon feed us with readymade texts of proof and illustrations. He half taught us mathematics and the other half had to be discovered by us. Of many anecdotes he narrated in the class, one is strikingly rich in irony and satire as also condescendingly self - critical.

He was working for some time for a Kannada monthly published from Hubli. A post graduate in maths working for a magazine would raise many eyebrows. On finishing his masters HLS joined the magazine to earn his livelihood. He did not think it menial having to do all sorts of job such as even assisting in the printing work. The person in charge of ' this month for you ' had suddenly left. The editor couldn't find a replacement. The circulation went down. For many even today as was then read a particular magazine to know their immediate future.

It was here that HLS found himself offering to write that feature on astrology. He knew numbers, mathematical though. He never knew anything about the Zodiac signs. But working out permutations and combinations was his resourceful repertoire. He went through the back numbers to have a feel of the kind of stuff written under this feature. He would try out every month a camouflage of different versions and interpolate them before putting them down under different zodiac signs. This went on for a few months till he resigned from there to take up teaching.

HLS would always claim, this boosted the circulation of the magazine. He used to recount wryly how he wrote on others' stars without being aware of his own.

Behind a serious countenance were hidden painful moments of a past that HLS would never want to forget. Narrating them was not to extract an empathetic glance. On the face of it he would eventually try not to get whittled away by his upbringing. But the pain though subdued it was persisted beneath all his acts of life. He would like to puff off life as it presented itself as he would cigarettes one after another.

He wasn't in his life a grandiose performer planning everything meticulously like any other middle class man would do. He did not squander money either. But he was always short of it. He kept himself busy away from the college. Not strictly a professional at teaching, HLS was an amateur acting in drama whenever an opportunity presented itself.

It's already a decade since he retired. A legacy, he didn't leave behind. But an aura of the kind of man he was, he certainly did. His was not a hallowed presence for he didn't represent a typical maths teacher who everyone would want today to help score. A romantic at methods of teaching as also in his attitude to life, HLS would discover to us a need to treat everyday not as a segment of months and years, but as single and unique. He taught us to be occupied in different ways even as maths itself kept us busy. HLS had a pathological hatred for anything lethargic or languorous. He believed in doing one thing or another, never expecting returns.

When asked what he would do after retirement, a portly diminutive creature that HLS was, had quipped with a philosophic grin, "Life has not scripted me anything in particular. It's like a class room for me where I would sit at the other end this time like you waiting for my 'teacher' to instruct".

I still feel he is somewhere around.