Indian Literature, Folk Epics

JNANPITH AWARDEE Chandrashekara Kambar -Part 2

2011-10-21T23:48:00.000-04:00

Drama:

At the time when Kambar wrote his first play in 1961, the Kannada theatre had begun to move away slowly from the Theatre of Realism (Kailasam and Sriranga), exploring new concerns and newer forms of representation. The ‘Angry Young Man’ of the Fifties had begun to catch the attention of the city audiences (with the Modernist plays of Lankesh) along with the ‘Absurd Plays’ of Chandrashekhara Patil and Chandrakantha Kusanur. Girish Karnad’s first play Yayathi (an interrogation of the old myth from a woman’s point of view) had just been staged (1960), introducing mythopoeic drama to Kannada theatre.

Although the first three plays of Kambar heralded the arrival of a major playwright on the scene, it was his Jokumaraswamy in 1972 that won him national recognition. The production of this play, under the direction of B. V. Karanth, as Rajendra Chenni records, was

“ by consensus the most significant event in modern Kannada theatre.

Here was a play for ‘total theatre.’ It had great songs set to music by

Kambar, ritual worship of the phallic fertility god, humour, uninhibited

treatment of sexuality, conflict and tragedy, albeit muted. Kannada

theatre seemed to have undergone a major scene-shift, from the realistic

proscenium ‘prosy’ stage to the colours, movement, music, and rhythms

of a mythopoeic folk-theatre.” ¹²

Jokumaraswamy was followed by a series of major plays including Jaisidanayaka (1975), Kaadu Kudure (1976; its film-adaptation won National Award), Harakeya Kuri (1983; film version won National Award), and Siri Sampige (1991; Sahitya Akademi Award). Including the recent play Shivarathri (2011), in all, Kambar has 23 plays to his credit.

Before we consider the last two plays of Kambar in greater detail, a few points in general concerning Kambar’s distinctive theatre may not be out of place. To start with, Kambar, thanks to his childhood days, seems to have absorbed almost all the stage-techniques (like mixing the serious with the comic, use of myths and legends, use of local idiom, use of music and dance, etc.) of folk-theatre. In his introduction to the English translation of Siri Sampige, he makes it clear what his roots as a playwright are:

. . . the folk theatre includes dance, drama, narration, song,

sex, death and religion. Most importantly, it is not only the

actors who are separate from the world outside but the audience

of the play as well. For the audience of the folk play participates

in what is ultimately a shared religious ritual in the form of a paly.

. . . A Londoner finds his dance, song, drama and religion at

different places. A man from my village looks for all these things

together. To simplify, Ibsen is impossible in my village; but may

I add, he should not be possible.¹³

Let me add that this is as good an exposition of ‘Total Theatre’ as expositions go.

However, he exploits all these techniques and stage-accessories of folk theatre to express modernist themes, which are (as discussed earlier) common to both his poetry and drama; the primeval force of sexuality (Rishyashrunga, Jokumaraswamy, etc.) contemporary political decadence (Jaisiddanayaka, Harakeya Kuri, etc.), the conflict between illusion and reality (Siri Sampige, etc.), tradition and change (Tukrana Kanasu ), etc. The important point to be stressed here is that Kambar’s plays are not ‘single- agenda- plays’; more often than not, most of the major plays of Kambar harmonise two or three themes together as does Jokumaraswamy, for instance.

The last two plays stand apart from the rest of the plays: Mahamayi (1999) and Shivarathri (2011). Even though they also employ ‘prologue’ and narrators to bring together narration and dramatization, and include songs and dances, they do not tell a ‘story’. While the first one is an allegory, dramatization of an abstract speculation about Fate and Human freedom, the second one views the great 12^th-century Veerashaiva movement in Karnataka from a subaltern point of view.

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Mahamayi: Dramatisation of a Paradox

Mahamayi ( ‘The Great Mother’) is a play that dramatises the most abstract ideas in the most concrete form. The issues it deals with are those that have haunted the human mind since time immemorial – the limits of human freedom and predestination. Where does one begin and the other end?

The myth through which Kambar chooses to examine these abstractions is one of death. There are many such Indian myths like that of Satyavan-Savithri and Markandeya¹⁴ which examine the issue of ‘human will vs. death.’ But the myth Kambar uses is one in the oral tradition. (Interestingly, in this myth it is not a god like Yama as in the classical tradition but a goddess, Shetavi Taayi (Mother Shetavi) who is responsible for one’s death.) Shetavi Taayi adopts an orphan (Sanjiva) and blesses him with miraculous ability to cure any person of any illness. But the condition is that he should treat only those persons whom the Mother approves. The play opens with three patients – the court jester, a grave digger, and a boy the only son of his mother – waiting for Sanjiva’s treatment. When he is examining the three, the Mother signals that the boy should not be cured. Sanjiva agrees but becomes sad that he cannot save the poor boy. Then he comes to know from the jester that the daughter of the king also is fatally ill and that nobody has been able till now to cure her. Sanjiva consents to examine her; but when he is getting ready, his Mother orders him not to treat the princess, making Sanjiva sadder.

Later, Sanjiva accidentally runs into the princess who, sick of her illness, is about to commit suicide; and he feels her pulse. At once, he diagnoses what illness she suffers from; and gives her a root to wear around her neck always. Miraculously, she recovers; and both fall in love with each other. However, the Mother, terribly angry with her son’s actions, orders him to remove the root from the princess’s neck and allow her to die as she is predestined. In order to demonstrate her power, she causes the sudden death of Sanjiva’s pet deer and also the latest mistress of the jester. Still, Sanjiva refuses to listen to her. In the end, the Mother manoeuvres in such a way that the princess herself removes the root from her neck and dies. However, when the Mother blesses her son doubling his life-span, he gives half of it to the princess and saves her. The last scene of the play shows a giant bird (symbol of Death) shrieking in pain and the maid of the Mother informing Sanjiva that due to the Mother’s curse henceforth he will lose the power of healing anybody.

The paradox of ‘Man’s freedom and pre-destination’ is at the center of the play and it is emphasized throughout. In the prologue itself, the Mother declares: “I am the Mother / the final destination / of all things, moving and motionless.” Girimallige supplements her statement that she is “the final, irreversible destiny.” When Sanjiva tells the Mother that he treated the princess so that she may escape “untimely death,” the Mother bursts out:

Who are you to decide what is timely or untimely for

her? Can you decide her fate / With your medicine?

Sanjiva: Then, is my medicine – Human effort – of no consequence

at all?

Mother: Truth lies too deep. Your knowledge, son, does not have the

power to dive so deep.”

Despite his Mother’s admonition, Sanjiva chooses to disobey her because he knows, as a man blessed with knowledge, he has to make a conscious choice and that only through such an attempt can he define himself as a man:

Sanjiva: I knew a moment would come when I would be compelled to take a

decision as a man. But I didn’t think I would also have to decide to go

against Mother. To marry you I must get my freedom. I am

grateful to you, Princess, for making me realize how valuable,

how inevitable freedom is.

Accordingly, he makes the conscious choice of saving the princess and thus establishing his human identity.

While discussing the inter-textuality of the play in his introduction, G. S. Amur states:

The ‘triumph’ of man over death has been the theme of myths

all over the world, though the instruments of victory have not been

the same. In the Markandeya myth, which figures prominently as a

sub theme in The Mother Supreme for example, it is bhakti,

devotion to God; in the Savithri myth it is jnana, true knowledge,

and in the Hercules myth, it is sheer physical power. ¹⁵

So, what does the play connote overall? Does it endorse the freedom

of Man? For, Sanjiva does save the princess against the Mother’s wishes; also, if Mother is, as she herself declares in the prologue, “Mother of all knowledge and being,” how could she not know that Sanjiva would gift part of life given to him by Mother? If she knew and kept quiet, why should she curse him? Superficially, it does appear that ‘ human effort, Love, conquers all including death’; but, we should remember that even the princess’s re-birth is due to the indirect blessing of the Mother in that it is she who doubles the life-span of Sanjiva. Then, is death the only ultimate truth available to Man? Not exactly; it is Sanjiva who consciously decides to give half of his life to the princess. While the myths of Savithri and Markandeya celebrate love and bhakti respectively, Mahamayi is open-ended and leaves the ambiguity of Life and Death unresolved.

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Shivaratri

‘Mah¹mane’ Vs ‘Aramane’: A Subaltern View

“Gelatige” (‘To the Friend’), the last poem in the recent poetry- collection of Kambar, Ellide Shivapura, (2009), ends with these lines :

“ What do we need to live?

A few illusions, a few more dreams!

My dreams are young, and I have scores of illusions!

Even an aged tree can put on new leaves if there is sap;

I possess a little even now to give – and to receive;

That is enough to lift up the horizon.”

These lines reveal why, even after 21 plays and six collections of poetry besides fiction and critical essays Chandrashekhara Kambar has something new to say, something new to show. Ancient Sanskrit rhetorician Rajashekhara defines poetic imagination as “pratibh¹ navanavønm∙¶a¶¹lini”¹⁶ ; and here lies the reason for Kambar’s ever fresh pratibh¹

or imagination: he has still a few dreams of ideals and functions, he is still left with a few illusions –dreams and illusions of a better society, and a just social order. Here, the title of Martin Luther King’s famous speech comes to mind: “I have a dream.” As long as writers have dreams –dreams of a just society –so long they will always be creative, and always fresh. Kambar is blessed with such dreams, still.

This new (22^nd) play of Kambar also is the dramatization of a ‘dream’ –the dream of Basavanna and his followers, who initiated the 12^th-century- socio-political revolution, called Sharana Revolution.¹⁷ As a matter of fact, the Sharana movement was of such great significance and impact that, beginning with Harihara, the 13^th-century poet, till today, there have been at least 200 literary works on that movement and the leaders of that movement. Even if we limit ourselves to the 20^th century, we find eminent writers like A. N. Krisnarao and Girish Karnad writing plays on the movement.¹⁸ However, the Sharana movement was of such magnitude and so inclusive that no single work can do justice to all the aspects of that movement. All that a writer can do is view the movement from one perspective or another.

However, Kambar’s play is different from all other works on that movement; also, this play is different from almost all other plays of Kambar also. Surprisingly, Kambar’s play (different from his other plays ) strictly follows the three Unities enumerated by Aristotle: the duration of the play is limited to just one night –the terrible, dark night after the Sharanas, Haralayya and Madhuvarasa, were meted out cruel form of death punishment; the night in which king’s soldiers hunted out the Sharanas (Basavanna’s followers); the night in which the atmosphere of fear, spread everywhere, made the dark new-moon-night darker. The place of action also is limited to just one part of the city of Kalyana, king Bijjala’s capital –that part of the city of Kalyana in which the marginalized sections of society such as dalits, prostitutes, gamblers, and such others lived; in fact, excepting Basavanna and Bijjala all other characters of the play belong to the lowest strata of society. Kambar as a playwright is known for his well-built plots and fully developed characters; but, in this play, there is not much of a plot which has a clearly marked development consisting of beginning, rising action, climax and the falling action. Rather, there are a series of scenes beginning with the socially ‘lowly’ ones and ending with the meeting between Basavanna and Bijjala. In the beginning, the Sutradhara briefly sums up the story up to the death of Haralayya and Madhuvarasa, and then the play begins. While some characters are on the realistic plane, a few others like Mugdha Sangayya, the guardian-goddess of the city of Kalyana, and a few others waver on the borderline of realism and symbolism. All these details add up to the fact that this play attempts to view the Sharana movement from the point of view of the marginalized sections of society. The play, keeping time constant, goes on moving from one place to another in the city, like a good cameraman moving from one place to another to catch the varied activities of different people at different parts of the city.

Through such techniques (as the lack of an organic plot, focus on the marginalized sections of the city, moving from one part of the city to another, unity of time, etc), the play intends to address certain interesting questions regarding the Sharana movement: a) How did the contemporary lower classes view the Sharana movement? b) What values of life generated by the movement entered their lives? a) and what was the nature of conflict between Basavanna and Bijjala?

a) we should note that every socio-religious movement has two aspects:

the first aspect deals with certain abstractions regarding the nature of God, creation of this universe, God-man relationship, etc. which is based only on faith alone to accept; and b) the second aspect consisting of certain codes of conduct (including food, dress and social behavior) pertaining to daily life.

Coming to the first aspect of abstractions, although the Sharana movement was a mass-movement, one cannot say that the lower classes had understood such concepts of ‘i¬a linga,’ ‘d¹søha,’ ‘k¹yaka,’ ‘sth¹vara-jangama,’ and such (linga, Shiva’s symbol, worn on the body; sharing what we have with others; physical labour to earn our daily bread; ‘stationary-moving’). In the play, on one occasion, Kallappa (a poor manual labourer) tells his neighbours: “It is said that Anna (elder brother; referred to Basavanna) gives every one a soul? Is it true?” Then Kashavva, replies: “And they give it free; it is called lingappa.” Kallappa then exclaims: “ If it is given free, couldn’t you bring home two or three? We could also be happy playing with it.” This piece of conversation makes it clear that common people, even the contemporaries of Basavanna, hadn’t grasped the abstract symbolism of ‘i¬a linga.’ However, certain basic codes of conduct and behavior preached by Basavanna (such as ‘do not kill; do not steal; do not tell a lie; . . . ) had reached the common people and had certainly made an impact on them.

The incident of ‘the stolen pearl-ruby necklace belonging to the palace’ establishes this point. When Damodara, the son of Harihara pandita (court-scholar), steals the necklace on the instigation of his father and hides it in Kashavva’s hut, the old man declares that ‘there is some unbearable stink of a dead rat inside the hut.’ When Sangayya the innocent gets it and gives it to one Kamakshi, she thinks she doesn’t want such a costly object and transfers it to the prostitute Savantri. She declares that she hasn’t earned it by her sweat and discards it in a corner of her house. But, the scholar-Brahmin Harihara covets such a precious necklace and induces his son to steal it.

Similarly, as the play points out, such unlettered and poor people like Kallappa, Kashavva, the old man, and such evaluate the incidents of ‘the death sentence meted out Haralayya and Madhuvarasa, inter-caste marriage, and such on the basis of ‘Natural Justice.’ Tungavva, a poor woman, declares in anger: “ That wretched king! One doesn’t know how many people the he gets killed and what for!” Kallappa responds: “Damn his mother! Look, I cannot bear even to look at such people.” Sangavva the prostitute defends her profession with the king: “ Sir, we also have certain principles. They do not change from person to person; king or commoner, they are the same for all.” The thief, Chikkayya, who comes from Kashmir (sent by his king) to kill Basavanna, goes through a change of heart and becomes a Sharana, a follower of Basavanna. All these details establish the fact that Basavanna’s movement had percolated even to the lowest strata of society and had deeply influenced their lives. The ones that remained untouched and away from the socio-religious movement of Basavanna were those that belonged to the upper strata of society like Harihara the scholar and palace-dwellers.

The entire play of Kambar is built on the binary contrast of ‘Aramane-Mahamane.’ ( ‘Aramane’ means the palace, an institution established by kingship; ‘Mahamane’ was the meeting place of all Sharanas irrespective of their class or caste.) At the climax of the play, both these binaries confront each other, at midnight, at the house of Sangavva the prostitute. Whereas Basavanna, representing Mahamane comes there in search of Sangayya the innocent, the king, representing the palace, comes there seeking pleasure. This is the most dramatic point in the play: the saint confronting the king in a prostitute’s house, on a dark ning of new-moon day, when the king’s soldiers are hunting down the saint’s followers everywhere. The playwright exploits this incident to establish the values and principles of ‘Mahamane’ and ‘Aramane.’

