Another India: Events, Memories, People

PREFACE

Another India has been in the making over the years. My writings, which took various forms—interpretative essays, narrations of little remembered historical episodes, retellings of mythic and folk tales, sketches of personalities, among others—sought to celebrate the living moral and aesthetic imaginations occluded in modern society. I hoped that the sharing of these cultural memories would reveal the limitations of the modern ideas of progress and development which make people settle for thin views of the world amidst a plentitude of rich cultural visions all around. This exercise was as much about myself learning to see better.

In carrying out my task, I drew upon my own sense for the matter at times and reached out to kindred voices at other times. Anything that came in handy was fine: books, films, controversies, life-experiences. Since logical and analytical reasoning overwhelms public discussions, I preferred to offer narrations with minimal interpretive commentary, and hoped that they would reveal themselves to the readers as they had done to me: as alternate pictures of community interactions, of spiritual imaginations, of mythic worlds.

Both the modern as well as the orthodox imaginations tend to distort the traditional past. If the former fears it as a house of illiberal attitudes, the latter celebrates it as a glorious state of affairs. Several of the folk stories I retell in this book reveal traditional society raising uncomfortable questions about itself, and make those voices our cotravelers as we probe our own existential predicament in the present. Besides, there is the richness of the oral narrative imagination. The tale of Junjappa, for instance, illustrates the daring epic creativity of a pastoral community. Several other stories in the book embody the stunning versatility in the imaginations residing outside the dominant cultural spaces.

The wish to set aside the power of modern ideas, either Western or the revivalist kind, is really to allow for proper descriptions of Indian social realities. Many parts of this book will show that the experiences of faith in the country are such that the term religion cannot properly describe them. Many other parts will show that several political leaders and creative intellectuals have—in their own distinct ways—tried to craft a culturally rooted democratic politics. In a free relationship with the civilizational moral inheritance, their creative imaginations also put on trial the ideas of modernity that have only grown in power since colonial times.

The rich reflections on virtuous conduct, justice and human suffering, seen in Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Sikh, tribal and other moral traditions are a living presence. The secular indifference to these moral conversations that have flowed over centuries is truly unfortunate. It has meant a shrinking of moral creativity in the present. This book goes over several exciting efforts that have sought to address contemporary concerns through a creative engagement with the different traditions of moral thought.

A rich range of aesthetic, spiritual and narrative streams flow together to form our cultural ethos, our democratic sensibilities. In engaging the contemporary predicament, we will need to give the effort everything we have. Another India, I hope, offers a sense of the excitement and the challenges in possessing everything we have.

COMING INTO FOCUS

A PEOPLE WITHOUT A STEREOTYPE

It is impossible to miss the large, floor-to-ceiling close-up shots of coy Indian brides and grooms on the restroom corridor walls at the New Delhi airport. Couples in Bengali, Kashmiri, Maharashtrian, Malayali, Punjabi and Tamil wedding finery are paired across the wall shared by the restrooms for men and women. Unsurprisingly, the Kannadigas have gone missing in this cute visual scheme of federal unity. In the national imagination, there are few images, sounds or smells that help create a recognizable presence for them.

Telecast ad infinitum on Doordarshan in the late 80s, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, the national unity song, affords another instance. The video strove to bring an authentic fit between the regional landscape, dress and personalities and the various Indian languages found in the song’s lyrics. Wearing a saree in the Gujarati-style, Mallika Sarabhai sings a line in Gujarati, and actress Revathi is draped in a Kanjeevaram saree while being all ears to Balamuralikrishna singing a Tamil devotional song.

A couple in traditional Coorgi attire lend visual support to the Kannada line in the song. In the absence of a nationally recognizable Kannada dress, the video director settled for a Coorgi symbol since Coorg is inside Karnataka. The irony is that the Coorgis have their own language, with many of them not seeing themselves as Kannadigas.

While locally specific dresses exist across Karnataka, no single attire has come to be ethnicized as uniquely Kannadiga either inside or outside the state. The same goes for food. Udupi and Kamat restaurants will serve vegetarian food from southern Karnataka, places like Swagath in Delhi non-vegetarian fare from coastal Mangalore. But what one might call Karnataka cuisine does not exist the way a state cuisine does for Bengal, Kerala or Punjab.

The unavailability of a codified image of how a Kannadiga speaks or acts will pose difficulties for any intrepid film director hoping to use a Kannadiga as the stock south Indian figure. How does one show a Kannadiga in Hindi or even Tamil and Telugu films? The missing resources for generic self-expression find positive summation in the Karnataka state tourism department’s motto: ‘One State, Many Worlds’.

