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.

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.

SHAKESPEARE OR SAKALESHPUR?

He didn’t know he was writing the name of a taluk in Hassan district, Karntaka. Nor did he even read having written it. Neither was he aware if what he had written would fetch him a mark. He flirted with the phonetics perhaps and wrote the way he possibly could.

Valuing second degree English scripts of a university, this writer to his shock and disbelief found an answer paper where a student had written Sakaleshpur instead of Shakespeare. I could discern the student had the right answer in his mind, but translating into a word by a proper arrangement of letters, the student had badly bungled. Announcing this to my co-valuers, I found the responses ranging from rebuke and ridicule, which is typical of English teachers, to an instant acknowledgement of the fact that there is something amiss in the collective process of teaching and learning. Few could realize, hegemonising skills of grammar over knowledge-based texts would result in such a faux pas.

There is a strange similarity between the two words. Both have eleven letters. Each almost rhymes with the other. Spoken as an Australian or an American would, they sound similar! Except for an ‘L’ and a ‘U’, the letters used are the same. A sub-conscious permutation of letters would only have caused the misspell.

Should I award him a mark? I thought for a moment for I knew he knew the answer. But then it would, though the purpose was served, be a fatuous assessment of the student and also, it would go against the pedagogic principles of language learning and evaluation.

In hindsight I believe I should have awarded him the mark for a teacher of literature and language has cultural as also social responsibilities and further, he cannot act as a pedagogue beyond a point. The student was wayward, no doubt, but the word he wrote in any case resembled that of Shakespeare.

Two and a half decades ago when I joined a mofussil college as an English teacher, grammar learning would stop at plus two stage. Teaching literature was the sole repertoire of English teachers at the degree level. We didn’t have a chimerical notion of grammar. It was when we had firmly believed learning or teaching language per se would make a student know neither literature nor language. The language component was assiduously kept out. The nuances of language we thought had to be imbibed through a literary orientation for literature is always an engagement with the masses speaking different tongues and churning out different possibilities of life. Teaching literature, we would have taught life and language together.

Only recently has imparting genesis of language acquired a preponderant space what with globalisation demanding intricacies and skills of English as more than essential things in the much hyped up economic and cultural discourses.

Coming as it did to us as a colonial baggage, English has acquired a super-speciality status donning as many roles as it can to suit the need of the hour. Being used as a link language to begin with, English became a cultural and social necessity in course of time. Leaving behind all Indian languages to their territorial and parochial boundaries, English over the last few years has impregnably conquered an unenviable space denting fanatic murmurs of native language activists. The result, fanaticism has grown, so also has English.

As a language, English in the formative years of India’s independence was learnt and spoken in the same manner as the native speakers of English did. Our English writers of fiction and poetry wrote in the way that almost superimposed either a Hardy or a Dicken’s or even a Wordsworth on their writings. R. K. Narayan’s novels strangely resemble Hardy’s Wessex narratives. Kuvempu in the early stages used to write poems in English that taken off the wrapper would prove to be ones written by Wordsworth. English had thus begun to acquire a hegemonical importance over and above native languages. At the cultural level English became a new lease of life, a source of liberation from the hierarchical structures of class, creed and other distinctions. Gradually, the same language, may be, in varied hues became a decolonising tool as is evident in the writings of a Rushdie or Arundathi Roy or even Vikram Seth. Ambedkar embraced English as an antidote to overcoming social and cultural hiatus.

Things have further changed since then. English is no more a language that would preempt and dislodge our own languages. On the other hand, English has simulated into our psyche a working ethos without which a great deal of modern India stands still. Whether we want it or not, English has grown into a paradigm of modern culture and development. No alternative appears in sight to a language which has taken on itself avuncular as also patriarchal responsibilities in the context of a global culture. English as a monolith has seeped into our social and cultural fabric transforming it beyond its frenetic, nevertheless diverse anatomy. For political and civilisational reasons, English has been a homogenising tool needed to transform a divisive and heterogonous cultural and social landscape into a unique and tendentiously pristine monologue of a singular mode of thought and expression.