Basavanna treats Savantri the prostitute as ‘mother,’ but Bijjala the king treats her a low woman who lives selling her body. ‘Aramane’ (palace) connotes rules and regulations, scandal mongers, spies and soldiers; ‘Mahamane’ is a place where all the Sharanas meet irrespective of their caste-creed-class and discuss their experiences. The language of ‘Aramane’ is Sanskrit, the language of gods (‘devabhasha’); the language of ‘Mahamane’

is the spoken language of all people, scholars and commoners .

On this occasion, the words spoken by Basavanna to Bijjala constitute the organizing motif of the play:

“ Sir, a king’s laws should be based on god-consciousness; and they should

respect every man’s self-respect. You continue to be a king only till

your laws do not violate these two principles. But your laws violated them;

hence we had to seek a path different from yours.”

Bijjala comes to fully understand the purport of these words of Basavanna when he is about to be killed by Jagadeva and Bommarasa. “ After all is said and done, I am a ‘Bhavi,’ a man of this world; pardon me, Basava,” Bijjala confesses with regret and gets ready to die.

Kambar uses the Vachanas (sayings) of Basavanna and other Sharanas in appropriate places, which lend the play a different dimension altogether.

They are not quoted either directly or in full; rather, their echoes are heard in certain phrases and sentences, which not only make such situations more dramatic but also harp back to the poetry and concerns of the Sharanas, and give a spiritual grace to such passages.

The title ‘Shivaratri’ is charged with meaning at many levels. Interestingly, even the highly experimental and allegorical novel Chakori also is narrated by dreams ‘on the night of Shivaratri.’ The term ‘Shivapura,’ a fictitious name that occurs in most of Kambar’s poetry and plays as a metaphor for ‘ideal society’ echoes ‘Shiva –ratri.’ This play, at a particular point, equates Kalyana (Bijjala’s capital) with ‘Shivapura’ (‘. . . It was our dream to make stagnant water flow, mix it with new and fresh water, and thus create ‘a meeting of rivers’ called Shivapura’ ).

At another level, the term ‘Shivaratri’ is charged with terrible irony. According to ancient Hindu myths, the rituals conducted on the day of ‘Maha Shivaratri’ (on the 14^th day of the black fortnight, in the month of Magha) symbolize such life-giving values as ‘non-violence, Truth, sympathy, and forgiveness.’ But, as the play shows, that particular Shivaratri was charactedrised by heartless violence let loose by a cruel political system. As the Sutradhara says, “ on that day, nothing was there, in the city of Kalyana, in the proper place and order. None had any trust in others. . . . in that night, the night of Shivaratri, Kalyana didn’t sleep at all.” What we find on that night, in the place of Shiva’s worship and prayers, are the bloody chase and murder of the Sharanas by the soldiers; the abominal cruelty of kingship that doesn’t want to return even the deadbodies to their relations but prefers to offer them as food for hawks and crows; fathers who force their children to steal from the palace; the established thief who becomes a Sharana; the prostitute who adheres to certain principles even in her lowly profession; Sangayya the innocent who insists on performing his linga-puja only in the prostitute’s place; and, to cap it all, the meeting between the saint and the king in the house of a woman of low repute --this is indeed and absurd world and the play’s title compels the audience to grasp this absurdity.

Shivaratri, echoes back to Kuvempu’s Smashana Kurukshetram¹⁹ (the cemetery called Kurukshetra) and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is the latest, different and powerful play –a major contribution to Kannada theatre.

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Notes

1 Shiva-pura: the locale of most of the plays and poems of Kambar is called

‘Shivapura.’ The term ‘Shiva’ connotes not only the name a god but it also has many other meanings like ‘auspicious’ and ‘good’; hence, intentionally, Kambar seems to use that term as a metaphor for the ‘ideal society.’

All the translations from Kambar’s poetry and plays, excepting the ones acknowledged, are mine.

2 Agrahara, Krishnamurthy, “kanimoli’; monthly column in Mayura (Sept. 2011),

84-89.

3 (coll.) Maitri, K. M., Kumararama Mattu Krishna Gollara Kavya (Vidyaranya:

Kannada Univ., Hampi, 1999).

4 (coll.) Shankaranarayana, T. N., Junjappa (Vidyaranya: Kannada Univ., Hampi,

1999.

5 Adiga, Gopalakrishna, “Bhuta,” in Samagra Kavya (Bengaluru: Sapna Bookhouse,

1999.

6 tr. Sumatheendra Nadig, Selected Poems of Gopalakrishna Adiga (Sahitya Akademi, 2005), 29-30.

7 tr. Swamy, Nagabhushana, Rocks of Hampi (Sahitya Akademi, 2006)

8 Satchidanandan, K., “ Towards a Poetics of Inversion,” Indian Literature-180 ,

141.

9 This is the famous statement in Mundaka Upanishad (3:1) which comments on

the relationship between the ‘soul’ and ‘body’ or God and individual soul; while the one, soul/God, remains unaffected by worldly affairs, the other, individual soul/body is always involved in action (karma) in the world. The full stanza is as follows:

“dw¹ suparª¹ sayuj¹ sakh¹y¹ sam¹nam vruk¬am pari¬aswaj¹te/

tayøranyam pippalam sw¹dwat nashnanyø abhich¹ka¶»ti//

(Two birds that look alike perch on the branch of the same tree; while one bird eats the fruit and enjoys its taste, the other just looks on.)

10 Bahubali, the brother of emperor Bharata, defeats his brother in war and then,

renounces everything and goes into meditation. This Bahubali-Bharata confrontation is dramatically depicted by the first epic poet of Kannada, Pampa (10^th century) in his epic Adi purana. In the 15^th century, Chavumdaraya got the famous idol called ‘Gommateshwara’ sculpted on the hill near Shravanabelugola (Karnataka).

11 Allama Prabhu is one of the revered mystic saint-poets, who was a part of the

Sharana revolution headed by Basavanna. Allama’s Vachanas have been translated into English by many; but the most well-known is: A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Shiva (Penguin Classics, 1973), 143-169.

12 Chenni, Rajendra, “ The Theatre of Chandrashekhara Kambar,” intro. Siri

Sampige and Other Plays (Bangalore: Provokeindia, 2009), xii.

13 Kambar, Chandrashekhara, “ My Writing,” intro. English tr. of Siri Sampige,

1996.

14 The story of ‘Satyavan-Savitri’ is found in many Puranas. As foretold before his

birth, Satyavan meets an early death; but his wife, Savitri, argues with Yama and persuades him to grant life again to her husband. Aurobindo’s epic in English, Savitri, is based on this myth. Markandeya, a mythical figure, is a devotee of Shiva; when Yama’s servants come to take away his life, he embraces ‘Shivalinga,’ the symbol of Shiva, and escapes death.

15 Amur, G. S., “The Mother Supreme,” intr. Mother Supreme, English translation of

Mahamayi, ix.

16 Rajashekhara, 9-10^th-century Sanskrit playwright-rhetorician, describes ‘pratibha’

or imagination in these words; according to him poetic imagination is always fresh and it seeks newer images and ideas.

17 For a detailed discussion of the Sharana movement and major ideals of that

movement, see Ramanujan’s detailed introduction to Speaking of Siva.

18 A few of the major plays on Basavanna and his movement in Kannada, in the 20^th

century are: B. C. Balur, Basaveshwara; A. N. Krishna Rao (Anakru), Jagajyoti Basaveshwara; Lankesh, Sankranti; M. M. Kalburgi, Kettitu Kalyana; H. S. Shivaprakash, Mahachaitra; Girish Karnad, Tale-danda.

19 K. V. Puttappa (Kuvempu)’s Smashana Kurukshetram is a poetic play that

pictures the Kurukshetra battlefield on the last day of the war, and looks at the war from the point of view of common soldiers and widowed wives of dead soldiers.

Dr. C.N.Ramachandran

JNANPITH AWARDEE Chandrashekara Kambar -Part 1

2011-10-16T09:45:00.000-04:00

JNANPITH AWARDEE Chandrashekara Kambar : Poet-Playwright:

“In Search of Shiva-pura”¹

Chandrashekara Kambar, playwright-poet-novelist-critic, holds a unique place in the field of post-independence Kannada literature; he fuses modern sensibility with traditional forms of performance and expression. With 22 plays, eight poetry collections, three novels, and 12 collections of research articles on theatre and literature, Kambar is one of the most significant writers in Kannada, today.

In the light of the rural vigour and gusto of Kambar’s poetry and plays, it is not a coincidence that he was born in a small village called Ghodgeri, in Karnataka. Born in 1937 into a poor family of blacksmiths by profession, Kambar had to struggle for education from the very beginning. But, while he was growing up in his small rural place, he began to absorb the very spirit of popular performances like ‘Sangya Balya’ and ‘Lavani’; and he developed an undying

love for their music and theatricality.

Kambar’s works, totaling 44, have been translated into English and other

Indian languages; and most of his plays have been staged in different parts of the country. This article focuses only on his poetry and plays; after introductory comments on the characteristics of each, the article goes on to analyse, in detail, the most recent works of Kambar in poetry (Ellide Shivapura) and drama (Shivaratri).

Poetry:

Kambar’s first collection of poetry was published when he had just

completed his college education, Mugulu (‘Bud’)in 1958. The Modernist movement was at its peak then and Adiga was its high priest. Although Kambar shared many concerns like those of cultural identity and self-consciousness of the Modernist poets, he dared to be different from them even in his first collection: he went in for the musicality of folk-rhythms and folk-dialect. His next collection, Helatena Kela (‘Listen, I will tell you’), published in 1964, established him as a major poet who differed from both the Modern and Modernist poets. To date, he has six collections of poetry to his credit, of which while Takararinavaru (1971) got the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award, his next collection Savirada Neralu (1979) got the Kumaran Asan Award. His most recent collection, Ellide Shivapura (2009; ‘Where is Shivapura’) appears to bring together all of his socio-literary-political concerns.

Since his first major poem, “Helatena Kela” (‘Listen, I will tell you’), can be considered seminal to the entire poetry of Kambar, an analysis of the poem constitutes the best starting point to discuss the major themes and concerns of Kambar as a poet.

This long poem is, in its form, a Dappina Pada (a narrative poem sung publicly to the accompaniment of a small percussion instrument called ‘Dappu’ ; it loosely resembles a ballad), which is an established form of oral tradition in North Karnataka. Kambar’s poem, written in quatrains in which the second and the fourth lines rhyme and are divided into 21 parts, retains all the features of the oral tradition (invocation; the singer’s humility –he asks the audience to generously ignore his faults; the refrain repeated at the end of each part –‘with Listen, my friend, I will tell you a story / Sit before me an open mind’; etc.). The story of the ballad concerns the radical change that comes over a once peaceful and self-sufficient village called ‘Shivapura.’ Once, a demon comes near the village in the form of a terrible tiger; he kills the feudal chief Gowda, and returns to the village transforming himself as the Gowda. Assuming all the powers of the earlier chief, he introduces many changes in the village like opening a school for which the traditional Garadi (training place for wrestlers) and the ancient banyan tree have to be pulled down. The Gowdti (wife of the Gowda) sleeps with him and becomes pregnant. Owing to her desires resulting from her pregnancy, she devours one by one all the organs of her son. The son is suspicious of the dupe but is helpless to confront him. Once, he hears a voice from a deep well (into which his father’s body-parts had been thrown) that there is a saint in the eastern direction who can give him the holy water which has the power to destroy the demon. The poem ends with the son staring at the eastern direction and patiently waiting for the saint’s arrival.

This is a seminal poem in the sense that it introduces all the major themes running through Kambar’s poetry; and they can be formulated as shown below, with the qualification that almost all the following concerns are common to both his poetry and plays: sexuality, tradition and change, the ontological problem of reality and illusion, and the theme of ‘quest for Shivapura’ which subsumes all other themes and concerns.

a) Sexuality: The theme of sexuality pervades both Kambar’s poetry

and plays to such an amazing extent that, as a few critics note, it appears to be almost an obsession with Kambar. Kambar views sexuality as the most powerful and creative/destructive drive of the human world, and he establishes his own equations which build up a consistent myth. To start with, Kambar always equates human sexuality with that of nature, and then goes on to treat both the Woman and the Earth, the media of fertility, as one; the barren woman automatically reflecting barren earth. Usually, such a barren woman has an impotent husband, thus forcing the woman to seek a suitable mate in others. Once she finds such a mate and gets impregnated by him, rains pour down to satisfy the parched earth. However, the mate the woman finds could be a hypocrite posing as her husband; it does not matter to her. Kambar examines all these motifs and their variations, poem after poem.

There are many successful poems like ‘Kadu Kudure,’ ‘Hori,’ ‘Kuduri Sidda,’ and others which address the issue of all-powerful and wild sexuality which doesn’t brook any social or moral taboos, and is the cause for the continuation of the race. ‘Kadu Kudure’ (‘Wild Horse’) describes vividly the vigour and abandon of all-consuming sexuality through the image of a wild horse: the horse is born in the far east where the Sun is born and where ‘green’s’ mystery is solved; it is born in the clouds unending; like a falling star, it comes galloping from a black forest,

“kicking the earth and boring a pit there,/wetting the pit, /

moving carelessly like a stream overflowing with water,/

carrying those who dare to ride it / beyond seven valleys/

and throwing them down, dumbfounded.”

(This song, which brilliantly recreates through its quick ballad-rhythm the very pace of the wild horse, was incorporated in the film of the same name; Shimoga Subbanna who sang this song for the film won the national award for ‘best singer,’ for that year.)

‘Hori’ (means bull) begins with a vivid picture of a powerful bull: “ Breaking free from ropes, snorting fiercely, / slipping from the hands of self-proclaimed strong men, /pawing the earth impatiently, leaping over fences, / Oh, look—there comes the bull.” As the poem develops, it equates man’s youth with the bull, both of which brook neither fences nor taboos.

“Kudari Sidda” (Sidda and the horse) narrates, in the form of a traditional ballad, the story of a man who was gifted, by an ochre-robed monk, a black horse with the condition that it should be returned to him after three months. The horse was so powerful that it could jump over valleys, run through jungles, and win every battle for Sidda. The horse and Sidda had so merged with each other that they could be mistaken for one. At the appointed time, when he had to return the horse to the monk, he lies and thus loses the horse; when he finds it again, it is no longer obedient to its master and carries him away to the unknown. The poem establishes the equation between the horse and woman when the monk in ochre robes : “ glancing at him mischievously, ‘what do you think a woman is? / woman is similar to a horse,’ he said.” Very adroitly, the poem comments on woman’s unbounded sexuality and man-woman relationship.

We find another variation of the same theme in the poem “Peacock, O Peacock.” It narrates the story of a childless woman and a drought-hit village. She develops companionship with a peacock in the forest. When she conceives, the drought-hit village also gets life-giving rains. But her husband suspects her and gets the peacock killed. In the end, she leaves home and disappears. Very naturally, the peacock in the poem becomes a symbol of virility, wisdom, and beauty, the three qualities Kambar always associates with Nature. When the woman meets the peacock, the description that follows is highly picturesque and suggestive:

“As the peacock danced, so did it rain,

Like a web woven of sparkling stars;

Like the ceaseless rains in the month of Shravana,

pouring down the Sun- god’s semen;

Like filling up the life-juice into the innermost,

the capital of Kubera, Alakavati of endless riches.”

