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.

WHITHER (OR WHETHER) HAS LITERATURE FLED?

Speaking in one of the sessions of the yearly cultural meet held at Heggodu last October, Dr. U. R. Ananthamurthy bemoaned that contemporary breed of Kannada writers is atrophied by a lack of creative energy and critical ingenuity. As to skill and workmanship, they have everything, but flashes, none he averred at the same time. Dr. Murthy likened literary creativity to sprouting of a seed which sucks the moisture as also the warmth of mother earth and sprouts. As much ritualistic as seasonal this process is, a literary work should get produced as much the same way as the iron heated, beaten and tempered before it becomes a finished product in a smithy. These images of ‘ seed ‘ and ‘ iron ‘ are inarguably patent demonstrations of literary creativity, but then has literature that flourished in greater part of the previous two centuries sustained its phenomenal importance at the stroke of 21st century too ?

Modern literature in Kannada during a vast and significant part of the 20th century elevated itself to new heights what with writers like Masti, Kuvempu, Bendre, Karantha followed by Adiga, Ananthamurthy, Lankesh and then Mahadeva, Tejasvi, Vaidehi, Mogalli Ganesh, Vivek Shanbhag and a host of many perceptive authors as varied as they are myriad enriching our tradition and culture. It is again possibly true that in variety and pervasiveness the present generation of writers does not match any of these, who could possess rather easily the ‘ warmth ‘ of time as also to use Eliot’s phrase ‘ individual talent ‘. The present creed does have the latter, but to quote Ananthamurthy again, they suffer from an enervating feeling of a lack of urgency as also time’s constraints. A great writer emerges perhaps only once in a millennium like Shakespeare !

An overview of world literature may help us enlarge this perception better. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gorky, Gogol and many Russia’s most celebrated brigade of writers have underneath their works a critique of a barbaric civilization unleashed by the Czars and nurtured by a fiefdom which had pervaded the whole of Russia and an exploitative, oppressive quasi – political bureaucracy that had sucked the masses to the very marrow. This prompted Lenin to say, “ Tolstoy is the mirror of Russian revolution “. But after the revolution what grew was an ineluctable propagandist literature that did no less damage to the cultural as also literary scene than what Czars did to the body politic. Literature produced then propounded the leftist ideology and had become as nuanced as to eulogise and glorify the ‘masters of revolution’ in an organized state machinery which curtailed human freedom in favour of bread, yet not butter. Tolstoy was not just the mirror of revolution, but a prophet who could forebode its destructive and garrulous aftermath.

Two world wars taking place within twenty odd years of Russian revolution metamorphosed the whole of Europe as effectively and conclusively as it did Russia, Literatures produced in these years imbibed at the individual as also collective levels of human existence a feeling more of pacifism than of war coupled with a sense of helplessness and ‘angst’ which jolted the mind and body together causing rampant estrangement and nihilism. Sentiments and perceptions opposed to modern culture of war which believed in total annihilation were inaugurated through a language of literature which by its somber and modest presence took head on state sponsored tendencies of war and attrition. In a way literature of these days came to the rescue of a beleaguered people who were surrounded by hawks of war and proponents of doom! Literature in Brechtian terms ‘instructed’ them against a cataclysmic state apparatus. Kafka, Camu, Malraux, Thomas Mann and a majority of such writers in their works produced heroes of impalpable energy and resilience who stood against and ultimately succumbed to the system as gritty images of a common man’s wrestling with the state. European literature has undercurrents of a culture made possible and disseminated by French, Russian revolutions, the two world wars and the consequences there on.

