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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Review |
Kannada World, Indian Cosmos
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| A comprehensive presentation of modern Kannada literature in translation |
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Sirigannada:
Contemporary Kannada Writings
Edited by Vivek Shanbhag,
TRANQUEBAR, 293 pages,  295
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IRIGANNADA PRESENTS THE READER, especially
the non-Kannada reader, with a wide range of
Kannada writing that reflects the concerns, preoccupations
and anxieties of writers and critics regarding contemporary
Kannada culture. The anthology features short
stories, extracts from plays and novels, a couple of poems,
an autobiographical narrative and |
a few essays. What is of great interest is that the pieces in the volume represent the diverse traditions within Kannada culture and literature and, very importantly, also bring the reader face to face with the changes India has been undergoing during the past two decades, widely recognised as the phase of globalisation. In this sense, the anthology—through translation—captures the Kannada world as representative of the Indian cosmos.
The Kannada literary tradition moved into a modernist
phase—called Navya in Kannada—more than 50 years ago.
The Navya phase generated tremendous intellectual energy
by closely interrogating long-held notions of tradition,
culture, community life and individual choices. The enormous
positive scepticism of the Navya writers continues to
be one of the most outstanding features of Kannada literary
and cultural traditions and—even after several decades—marks contemporary Kannada consciousness.
There followed a phase during which the specificity of
the Dalit experience journeyed into a larger ideological terrain
(inspired by Marxist ideas) that dealt with the oppression
of all lower castes and marginalised sections of society.
This phase is recognised as the Bandaya phase—meaning
‘protest’. Bandaya literature is protest literature.
It is imperative to recognise that there also exists a continuous
and uninterrupted flow of a feminist consciousness in
the Kannada literary tradition. Though not clearly acknowledged by the dominant critical tradition, it was constantly
evolving to become a literary force on its own terms, even demanding
the construction of a full-fledged feminist theory.
All these echoes, resonances and voices are adequately
represented in this volume. Most of the pieces here belong
to the past two decades. The promising writers of the
younger generation included in this book provide a contrast
to the big names of the Navya period such as UR Ananthamurthy,
Chandrashekhara Kambara, P Lankesh, KP Poornachandra
Tejaswi and Girish Karnad.
Rather than present a chronological and linear account
of the literary tradition, which is what the book does, it is
far more useful to focus attention on the thematic patterns
and ideological concerns that emerge from the works. A
conceptual approach opens up to the reader the dualities,
contradictions and paradoxes of a culture and a society in
transition. The Navya writers argued that the experiences
of the individuals and the communities they depicted were
not merely consciously held positions that had to be ‘stated’
in a work of art. On the contrary, it was necessary for the
writer to transmute ideas into experiences out of which
such positions would emerge. In other words, works of art
needed to ‘enact’ the dilemmas of human beings and not
project them as ‘objective ideas’.
Several tensions of the contemporary world find expression
in these pieces—feudalism; patriarchy; mythical beliefs;
the virtual reality of a globalised world; the turmoil
of widows in a dehumanised traditional order; the historical
location of a mythological world; the existential predicament
of a Dalit; the manipulations of an opportunistic,
smalltime politician’s lackey; and the ideological and moral
conflicts of a brutal, hegemonising nation-state. The works
articulate these issues through a wide range of imagery
and by employing different kinds of metaphors and symbols
only to highlight the complexities of our times. The
overlapping of social situations, historical contexts and the
reenactment of individual anguish and misery at different
junctures point to the continuum in which individuals and
communities confront their destinies.
In the short story ‘Kamaroopi’, UR Ananthamurthy portrays
the wily moves of a smart operator in a world of petty
politics, revealing its nexus with the worlds of commerce
and trade, and underlining the nature of our amoral sociopolitical
order. The manner in which nation-building takes
place through an unholy alliance of corrupt politicians and
the utterly faceless world of modern business is a telling
comment on the nature of our nation-state and the moral
bankruptcy of our civil society with its façade of dignity
and honour.
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KP Poornachandra Tejaswi portrays the strategies of survival
adopted by a so-called primitive and backward world. |
P Lankesh in ‘Classmate’ and Kum Veerabhadrappa in
‘The Handshake Episode’ attempt to unravel the labyrinths
of a decadent feudal order governed by a dehumanising
caste system. Even as these short stories deal with the cruelties
of the feudal world, they foreground the many subtle
ways in which modernity makes its way into that world
and weaves a pattern into the feudal fabric. The two stories
depict the complex manner in which Indian feudalism undergoes
a transformation and how individuals experience
a metamorphosis, not through dramatic revolutions, but by
means of subversive acts.
A truly modern sensibility is at work in the fiction of
Ananthamurthy and Lankesh, which is manifested differently
in KP Poornachandra Tejaswi’s story, ‘An Indentured
Spirit’. Adopting a comical mode, Tejaswi contrasts the rational,
sceptical attitude of a modern protagonist with the
myths and superstitions that prevail in a rural landscape.
Tejaswi does not create a simplistic opposition between
the two. Instead, in the story, myths and superstitions are
used by a crafty old Harijan, Maara, to hoodwink gullible
villagers for his own gains. The story—through a distinct
modern consciousness—unfolds all the strategies of survival
of a so-called primitive and backward world, in no
way inferior to those of the modern world. In this, Tejasvi
differs from the other Navya writers who were more concerned
with urban themes.
The Kannada literary sensibility, in spite of a predominant
rational consciousness, has juxtaposed aspects of
modernity with several elements of a mythological world. Chandrashekhara Kambara and Girish Karnad are two
writers who use myths in an extremely creative manner,
historicising them with great sophistication. The fine relationship
between myth and history finds full expression
in the excerpts from Kambara’s Shikara Soorya and Girish
Karnad’s Agni mattu Male (Fire and the Rain). The Kannada
literary tradition offers a mythopoeic imagination that
compels us to question the dominant epistemological constructs
of Western sociology, anthropology and history.
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