The whole poem, structured in the form of a ballad with refrain and repetitions, equates human world and natural world at one level, and at another, contrasts the sterile human world with the virile natural world.

In this context, interestingly, there is a folktale in Bundeli language which also associates human beings and peacocks. Agrahara Krishnamurthy, who discusses this tale in his column “Kanimoli,”² points out that this is a tale told by grandmothers to their grand-children while she puts them to sleep. A merchant has two sons; while the elder one, Jeto, is interested in business and such other worldly affairs, the younger son, Laro, isn’t interested in worldly affairs including marriage. He always wanders in forests, seeking the apsara (a heavenly woman) who, sitting on the wings of a peacock, awaits him. One day, during heavy rains and lightning, he disappears from home. Villagers searching for him hear, at daybreak, a peacock’s cry and when they look at the sky, they see a blue light gradually rising high in the horizon. In Indian mythology, peacock is the mount of Saraswati, the patron goddess of wisdom and fine arts; also, the blue colour symbolizes mystical wisdom. Hence, this tale, which can be interpreted in many different ways, establishes that rich folk-imagination always functions through complex myths.

“Helatena Kela” gives us a total picture of the ‘myth of sexuality’ that Kambar explores, poem after poem and play after play. In the poem, when the demon-tiger terrorizes the village and the Gowda goes out to hunt it, the village is in the grip of a severe drought:

“ In the river, there were no waves;/ the banyan tree couldn’t yield any shade;

The village alleys were totally deserted;/ it was as hot as in a crematorium.”

Only when the demon disguised as Gowda returns and his wife becomes

pregnant, clouds burst and it pours down heavily. When her son confronts her with his suspicions, “ She just laughs freely/and asks her son to appease the hunger of her pregnancy.” Here, Kambar appears to view Woman, the medium of fertility, almost ®moral regarding fulfillment of her sexuality. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to state that no other Kannada poet has explored the nature of sexuality, so deeply, so movingly, and so picturesquely as Kambar.

In this context, it is interesting to see the way Kannada oral narratives deal with sexuality. In the long oral epic Krishna Gollara Kavya³ a king with seven wives consults the astrologers as to what they should do to get an offspring; and they are advised to leave the palace, to go to a place where four roads meet, and digging up the earth there to raise an orchard. When the fruit trees grow, bear fruit, attract birds from far and wide and the birds build nests on the tree-branches and raise their chicks, the king’s wives also will become mothers. In other words, this oral epic also equates fertility in Nature with fertility in the human world; when one suffers, the other also suffers. Another oral epic, Junjappa⁴, registers the same equation in a different way: once, the chief of the ‘forest-cowherds’ suggests that, whenever they contemplate marriage and want to test the suitability of the boy and the girl, they should not consult astrologers but the would-be couple should plant a few seeds and water them for a week; if saplings come out of the seeds, they can go ahead with their wedding plans; but if the seeds get burnt out and die, it is a sign that the marriage should not take place. In other words, in Kambar as in many oral narratives, Man and Nature are bound by the same principle of fertility and growth; both are interdependent.

b) Tradition And Change:

The contrast between the first and the last part of “Helatena Kela”

introduces another major theme of Kambar’s poetry –‘tradition’ and the ‘change’ brought in through colonial occupation and education.

Shivapura, on the bank of Ghataprabha, is a beautiful small town full

of greenery and peace. There was an ancient banyan tree on the river-bank, so huge that a hundred bullock carts could take shelter in its shade. In its shade, cows were mated and village-elders met, and new-born babies smiled there; Hari preached, the Vedas were developed, and Buddha gave his sermons under this tree-shade. These details build up a picture of a culture and tradition that are ancient, creative, and wise.

The demon who kills the Gowda, transforms his form, and returns to

the village disguised as the old Gowda. He,

“ Rises late in the morning, lends money on interest,

And conducts a meeting of all the villagers, in his chavadi;

For the sake of the village children, he proposes,

To pull down the Garadi, and build there a school.”

(chavadi: the office of the village chief; garadi: training place for wrestlers)

When all the villagers happily agree to the ‘Gowda’s’ proposal, gather

together, pull down the Garadi and begin to dig the earth for the foundation of the school- building, they come across huge roots of the ancient banyan tree, criss-crossing. The plea of the old man, Kariyajja, not to cut the tree is ignored, the roots are cut, and the school-foundation is offered prayers. Very soon, Kariyajja dies. These details give us a negative picture of ‘the change’ that takes place in the village; ancient traditions and wisdom are destroyed and new, alien institutions are introduced. In this context, Kamabar appears to privilege tradition and view any change (obviously introduced by the colonizers) as destructive including ‘opening of schools’. From this point of view, Kambar seems to be an out and out ‘traditionalist.’

However, if we consider the entire poetry of Kambar, we realize that

Kambar’s view of ‘tradition and change’ is highly complex and ambiguous: while he appears sad that an ancient and creative tradition is in decline, he also registers his awareness of the limitations of such a culture, which was based on hierarchies and exploitation; and he registers such ambiguous stance in poems like “nammajja” and “Gangamayi.”

“Nammajja” (‘our grandfather’) begins equating the grandfather with an ancient banyan tree (the symbols of tradition in “Helatena Kela”). On its innumerable branches forming a canopy across the river, wounded and weak birds writhe and shriek in pain. The next three lines develop this ambiguity further:

“The innumerable branches of the tree are enough to cremate,

at least, three newly-delivered women; during the Panchami festival,

young girls tie swings to the branches and sitting on them, they sway

smiling happily, and singing like peacocks.”

The details of the grandfather that follow complete the ambiguous view of the poet towards tradition and change: the old man smiles like fate that none can fathom; when the speaker in the poem is happy that he buried the old man’s corpse long ago, he finds the old man’s roots and reflections in the old well in his backyard. The modernist poet Adiga also, in his famous poem “Bhuta”⁵ (past/ ghost), uses similar images to connote his ambiguous attitude to tradition:

“ They haunt me, the mysterious fetuses of the past;

The stale air of the sunken old well

rises on all fours crawling upside down, . . .

As I grope peering in the darkness

suddenly flashes a line of golden ore, . . .” ⁶

The poem “Gangamayi” (‘Mother Ganga’) is more bitter and severe toward tradition, symbolized by Ganga considered holy and pure by Indians through ages. In this poem, it is the village pond that is named (satirically) ‘Mother Ganga,’ within which,

“ a million screams and screeches of dogs, foxes, pigs,

parrots, and nightingales. . . .

Once the boil in the east bursts oozing blood and pus

the movements commence here: . . .” ⁷

The long poem continues this tone of disgust and anger: the pond is the last resort for dead bodies of orphans and bastard children; its water is used by the villagers for all their activities including drinking and cleansing themselves as well as their animals; and though myths and poems celebrate its ancient glory and holy water, none is sure of what they are.

It is a historic fact that the entire Indian society entertained from the very beginning, and continues to have, self-contradictory/ambiguous attitude to the changes in the Indian society introduced by colonial masters. While, on the one hand, Indians were happy that ‘modern education’ helped them remove many cruel old beliefs and practices like casteism and gender-discrimination, on the other hand, they were troubled by the fact that such ‘modern education’ posed a threat to their ancient culture and literature, creating a sort of intense aversion among the younger generations towards anything that was Indian. The consequent ‘Yes, but . . .’ attitude was to be found even among great thinkers and writers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Raja Rammohan Roy (in Bengali), and Shivarama Karanth and Kuvempu (in Kannada). Kambar, though born later, is no exception to this position.

c) The Ontological Problem of Reality and Illusion:

In many of his celebrated poems and most of his plays, Kambar introduces two characters who are look-alike; between them, one is true and the other is an imposter. But the problem is, how do we distinguish the authentic one from the imposter? This problem is as old as the Upanishads that formulate the problem as ‘sarpa-rajju ’ (‘serpent-rope’) looking the same in darkness. Kambar raises this problem in many of his major works, through such devices as ‘doubles,’ and ‘substance and shadow.’

The device of ‘doubles’ appears first in “Helatena Kela,” in which the real Gowda is killed by a demon, who later transforms himself as the Gowda and enters the village. None but the Gowda’s son suspects that the one they see could be an imposter. The same device is employed in plays like Rishyashrunga and Huliya Neralu.

Among the major poems that dramatise this issue, we can cons

ider “The Player King and the Clown” and “ That Tree and This Tree.” As K. Satchidanandan points out in his introduction to the collection of English translations of Kambar’s select poems, the poem “The Player King and the Clown is paradigmatic to Kambar’s poetics of inversion.”⁸ In this poem, the clown gives up his costume, pranks and identity; and appears before the audience as the king himself. The audience accepts him happily. When the real king’s face is seen, the clown declares that it is the face of a buffoon and asks the audience to laugh at the face. Even when the director comes on the stage and declares who is who, the audience does not listen to him. The question here is, how does one become a king or a clown? Is it by intrinsic merits or when others accept one as such? In other words, how do we distinguish between maya or illusion and reality? The advaitin Shankaracharya declared that we can see through maya when we come out of avidya or false knowledge; but what is avidya? One question leads to another leading to an endless maze of questions with no answers.

Another celebrated poem of Kambar, “ Aa Mara Ee Mara” (‘That Tree,

This Tree’), dramatizes a variation of the famous Upanishadic episode “dw¹suparª¹ sayuj¹ sakh¹y¹m . . . ”(two parrots on the same branch of a tree)⁹ and it adroitly raises the same ontological question at an abstract level: are illusion and reality absolute or do they depend on each other to be defined? The poem poses this question through ‘substance and its shadow.’ There is a tree on the bank of a pond, and there is its reflection in water. Their relationship to each other is paradoxical: while their roots are the same, their stems are different; one laughs when the pond’s water is disturbed but the other trembles. The poem ends with a sad comment on the split consciousness of the modern man:

“Do you know what the tragic weakness of this story is?

The point or space where / the real tree and the tree-in-water meet/

has disappeared for ever.”

The poem registers, through apt images of the tree, the relative nature of

Illusion and Reality: each is false or true only in relation to the other.

There are many other poems which raise such haunting questions.

For example, the memorable poem or song “ marthenendara mareyali hyanga” (‘Even If I wish to, How Can I Forget?’). In this poem, rather ruefully, the poet wonders at the astonishing strengths and regrettable weaknesses of Mao Tse Tung; and sadly records that the ‘Brave New World’ promised by him was never delivered:

You said you would give a form to the non-existent,

You declared you would wall-in space,

You promised you would bring another sun

to create the living and the non-living;

Even if I want to, how can I forget you!

. . .

You changed only the name of the colour,

and you didn’t recognize the jaundiced eye.

d) Quest for Shivapura: ‘Shivapura’ is the name of the fictional ideal

society that recurs in all the works of Kambar including drama and poetry. In fact, his long allegorical novel Shikharasurya (2010) explores extensively the nature of such a society and its values.

In poetry, the first poem that describes the fictional ideal society is “Shivapurada Hadu” (‘the Song of Shivapura’) in the second collection Helatena Kela. It begins with the following lines describing Shivapura:

“ To the birth-place of greenery, / To the forest where songs grow,/

To that place which warms our cold bodies, / Which grants dreams to our eyes,/

Which protects our youth, / Which makes flowers smile even through thorns,/

Victory to such a place, Shivapura.”

It is interesting to observe that not much has changed about the characterization of Shivapura, even after a period of four decades. Ellide Shivapura, Kambar’s most recent collection (2009), is his most amibitious exploration, through extended metaphors and motifs, of the ‘ideal society.’

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Shivapura: the Maze of Binaries

Ellide Shivapura is a collection of 55 poems, organized in four parts: ‘Ghodageri,’ ‘Hampi,’ ‘America,’ and ‘Bayalu.’ While the first part draws a geographical-cultural map of Shivapura, the second and third parts function as negative models; and the fourth part attempts to locate the point at which all the binaries dissolve.

The first part has a series of lyrics that describe the location and cultural contours of Shivapura. It is a small village, in which “small streets do not lead one anywhere / from the village;/ And one has to enter the village / only through a small rugged path.” This village, isolated from the rest of the world, has no burden of long history and no poetic fancies of lotuses and swans playing in lakes.

“In the river, there were no lotuses born of poetic fancy;

Neither were there swans;

We were the ones, adolescents like me, that used to swim.”

But, now, the river’s spendthrift youth has already disappeared, and the water is only stale. Now, when the river overflows occasionally, one is not sure if it is due to flood water or tears. There were old trees whose age one could only guess; but now all those trees are cut down by the city-people. Most importantly, there used to be grandmothers who would tell their grandchildren exciting stories about gods’ adventures and they, through their tales, would bring to the earth the heavenly abodes of gods. But now such mothers and grandmothers are no more, and no more one can hear such poetic and exciting works of imagination.

The second and the third exhibit negative models opposed to Shivapura. The first part analyses kingship and power through such once-glorious capitals as Hampi and Delhi.

Hampi, the capital of the medieval Vijayanagara empire, was renowned for its pomp and power, and for its incessant wars waged either for survival or for subjugation of others’ territory; and in course of time the empire was humiliated in war and was ransacked by the victorious enemy forces. In the decisive war, “ mass assassinations and brutal murders took place;/ cowardly deaths and valiant martyrdom.” While fleeing the subjugated city,

“ frightened, when they emptied the Temple,

they left behind its gods and their incarnations,

skeletons everywhere, hands and legs broken,

strewn all over the streets, helter skelter.”

Today, when one wanders through the streets, suddenly a trunkless head may fall into his hands, making him wonder:

“ Which god’s head is this?

No light in its eyes, and no wind passes through its broken nose;

even if one calls, the mutilated ears cannot hear;

and words haven’t escaped from those half-opened lips.

To which trunk shall I join this head?

Or,

shall I throw it away,

to lapse into its nightmares, again?

Delhi is another ancient power-centre, a capital which has seen many empires rise and fall, and which still thinks it is the controlling centre of this country. In one of his earlier poems on Delhi, he thinks of it as a cabaret dancer, who “ covering her wrinkled body/ with the best foreign dress available, / cunningly enacts the role / of a sex-hungry adolescent cheat.” In the poem “Delhi” in Ellide Shivapura, the poet calls it a wily but pleasure-seeking woman who smiles brilliantly through her new dentures. The poem ends with these biting lines:

“This eternal virgin goes through a new marriage, every day!

The wedding party of politicians elected by counterfeit voting,

gorges itself on a rich repast till it gets unsteady on its feet.

She meets out varied pleasures, like Vividha Bharati,

to suit the taste of all and sundry.

O you media-maidens! Sing wedding songs,

to her -- the grinding mill of pleasures.”

America as a whole is a negative model for different reasons: it is a country in which the moon is dead; it is full of colourful malls that sell dreams to suit each and every person; and queen America spends all her time sitting in front of the mirror. To quote a few relevant lines:

“ Did you hear the news?

Weaving a net of all the four organs of the Forces,

they hunted down the deer in the Moon, the Americans –

Then, one poisonous arrow struck him also,

and the Moon lay dead.

. . .

Poor fellow! The Moon was a poet;

And, in his poetry, there were only girls,

alluring beauties of mini skirts.

. . . ( “ The Moon died”)

“ It is a shopping complex, selling dreams.

One button in front of each shop—

One pit for one button –inside the pit an attractive woman.

. . .

When you come out of one, another woman in another box;

Yet one more woman in one more box –

Rows and rows of beauties” (“Market that sells dreams”).

“ Queen America is obsessed with mirrors.

. . .

the self-proclaimed temptress of the universe,

who, standing always in front of the mirror,

admires herself as the most beautiful woman,

who flatters herself

that whoever approaches her is going to rape her –

To her

my salutations” (“ To Queen America”).