Browsing through pages of British literary history would reveal the presence since Chaucer of a marked but less pronounced critiquing by a galaxy of writers emerging at different points of time of a state run berserk by kings and queens alike. All those years recognized as different ages and named after such writers as were thought prominent, were years of subjugation perennially done by the system, of a people who had been craving, at the same time growing from strength to strength in their desire, for self rule. Shakespeare in his plays could muster and improvise a crisis that was deepening inside a political and social sphere on his way to depicting a state fallen from grace of god as also of people. He discoursed on love and friendship in his sonnets and on their eternal, yet temporal nature. What helped Shakespeare was the time in which he lived as also a language which he used not very conscientiously. At a time when Greek and Latin were languages which had hierarchically appropriated the cultural landscape of England and hegemonised the upper echelons of the society, this colossus of a writer used English, the language of the common man then and scripted a vast theatrical scape of timelessness. It was again in Shakespeare that the timeless and temporal, the good and evil, the timid and courageous, the justice and iniquity and particularly the state and individual had become involved in a spiritual as also political struggle for supremacy and endurance. He didn’t perhaps leave anything to be said to the writers who followed him. Nor did they feel they had something to say other than what Shakespeare had already said Shakespeare II couldn’t just be born.

True, English literature and its arch critics may still pride in the past glory of Shakespeare which one might think is more than compensated by literary wizards such as Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Lawrence and others. But none of them cherished as Shakespeare did a truamatised and inglorious time. Despite their ‘individual talent’, they lacked a time reminiscent of Shakespear’s. Literature of the romantics wasted its power and energy only to be further enervated by a civilization that had held a colossal sway over mind and matter. Dickens and Blake may match Shakespear’s genius, but his ‘ripeness’ is unique only to Shakespeare.

America did really produce a great writer in Mark Twain. But then Meluille and Hemingway were great literary craftsmen thinking along the lines as do present day imperialists that power and knowledge alone would remain as ultimate values to be chewed and swallowed, if not digested for centuries to come.

Literatures by aboriginals of Australia reflect barbarism of white hegemony over their land and sea. The white writers though have written on this, have done so in a condescendingly ‘ philanthropic ‘ zeal or in a guilt born out of their unabashed appropriation of the aboriginal psyche, like Conrad writing about Africans in as much the same abysmal sympathy and intolerance. Without being aware great literatures produced over a period of time all over to a point incredulously kept supporting the state and its values. Like the kings of the past who got their hench literature men to write only about their wars, wine and women.
All art is anti-establishment, it is said. There indeed were literatures that tried to unleash themselves from the state’s subjugation and appropriation like the ones Pampa and Kumaravyasa produced despite working for a throne as they had physical and metaphysical compulsions in a crisis of commitment that was torn between the throne and the throng. But literatures produced now a days are akin to things in a globalised world manufactured and doled out by firms to consumers for instant consumption ‘a la’ ‘ ready to eat ‘ products.

Ananthamurthy was only hinting at this kind of literature.

Habib Thanvir, noted theatre personality in an interview to The Hindu some time ago had said, ‘the worst times have produced the best of art'. He was only trying to answer a query why great works weren’t forthcoming as they once were. Shakespeare had the ‘ worst ‘ time to drain out of which he built his plays bit by bit with a veritable spectrum of discourses on as far ranging issues as love and hate at one end and politics and civilization at another. He attained timelessness by probing its own vacuousnes and it is this sense of vacuity he probed has made him more modern and contemporary than topical.

Kannada literature in the first half of the 20th century reflected how colonial power in theory and practice devastated a native and indigenous culture by replacing it with a semitic and syncretic theo-political governance. Kuvempu created in his fiction little cultural texts of the collective out of which the individual tried to emerge and these texts deflected the colonial legacy by trying to anaesthetize it. Karanth too though in a different tale of human life subsumes in his novels relatively upper caste moorings of a modern ethos entering into the collective and decisively splitting it. Both these writers put to test rather obliquely a microcosmic ‘self' as against a macroscopic and homogenising ‘other'. Bendre’s was a disparately unique phenomenon. He entered into the ‘folk' to show how colonialism ruptured the consciousness of a people and countered it in his poems with images not drawn from far and wide, but from within the mystical and mysterious domains which were still not undone by the new colonial culture.
The crisis and conflict arising out of attempting to negotiate with the new culture found expressions in modern Kannada writers, Ananthamurthy and Lankesh to name only two who were as much influenced by literature and philosophy of western writers like Sartre, Camu and other existential thinkers as by that of Kuvempu and Karanth. But then, the warmth of ‘time' in which great writers world over regaled, producing remarkable quality of literary thought through their fictional and critical preoccupations has long ceased to exist to put pressure on the creative energies of present writers. Literature produced without the urge of time cannot carve itself a place as phenomenal as it could do once. ‘Tradition and individual talent’ alone would not bolster the ‘image’ of literature. Fine tuning of literary creativity has to be done by a prescription of time which was available to Shakespeare and other lesser giants!