Durable associations with Karnataka do of course exist outside: the pleasant climate and the hip IT sector of Bangalore, cricket stars like GR Vishwanath and Rahul Dravid, music legends like Kumar Gandharva, Gangubai Hangal and Mallikarjun Mansur and, in intellectual circles, figures like M.N. Srinivas, U.R. Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad. Standard views about what Kannadigas are like as a people though do not exist. There is no sense of a Kannadiga student, for instance, on campuses at JNU, the IITs and the IIMs.

Consider a few images: the enterprising Malayali with the great survival instinct; the Bengali who is tenacious about his language; the fun-loving, ostentatious Punjabi. These views are of course gross caricatures and will run up against exceptions all the time. But the stereotypes exist and their absence in the case of Kannadigas—as well as numerous other communities in the country—is real. Community stereotypes thrive through jokes, gossip and anecdotes. Colloquial descriptive labels give them anchor: Mallus, Bongs, Gultis, and Gujjus, to name a few, all evoking confident certitudes about those communities. Stereotypes of communities will more likely emerge when their styles of being and doing get noticed and talked about in ways that add up and cohere in the minds of others. While these encounters can be social, or even simply textual, where people have views of others without ever having met them, what is clear is a community has to invite enough attention towards itself to generate standard impressions.

Historically, the Kannada speakers have not moved out much; and, the ones who did have not aided in the creation of generic impressions about themselves. When the Udupi restaurants in Bombay faced violence from a nascent Shiv Sena in the 1960s, the latter thought they were attacking South Indians and Madrasis, and not Kannadigas.

While stereotypes justly set off alarm for their potential for stoking wicked fun, harm and even death, the lack of it presents a peculiar predicament. Being a vague, inchoate presence in a system of federated stereotypes can summon unease and a sense of failure. While anonymity can be a source of pleasure and freedom, invisibility conveys a lack of power for those who wish to mark their presence in India’s repertoire of sub-regional images. The non-arrival of a generic Kannada identity is also a triumph of its heterogeneous nature. None of Karnataka’s chief cultural zones, that is, the old Mysore region, coastal Karnataka, Coorg, Mumbai-Karnataka, and Hyderabad-Karnataka, has been able to stand in for the Kannada community image. Amidst the unpredictable twists in a fast-transforming India, a Kannadiga stereotype might yet emerge. At the moment, however, being an amorphous presence in the national imagination should mean a delicious freedom.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ANIMALS GONE?

One of the delights of Dadasaheb Phalke’s silent film, Kaliya Mardan (1919), is the child Krishna’s tussle with Kaliya, the deadly snake, in a river. Since the early days of Indian cinema, animals have appeared as characters in films across several genres: historical films (horses, elephants), mythological and devotional films (swans, peacocks, parrots, deer) and social dramas (dogs, snakes, monkeys, cows).

Notalways an incidental part of the cinema’s landscape, animals were often moral agents discharging right or wrong action in the film’s narrative. They gave up their lives to save their masters or to avert disaster, or helped lovers meet or reunite, or were a source of trust and friendship. And those which aided in the misdeeds of villains were duly punished for siding with evil. The stuffed leopards and tigers inside mansions gave off clear clues that the masters of the house were dangerous. Besides, on many an occasion, animals sought revenge in reincarnated form.

Films with animal characters were of course continuing an old narrative tradition. For centuries, the stories in the Pancatantra, the Hitopadesha and the Puranas, as well as in the less exalted world of folklore, have included animal characters as moral beings.

Mainstream film makers have felt confident in linking up with this old tradition and cast animals in moral roles in their films. Big hits of the late twentieth century like Hum Aapke Hain Hain Kaun (1994) and Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) featured a Pomeranian dog and a pigeon, respectively, as important characters in them. Filmmakers in art or parallel cinema though do not seem to have felt as comfortable as their colleagues in mainstream cinema. Animals of course do appear in art cinema. In his essay, The Humanism of Ray, the critic, TG Vaidyanathan, the critic, noted, Ray’s compassion and understanding are not only reserved for men but seem to extend also to Nature. Consider the animals that throng his films. There are cats and dogs in nearly everyone (of them). Ray’s films, he continued, express pervasive sympathy for the entire order of animal creation.

Animals have also appeared as metaphors and allegories in art cinema. In Elippathayam (The Rat Trap, 1981, Director: Adoor Gopalakrishnan), the rat trap becomes a metaphor for the prison house of landlord culture in rural Kerala with the landlord being likened to a rat. In Ondanondu Kaaladalli (Once Upon a Time, 1978, Director: Girish Karnad), a couple enact the metaphor of being a tiger in bed: the wife becomes a growling tigress to show that she could be as tiger-like at love making as her husband. In Koormavatara (2013, Director: Girish Kasaravalli), the cracked surface design on the shell of a pet tortoise, which the Puranas explain as having appeared when Vishnu, in his tortoise-avatar, bore the Mandara mountain on its shell to prevent it from sinking while the Devas and the Asuras churned the ocean for nectar, offers a mythic allegory to the crushing experiences of the film’s protagonist whose newly awakened Gandhian sensibilities make the world hard to endure.