In his quest for the ideal society, when Kambar privileges Shivapura in relation to the empires, past and present, he is still caught in binaries – of the rural vs. the urban, the village vs. the city, and arts vs. technology. As long as he is caught up in such binaries, his quest is doomed to fail.

The last part shows us that the poet is aware of such lure of binaries. Perhaps it is due to such a realization that the quest in the last part is for a way to transcend all binaries—in myths, language, politics and life.

The first major lyric in this section dramatizes the ‘Sun myth.’ When the Sun beams with arrogance that ‘there is only one sun and in this world Truth is one,” his wife Sanjnya breathes life into her own shadow on the earth and sends her to her husband. The Sun accepts the Shadow (Chaya) as his wife and begets two children, Shani and Yama. Now, in addition to himself he has two more sons – “two more truths.” Commenting on this myth, the poet says:

“ Now, tell me; Is there only one Truth in this world?

If there is only one eye during day, there are thousand at night.

If there is only one Truth for the day,

for the night, in order to hoodwink it,

there are thousand truths” (“ The Sun’s Shadow”)

It is this realization that there are more truths than one that, perhaps, allows one to transcend the binaries and thus give up one’s quest for ‘Shivapura’ which can exist only in relation to another society.

Among those who have understood this truth, the first one is Bahubali. ¹⁰ Bahubali, the brother of emperor Bharata, defeats his brother in single combats and then, at the moment of victory, he renounces everything including his clothes, and stands on a hill in meditation. He is one of the revered saints in Jainism. In the following lines, the poet addresses Bahubali/ Gommateshwara thus:

“ To him who was born on the earth

but lifted his head amidst clouds,

To him who taught us the way to understand both the worlds,

I bow” (“Bahubali”)

Another instance is of mystic poets like Allama Prabhu,¹¹ who transcend the demands of language. Before we construct a sentence, we have to choose the subject; but the subject demands a verb and needs an object. Further, for the sentence to be acceptable, the subject, verb and object should be in a particular order. When one has constructed such a sentence, one realizes that that was not the sentence he wanted to construct. If one attempts to talk of his love at present, by the time he has said it, it will be his past love.

“That’s why

language has to become non-language

and sound should become soundless” (“ My today’s love”)

To the question posed in the beginning, ‘Where is Shivapura,’ the answer given at the end is ‘Nowhere.’ Hence, the last part is called ‘Sky and Space.’

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I bow” (“Bahubali”)

“That’s why

language has to become non-language

and sound should become soundless” (“ My today’s love”)

To the question posed in the beginning, ‘Where is Shivapura,’ the answer given at the end is ‘Nowhere.’ Hence, the last part is called ‘Sky and Space.’

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A Critique of Modernity: Kannada Poetry -Part 2

2011-03-05T22:48:00.000-05:00

In the impressive literary oeuvre of Chandrashekhara Kambara, the poet-playwright-novelist, the constant locale of all his works is ‘Shivapura’ –a fictitious Utopia like the city of ‘Kalyana’ in the eyes of the 12^th-century-Veerashaiva saints. Kambara’s most recent work Ellide Shivapura (Where is Shivapura?), published in 2009, is a collection of 54 poems on varied topics; and it is divided into four parts. Though the poems are on different subjects, collectively, they connote the socio-cultural contours of the ideal society –Shivapura.

The poems in the first part suggest that Shivapura is an independent and self-sufficient place: its small roads lead nowhere but to one another. It is a place full of creativity: the narrator’s mother is an inexhaustible granary of old stories and songs. The poems in the second and third parts –Hampi and America –suggest, collectively, negative models. Hampi, both the capital of the medieval Vijayanagara empire and a metaphor for all power-centres like Delhi, connotes kingship, power, and authority; it respects only the language of gods, and it breeds violence.

Consequently, it is reduced today to a massive heap of rocks, broken idols, and ruined palaces. America, in a different way, is a negative model: it has no poetry (‘the Moon is dead there!’); the Queen-America sells dreams to all and sundry of unending sensual pleasures, and every one there is happy looking at his/her own image in mirrors. The fourth part contains a series of lyrics with metaphysical overtones that register a normative centre: Bahubali who renounced everything, the flute-playing cowherd, the Sun who also has a shadow (Chaayaa his wife), and the strangers holding staffs of light – all these connote the various aspects of a living and creative society. In short, Kambara’s Shivapura fuses together the Marxist ideal society (pre-industrial organic society) and the Brindavan-society full of music, poetry and dance.

As contrasted against Moily’s Ramarajya and Kambara’s Shivapura, Shivaprakash and Deva show us, with minute details, the ‘wastelands’ called ‘Avantikaa’ and ‘palace- turned-luxury resort.’

H. S. Shivaprakash, poet-playwright-essayist, brings together, from his very first collection, myth, mysticism, and social criticism; his recent collection, Matte Matte (‘Again and again,’ 2005) is no exception. The forty poems in this collection meditate on the history of Man, economic imperialism of the West, and metaphysical truth. The title is based on the saying, ‘history repeats itself’; and in the eponymous poem, he dreams of the Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps, and when he gets up he reads in newspapers the torture of Iraqis by the American soldiers. Another poem, addressed to the Statue of Liberty, ends with these pungent lines: “ O goddess of liberty! In the heaven of commodities that you are building/ Smoking cigarettes / Is a very small sin.” ‘Avantika,’ the long poem, at one level views the ancient and legendary capital as a metaphor for all capitals of all empires that have risen and fallen in violence. At another level, it becomes a liberator of one through death; it tempts the narrator: “How wonderful / To get total release from all colours / From all pulls of this dualistic world / And from counter pulls.” At a different level, it becomes the patron of poetry and poets. Finally, the narrator finds Avantika within himself. In the form of a dramatic monologue, the entire poem lays bare, very powerfully, the narrator’s fears, hopes, and yearnings.

Ramachandra Deva, poet-playwright-journalist, achieved considerable fame with his Indraprastha (1994), in which through the metaphor of Delhi, he laid bare the ugly facts of empires and capitals, and the way they depended on violence and forced labour. In his recent and more ambitious collection, MaataaDuva Mara (2002), he ruthlessly exposes American cultural imperialism and the loss of native culture and literature.

This long poem, divided into eight parts, has at its centre an old Indian tale of a speaking tree in a forest; the tree talks to us in our own language only when we approach it and talk to it, otherwise it remains quite hidden in the forest. Deva develops this tree as a symbol for Tradition which yields us its insights only if we approach it. Superimposed on this tale is another old tale of incest, ‘The Tale of Karthika.’ In this tale, a king forces his own daughter to become his wife and begets Karthika, who later turns into a Jaina monk. These two tales are embedded into a modern story of an Indian king, who, after independence, cannot maintain his huge ancient palace and turns it into a luxury resort. Through such interwoven stories, Deva exposes the kind of Americanization that is taking place in India, in almost every field –we find corrupt and lazy officers, incompetent ministers, sadistic policemen, Vice-chancellors running tutorial colleges, highly qualified professors justifying American intervention in such a backward country as India, and Indian girls in BPOs talking to Americans in American accent. In fact, this long poem powerfully registers the kind of cultural anarchy dreaded by Arnold and spiritual death foreseen by Eliot.

Pratibha Nandakumar, perhaps the most widely translated woman poet in Kannada, has been very active in this decade. She has brought out four collections which include such widely discussed collections as Munnudi Bennudigala Naduve (Between Introduction and Blurb) and Coffee House. She is witty, urbane, and occasionally satirical. One of her major concerns in her recent poetry is the ‘onslaught of modern technology on urban life’ (in the form of scores of T. V. channels, colourful advertisements, coffee houses, mobile phones, etc.). They have created a ‘virtual reality’ blurring the boundary lines of illusion and reality. However, she is not a ‘doomsday prophet’; she accepts change since it is inevitable. But she also shows us wittily the nature of such changed life-styles – holding a slanted mirror.

Jayanth Kaikini is an urban poet like Pratibha Nandakumar; and his poetry deals with

concrete and sensuously apprehended things and objects around him, and the very pattern he imposes on these ‘trivial’ and unrelated details of daily life creates a perspective of irony or pathos. Ondu Jilebi (2008), the fifth collection by Jayanth, also reflects his abhorrence of theoretical statements and disembodied abstractions. Even the kind of language used in this (as in other collections) has been consciously shorn of any lyrical or ‘poetical’ elements. It is the juxtaposition of disparate images of daily life in a city like Mumbai or Bengaluru that leads to a distinct experience and a new awareness of life. Consider these typical lines:

“If only he had felt the affection at the blue finger tip/ Of the Lambani girl wrapped in a yellow daavani /Engaged in cleaning the glassy eye /Of the young man, holding his head, staring at his eyes intent, and blowing into them/ While the young man stood tottering under the huge load on his head/ In the middle of the road, at noon, deserted, ...” The kite, flying high, appears to the poet like “ a short application/ For the vacant site / In the mysterious world, priceless and incomprehensible. / For ‘immediate disposal’ / It needs the will of the cloudy system, above.” Through such unexpected collage of images, Jayanth shocks us to a new recognition of the despair, agony and excitement of life around us.

*********** **********

Now a few generalizations:

a) Modern Kannada poetry has always been characterized by contemporary

consciousness; and, depending upon the way modernity is defined from time to time, it has either eulogized it or has launched a severe criticism against it. But, its response has always been mixed with enthusiasm and fear vis-a-vis what it views as modernity. In the first decade of this century, when neither tradition nor modernity is an issue, what terrifies most of the poets is Globalisation and its impact on native cultures and languages. Also, the poets seem to be threatened with the onslaught of multi-channel TVs, Cyber culture of Internet, Email, and Ebooks; and they despair about the place of poetry in such a society.

b) One need not bemoan, as many critics often do, that there are no influential

literary movements today in Kannada. For, an influential movement patronises only such poetry which adheres to the assumptions and expectations of the movement, and hence breeds monotony. But, today, when there are no influential movements, Kannada poetry is varied both in form and concerns.

c) A curious situation exists in Kannada today. Poets bemoan that readers do

not take their poetry seriously, and publishers groan that readers have given up reading poetry. However, good poetry continues to be written and new poets continue to enter the field. Does the ‘bulk-purchase scheme’ of the Karnataka government explain this paradox? I am not sure.

d) Another novel feature is that the frontiers of poetry are getting extended

and the boundary-lines between different forms of literature are getting blurred. The same poet (let’s say, H. S. Venkatesha Murthy or B. R. Lakshmana Rao or Jayanth Kaikini) writes what we call serious poetry, writes songs meant to be sung, and he also writes popular film-songs and songs for the T.V. Perhaps, the time has come not to indulge in such differentiations as ‘serious poetry’ and ‘popular poetry.’ I am not sure if we should call this situation ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern.’

--------------------------

C. N. Ramachandran

(Paper presented in the Seminar on “ Poetry in Transition: Critique of Modernity,” organized as part of Thunchan Festival, Trishur, February 3, 2011)

A Critique of Modernity: Kannada Poetry -Part 1

2011-02-17T07:01:00.001-05:00

‘Modernity,’ derived from Latin ‘modernus’ to mean ‘recent’ or ‘just now,’ is a slippery term; and unless we specify a particular field and particular context, it does not mean anything. For instance, in the field of literature, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, and Bana; in religion, Buddhism, Advaita, the 12^th-century Veerashaiva Movement, and Arya Samaj; in political system, absolute monarchy, empire-building, and democracy –all these can be viewed as ‘modern’ since they rebelled against the ideas and practices of their immediate past and set about exploring new paths.

Even in the West, St. Augustine of the fifth century, Martin Luther of the 15th century; French Revolution, the civil war waged by Lincoln to end slavery, and Jefferson’s Bill of Rights; in literature, anybody from Euripides to Shakespeare and Virgil to Eliot – all these, from time to time, have been designated as ‘modern.’ In other words, terms like tradition and modernity come into existence only through ‘opposition’ to another term. Defined thus, it does not designate any one particular period but only a set of values and practices as a reaction against another set of values and practices. In short, no society or Idea or system is modern or traditional by itself; it depends upon what it revolts against, and its essential spirit is summed up by Kalidasa’s famous statement, “pur¹ªamity·va na s¹dhu sarvam” (‘only because something is old, it does not become acceptable’).

However, during the colonial period and after independence, whenever the opposition of ‘tradition and modernity’ is discussed, ‘modernity’ has been defined as ‘Enlightenment Modernity’ –that is, modernity as defined by the 18^th century and early 19^th century British sociologists. Defined thus, the term connotes

a) primacy of Reason and Rationality, b) empiricism, c) scientific knowledge as key to expanding all human knowledge, d) universalism, e) linear view of History, f) individualism, g) and tolerance.

The fact that systems and ideologies are not transferred from one society to another totally and mechanically is too obvious to be belaboured. Hence, what interests us is not how the British or the French defined modernity but how the Indian society understood and accepted it.

When we view Kannada literature of the last century from this point of view, we become aware of a curious phenomenon: the values and institutions which the rulers were proud of were not the ones that the Indians desired to get from the rulers. Though, without any exception, all the Indian authors upheld English education during the colonial period and enthusiastically welcomed modernity, none of them seemed to be interested in the ‘modern institutions’ established by the British in India --Rule of Law, Parliamentary democracy, Mono-theism, and such on which the British prided themselves. Instead, author after author in all Indian languages, bemoaned lack of education for women, child-marriages, casteism and practice of untouchability, and cruel practices like Sati and treatment of widows. That is to say, Indian writers and leaders re-defined modernity as ‘reformism’; in their view, to be modern was to treat men and women equally, to give education for all, and to give up caste-distinctions. Unless we clearly understand this point that whatever it might have meant for the West, to Indians modernity was equated with social reform and English education was viewed as an instrument of such reform, we cannot understand the total and unqualified enthusiasm with which early 20^th-century writers greeted modernity and British rule.

******** **********

Now, coming to the issue of modernity and Kannada poetry in the 20^th century, we can discern, broadly, three phases each of which was a reaction against the earlier poetry, both in form and content. The first phase (1920-1950), called Navodaya, had all the characteristics that we associate with Romanticism: egalitarian view of life, glorification of love and nature, and experimentation with different poetic forms the lyric being the most employed form. The second phase (1950-1980), called Navya, was characterized by the qualities that we associate with modernist poetry: structure of precise and concrete images, concern for the individual, and a strong distrust of powerful social institutions. The third phase (1980-2000), called ‘dalita-bandaya,’ was primarily poetry of revolt, especially against caste hierarchy, gender discrimination, and corrupt political institutions. Of these three movements, each defined modernity differently and, consequently, responded to it differently.

The first Navodaya movement understood modernity as social reform and the British rule as an instrument of such modernity; hence, it sang paeans of the British rule. To take just two representative examples, B. M. Shreekanthaiah (popularly known as BMSri), the scholar-poet who inaugurated the ‘modern’ movement in Kannada poetry, eulogized British rule in these words:

“In the end, I remembered the one who could be of help to my family;

I remembered my loving sister, Britannia, the queen of the seas;

She taught us the essence of all religions, she opened the gates for all knowledge;

She brought us closer to all other countries, and she looked after the welfare of all.”

“The Words of Mother India”

It was for this reason that he undertook the free translation of 19^th-century British lyrics in Kannada; and, in this translation, he gave up the use of adiprasa or initial rhyme and traditional stanza forms, employed modern Kannada, and adopted free verse. Hence, the influence this collection, English Geethegalu (1921) wielded on future Kannada poetry can be compared to that of Lyrical Ballads (1897), which heralded the beginning of the Romantic era in English.