Philosophy was once believed as the ultimate and decisive wisdom as much as mathematics which has had a hegemonical presence over all spheres of human knowledge and endevour even now. These two spheres of knowledge as diverse as they might seem at the outset coexisted in some of the greatest minds of the past. Euclid was as much a philosopher as he was a mathematician of unparalled reckoning. And Galileo was another. Mathematics and philosophy being knowledge based, elite-centred hegemonical texts were politically and socially canon forming with a view to sustaining the stranglehold over the subaltern minds which could not even aspire to know the basics of these disciplines. They had become an exploitative and coercive tool to subdue a consciousness which hibernated within the crevices of the suppressed majority.

Literature lighted these crevices to be able to reach a space hither to unexplored and unrecognized. This space was transfused and transformed into a fruition of an experience of the collective and ordinary. Literature could run into the space occupied by philosophy with its liberal humanist position and was slowly able to dislodge it by reaching out to a majority that was denied participation of any kind in disciplines such as philosophy and mathematics. Literature in fact did not need a homogenising and intellectual space as it originated from within the subterranean, voicing the concerns of a people who too for their appreciation of literature didn’t need to know other knowledge based elite centred disciplines. Literature thus dislodged philosophy from its pivotal and enviable position by democratizing and disseminating a trudged and trampled consciousness to which it gave an image of existence like a sparrow that weaves a web of nest to give succour and feed its offspring. Literature could not have been born in a more opportune moment.

Having made its foray into a world constructed and deconstructed by itself, literature in the new millennium these days seems without a rudder having lost out to other disciplines in a globalised context which leaves no choice to people but to imbibe reluctantly or otherwise a new globe culture. Literature seems as much impoverished as philosophy did when literature was beginning to emerge.

It could also be that literature save its fictional world is getting expressed through social sciences and cultural studies. These are the days of great social scientists and even one time important literatteurs like Arundhathi Roy and Tejaswi have taken up non fictional and philosophic discourses leaving behind their tales of human life. Arundhathi Roy in particular of late is largely focusing on the dangers of imperialist discourses with a counter discourse which is tempered with an activism of some sort alongside Medha Phatkar.

Literature with its erstwhile not so predetermined an approach as seen in social sciences’ repertoire of today appears, it has done with its agenda and cleared its space for newer disciplines. Wheel coming full circle cannot be averted.

Ananthamurthy’s concerns for literature expressed at Heggodu were possibly an understatement as he himself is looking beyond the territorial meaning and integrity of a literary text for probably fresher horizons of political and civilizational conflicts to be able to speak in an idiom which is at once antithetical to the literary ‘genre’ as such and also to his once cherished, but ebbed of late , phenomenal and hegemonical importance of literature.
Literature ‘perse’ does not exist now. It is rid of its canonical and phenomenal importance. We have stepped into a theorized and theoromised trans-national space trying to interrogate a globalised world view which was once done by a fictional ‘outfit’ called literature. Literature does have a small space with many writing poems and stories still. But then the contemporary reader has other ideas. At the personal level I would rather listen to a speech or read an article by Arundhathi Roy than browse through a novel of today by any other even of erstwhile greatness who would either celebrate the past or prescribe a gori future!

Times have changed; so should literature.

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.