Kummatty (The Bogeyman, 1978, Director: G Aravindan) might be a lone exception in Indian art cinema in having an animal as protagonist. In this extraordinary film, a wandering magician and entertainer turns a boy into a dog. The boy’s parents treat the dog as their son until the magician turns it back into a boy the following year. In an unforgettable scene, the first act of the freed boy is to set the caged bird in his house free.

But animals have not appeared as moral actors in Indian art films. The hold of secular thought over art cinema is so strong that its worldview routinely presumes a world under the charge of humans.

Dubbed into several languages, a recent hit Kannada film, 777 Charlie (2022, Director: K. Kiranraj), which features the affection between Dharma, a lonely young man, and Charlie, a female labrador that succumbs to cancer in the end, cautions against incestuous dog breeding. The allusion—through the hero’s name—that the companionship between the two film protagonists is like the one seen between Dharmaraya (Yudhishtra) and the dog towards the end of the Mahabharata though is a strained one. Unfolding against a landscape of pet food, animal welfare activists, no-dogs-allowed signboards, a veterinary clinic and a dog competition, 777 Charlie works with a diminished biological view of animal life.

The previous readiness in working with animals as moral characters has surely waned in mainstream Indian cinema. Alongside laws that make it difficult to use animals in films these days, something else might have brought about this decline in interest: the changing sensibilities of urban middle class audiences in India and abroad which do not resonate with films with animal characters and, indeed, with older conventions of social melodrama. The end of such films will mean Indian cinema’s farewell to metaphysical views of animals as moral actors. Animals are likely to continue to be found in oral narratives and children’s literature and television, but their departure from mainstream cinema as moral characters signals an impoverishment of worldview.

TWO OR THREE THINGS ABOUT RAJKUMAR

Understanding Rajkumar as a cultural phenomenon is a seriously difficult task: the dimensions of his presence in Karnataka are so many. A moral icon, a folk hero, a voice, a force, a natasarvabhouma (the Emperor of Acting): these familiar ways of pinning him down convey the complex cultural persona of the Kannada superstar.

It is unlikely that another film actor in the country has matched the variety of roles Rajkumar played. Appearing in 220 films across five decades, he has done lead roles in historical, mythological, devotional, romance, action and espionage thrillers, and family melodrama, among other film genres. In what is surely an uncommon cultural fact, Kannada film viewers have experienced a diverse range of genre settings through the figure of Rajkumar: they have seen them through his eyes; they have felt them through his body.

Between 1953 and 2000, the release years of his first and last films, Bedara Kannappa and Shabdavedi, respectively, Rajkumar can be seen forging continuities between the past and the present and the future of Kannada society. The continuities in the community selfhood run through political-military episodes, exemplary lives of saints, mythological drama and the so-called social films.

The past was more squarely the past of Karnataka in the case of historical figures from this region—for example, Krishnadevaraya, the emperor of Vijayanagar, Kaivara Tatayya, the saint, and Ranadeera Kanteerava, the king of Mysore. Then there are the figures that Karnataka could lay claim to as being part of a sub-continental region— for example, Kalidasa, Kabir, and mythological characters like Arjuna and Ravana. The films of Rajkumar supplied durable images and sounds for numerous historical and mythological episodes. Indeed, popular memory in Karnataka recalls the visual images of Satya Harishchandra and Immadi Pulakesi, the Chalukya emperor, from his films.

The films of Rajkumar supplied durable images and sounds for numerous historical and mythological episodes. While history books reached schools and colleges as a set of dull details of dates and proper nouns, the historical, mythological and devotional films of Rajkumar brought the past to life for large numbers of people in a resonant way. The sets were grand; the dialogues were grand; the acting was grand: they vivified the past in ways that bewilder sober historians. Initially a theatre actor at the famous Gubbi Nataka Company, the timing and pitch of Rajkumar’s delivery of stylized speech in these films was unmatched.

In films set in contemporary times, Rajkumar moves smoothly across both modernity and tradition. He visits temples, does puja at home, does the duties expected of a son, a lover, a husband and a parent. In other words, he is not embarrassed about traditional ways of being in the world. At the same time, he is comfortable in suits, in modern professions, in using modern technology, and more generally, in navigating modern spaces without melancholy, pathos, nostalgia or anxiety.