Most of the poets after BMSri, including Kuvempu, followed the model of BMSri in poetry; but, regarding his attitude toward English and colonial rule they had much to oppose. Kuvempu, for instance, welcomes the new ideology coming from the West, but not the colonial rule. He wants modernity only to destroy age-old superstitions and cruel practices rampant in Hindu society. Hence his ‘mother

India

’ moans thus:

“Surrounding me from all the sides, / They are standing with their swords lifted high. /

But, they tell me that I don’t know / That I am really free./ What freedom is this?”

(“ Bharatamate”)

Whereas in one poem he gives a clarion call for the young men to break their shackles of idolatry and superstitions, “Give up and come out of temples, churches, and mosques, /And come and join me in rooting out poverty,” in another poem, he tells them:

“ Throw out these hundreds of gods far, far away.” It is in this spirit that he wrote scores of poems on farmers, manual workers, scavengers, and such neglected things as manure, and forced the readers to notice the marginalized sections of society. ( In fact, one of his long poems is titled ‘The Unknown Hero.’) In his plays, novels, and his epic Shree Ramayana Darshanam, he focused on hitherto marginalized characters like Manthara, Shabari, and Ahalya, and brought them to the centre-stage. His poem, ‘Hosa Balina Geethe ‘ (‘The Song of New Life’) not only advocates the essence of ‘modernity’ as conceived by him but it also mirrors the ethos of the whole society during that period; a few lines of it are given below:

“ Equal share for all, equal life for all –

This is what the voice of the New Age declares; listen.

O, you unfortunate men, groaning and backs bent

Under the dead weight of poverty for ages, get up and stand erect.

.................

That you are weak, that you are lowly born,

That it is all one’s inevitable fate –give up all this ignorance;

Come together, all of you, shoulder to shoulder,

And help the wheels of the age roll and bring in change.

During the ‘navya’ or ‘modernist’ period, we find the poets attempting to walk on a razor’s edge: while, heavily influenced by Eliot and Auden, they usher in an imagist-dramatic-satirical form, in content they vehemently oppose Westernization. That is, they conceive of ‘modernity’ as institutions suppressing individuals, democracy as the oppression by brute majorities, and, in literature, Western models as marginalizing native traditions. Gopalakrishna Adiga represents all these fears and self-contradictions.

Just as English Geethegalu ushered in the Navodaya movement, Adiga’s Chande Maddale (1954) can be considered to have ushered in the Navya period. Some of the finest poems of Adiga were written in this and the six collections that followed it. Many of his poems, like ‘Himagiriya Kandara,’ ‘Bhumigeetha,’ ‘Bhuta,’ and ‘Shriramanavamiya Divasa’ analyse the tradition-modernity issue deeply and dramatise the poet’s ambivalences. His poem ‘Prarthane’ (prayer), the manifesto of Adiga’s poetry, has this important line in it: ‘O, Lord! ... Protect me from the contagious European disease.’ The Kannada term ‘pharangi ( European) roga (disease)’ means both the venereal disease supposed to have been brought to

India

by the Europeans, and the disease of imitating or following the Europeans. The most representative poem in this regard is ‘Bhuta.’

The term ‘bhuta’ means both ‘past’ and ‘ghost’, and the poet exploits both the meanings of the term to discover what our relationship should be toward our past. The poem begins with a powerful image of an old and dark well containing stinking water, poisonous air, and all sorts of parasites; but in it, here and there, a thin gold vein all along the rock, is also to be seen. The poem develops this image as a metaphor for India’s past, and then moves on to this resolution on the poet’s part:

“At the time of digging, the soil is foetus form.

Deeper and deeper thrust of the pickaxe

might show us the shining golden or.

Excavating it, smelting and purifying it,

at least now we must learn

to shape them into the images of our personal gods.”

Past, purified of its rotten elements, and moulded to suit present-day society – this seems to be the general attitude of Adiga and other Navya poets towards tradition.

The poets of the next ‘Dalit-Bandaya’ Movement, in general, interpreted modernity along the lines of the early Navodaya poets –ie. English education, protest against discrimination on the basis of caste or class or gender, and revolt against corrupt political and religious systems. In this movement, while poets like Siddalingayya and Malagatti focused on Dalit experience, Sarvamangala and M. L. Pushpa on gender discrimination, others such as Chandrashekhar Patil and Baraguru Ramachandrappa emphasized institutional tyranny. To all these poets, English education was the means of modern ideas and of changing society.

By the turn of the century, all influential literary-cultural movements appear to have exhausted themselves. Dalit poets like Siddalingayya and Aravind Malagatti, and staunch feminist poets like M. L. Pushpa and Savita Nagabhushana, who were very active in the 80s and 90s of the last century as the angry young men and women, seem to have given up the single agenda of Dalit experience and/or gender difference. Consequently, most poets seem to be seriously concerned only with one issue: fear of massive industrial and technological development, and survival of local languages and cultures vis-à-vis Globalisation. In their view, this concept of development is Western and it has enslaved countries like India in a new form of colonialism –economic and technological colonialism. Strongly reacting against such a trend, either they poignantly picture the death-throes of traditional Indian society with its ancient culture and literature or they are intent on exploring the contours of a utopian society which is markedly different from the American model. This category includes, to mention only a few leading poets, M. Veerappa Moily, Chandrashekhara Kambara, Ramachandra Deva and H. S. Shivaprakash.

The most ambitious work characterized by the Utopian quest is the poet-novelist Moily’s epic, Shree Ramayana Mahanveshanam. This stupendous work, divided into five volumes (in Kannada) and running into some 42,000 lines (2000-2005), undertakes ‘anveshanam’ or exploration of what constitutes ‘Ramarajya’ or ideal society. In this work, the poet introduces scores of new characters and incidents and re-interprets many familiar incidents of Valmiki’s Ramayana from a modern point of view. It is very interesting to see the way Moily introduces into the body of the ancient classic contemporary burning issues such as the Arya-anarya confrontation, exploitative mining in tribal areas, and need for universal education.

More than all, what distinguishes Mahanveshanam is the lofty vision it unfolds for India in future – the vision of a secular nation of many voices, many cultures, and many peoples. On one occasion, Rama declares that “ mono-cultural doctrine dumps us into a well of darkness.” At the time of coronation, Rama unfolds before his subjects his vision of Ramarajya in these words: “ Ramarajya has no other creed and no other goal / but progress and upward evolution.” In short, Moily collapses the past and the present in his work in such a way that his epic remains rooted in the Indian context and it transcends time and space.

Continued in Part 2

*************************************************

Dr. C.N. Ramachandran

Book review: Nirdiganta by Dr. Veena Shanteshwar

2011-01-21T09:16:00.000-05:00

   Shanta Imrapur, ed. Nirdiganta; 2Vols.
   Sindara Pustaka Prakashana, 2009 price= 359
   “ A Unique Festschrift”

   Beginning with Sambhaavane, presented to B. M. Shri. in 1941, there is a rich tradition of festschrifts in Kannada; but most of them tend to be felicitation volumes, full of admiration and eulogy for the concerned writer. However, Nirdiganta, presented to Dr. Veena Shanteshwar is an exception; the articles in these two volumes go beyond personal eulogy and critically discuss the form and concerns of the Short Story in different Indian languages.

   Dr. Veena Shanteshwar’s achievements are manifold: a scholar in English, Kannada, Hindi and Marathi, she is also a reputed writer of fiction and criticism, a successful translator, and an able administrator. She has to her credit, 27 works including five short-story collections and two novels in Kannada,; many research papers in English; and eight works of translation from Hindi, English and Marathi to Kannada, including the Sahitya-Akademi Award-winning novel, Nadi Dwipagalu, from Hindi. She has founded many literary-cultural associations in Dharwad, among which the most notable is the Association of Women writers of North Karnataka, of which she was the founder-member in 1985, and later Secretary and President. As the principal for nine years, she was responsible for the all-round development of Karnatak College, Dharwad. Many awards and honours have come seeking her including the ‘Dana Chintamani Award,’ the highest award instituted by Karnataka Govt. for women writers. The festschrift, presented to her to mark her 65th birthday, is worthy of such a multi-faceted personality.

   As a festschrift, Nirdiganta (in two volumes) contains many novel and meaningful features. As the Chief Editor notes, these volumes are being published in the centenary year of women’s writing in Kannada (the first novel in Kannada by a woman, Santubai Neelagara’s Sadguni Krishnabai, was published in 1909). The first volume contains, besides critical articles on the form and concerns of Short Story and on the works of Veena Shanteshwar, scholarly overviews of Short Story by women in 14 Indian languages. The second volume contains interviews of eleven major women writers in Kannada, each interview followed by a representative story of that writer. The focus of all these articles is ‘the woman as writer’ – her problems, struggles and successes. Owing to lack of space, I can make only a point or two, selectively.

   When we go through the review articles, what strikes us first is the Sahitya Akademi motto that ‘Indian Literature is one, written in different languages.’ Some of the common concerns of the stories in different languages are: subordination of women due to traditional beliefs and practices, denial of formal education, exploration of the varied paths of freedom, reinterpretation of characters in myths and classical epics, and search for feminine identity.

   But, importantly, there are region-specific variations. It seems that Punjabi (women) writers have responded more forcefully than others to the pressures of globalization on farmers and agriculture; stories charged with ideologies dominate in Malayalam; and so on. In this context, the stories in Manipuri and Bodo appear to stand apart. Since both Manipur and Assam are prone to terrorism since long, most of the stories in Manipuri and Bodo dramatize the plight of women and children caught in between the Indian Army and native terrorists.

   The interviews of major women writers drive home the point that writing for a woman is like swimming against the current; they have to write amidst such adverse conditions as poverty, lack of formal education, virulent opposition, and lack of encouragement. While most were ridiculed, a few others were physically manhandled. Also, all of them have to sail in two if not three boats –Family, Profession and Writing. Despite such heavy odds, the fact that they do write and write seriously is a tribute to their indomitable will and irrepressible creative urge.

   The members of the editorial board deserve hearty congratulations on bringing out a major reference work in the field of Indian Short Story by women.
   -------------

Dr. C. N. Ramachandran

Ways of reading Poetry

2011-01-10T20:50:00.000-05:00

Let me begin with a few general statements. The ‘meaning’ of a poem is not its summary or paraphrasable ideas. Poetry does not convey what can be conveyed in prose. In other words, a poem does not only tell us something, but it also attempts to convey a unique experience, feelings, and emotions associated with it. Such a poetic experience is called by Indian aestheticians ‘rasaanubhaava.’

What are the various ways or poetic strategies a poet exploits to convey such poetic experience? While Kuntaka, an eleventh-century Indian aesthetician, calls it ‘vakrokti,’ Russian stylistician Mukarovsky calls it ‘Deviation’ –at different levels of a poem. Let us consider these in detail.

a) Deviation at the level of sounds or phonological deviation:

Repetition of the same or similar phones /sounds and words, results in Alliteration, Assonance, and Onomatopoeia. Consider these lines:

“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free.” Or

“The moaning of doves in immemorial elms,

And the murmuring of innumerable bees.

Such a repetition of ‘f’ and ‘b’ in the first (by Coleridge in “Ancient Mariner”) and ‘m’ in the second (by Tennyson) creates a suitable atmosphere, of cheerfulness in the first and of calm twilight in the second.

b) Deviation at the level of metre: Whereas metrical regularity is

an inviolable rule in Indian poetry, metrical variations are of special concern for English poets, with which they achieve extraordinary effects.

“ The woods decay, the woods decay and fall;

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath;

And after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality

Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms.”

In this passage, after four lines of regular Iambic pentameter, we find a trochee “me only cruel” and a five-syllable word “immortality.” Through such unexpected metrical deviation, Tennyson in “Tithonus” foregrounds or stresses the tragedy of Tithonus who, though old like a shadow, cannot die; hence, in his case, it is ‘cruel’ immortality.

c) Deviation at the level of morpheme or word:

Normally, single words are not broken at the end of a line; when a poet does so, that particular word gets foregrounded; for instance:

“ I caught this morning morning’s minion, king

Dom of daylight’s dauphin”

Here, Hopkins, in his celebrated poem “Windhover,” breaks ‘kingdom’ into ‘king’ and ‘dom,’ thereby foregrounding ‘king’; that is exactly what he wants to convey –that the bird kingfisher is not a mere bird but a king among birds, a symbol of the endless mercy of ‘the king of kings,’ ie. God.

Similarly, Eliot in “The Waste Land” uses the Sanskrit word ‘Ganga’ instead of the anglicized ‘Ganges’ in the line “ Ganga was sunken.” Thus, he hopes to bring in all the collocations of purity, holiness, and sublimity that the Indians have towards the river. If such a river as Ganga goes dry, then there is incurable spiritual dearth in this world.

d) Deviation at the level of ‘Register’ or diction:

When a poet, consciously, imposes an alien register on a subject, he creates pointed irony. An excellent example of this usage is W. H. Auden’s “ The unknown Citizen.” He begins the poem with a file number ( To JS/ 07/M/378, This Marble Monument Is Erected By The State), and then he goes on to describe a citizen in a purely bureaucratic register. The effect is one of total loss of individuality of a citizen in a modern state, who has no private life of his own, and who is only a number in the state-records. The poem ends with these ironical words:

“Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd.”

In fact, such clash or juxtaposition of registers is very common among English poets. Donne, the 17^th-century poet, uses the registers of warfare and love in his famous religious sonnet which begins with the lines “Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend,” and ends with

“ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

We find similar very successful use of this strategy in such poems like “Naming of Parts” and “Judging Distance.”

e) Deviation at the level of syntax: Normally, in the

‘object position’ of a sentence, a noun or a noun-phrase has to be used; but occasionally, a poet may break this usage to achieve poetic effects. Consider these lines:

“I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.”

In these lines, taken from a modern poem called “Love Song,” Alan Dugan uses a very unexpected word ‘a you’ which is grammatically wrong; a pronoun cannot succeed an article. Hence, the words ‘a you’ stand out, suggesting that, the poet wants a woman as his wife who has her own personality and not his better or worse half (‘a you’).

f) Connotation and Denotation or Structure and Texture:

In a poem, as in any other communication, we find a message or a statement; this is denotation or structure. However, while making this statement, the poet uses certain words, idioms and images which are charged with emotion; this aspect of the message is called connotation or texture (dhani in Sanskrit). Often, in a good poem, there is a clash or tension between structure and texture.

Consider the famous poem, “ Ode On a Grecian urn” by Keats. Its

denotative meaning is very simple: “ Life is trivial and transient; but Art is meaningful and permanent.” However, when we consider the description of the urn, many questions arise. To start with, the urn, symbolizing Art, is “unravished bride”; if a bride is ‘unravished,’ it defeats the very purpose of marriage. Then, the poem is full of unanswered questions: “What men or gods are these?” “What maidens loth?” “What mad pursuit?” and such. The urn is only a “fair attitude”; and it is a “cold pastoral.” With such evocative details, the poet succeeds in convincing us that ‘what appears to be an ideal is only an illusion.’ The bold lover (on the urn) near his beloved may be young forever, but he can never kiss his beloved. In other words, Life may be transient, but it is fulfilling; but art is cold and unfulfilling. Hence, the poet suggests that he prefers transient life to deathless art –totally opposed to the earlier statement.

g) Allusions and Symbols:

Though any poem (or play/story) can talk of or show only limited time and place, it aspires to envelop unlimited time and space. A poet attempts to achieve this seemingly impossible objective through the use of allusions, symbols, and archetypes.

