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.

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.

Prof. CDN : A TRIBUTE

A bubbling enthusiast in English I joined the department at Manasa Gangotri, Mysore for a masters in English Literature in the early eighties having given up studying science enervated by its mathematical formulae, physical equations and to say the most chemical bonds which had tested by perseverance for three years though I came out in the end graduating in science with a good degree.

Prof. CDN had retired a couple of years earlier. But the ambience there was so agog with his aura as to make one feel the professor’s presence with greater fecundity and fullness. Most of my teachers had been his students and the influence was obvious. He was still every inch a professor in the department.

Many years earlier, Prof.C D Narasimaiah was instrumental in inaugurating a literary club which with its weekly meetings had created a platform particularly for us, a host of literature savvy megalomaniacs who thought literature was everything, bread and butter nothing. Impoverished by my three year degree course, I was sedate and languorous in the beginning what with my mates tickling my rustic English to do the fine tuning job and enabling me not to look back since.

The road became easier. I trudged along nicely with my frequent visits to Dhvanyaloka - the brain child of the great professor and an epicenter of modern English renaissance. The aura in the department had ebbed, but transported to a different space that was large enough to include Professor’s ever enhancing domain of literature and culture.

Having a humble and modest social and cultural background, Prof.CDN to the envy of many went on to become one of the most reckoned teachers of English Literature. At Cambridge, he was Leavis’ direct student. He brought back to Mysore Leavis’ legacy of the sacrosanct of the text and its cultural and social derivatives. He stuck to Arnold – Eliot – Leavis line of modern literature till the end with the theory oriented critical jargons of European thinkers such as Derrida and the like, making no dent in his literary perceptions. The new way of looking at literature wasn’t just there.

Prof. CDN is remembered today for many things, two being most striking. Introducing English studies in Indian universities and elevating Indian English writing far beyond its known territorial and cultural limits. The latter was a little too much done to regard Indian ‘Bhasha’ literatures as also equally important. The Professor was a man of unwavering faiths as also prejudices which were not too many though.

Prof. CDN considered literature a homoginising tool which is why he preferred Indian English literature to literatures in Indian languages. He perhaps didn’t like the rusticity of our languages used in literature for he had gone beyond to imbibe overwhelmingly the elitist and sophisticated tools of English language and to undo the backwardness of his upbringing. Going back to the roots meant reliving and retrieving the past from which he wanted to release himself. Not to feel inferior has always been a cultural phenomenon. It was a wrong political act , but culturally, he was rigid perhaps!

He revered Nehru beyond a limit who too thought of homogenising heterogeneous Indian identity through modern methods of development. He could think of Gandhi as only a writer, but not as a social reformer who would in any case not dismantle Indian diversities.

Prof. CDN without exception stood his ground when he was to assess the impact of European theories on literature. He was an extreme rightist in this context. He always relieved as Leavis did, a literary text was sacrosanct and it embedded a meaning that was interpretative as also decipherative at the same time. He would not agree with Derrida or in that matter a host of post-structuralists who maintained, a literary text per se did not exist and the meaning each time it was thought to represent something kept deferring. The text was not the text. The text did not refer to the bounded words on the page to quote Leavis. The text would lie elsewhere. For the whole of Wordsworth’s poetry industrial revolution was the text and for Eliot’s, modernity.

Prof. CDN did not even wink at these concepts. Literature for him was the ultimate. He looked at the post modern theorists rather disdainfully and with little sympathy. He hegemonised literature over other discourses. This was largely the Professor’s undoing. But then, he was a true meditative saint of literature and as one of my teachers who was CDN’s student put it, ‘Prof. CDN epitomized all English sophistication’.

Talking of CDN, two personal sketches, one in which I was myself involved and the other, a friend’s account, would not be out of place. An international seminar held at Dhvanyaloka when I was still a student at Mysore was an opportune moment for me to deconstruct the Professor. The discussion was on English studies in colonial and non-colonial contexts. I interjected during a session with a view that English literatures to our students should be taught in their mother tongue as English, as a language, would pose social and cultural problems. Prof. CDN was aghast and furious. He asked satirically whether all English departments in the country should be closed down! For the first time I thought the Professor was a live wire! Dr. Ananthamurthy who was present later told me, ‘yes! What you said was right, but …’. The Professor bore no ill will towards me for expressing what he thought was a very uncomfortable and unconvincing view point.

Every year towards the end, the Professor would invite final year students to his residence for a toast followed by dinner. He would personally make an offer of toast to students. After the dinner, he would move to each student and offer cigarettes. It was an English bonhomie of a party which the students regaled and enjoyed. The Professor could not have been more amiable.

The Professor died in his sleep at his daughter’s residence in Bangalore where he had gone to renew his passport. Remember, he was 80-plus and had plans to go to Sri Lanka. Literature was always a pilgrimage for him. He undertook it, lived it and died for it.

Prof. CDN may not be amidst us today. But we remember him for all his courage and conviction. He was a single man who became colossus for generations of students and authors. It was hard not to disagree with him, but then he could improvise our differences into a creative phenomenon. Such was the man and his legacy not to be just preserved, but to be sustained only to enliven ourselves by constant questioning and disagreeing for many many years to come.

