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.

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!

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.