Wordsworth begins his famous ode on Tintern Abbey with these lines:

“… and wreaths of smoke, / Sent up in silence, from among the trees, …”

What Wordsworth is doing here is bring to the reader’s mind similar lines in Homer and Virgil, of wreaths of sacrificial smoke, ascending from the groves in gratitude to the gods in heaven. In his “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley identifies ‘spirit’ and ‘wind’ as found in pagan cultures –what is called ‘praana vaayu’ in Sanskrit. Eliot, in “Four Quartets,” alludes to Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna, regarding ‘nishkaama karma.’

A symbol or an archetype is an incident or a detail in a poem, which, due to the contextual connotative pressure, suggests something more than what it means. A brilliant example of such symbolism is the ‘Chestnut tree’ in Yeats’s “Among the School Children.” Along with the poem the symbol also develops, and in these lines (“O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?”) it becomes a great symbol of ‘the perfect man’ who harmonises intellect and emotions, rootedness and branching out, and this world and the next.

In short, poetry is a complex network of various linguistic and semantic structures; and, if we respond to its totality what it gives us is delightful instruction and instructive delight, experientially.

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Dr. C. N. Ramachandran

Kannada Poetry Today: Themes and Concerns -Part 2

2010-12-31T23:16:00.001-05:00

C) Transcending Ideological Frames: The poets in this group (such as Aravinda Malagatti, L. Hanumanthaiah, S. G. Siddaramaiah, Savita Nagabhushana, H. L. Pushpa, Pratibha Nandakumar, and others) are those that were active in 80’s and 90’s of the earlier century as the angry poets of ‘Dalit-Bandaya Movement.’ However, most of them now have given up the single agenda of Dalit experience and /or women-subordination and have extended their fields of concern to include either the effects of the recent phenomena of Free Market economy and Globalisation or mystic experience in general.

We find such a change of perspective in the poetry of Siddalingayya who, in 1976, inaugurated, in a sense, Dalit poetry. In his recent collection, Meravanige (2001), he interrogates many positions and stances of Dalit poetry including his own. We find a major shift in such poems like “Gandhi,” in which he almost replaces Ambedkar with Gandhi: “You crushed the mirage, and banished it from the country;/ You forced the white sun to set.” In another poem he registers the newly acquired confidence and self-assurance of the Dalits in these words: “ Why should we fear now / That there is fire, poison, and sharp blades?/ When the full moon of dreams and poetry shines, / Why should we talk about future grievances?”

Aravinda Malagatti, another major poet of Dalit experience in the past, extends the areas of concerns further in his three collections of poetry published in this decade. The first one, Shree Chandala Swargarohanam (2003), is a long narrative on the model of medieval Kannada epics. He takes up the Trishanku myth, found in various forms in ‘Brahma Purana,’ and ‘The Ramayana,’ and he deconstructs the myth so as to expose the tyranny of the Varnashrama system inherent in the myth. What is interesting in this deconstruction of the myth is the poet’s two-fold objective: he exposes the inhumanity of the powerful priestly caste through Vasishtha and his sons; at the same time, he fiercely asserts the identity and culture of the ‘lower’ castes through the parents of Matangi.

The other two poetry-collections of Malagatti also exhibit a dual thrust. Both Silicon City Mattu Kogile (2003) and Vishwatomukha—Hu Balu Bhaara (2010) contain two easily distinguishable parts: while the poems in the first collection expose the ‘internal exploitation’ based on caste within the Indian society and the ‘external exploitation’ due to Globalization common to all Indians, the poems in the second collection document the work-ethics, family-relationships, and culture of the Dalit communities. Intentionally, Malagatti uses literary or sophisticated form of Kannada while exposing external exploitation, and a rural-colloquial form while asserting ethnicity.

S. G. Siddaramaiah, whose two collections were published during this decade (Kaaya Maayada Haadu, 2007; Uriva Batti Taila, 2010), alternates between the dignity of the ‘backward castes,’ and the soul’s yeaning for mystic experience. Poems like ‘Giduga mattu Erehula’ (‘The hawk and the Earthworm’) register the unfortunate situation of the working castes losing their work-ethics and becoming a part of the acquisitive society ushered in by the open-market economy. The ‘Jogi’ poems in the earlier collection and most of the poems in the second collection give expression to his second concern, of mystic experience. Also, he successfully uses the rhythms and idiom associated with the oral traditions, kept alive by the ‘lower castes.’

Many other poets like L. Hanumantaiah, Subbu Holeyar, Baraguru Ramachandrappa, and Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy are active in this decade (Karnaraga, 2007, Sujigatrada Kolaveyinda …, 2003, Chappali Mattu Naanu, 2001). They continue the tradition of Dalit poetry of the last century and write very forcefully on the plight as well as dignity of being a Dalit or of backward caste in a so-called secular society.

What is true of Dalit poets and poets of protest is equally true of erstwhile feminist poets. Metaphorically speaking, most of the women poets like M. L. Pushpa, Savitha Nagabhushana, and others, have given up the ‘Amrutamathi model’ and have opted for ‘Akka Mahadevi model.’ (Amrutamathi in Yashodhara Charita was seen earlier by women poets as a model of a ‘rebel against male-oriented establishment; Akka Mahadevi, the 12^th-century Veerashaiva saint, like Meera, rejected her husband and earthly bonds and moved from place to place singing the praise of Chenna Mallikarjuna.)

In fact, Pushpa herself constructed, in her first collection, the rebel model of Amrutamathi in her famous poem ‘Amrutamathiya Swagata.’ But in her fourth and recent collection, Lohada Kannu (Eyes of Metal), she is mostly concerned with seeking the Guru who can lead her to that stage in which she can transcend such dualities like man-woman and this world-other world. Her agonized soul cries at the end of a poem, “Beyond all these / O God! If you do exist, / To the world beyond the reach of logic / float me like a dry leaf. / Unite the hungry soul with the Soul that can only be glimpsed / And shed light, again.” The long poem ‘Nadee Mukha’ (‘The Face of the River’) continuously equates Woman and the river, exquisitely pictures their varied courses, and concludes with these words: “Woman means river, River means woman / All boundary lines are false / Heaps of rainbows / And pearls and corals, formless/ Hidden in the subterranean flow.”

Savitha Nagabhushana is another significant poet who established herself in the beginning as a strong voice against patriarchy and gender differentiation. Her fifth collection, Darushana (2008; Vision), reveals her mellowed view of life and the desire to go beyond binaries. Though her poetry retains contemporaneity, it is characterized by inward looking and self-analysis. Even while talking of Gujarath riots, she introspects on the way one can conquer the instinct of violence and aggression hidden in oneself. At this stage, Rama is important to her only because he could humble himself to eat the fruit already tasted by another and Shiva only because he wandered carrying the corpse of his wife. She pointedly asks herself: “Why should one remember / Draupadi while wearing a saree, / Shakuntala while taking up a ring, / and Sita while the fire blazes in the earthen oven?”

Many other women-poets who belong to this group are Jyothi Guruprasad, Tharini Shubhadayini, Rupa Hasan, Sandhyadevi, and others.

D) Physical Poetry: Many active poets come in this category: Jayanth Kaikini,

S.Manjunath, Agrahara Krishnamurthy, Mamata G. Sagara, Rosie D’Souza, and such. The distinguishing feature of the poets in this group is that they refuse to indulge in abstractions or generalizations; their poetry deals with concrete and sensuously apprehended things and objects around them, and the very pattern they impose on these ‘trivial’ and unrelated details of daily life creates a perspective of irony or pathos. Jayanth Kaikini is the most significant poet in this group.

Ondu Jilebi (2008), the fifth collection by Jayanth, also reflects his abhorrence of theoretical statements and disembodied abstractions. Even the kind of language used in this (as in other collections) has been consciously shorn of any lyrical or ‘poetical’ elements. It is the juxtaposition of disparate images of daily life that leads to a distinct experience and a new awareness of life. Consider these typical lines:

“If only he had felt the affection at the blue finger tip/ Of the Lambani girl wrapped in a yellow daavani /Engaged in cleaning the glassy eye /Of the young man, holding his head, staring at his eyes intent, and blowing into them/ While the young man stood tottering under the huge load on his head/ In the middle of the road, at noon, deserted, …” The kite, flying high, appears to the poet like “ a short application/ For the vacant site / In the mysterious world, priceless and incomprehensible. / For ‘immediate disposal’ / It needs the will of the cloudy system, above.” Through such unexpected collage of images, Jayanth shocks us to a new recognition of the despair, agony and excitement of life around us.

S. Manjunath also, like Jayanth, dislikes statements and attempts to bring out the ‘thinginess’ of the concrete things around him. His seventh collection, Jeevayana (Journey of life), is a cluster of 34 poems; and a loose thread of autobiography runs through all of them. Interestingly, highly emotive sketches of his childhood are pictured through kinships like ‘elder sister,’ ‘elder brother,’ ‘aunt,’ ‘father,’ and such. It is here that Manjunath differs from Jayanth; while Jayanth’s poems are apparently impersonal and his imagery is urban, Manjunath’s poems are seemingly personal and he draws his images from rural life. However, both of them connote a variety of experiences which are both personal and impersonal.

Mamata G. Sagara is a poet who writes differently from all other women poets; and her poems carry traces of modern thinkers and linguists like Derrida and Saussure. But, again, it is through concretely observable details that she constructs her poems, very consciously. Her new collection, Heege Haaleya Mele Haadu (‘ Casual songs on loose sheets’, 2007), has poems that poignantly register the agony of the victims of Gujarath riots, the hollow logic of religious fundamentalists, and such contemporary issues; however, it is her sensuous and concrete images that immediately catch our attention. For instance, consider these lines: “ The shadow of ear-rings / sways this way and that/ and desires swing”; or, “ On the pointed knife tip/ of sharp grass blades / a drop of snow./ It is poised as if / it might fall now or the next moment.”

**************

Now a few generalizations:

a) One need not bemoan, as many critics often do, that there are no influential literary movements today in Kannada. For, an influential movement patronises only such poetry which adheres to the assumptions and expectations of the movement, and hence breeds monotony. But, today, when there are no strong movements, Kannada poetry is varied both in form and concerns (as I have attempted to show in this paper, hopefully).

b) Secondly, a curious situation exists in Kannada today. According to publishers, readers have given up reading poetry; and hence, publishers are reluctant to publish poetry. However, good poetry continues to be written and new poets continue to enter the field. Does the ‘bulk-purchase scheme’ of the Karnataka government explain this paradox? I am not sure.

c) Another novel feature is that the frontiers of poetry are getting extended and the boundary-lines between different forms of literature are getting blurred. The same poet (let’s say, H. S. Venkatesha Murthy or B. R. Lakshmana Rao or Jayanth Kaikini) writes what we call serious poetry, for ‘Sugama Sangeeth’ (songs set to music), and also popular film-songs and songs for the T.V. Perhaps, the time has come not to indulge in such differentiations as ‘serious poetry’ and ‘popular poetry.’

Again, full-fledged plays are made out of medieval epics as well as modern poetry. That is, Pampa’s Vikramarjuna Vijaya, a difficult epic written in old Kannada, is turned into a play in which the verses of the original themselves are used. Similarly, selected poems of a single modern poet (let’s say, K. S. Narasimha Swamy or G. P. Rajaratnam) or even single long poems (like Adiga’s Bhoomigita) are strung together (the narrators of different poems being the characters) in the form of a play, and such plays are staged successfully.

In other words, much significant experimentation is being carried out in the field of Kannada poetry during this decade; and I am curious to know if similar /other experiments are being undertaken in Marathi and Konkani. Thank you.

****************

Dr. C. N. Ramachandran

(presented in the KOKAM Seminar, held at Goa, on December 5, 2010)

Kannada Poetry Today: Themes and Concerns -Part 1

2010-12-28T01:36:00.000-05:00

First, let me set out the broad contours of my paper. Though I am aware that the history of Kannada poetry –of any poetry for that matter – has scant respect for the artificial periodisation of time in the form of decades and centuries, only for the sake of convenience, by ‘today’ I mean Kannada poetry in the last decade –ie. the first decade of the 21^st century.

During this period, many great and established poets like G. S. Shivarudrappa, Chandrashekhar Patil, and Vaidehi, haven’t published any poetry although they are active in other fields; however, fortunately, many other senior poets such as U. R. Ananathamurthy, Chandrashekhara Kambara, Veerappa Moily, Siddalingayya, Aravinda Malagati, H. S. Venkatesha Murthy, Pratibha Nandakumar, H. L. Pushpa, Savitha Nagabhushana, and a host of younger poets are actively engaged in poetry.

Secondly, there is no perceivable new or influential literary-cultural movement in this decade. As a matter of fact, throughout the last century, influential movements (such as Navodaya, Pragatisheela, Navya and Dalit-bandaya) arose from time to time and gave Kannada poetry new concerns and newer forms; but even the last literary movement of ‘bandaya’ or revolt lost its force by the end of the last century.

Hence, what I intend to do in this paper is not to discuss any one major poet in detail but to broadly draw a map of the themes and concerns of Kannada poetry in the last decade. The major themes and concerns, roughly, can be identified as follows: a) Quest for Utopia, b) Meditations on Life and Poetry, c) Transcending Ideological Frames, and d) Physical poetry. I need not add that these themes often crisscross one another.

a) Quest for Utopia: As a matter of fact, this theme is as old

as The Ramayana and The Mahabharata in

India

, and Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, and More’s Utopia in the West. Probably, the disappointing functioning of democracy in

India

and pressures of Globalization have added a new edge to this old motif. Kannada poets have explored during this period the nature of an ideal society in two different ways: through a reinterpretation of old classics and through speculations on a fictitious society.

1: The most ambitious work concerned with such a quest is the poet-politician Veerappa Moily’s Shree Ramayana Mahanveshanam. Moily’s work is the result of astounding amount of research and reading. The entire epic is divided into five volumes published between 2000 and 2005, and it runs roughly to 43,000 lines. It undertakes ‘anveshanam’ or exploration of what constitutes ‘Ramarajya’ or an ideal state. Though Moily closely follows Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, he introduces scores of new characters and incidents, and re-interprets many familiar incidents from the point of view of modern ethos, drawing freely from Jaina and Folk traditions. Among the incidents re-interpreted, the major ones are the Ahalya episode, Shurpanakha’s disfigurement, and Sita’s Fire-ordeal. Coming to characterization, Lakshmana is the hero of the epic and Ravana a tragic figure and not a villain. It is very interesting to see the way Moily’s work introduces burning contemporary issues through new characters and incidents –such as the Arya-anarya (tribal) confrontation, exploitative mining in tribal areas, need for universal education, alcoholism, etc. –so unobtrusively.

More than all, what distinguishes Mahanveshanam is the lofty vision it unfolds for India in future –the vision of a secular nation of many voices, many cultures, and many peoples. On one occasion, Rama declares that “Mono-cultural doctrine dumps us into a well of darkness.” At the time of coronation, Rama unfolds before his subjects his vision of Ramarajya in these words: “ ‘Ramarajya’ has no other creed and no other goal / But progress and upward evolution.” In short, Moily collapses the past and the present in his work in such a way that his epic remains rooted in the Indian context and still it transcends time and space.

