A Kannada Poem by S Manjunath

In the street

– S Manjunath

Rain began to lash out midway;

granny covered the infant in her arms

with the folds of her sari

I can’t hasten

to shelter them under my umbrella – yet

I can’t keep on under it unruffled.

I hurry

as if to cross the distance

between us;

an unknown twinge – as if piercing the heart

from the umbrella’s handle.

As the granny rushed under a tree

with the infant bouncing like a ball in her arms

as if the rain drops had washed away her age

making even the infant cackle

tinkling waves of the infant’s laughter come floating

where have dark clouds gone

no one needs this umbrella anymore

 

Bhakti Expressions

H S Shivprakash is a brilliant poet who writes in Kannada. He has been a premier poet and dramatist in Kannada for decades running. A poet of unique voice, he beats no trodden path, or perhaps he retraces the lost paths. Persistent in his search for alternative traditions to the hegemonic ones, Shivprakash has not hesitated to turn against the mainstream literary practices. Serving as a professor at JNU, Delhi, Shivprakash has also edited Indian Literature for some time. While he has a special liking for the vacana tradition, he has taken to explore the Sufi, bhakti, and other diverse mystic traditions in both life and letters. Shivprakash’s poems are not attempts to retrieve the bhakti form of writing poetry but that of bhakti spirit. More often Shivprakash’s poems explore the ‘narratives’ of the bhakti, sufi and other mystic personalities. Here again, he usually wanders far into the untrodden ways to steer away from the hegemonic fields. His poetry is a poetic rendering of the history of marginal forms of life.

Here is an excerpt from his article on Bhakti traditions “Transmutations of Desire and Power in Bhakti Expressions”.

One of the challenges associated with viewing India , as unified literary space is to trace continuities between creative practices in far-flung times and spaces of the many-tongued subcontinent. In this context, the study of various Bhakti movements assumes great significance for the simple reason that, as pointed out by Manager Pandey, Bhakti is the first and greatest pan-Indian literary and cultural movement across languages and regional barriers which altered cultures of people at large. The socio-historical and at times even the philosophical aspects of this pan-Indian movement have received sufficient scholarly and critical attention; at the same time, the literary and aesthetic dimensions of the movement have not yet received the attention they deserve. Because Bhakti mode of expressions dominated Indian creative psyche for well over a millennium, the study of patterns of continuities and divergences of the enormous body of literary and aesthetic practices relating to Bhakti can go a long way in helping us understand India as a common literary and cultural space.

A judicious mixture of synchronic and diachronic approaches is necessary to arrive at a comprehensive view of the achievements of Bhakti movements.  The obstacles are many, however. As Manager Pandey pointed out again we do not have in India the likes of continental critics of the west – Rene Wedlock or George Steiner, for example – whose scholarship extends over several languages, classical and modern.   This is true of literature on Bhakti, too.  For instance, even an eminent authority like V Subramaniam, who has written the most comprehensive account of Bhakti movement from a comparative perspective, can be accused of lopsidedness. For his superb analysis of Tamil Bhakti in relation to North Indian Bhakti passes silently over Karnataka, the next door neighbour of Tamil Nadu. The Karnataka experiment pioneered the subaltern forms of expressions of urban artisan Bhakti that paved the way for Nirguna Bhakti of North and of Orissa. Neither does he say anything about Sakta Bhakti whose paradigms are considerably different.

Attempts made to synthesize Bhakti in classical Bhakti texts also suffer from shortsighted view. For instance the typology of Bhakti worked out in Narada Bhakti Sutra in the form of nine types of Bhakti, though it relates Bhakti to mundane ways of relating, ignores some forms of labour-centered expressions characteristic of artisan Bhakti.

Such lopsidedness results from a) the enormous volume and bewildering variety of Bhakti expression and (b) our own limited familiarity with this vast material.

More here.

 

 

 

Kannada theatre and modernity

What is the significance of modernity in India? The question is quite old and has fostered diverse debates. But the answers have varied. A historical view of the debate on the status of modernity in India may trace various positions. For a long time the debate basically took a pro and anti stance. There were also questions about the form it takes in India. In the recent past, sociological theories of modernity have been quite influential. Increasingly people have been undertaking micro studies insisting on the diverse ways in which modernity has been accessed and practiced in India.

Recently Akshara, who is a theater scholar and a major figure in the Kannada literary scene, wrote an interesting piece on the ‘contradictory multiplicities within Kannada modernity’. He argues that the story of theater history is imprisoned in colonial categories and has not sufficiently attended to the diverse negotiations that Kannada theater has made with modernity. He indicates that the urge for coherent and linear narrative is the reason why the contradictions are not adequately incorporated in the story of modernity in India. He recommends a fragmentary, non-coherent historiography to develop a nuanced theater history. Akshara presents such a fragmentary narrative in his essay “The Contradictory Career of the ‘Modern’

in the Kannada Theater”. In this essay he grapples with the issue of ‘modern Kannada theater’ and asks how one can constitute a category such as this. He enacts his own recommendation by presenting micro-stories of Kannada theater to comment on the categories of historiography of theater in Kannada. He suggests ambitiously that if such a study is successfully carried out, it is possible to discover a ‘desi modernity’.

Here is an excerpt from this very fine essay. A shorter version of this essay appeared in Seminar here.