In the last few years, universities which believe they have a stake in englishising a laid back culture and society have started modifying literature oriented English syllabi by bringing in bouts of language learning skills and prescribing separate work books on grammar and composition for the students to work out in the class. A language teacher is more a facilitator, they say. But the pedagogic nature of these books is always suspect for what the students have since their school days learnt and studied is reproduced with abysmally easy illustrations. Universities seem to still believe students have not picked up threads of Grammar when they arrive at the plus two level and after. True, but language learning has to stop at some stage leaving a definite space for the students to think of higher truths of life. To continue to believe students are language infirm for the purpose is only to condescendingly judge their innate capacity at the undergraduate level when their perceptive responses to literature and culture are more positive than their tentative and forced leaning towards learning skills of language which are always stoked with fear and a sense of being intimidated to be learning something reluctantly. But the universities believe theirs is also some kind of white man’s burden in preparing our students with a wild card for an entry into global market!

The idea though looks noble at the outset is in itself stymied and short sighted. Reintroducing grammar component which is no different from what is in vogue at schools demoralizes students to be told over and over again their language needs mending. They would develop pathological hatred towards language learning and also towards teachers some of whom are characterized by an equal share of pathological discontent for teaching a pedagogical text shorn off its spiritual and mundane qualities.

Teaching language in a class room situation at the degree level lacks its emotive intent. At best it could be imparting skills in the use of language , and at worst it could precipitate into an absurd drama where only one person acts and facilitates while at another end students doze off! You teach a Dickens or a Blake or an essay on culture by Matthew Arnold of yester years or on imperialist discourses by Arundhati Roy of today, you will find students sit up and listen. They would begin to involve you and themselves animatedly. Ideas would flourish in a dialogic exchange. A monologic and enervating exercise would give way to refreshingly spiritful array of opinions and remarks. You would not enliven a class better.

Pedagogy in today’s system of education is the worst and most dangerous thing to happen to a student at the university level. It preempts knowledge acquiring and enhancing stimulus. College education should be anything, but pedagogic. Grammar lessons always have a pedagogic oeuvre, creating resistance and making students vary of attending classes.

Prescribing and enlisting topics for study of language has a way of transporting colonial legacy of a different kind where the importance of English language is too far stressed and romanticized. The talk of need based and practical linguistics too has a delimiting resonance. It avows to transform an English class into a clinical lab where your positions and prepositions would be tested. It would a clause correcting class act in a class of classic dynamism! You class struggle to pass, then you are a proud owner of a wild card.

English teachers have a stake here. They should not consider themselves to be at the helm teaching age old, worn out and clichéd expressions of grammar which ironically do not have a place even in English speaking nations. Queen’s English that we have been teaching for decades is a matter to be sent back to its colonial barracks. It is only a relic to be treasured in its own place of origin.

Nor do we have to consider teaching neo colonial and global outfits of English language which again are reflections of another legacy being seriously interrogated alongside the process of globalisation itself in the third world countries. A student graduating from a university would choose the kind of English he needs in the kind of world he chooses to live in for there are as many Englishes spoken in different worlds as there are intrepid and varied voices abounding in national and transnational situations. The kind of English taught at universities would prove increasingly detrimental as nowhere is such English spoken.

Yes, there are Spoken English courses offered by private institutes. In the little town where I reside crash courses in Spoken English are on a platter available to the needy not to speak of cities like Bangalore where every posh street is not without a spoken English clinic. They wouldn’t help them a wee bit either. For, which Spoken English they teach is a moot question. There is not one unique Spoken English spoken all over the world like the queen’s English. English today has many avatars changing its garb as the situation warrants.

Students too have their own share of blame. They don’t want to learn a language through its artifacts. What they desire is a capsule of spoken English to be swallowed whenever they have a symptom of their English being infirm and functionally deficient. They carry those capsules as a diabetic would a little lump of sugar to be used when he feels his sugar level is dropping!

It is high time that the universities as also English teachers paid their last respects to pedagogic nature of class rooms. English teachers in particular should present themselves not as pedagogues anymore, but as ideologues of overwhelming bearing in the context of a globalised world.

If we had taught more Shakespears, or Dickens, or Blakes, the student would have by reflexes alone known how to spell Shakespeare. Yes, reflexes are what a student trying to learn a language needs and it is what we should help enhance.

Whether we want more Shakespears or Sakaleshpurs is for the universities and English teachers to decide and halt future deterioration of sense and sensibility among the learners before long.