Remembering Subbanna

A year since Subbanna died; a year that saw Ninasam, his brain child, relocate itself and find its new bearings without his phenomenal presence felt ubiquitously yet unobtrusively for more than four decades; a year that witnessed a sudden spurt of activities as if to challenge death’s inevitability with human sagacity. It was also a year of unemotional obsequiousness offered to a great man who in his life time was able to transform a dithering village community into a group of connoisseurs of art and culture.

Subbanna now conjures up before us only an image – of a fragile frame with a conflation of dark and white beard dotted on a rugged texture of a face. A tiny ‘pan’ bag tucked precariously in the arm pit would necessarily draw people to him for a ‘pan’ and a discussion on issues ranging from the price of areca to literature and to politics and decentralization that saw his reddish lips quiver beneath a pair of glossy eyes hidden behind his fat framed spectacles. Subbanna would as animatedly talk to younger souls as he did to scholars from world over who converged at Heggodu making it a confluence of literary and cultural terms.

The same grace and warmth may be missing now. But then the legacy he has left behind will for sure enliven this tiny village ambience that would remain incorruptible despite a global and corporate bonhomie trying to dislodge it. Subbanna’s absence would be all the more conspicuous.

Back in Heggodu, after finishing his honours degree, Subbanna had a mission to perform. The British had not left India. The freedom struggle was at its peak. As Subbanna himself would say, there was an upsurge of energy waiting to be translated into a zeal, an urge to do something. Alongside an embittered mass trying to drive the British out, there existed an unimaginably insouciant people tethered to a traditional hook-up.

Subbanna had to respond to both kinds of people - the surged up as also those in stupor. He channeled the excess energy along the road of culture and woke up the slumbered lot to the realities of time. Subbanna improvised his traditional wisdom lacing it with lores of modernism on his way to morphing an endangered consciousness into a repertoire of literature and culture. Only Gandhi knew, a village had so much to offer. The result - Ninasam was born.

In cultural terms, Subbanna was a true Gandhian. Politically, he was a socialist who contributed immensely to the movement that offered a counter discourse to the land owning patriarchy. He answered with his concept of a village many of his adversaries, Marx, for instance, who spoke of ‘village idiocy’ privileging economic development alone over other values. He thought big! But Subbanna like Gandhi focused on the very mundane and ordinary.

Subbanna was not an aesthete in the true sense as he strongly felt his cultural and literary preoccupations had to be tempered with the politics of time. Subbanna was a rigid practitioner of an art that always made a political statement. As a socialist, he thought the sound of a bullock cart was as important. At the same time he wanted politics to be rid of its insidious communal appeal. He was equally distrustful of violence of any kind which he felt would overwhelmingly strengthen the state and ultimately pronounce doom on democratic institutions.
Subbanna’s discourses on art and literature as also on culture and society project him as an avid reader of contemporary politics who situated himself very strongly in democratic foundations.

Subbanna’s philosophy of getting attuned to a work force had always hinged on community participation. He never claimed Ninasam was only his and made possible only by his efforts. He made people believe Ninasam was their’s too. Any institution should endure only with people participating in it and as long as they want it. He was therefore against state funding of cultural projects. He rejected the Ford grant when offered the second time as it would deviate Ninasam from the people.

Till the end Subbanna insisted, many places like Heggodu should blossom and operate as a cultural alternative to globalisation – not through state funding but through people’s will. At a time when culture is commodified and multinational agencies are very keen on opening cultural centres of excellence in cities and metropolises, Subbanna remains as a guiding spirit, a beacon whose inveterate ideological indebtedness to democracy as a people’s governance would for a long time keep at bay global operators of culture and art.

‘Excellence’ is a word too often heard. For Subbanna, excellence of any kind was only a pathological obsession which derailed the very idea of progress. By progress, he did not mean development through dams and bombs. But it had a spiritual and metaphysical oeuvre making one at the same time look inwards. Art experience was never apolitical for him. But then it was neither too political to erase our social and cultural memories. On the other hand, it would take us beyond categories of time into the metaphysics of being. He was equally disdainful of politics that refused to allow itself a space beyond its delimited scope of the mundane and ordinary. At the highest level, the experiences of art and politics coalesce at the same point and space. If Subbanna had a specific aesthetics in mind, it was to achieve this space!

A day long function was held to mark the first death anniversary of Subbanna ( July 16 ). A seminar on ‘Crisis in contemporary culture and politics’ was held in the morning followed in the evening by a production of a Shakespeare’s play ‘Measure for Measure’ translated and directed by Subbanna’s son Akshara.

A great play which addresses issues of religion and politics at one end and sex and morality at another, ‘Measure for Measure’ has had a powerful contemporary appeal too. The cast included amateurs from Ninasam who regaled the audience as much as any professionals would. Staid and pedantic while communicating the serious, the play became alive at points where kingship was a butt of ridicule and gossip.

A fine tribute to Subbanna in the end.