In his most famous film, Bangarada Manushya (Man of Gold, 1972), for instance, he deploys tractors and bore-well drills to make dry land cultivable for modern agriculture. Again, in an earlier film, Operation Jackpotnalli CID 999 (1968), which was inspired by the James Bond thrillers, the Secret Agent’s secretary asks the Police Chief to call back later as he was doing yoga at the moment. And, Rajkumar’s ability to speak in English in modern day film settings is never in doubt. What he will never let pass though is anyone using English for status games, for making Kannada appear an inferior language.

On a broad glance, Rajkumar’s films, in particular, those that he did after acquiring superstar status, work as a custodian of Kannada morality. Whether set in the historical or mythic past or in the rural or the urban present, the characters played by Rajkumar will affirm the values of self-restraint, kindness, humility, justice, tolerance, compassion and respect for others and refute arrogance and violence. They will be non-elitist and hold up the value of civility and refrain from peddling hatred. Being courageous rarely lapses into militant self-pride.

Not aligned with any denominational religion or sect, these values are worked out in a general sense in Rajkumar’s films. A crucial feature of these films pertains to their edificatory content. A Kannadiga NRI parent in the US once told me that he had made his young son watch Gandhada Gudi (The Sandalwood Shrine, 1973), where Rajkumar plays an honest police officer, several times as that hit film imparted good values. The director of a documentary on the film superstar admitted that the motive behind the film was to impart good values to Kannadiga children, especially in NRI families. Clearly, Rajkumar’s films are not wholesome entertainment alone: they also extend lessons in self-edification. It would be incorrect however to view Rajkumar’s films as affirming a consistent set of values. On occasion, the roles he played held out moral lessons within the framework of karma siddhanta and divine predetermination (Yene Aaadaru, Avana Kaanike,/Whatever happens, it is His gift, is the refrain in a famous song in Premada Kaanike (A Token of Love, 1976)). On other occasions, they exhort the audience to take charge of their lives without an accompanying idea of karma. The famous song from Bangarada Manushya is a good illustration: Aagadu yendu, namigaagadu yendu, kai katti kulitare, saagadu kelasavu munde, manasondiddare margavu untu/Saying it can’t be done/saying it can’t be done by us/if we don’t do anything/ the work won’t get moving/Where there is a will, there is a way. Apart from the song lyrics, heeding the work of the scriptwriter, cameraman and the director will all form a part of the task of grasping the film phenomenon, Rajkumar."

Rajkumar’s films show a care for building a Kannada samaja (society), and not a Kannada rashtra (nation) as such. He played the roles of royal personages many times but hardly ever that of functionaries of the modern state. Apart from the occasional role of a mayor, in Mayor Muthanna (1969), or that of a police officer, Rajkumar is not found playing a politician or bureaucrat or judge in ways that emphasize the value of the modern state or the rule of law.

In Raajakumara (2017), when its hero and Rajkumar’s son, Puneeth Rajkumar, is asked to join politics, he replies: Father always used to say: ‘Those who rule over people need political power. We care for people. Willpower suffices for us.’ This response strove to explain why his father stayed out of electoral politics. Following his support for the Gokak movement in the early 1980s, which sought primacy for Kannada language instruction in state-run schools and job reservation for Kannadigas, Rajkumar became a symbol of the activist dreams of the Kannada movement. He desisted however from moving towards party politics.

Through the mysterious process which frees individuals from their community identity in people’s eyes in India, Rajkumar, who came from the Idiga community, a toddy tapper caste, belonged to all. When held hostage inside a forest by Veerappan, the smuggler, for over three and a half months in 2000, the uncertainty over his safe return kept everyday life in the state tense the entire time. No one else could have drawn such levels of concern.

As superstar, as voice, as image, Rajkumar is an intimate presence in the lives of Kannadigas. Whether they admire him or not, he remains a deeply familiar point of reference, a point of entry into a world of belonging.

A WEDDING CALLED MANTRA MANGALYA

Purnachandra Tejasvi’s biography of his father, Kuvempu, the great Kannada writer, recalls:

Father knew full well that even idealistic youth surrendered to hidebound orthodoxy at the time of their marriages. This is why, during the seventies, he addressed the youth thus: ‘Don’t try to reform the world, or society, or orthodox tradition. Nothing will change if your minds do not change. If you are individuals with integrity, try to follow a small suggestion of mine for reforming yourselves: avoid dowry, blind ritual conformity and ostentatious wedding expenditure. These might not seem revolutionary. But you will experience the beauty and joy of doing what you believe in.’

Avoiding grand weddings, Tejasvi adds, his father ensured that the marriage ceremonies of his children stayed simple.

Kuvempu evolved a distinct model of marriage that he later called Mantra Mangalya (MM). It was an organic extension of his ethical ideal of Vishvamanava (universal man), which, briefly put, views all community identities as artificial and limiting on one’s experience of the world.

The MM wedding recognizes marriages across the lines of caste and religion. Dowry, bride-price and horoscopes