LITTLE VIGNETTES ON BUS TRAVEL

Traveling by bus in mofussil areas is in itself a very enriching experience if you wouldn’t mind being embarrassed over trivials. In the competitive world of privatization, bus operators have a stake. Their agents vie one another for their masters to get the day’s largesse. Their guiles are quite intriguing. They would not take off unless there is a ‘knock out’ punch from the next bus agent. Even then the take off wouldn’t be smooth. The engine would start, but the bus would be idle and the agent would be calling passengers in his stentorian voice crying destinations as if they are beyond sea! You would come running and get into the bus hoping the bus to take off instantly. It does start after a quarter of an hour by which time a government bus would have sped off. You curse and sit.

Having ensconced in your seat with a news paper bought at the stands you have hardly unfolded it. Your back row neighbour with a smugness attached to reading an English daily dabs you gently on your shoulder with a synthesised grin for the paper you have not browsed yet. You give him the paper with a wry smile not wanting to ruin your morning. You condone the tendentious attitude of reading a paper on ‘gratis’.

Your neighbour folds and unfolds reading or trying to read the previous day’s denouement. He returns the paper with customary thanks and you wouldn’t like to read the paper that is reduced to a mass. You bury it in the racks over head and sit blinking vaguely at the outside skies. You wouldn’t like to look back.

Your problems don’t end here. The cassette recorder begins to pound on your ears once the bus prepares to leave the town. You would really mind hearing the latest hype. You would plump for the classical if the recorder can’t be fully stopped. The conductor fails to take the cue. For, he wants to prove, he knows the latest. The movie buffs in the bus make him an instant hero. Cacophony for you is symphony for them. The blue outside sky is what beckons you.

The bus which the agent behoved as non-stop, stops at every available opportunity. You take cudgels on others’ behalf who are not many though. ‘If every bus is a non-stop one, how should we go?’, a co-passenger is heard shouting. Many join in to form the chorus. You sit subdued and offended. You think, of complaining, but decide against it. Even one in this world has a slice of good or bad or both, you philosophise. You try to hide your taut and pallid face, but can’t. You get down at your place and move off in the end.

But then going by bus has indeed its pleasurable moments. You notice with awe mild skirmishes for a seat among other passengers. You remember you too were involved in such things once or twice in the past. You chip in trying to counsel the vanquished for you are already a victor gratified with a seat. Failing, you sit looking at the minor comedy of manners which Shakespeare would have turned into a major one.

‘Jatras’ are regaling features with people who you would see perched on top of the bus, the inside being jam-packed. No rules or regulations and for that matter not even life threatening consequences would whittle them down. If you are a passenger inside or a curious onlooker, your middle class upbringing with a sense of security paramount always in your mind would make you feel for the endangered commuters who care little for they have reposed unflinching faith in the deity worshipped during the jathra.

Being on top of a bus is yet another moment of bliss. You think you are on top of the world seen by the bystanders below awestruck. I myself remember one such experience.

Grown and brought up in the midst of a rustic village, with sylvan surroundings silhouetting our ways of life I had to commute all the way to a near by town for my school. Those were the days when buses were not too many. On every weekly gathering of the town people being seen on top of the bus was an unfailing regularity. Students weren’t as a safety measure allowed getting onto the top! One such day is still deeply entrenched in my memory. The bus was as usual filled to the brim! I pleaded with the conductor to allow me to travel on top. He was reluctant, but I persevered. The moment of my reckoning came the same day, with the conductor agreeing.
Climbing onto the top, I chose a sack of rice to sit on. There were a few elders who had chosen to sit similarly. As the bus moved I thought I was on cloud nine! Wobbling and meandering its way on a road that had scrapped with years of use, the bus halted at my station. I got down feeling no less than Hilary on Mount Everest who too could not have been as hilarious.

Back home, I narrated the tale to my father. He became aghast and in a fit of rage flogged me soundly. I swore never to travel on top though I shyly did on a few more occasions not declaring my heroics to any body!

Commuting for years to my school and college by bus I could know the microscopic as also macrocosmic view of Indian life. The kinds of language that were uttered by passengers as varied as they were myriad, the things they bought and transported, the idiosyncratic mannerisms as it would seem to us, the intrepid voices narrating the politics of the land, the debates during election time on who would win or lose and a host of issues getting circulated inside the bus did make me think how public opinion would formulate itself inside a bus which remains even now as the only popular mode of transport of the poor and the down trodden. Traveling with them would annihilate our ego making us think, we are on par.

To know India is to travel by bus and to travel by bus is to know India!