2: In the impressive literary oeuvre of Chandrashekhara Kambara, the poet-playwright-novelist-educationist, the constant locale of all his works is ‘Shivapura’ -- a fictitious Utopia like the city of ‘Kalyana’ in the Vachanas of the 12^th-century Veerashaiva saints. His most recent work Ellide Shivapura (Where is Shivapura?), published in 2009, is a collection of 54 poems of varying length and topics; and it is divided into four parts: Ghodgeri, Hampi, America, and ‘bayalu’ (Space). Though the poems are on different subjects, collectively, they connote the socio-cultural contours of the ideal society, Shivapura.

America

, in a different way, is a negative model: it has no poetry (‘the Moon is dead there!’); the Queen-America sells dreams to all and sundry of unending sensual pleasures, and every one there is happy looking at his/her own image in mirrors. The fourth part contains a series of lyrics with metaphysical overtones: Bahubali, the flute-playing cowherd, the Sun who also has a shadow (Chaayaa his wife), the strangers holding staffs of light, and Adiga the poet – all these connote the various aspects of a living and creative society. In short, Kambara’s Shivapura fuses together the Marxist ideal society (pre-industrial organic society) and the Brindavan-society full of music, poetry and dance.

3: Beginning with the last century, surprisingly, many ambitious and successful epics continue to be written in Kannada –Kuvempu’s Shree Ramayana Darshanam (1947) being the most meaningful, to be followed by Moily’s epic in the beginning of this century. In this context, two more epics written by Latha Rajashekhara deserve our attention.

Latha wrote her first work Buddha Mahadarshana in 2004; it is an impressive work in six volumes, running into roughly 16,200 lines. Later, in 2007, she brought out another, more ambitious work, Yesu Mahadarshana, in nine volumes totaling 21,600 lines. In both of her grand narratives she follows the accounts of life of the Buddha and Jesus Christ handed over by tradition; and she narrates their lives chronologically. What characterizes her traditional narratives are her study of most available sources so as to make her accounts authentic, the strings of novel similes and metaphors, and her focus on the visions of these two great men. She draws their works and visions so poignantly that they transcend their religious frames and become universal.

4 Ga. Su. Bhatta Bettageri is another poet who reinterprets the classics like the stories of Jwala and Nala-Damayanti’ in a new way in order to expose unequal man-woman relationships and tyranny of kingship.

b) Meditations on Life and Poetry: Ananthamurthy, Venkatesha Murthy and Shivaprakash

1 U. R. Anantha Murthy, better known for his path-breaking Fiction and daring socio-cultural criticism, is also a significant poet. In the year 2009, he brought out his fourth collection of poems Abhaava, besides bringing out translations of selected poems of Yeats, Rilke, and Brecht, each with a critical preface and explanatory notes. Clearly, poetry to Anantha Murthy, as he states in his introduction to Abhaava, is something that possesses him like a spirit, periodically. He writes what he calls in Kannada ‘gapadya,’ a kind of poetry that exploits conversational rhythms and day-to-day language. His latest collection contains 18 poems, of which six are translations of Brecht, Rilke, Edwin Muir and others.

From the very beginning, the process of creation (be it poetry or fiction) has both fascinated and frustrated Anantha Murthy; and many of the successful poems in this collection attempt to give a concrete form for that formless process. One of his highly successful poems in this collection is ‘kaavyada Aatmaanusandhana’ (roughly, mediation between poetry and self), in which he uses the game of cowries played by children as a metaphor for the poet searching and waiting for the right words to give shape to his experiences. The poem ends with this awareness: “It’s difficult: resolution isn’t enough, it also needs luck.” Similar poems in this collection, emphasizing chance and waiting on the part of a poet are “Pakshigaagi Kaadu” (Waiting for the bird), “Simbalist Kaavya,” “Saavina Sanne,” and such. Other poems of this collection (and earlier collections) explore the dualities inherent in Life.

2 H. S. Venkatesha Murthy, poet-playwright-novelist, has published till now 16 collections of poetry. His poetry is rich and variegated, characterized by mythical, narrative and oral elements. One special feature of HSV as a poet is that he writes serious poetry as successfully as children’s poems, and also popular songs for films and cassettes. His latest poetry collection, published 2009, is Uttarayana And … .

The 31 poems in the collection are divided into four parts. The title of the collection is very suggestive: ‘Uttarayana’ means the ‘northward solstice traditionally believed to be auspicious period for one’s death, and ‘uttara’ in Kannada also means ‘answer.’ Uttarayana and … is a journey seeking answers to the eternal questions of life and death.

The lyrics in the first part establish the importance of familial relationships (even Rama and Shiva are ‘gods with a family’). The songs in the third part narrate child Krishna’s pranks and thereby divinize ‘childhood’ and ‘innocence’; and Krishna’s exhortations in the last part document the process of one becoming ‘Krishna’ –feeding the cattle, scrubbing the horses, and serving elders.

The second part contains one long eponymous elegy, divided into 24 sections (written on the untimely death of the narrator’s wife). It evokes a welter of emotions and moods through precise and authentic images: disbelief at the sudden disappearance (“like a wick burnt out, oil finished”), despair about his helplessness (“You can’t break the mirror, you cannot catch the reflection”), haunting memories of their past life, speculation on her ‘form after death’, and the final acceptance of the inviolable law of nature. This personal elegy, remarkably, universalizes a personal experience.

3 H. S. Shivaprakash has brought together, since his first collection, myth, mysticism, and social criticism; his recent collection, Matte Matte (‘Again and again,’ 2005) is no exception. The forty poems in this collection meditate on history of Man, economic imperialism of the West, and metaphysical truth. The title is based on the saying, ‘history repeats itself’; and in the eponymous poem, he dreams of the Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps, and when he gets up he reads in newspapers the torture of Iraqis by the American soldiers. Another ends with these pungent lines: “ O goddess of liberty! In the heaven of commodities that you are building/ Smoking cigarettes / Is a very small sin.” ‘Aavantika,’ the long poem, at one level views the ancient and legendary capital as a metaphor for all capitals of all empires that have nourished, lived and died in violence. At another level, it becomes a liberator of one through death; it tempts the narrator: “How wonderful / To get total release from all colours / From all pulls of this dualistic world / And from counter pulls.” At a different level, it becomes the patron of poetry and poets. Finally, the narrator finds Aavantika within himself. In the form of a dramatic monologue, the entire poem lays bare, very powerfully, the narrator’s fears, hopes, and yearnings.

(continued in Part 2)

-Dr. C.N. Ramachandran

Kannada Drama with Particular reference to Chandrashekhar Kambar -Part 2

2010-12-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

II Dr. Chandrashekhara Kambar

a) Biographical:

Padmashree Dr. Chandrashekhara Kambar, playwright-poet-novelist-critic, holds a unique place in the field of post-independence Kannada literature; he fuses modern sensibility with traditional forms of performance and expression. With 21 plays, eight poetry collections, three novels, and 12 collections of research articles on theatre and literature, Kambar is one of the most significant writers in Kannada, today.

In the light of the rural vigour and gusto of Kambar’s poetry and plays, it is not a coincidence that he was born in a small village called Ghodgeri, in Karnataka. Born in 1937 into a poor family of blacksmiths by profession, Kambar had to struggle for education from the very beginning. But, while he was growing up in his small rural place, he began to absorb the very spirit of popular performances like ‘Sangya Balya’ and ‘Lavani’; and he developed an undying love for their music and theatricality.

With the help of Sri Savalgi Swamiji and others, Kambar continued his education and finally got his B. A. degree from Lingaraj college, Belgaum, and M. A. degree from Karnatak University Dharwad. Later, he was awarded the Ph. D. degree in Kannada by the same University for his thesis on “ Origin and Development of Folk Theatre” (1975).

After obtaining his Master’s degree, he taught in many colleges, and worked with Dr. A. K. Ramanujan in Chicago University, from 1968 to 1970. Then he joined the department of Kannada in Bangalore University where he worked for 21 years (1970-1991). When the Kannada University, Hampi, was founded in 1991, he was selected as its first Vice-chancellor, in which capacity he worked for two continuous terms (1991-1997). It was Kambar who built up the University as a center for original research and who strove hard to shape it as ‘a university with a difference.’

After he retired as Vice-Chancellor, he was called to head ‘The National School of Drama’ at Delhi (1996-2000). He also served as the Member of the Executive Committee of Sahitya Akademi, Sangeeth-Nataka Akademi, Theatre Expert Committee, and Ford Foundation in India. At present, he is the nominated member of Karnataka Legislative Council (2004 - ).

During his illustrious career, many Honours and Awards have come seeking Kambar, of which mention can be made of the Padmashree (2001), Kabeer Samman (2003), and Central Sahitya Akademi for Siri Sampige, in 1991. (For a detailed list, see Appendix.)

Kambar’s works, totaling 44, have been translated into English and other Indian languages; and most of his plays have been staged in different parts of the country. (For details of translated works, see Appendix.) He has participated in many national and international Conferences, particularly in Berlin, Moscow, and Japan. He was a special invitee of the French government to participate in the Avenue Theatre Festival, in 1998.

B) Literary:

a) Poetry:

Kambar’s first collection of poetry was published when he had just completed his college education, Mugulu in 1958. The Modernist movement was at its peak then and Adiga was its high priest. Although Kambar shared many concerns like the concern for cultural identity and self-consciousness of the Modernist poets, he dared to be different from them even in his first collection: he went in for the musicality of folk-rhythms and folk-dialect. His next collection, Heltena Kela, published in 1964, established him as a major poet who differed from both the Modern and Modernist poets. To date, he has six collections of poetry to his credit, of which while Takaraarinavaru (1971) got the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award, his next collection Saavirada Neralu (1979) got the Kumaran Asan Award.

As a poet different from others, he uses a dialectical variation of Kannada (which by itself sets his poetry apart from that of the rest); he employs folk-rhythms and oral-narrative techniques in the place of dialogic form and dramatization; and he has a penchant for creating his own or re-interpreting existing popular folk myths. In other words, Kambar successfully brings together in his poetry the elements of the folk and sophisticated consciousness, the local and universal concerns, and this world and the other world.

To illustrate. The long narrative poem “ Navile Navile” (‘Peacock, O Peacock’) equates fertility in the human world with fertility in Nature. It narrates the story of a childless woman and a drought-hit village. She develops companionship with a peacock in the forest. When she conceives, the drought-hit village also gets life-giving rains. But her husband suspects her and gets the peacock killed. In the end, she leaves home and disappears. Very naturally, the peacock in the poem becomes a symbol of virility, wisdom, and beauty, the three qualities Kambar always associates with Nature. The whole poem, structured in the form of a ballad with refrain and repetitions, equates human world and natural world at one level, and at another, contrasts the sterile human world and the virile natural world.

Another celebrated poem of Kambar, “ Aa Mara Ii Mara” (‘That Tree, This Tree’), a variation of the famous Upanishad episode “ dwaa suparna sayujaa sakhaayaam …,” adroitly raises the ontological question of illusion and reality: are they absolute or do they depend on each other to be defined? There is a tree on the bank of a pond, and there is its reflection in water. Their relationship to each other is paradoxical: while their roots are the same, their tops are different; one laughs when the pond’s water is disturbed and the other trembles. The poem ends with a sad comment on the split mind of the modern man:

“Do you know what the tragic weakness of this story is?

The point or space where / The real tree and the reflected tree meet

Has disappeared for ever.”

The poem registers, through apt images of the tree, the relative nature of Illusion and Reality: each is false or true only in relation to the other.

As Professor Satchidanandan points out, the poem “ The Player King and the Clown” is paradigmatic to Kambar’s poetics of inversion. In this poem, the clown forgets his costume, pranks and identity; and appears before the audience as the king himself. The audience accepts him happily. When the real king’s face is seen, the clown declares that it is the face of a buffoon and asks the audience to laugh at the face. Even when the director comes on the stage and declares who is who, the audience does not listen to him. The question here is, how does one become a king or a clown? Is it by intrinsic merits or by the acceptance of others?

There are many other poems which raise such haunting questions. For example, the poem or the song “ maretenemdare mareyali hyaamga” (‘Even If I wish to, How Can I Forget you?’). In this poem, rather ruefully, the poet wonders at the astonishing strengths and regrettable weaknesses of Mao Tse Tung; and sadly records that the new ‘Brave World’ promised by him was never delivered. Many other poems like “Hori” (bulll’) and “Kaadu Kuduri” (‘The Wild Horse’) develop the images in very forceful language to connote vigour, abandon, and sexuality, and reflect on the place of sexuality in an urbane, civilized world.

In short, Kambar brings an alternative sensibility as well as new idiom to Kannada poetry. His whole poetic oeuvre, as Satchidanandan puts it, is an attempt to retrieve those songs, those narratives, and those aspects of human life that dwell in the dark nether world and restore them to light and hope.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. C.N. Ramachandran

Kannada Drama with Particular reference to Chandrashekhar Kambar -Part 1

2010-12-15T03:13:00.000-05:00

The history of modern Kannada drama can be divided, roughly, into four periods: a) Professional-popular theatre, b) Elite Theatre of Realism, c) Navya or Modernist Theatre, and d) Navyottara or Post-modernist Theatre.

a) Professional-popular Theatre:

Although Kannada poetry has a rich history of more than a millennium, drama entered Kannada literature only at the end of the 17^th century; and the first Kannada play to be staged was Singaraarya’s Mitravinda Govinda (1700), a free adaptation of Sri Harsha’s Ratnavali in Sanskrit. However, popular local forms of theatrical entertainment – called ‘Pagarana,’ ‘Yakshagana,’ ‘Bahurupi,’ etc. – existed since a long time. Mummadi Krishnaraja Odeyar, the king of Mysore (1811-1860), was himself a great writer; and he patronized Yakshagana, a popular dance-music-drama, and wrote many plays in that form.

During the reign of the next Mysore king, Chamaraja Odeyar, many Parsi dramatic troupes visited Karnataka and introduced the ‘modern theatre.’ The Yakshagana tradition, the influence of English education, and the model of plays of the Parsi troupes – all these worked together to establish a strong professional-popular theatre in Karnataka, in the beginning of the 20^th century.

In the beginning, under the king’s patronage, a ‘Palace Troupe’ was formed consisting of court scholars and musicians; and they staged adaptations of Sanskrit plays for the elite audience of the court. However, private troupes (called ‘companies’ in Kannada) were soon formed in Bangalore and other major cities. Most of the plays staged by these troupes were either mythological or based on Ramayana and Mahabharata, and later free adaptations of Sanskrit plays and those of Shakespeare. These plays, consisting of innumerable songs, dances, and sophisticated (Sanskritised) language, were notable for their picturesque scenery, glittering dresses, and gorgeous spectacle. (Talking of grand spectacles, one could mention the plays like “Kurukshetra” and “Dashavataara” of Gubbi Company, in which real horses drawing chariots and real elephants would be brought on the stage.) Most of the plays would begin at ten at night and go on till morning. Some of the most popular professional troupes like the legendary ‘Gubbi Company’ and a few of the finest actors and singers were a part of this popular theatre.

This popular theatre reigned supreme in the first half of the last century, and it continued to fulfill the needs of the rural audiences throughout the century. However, the rise of the Realistic Theatre in the Twenties of the last century vehemently opposed the popular theatre and marginalized it. Thus was created the ‘Great Divide’ between the Professional and Amateur theatres, which ‘Divide’ has not yet been bridged completely.

b) The Theatre of Realism: (1925-1950)

Historically speaking, the first realistic-social play in Kannada was written in 1887: Iggappa Hegade vivaaha Prahasana by Karki Venkataramana Shastry; and it dealt with the then burning social problem of ‘Tera’ (bride-price ), prevalent in a particular Brahmin community. It was immediately followed by another play on the same subject, Kanya Vikraya. But neither of these came on the stage and failed to catch the attention of any. Perhaps the time for such plays was not ripe.

The first two decades of the 20^th century in Karnataka (as in other parts of the country) were marked by the sprit of interrogation resulting from the introduction of English education, social Reform Movements, and (a little later) by the National Independence Movement under the leadership of Gandhi. As a corollary of all these movements, the Theatre came to viewed as an instrument of social reformation; and, as one would expect, a social play called Tollu Gatti (Hollow Strong) by a new playwright won the first prize in a contest organized by Amateur Association, Bangalore, in 1919. This event marked the beginning of the Realistic Theatre in Kannada; and it dominated the Kannada elite theatre for about three decades till there was a reaction against it in the Fifties.

The most important playwrights of ‘Social Drama’ in Kannada were T. P. Kailasam and Sriranga (Adya Rangacharya). Both had spent considerable time in England and had absorbed the form and spirit of the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, and Galsworthy. They returned to Karnataka determined to change the Kannada theatre on the models of Ibsen and Shaw. The ethos of the turbulent period also, with its cry for social reformation and modernism, helped and sustained them in their efforts.

T. P. Kailasam wrote in all 17 plays in Kannada and five in English. Most of the well-known plays of Kailasam can be called ‘Problem Plays.’ In each play, the playwright takes up a particular social problem and dramatizes it in such a way that the unjust and exploitative as0pects of the problem are laid before the audience, provoking them to think and act in order to solve or change them. Some of the major problems Kailasam dealt with are: education (Tollu Gatti, 1919), prostitution (Sule, 1945), hollow and vindictive Brahminism (Bahishkaara, 1926; Nam Brahmanke, 1926), marriage (Taali Kattoke Kuline? 1941), marital relationships (Vaidyana Vyaadhi, 1935; Ammaavra Gamda, 1945), popular drama (Nam Kampni, 1944), etc. Most of these plays appear today as talkative though their wit and humour are still fresh. They use a curious mix of English and Kannada which today’s audience may find difficult.

Another noteworthy factor of these plays is their anxiety regarding unquestioned acceptance of Western thoughts and institutions by the Indian Middle Classes. In this sense, Kailasam is typical of pre-independence thinkers and social reformers who wanted to build healthy bridges between the Indian and Western cultures. In his very first play, Tollu Gatti, he contrasts two sons of an English-educated officer. While the first son, cut off from traditional culture and values, grows up as a selfish and heartless being though remarkable in academic achievements. The second son, though not very successful academically, is full of love, caring for others, and selflessness. Both their characters are tested when their house catches an accidental fire; while the first ‘westernised’ son runs out with his books, the second son saves his ailing mother. Thus, the ‘ordeal of fire’ demonstrates who is really ‘sound’ and who is ‘hollow.’ (Following Shaw, the playwright calls his play a ‘disguised lecture.’) Perhaps it is for this reason that he uses ‘Kanndinglish’ in his plays to reveal the schizophrenic nature of the middle classes during the colonial period.

Sriranga, the younger contemporary of Kailasam, laid a strong foundation for social plays in the northern part of Karnataka. The total number of plays including one-act plays written by Sriranga is staggering, running to more than a hundred. There are two distinctive phases of Sriranga’s dramatic career: the first of ‘Problem plays’ and the second of self-conscious ‘Symbolism.’

The problem-plays of Sriranga deal with contemporary social problems such as untouchabiity, child-marriages, plight of widowhood, family planning,, and such. The purpose is, as in the plays of Kailasam, to depict the plight of the victims of an exploitative and cruel relious-social system; and thereby give an impetus to social reformation. Among his problem plays, the most notable are: Harijanwaara (1934; problem of untouchability), Sandhyakaala (1936; clash between orthodoxy and modernism), Shokachakra (1957; moral decline in post-independence India), etc.

The more famous plays of Sriranga, like Kattale Belaku (1959) and Kelu Janamejaya (1960), belong to the second phase. In this phase, the playwright uses many techniques and conventions of traditional drama to transcend the limitations of realism. Also, the plays move in two directions simultaneously: while they turn outward and examine issues like Illusion and reality, they turn inward and self-consciously explore the nature of dramatic illusion.

Both Kailasam and Sriranga share certain common weaknesses: long exhortations, black-and-white characterization, and lack of movement on the stage. Also, more importantly, they were responsible for the vast schism between professional-popular drama and elite amateur drama. But, despite these limitations, it is no exaggeration to say that these two playwrights ushered in ‘modernity’ and ‘contemporary consciousness’ into Kannada drama and shaped the theatre as a socially responsible institution.

Another playwright, more famous as a novelist, was Shivarama Karanth, who wrote many successful realistic plays like Bittida Bele. But he is remembered today more for his theatrical experimentations like ‘Gita Nataka’ (similar to opera), mimes, and shadow plays.

Curiously, every major writer of this period (called ‘Navodaya’) wrote plays which were not meant for the stage. Drama as a form of literature, divorced from the theatre, flourished during this period; and all possible sub-genres of Drama like Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, Opera, Musical, and Mime were introduced to Kannada literature. Some of the major writers of ‘closet plays’ were: Samsa (historical plays), Kuvempu (mythical plays and Shakespearean adaptations), Putina ( Operas), etc.

c) Navya or Modernist Theatre (1950-1965)

Along with modernist poetry and fiction, modernist drama also entered Kannada theatre during the Fifties of the last century. However, plays in the modernist mode – both ‘plays of the Angry Young Man’ and ‘Absurd Plays’ (called ‘Asangata’ in Kannada) – were short lived; and only two major playwrights of this period need to be mentioned: P. Lankesh and Chandrashekhara Patil.

Lankesh, better known as a novelist and short-story writer, wrote in all nine plays, of which two are notable even today: Teregalu (1964; Waves) and Sankranti (1971; Transition). Influenced by Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, the first play forcefully lays bare the decadence and decline in values of post-independence India. The play revolves around three strangers interrogating a seemingly innocent individual; and as the play moves, it gathers varied ethical and political connotations. The second play examines the famous 12^th-century socio-political revolution of Karnataka under the leadership of Basavanna and the reasons for its failure. The play explores the inherent contradictions of all such socio-religious movements.

Chandrashekhara Patil (Champa, as he is popularly known) was, like many others of his generation, greatly influenced by the Absurd plays of Ionesco. However, Patil’s strong theatrical sense and his forceful prose make a few plays like Kodegalu (Umbrellas) and Appa (Father) relevant even today.

In general, both the Modernist and the Absurd forms of drama could not find any roots in Kannada since the experience they communicated and their form appeared totally alien to the Kannada audience. Very soon, they gave place to a new kind of plays which could successfully combine the elements of both traditional and avant guard theatres.

d) Navyottara or the Post- modernist Theatre: (1960 - )

By critical consensus, this period is considered the ‘Golden Period’ of Kannada Drama. Many dramatic geniuses like Girish Karnad and Chandrashekhara Kambar, many highly imaginative directors like B. V. Karanth, and many committed troupes like Samudaya, Benaka and others entered the Kannada theatre during this period and brought it recognition, both national and international. Some of the best plays, from the points of view of both literature and theatre, were written and staged during this period.

There were many reasons for this dramatic surge at this point of time. One of the reasons was the establishment of National School of Drama at Delhi. Most of today’s famous directors were N. S. D. products; and they brought an increased awareness of theatrical possibilities to Kannada theatre. Also, almost at the same time there arose the School of Drama at Heggodu (the famous Ninasam center) and the Repertory, Rangayana, at Mysore. Those who were trained in various aspects of the theatre in these centers made it their aim to bring together the techniques of professional theatre and social seriousness of Avant Guard theatre. Again, the Modernst movement of the Fifties had succeeded in creating an awareness of literature, be it poetry or drama, as a serious intellectual activity and a heightened sensitivity towards language. Added to all these elements, Karnataka had just begun to understand and appreciate the vast resources of its folk-traditions in poetry and drama. As a result of all these forces, the ‘Great Divide’ between professional-popular theatre and amateur-experimental theatre came almost to be bridged.

It is in this context that one has to view Kambar’s achievement in the field of drama. He brings to the theatre not only a play which has an interesting plot and subtle characters but also poetry, songs, and dances drawn from folk traditions. Indeed, along with Girish Karnad Chandrachekhara Kambar can be said to have created a ‘Total Theatre.’

-Dr. C.N. Ramachandran

Parasangada Gende Thimma -Part 2

2010-12-06T05:25:00.000-05:00

The Kannada film based on the novel (with the same title) was produced in 1978. It was directed by Maruti Shivaram and the roles of Gendethimma and Maranki were played by Lokesh and Rita Anchan, respectively. The artist behind the camera was the man known for his imaginative handling of the camera, Ramachandra; and the lyrics were penned by the famous poet Doddarange Gowda. As a bridge-film, it was a big hit with both the masses and the critics.

A film, as is common knowledge, is a visual medium with its many in-built compulsions. To start with, its time-frame is limited; whatever it has to show, it should do so within two to three hours. More importantly, it is a composite art-form that demands contributions from many different people: dialogue-writer, music-composer and singer, lyricist, cameraman, dancers and choreographer, director, and many others. And, most importantly, it is an industry, in the sense that huge investments are made on it in the form of money, time and labour of hundreds of people. All these factors compel a film to cater, primarily, to the taste of the ‘implied audience’ which consists of both the illiterate and the literate, both the individual and the family.

In such a situation, naturally, the visual medium has to be different from the print medium in many ways. Coming to the film version of Alanahally’s novella, owing to its limited time-frame, the film version leaves out many incidents and characters of the written version: it omits the Maranki-Nanjanagud-uncle episode entirely; it shortens the ‘Shani-impersonator episode’; etc. On the other hand, to make the film more ‘colourful,’ it adds the early-morning scenes of a village as it was some seven to eight decades ago –women manually grinding corn on a stone-grinder and singing folk songs, farmers going to their fields with the ploughs on their shoulders, women drawing water from deep wells, and such.

Again, the Indian audience is presumed to demand entertainment first and foremost (be the film realistic or mythological). Hence, a film has to have lilting songs and voluptuous dances. There are in this film eleven songs, most of which are set to pleasing and tunes; and there are group dances which show rural people rejoicing in farming activities or festivals. Shri Ramachandra’s camerawork is superb and it catches, in myriad hues and colours, the sunset and sunrise, and the group-scenes of villagers celebrating an occasion happily. In order to appeal to the prurient in the audience, Maranki is always shown either smiling or slightly bending so that the camera can catch her rich bosom. Also, Thimma in the film (Lokesh) is not physically as unattractive as the novel describes him, and Bediyamma’s hut and its surroundings in the film are not as filthy, wretched and nauseating as the written text describes it –again, another attempt not to disturb the pleasure-seeking audience.

A visual medium, which has to meet the expectations of the mass-audience, cannot afford to indulge in subtle analyses of characters and ambiguous points of view. (Of course, the ‘experimental’ films undertake such a daring step; but they fail at the box office.) They have to avoid ambiguous attitudes and present characters who are almost black and white. To a great extent, this film also follows that dictum; what is covert in the novel is overtly presented in the film.

Consider the covert love of the author (or narrator) for rural life: emotively, he has a deep-rooted attachment for the various aspects of rural life, but he also, ideologically, desires change in the stagnant society. But the film, beginning with a woman singing and grinding corn on a stone-grinder early in the morning (which is not in the novel), colourful and eye-catching scenes of farming activities, the lyrics composed in the folklore tradition like “ teraneri ambaradaage nesara nagutaane …” (‘climbing his chariot, the Sun smiles in the sky’, surely one of the finest lyrics composed for a film), the rural huts being less filthy and crowded -- with all these features, the film shows us a serene and lovely village-life ruined by the changes Maranki introduces. That is, the film overtly privileges rural life as against city-life and depicts ‘Change brought in by City-mores’ in darker colours than what the written text suggests. To emphasize the destructive aspect of ‘Change,’ Maranki, the metaphor for change, is shown in the film always wearing an eye-catching red-blouse –the red colour acting as a sign of both attraction and threat. Further, nakedness in words doesn’t reveal anything; but the little flesh shown in the visual medium was enough to be given an ‘A’ certificate (though the director considered it unjust).

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In one of his seminal essays, A. K. Ramanujan argues that a translation has to obey three sets of conflicting allegiances –to the text, to the reader, and to the culture of the text translated. ² In principle, a translator has to give equal importance to all these three allegiances; however, in practice, since they are conflicting, allegiance to one or the other factor dominates. Also, we notice that this dominance of one factor or another varies depending upon the assymetrical power-relations existing between the source language and target language. If, in the politico-economic hierarchy of literary works, the source language is supposed to be much lower than the target language, allegiance to the implied reader of the translated text dominates; and, as a consequence, during the process of translation, the entire ‘rhetoricity’ of the original is consciously wiped out clean.

‘Rhetoricity’ is the term Gayatri Spivak uses in her essay “ The Politics of Translation,” in which she argues that “ a translator should engage herself/himself with the ‘rhetoricity’ of the original.” ³ Here, by rhetoricity she means the network of connotations built by different registers of a language, intentional uses of particular terms, proverbs and addresses. To illustrate this point, she compares her translation with another translation of a story by Mahashweta Devi. Spivak translates the title of the story ‘stanadayini’, as ‘Breast-giver’ whereas another translator uses ‘The Wet-nurse’; and Spivak points out the difference in these words: “ The alternative translation … thus neutralizes the author’s irony in constructing an uncanny world; … the theme of treating the breast as organ of labour-power-as-commodity … is lost even before you enter the story” (p.400).

Whereas the non-Kannada-English-knowing ‘implied reader’ decides the tone, vocabulary and style of the translated version, the implied entertainment-seeking mass-audience decides the texture and tone of the film, which, as analyzed earlier, is loud, does away with all the subtle innuendos and ambiguities, emphasizes the sensuous character of Maranki at the cost of Thimma, and thus makes explicit what is implicit in the novella.

However, I do not want to push this argument too far. For, publishing houses have to sell their products to survive, and the reader of translations has to be persuaded –if not pampered –to buy the translation and give his time to it. Similarly, a film, in order to succeed, has to cater to the taste and expectations of an average spectator and not only of a connoisseur. Consequently, a series of compromises has to be made during the process of translation from one language to another, and one medium to another. Each ‘Avatar’ has its own compulsions as well as justification.

In fact, even the so-called ‘original’ written work is a ‘translation’ – the author ‘translates’ into words the abstract and amorphous thoughts and images of his mind; and while doing so, he also has to make a series of compromises from the point of view of communicability: providing a causal link to the incidents, transforming images to be both emotive and thought-provoking, in short giving the abstract ideas and images “a local habitation.”

The word ‘translation,’ from Latin ‘translatus’ ( trans + latus = borne, carried), means both ‘to turn from one language to another’ and also ‘to remove from one (cultural) place to another’ . Only, one wishes, a translator /film-director could be a bit more sensitive while making the necessary compromises than what he/she appears to be, today.

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NOTES

1. Shrikrishna Alanahalli, Parasangada Gendethimma ( 1974; rpt.

Mysore: D. V. K. Murthy, 1993). All of my references are to this edition.

2. Vinay Dharwadker, “ A. K. Ramanujan’s Theory and Practice of

Translation,” in ed. Susan Bassnette and Harish Trivadi, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory And Practice (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114-141.

3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “ The Politics of Translation,” in ed.

Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader ( London & New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 397-417.

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Dr. C. N. Ramachandran