How do we account for these contradictory instances of ‘modernity’ while we write our history of Modern Kannada Theatre today? – This seems to be the key question to me, and this is the reason with which I set out to write my essay, invoking the contradictory multiplicities within Kannada modernity, that is perceived to be one single body. It is generally accepted by critics in Karnataka today, and elsewhere, that the term ‘modern’ denotes not only different things in different contexts, but is also defined by the particular context it emerges from. Today, we are also aware that the future of this concept, especially in the desi languages/cultures in India is an intricately woven multifaceted narrative. On the one hand, it is a fascinated acceptance of Western modernity (as it was perceived), and on the other, there are various attempts to adapt, alter, and even parody it, consciously or unconsciously. But what we have still not been able to do is to develop a nuanced narrative that captures the contradictions, ambivalences, multiplicities within the Kannada theatre traditions, without resorting to simplistic stereotypes generated about it.  Or, in other words, we have still not been able to create new ways of conceptualising the contradictory career of our modern theatres and instead, we are stuck with the imported and imposed categories like ‘folk’, ‘urban’ and ‘commercial’ and the like in almost all our narratives on the history of regional theatres.

Akshara is a fine playwright and an all encompassing theater personality. He currently heads the theatre school NINASAM. Read an interview with Akshara here. He is not an intellctual pretender. He writes with deep commitment. Not easily swayed by current fashions, Akshara’s views are always refreshingly practical and uncluttered.

 

Dalit Poetry in Kannada III – Moodnaakadu Chinnaswamy

There are some excellent dalit poets writing in Kannada these days. I don’t have too good an access to the latest dalit poetry emerging in Kannada as my visits to Karnataka are not vary frequent. I try my best to get as much as my friends can send me. Continuing my earlier posts, here and here, I present a translation of another Kannada Dalit poet. This time another well known name: Moodnakadu Chinnaswamy. I am familiar only with a few of his poems and they are very good. Here is one ‘Footwear and me’ in my poor translation. I read it in a magazine and can’t find that copy around me. So I am a little unsure if this is the complete poem or if I managed to translate only a fragment. I am sorry, I haven’t done enough homework on this. But I promise I will soon rectify this deficiency. I also don’t have a picture of the poet M. C. If anybody has one, do share, please….

Footwear and me

* Moodnaakadu Chinnaswamy

When I go to the temple

The footwear is not left outside

It is I who is outside

Shoes on cobbler’s feet

Makes as much news as when

A man bites a dog

Taking off the shoes

Everyone’s feet

tread all over me

I am a plant:

and they just don’t realize

that under their feet are my roots

Like a crane craning her neck

to the dried up lake’s spring

I stand on my toes

and peep in to steal

as much of god’s form as I can see

 

A Poem about Mother

A phenomenal prose writer Lankesh was not specially known for his poems except for his ‘Nilu’ poems.  But this one has moved so many people. Earthy in its perception of the mother, the poem so well captures what most of the modernist Kannada writers were doing: indexing the shift in the consciousness from rural to urban. The poem was translated by KV Tirumalesh, himself a great poet. It had appeared in Kavi Bharati- Triennial of Indian Poetry, March 1987.

Mother

* Lankesh (Translated by K.V. Tirumalesh)

Like a wild bear
She tended her children,
Cared for her husband and cared for the money.
She would howl like a hurt dog,
Groan and fight.

Mean, crooked and fretful like a monkey,
Guided only by the welfare of the family,
She would be a fury
If her son went out of her hand
Or husband went after another woman.

The jungle bear doesn’t want your scriptures;
My mother lived for a few morsels of food;
For work and for her children’s sake,
For a roof to live under,
For a sheet to cover,
For that upright walk
Among her equals.

For her are these tears of gratitude
And admiration – for bringing me up.
Bringing me to life
And for that departing – as if
It were to the fields that she went
Talking quietly
This woman of the earth.

 

Contemporary Kannada Poetry – Ashok Hegde

Here is the translation of Ashok Hegde’s poem A Morning Picture.

A Morning Picture

* Ashok Hegde

A sleep-interrupted, tea-nauseated chilly morn,
patches of people all over the floor,

in the corner, like a crumpled shirt, a child,
an old woman scratching her dugs in residual drugged sleep,

a teen’s endless cough.
As folk, like the wick extinguished in midnight,

lose the world in their impatience,

you, woman, in lonely expectation waiting…

Come and be a live track,
from your mere touch let
my life rail run full speed, fill each of your
atom with me, untie knots,

drape me in a new dress,

your lips to my lips bring;
drink sins in cupfuls, loot

the cup of my life.

Give to my hands all

mysteries of your body,

place ear to ear so they record each ache,

inhale the sweat smell of my body,

let it spread in this world
in anticipation of a new birth.

Let the snow melt, the rain-moth float,

let the river swell into a sea,

you be fuel to my

fiery lust, burn beyond other births

let hell’s worm be born

Phoenix like in this trashy flesh.

(Translation: Kamalakar)

 

Kannada Poetry – Alanahalli Krishna

His Kadu is the quintessential modernist novella. Yet, in his poetry he is very unlike the Kannada navya tradition of poetry. This is Shrikrishna Alanahalli who but for his early demise would have been by now known to everyone with any interest in Indian Literature. He has written enough to make him an icon in Kannada. Several stories and three novels. His poetry both his own and what he brought from elsewhere, are all of considerable interest. But I am interested specifically in this poem, ‘Butterfly and the Master’. I think it is a very good poem. Here Alanahalli manages to mix wonder and politics. There is the signature point of view of the ‘boy’ (not child yet not adult) that like the butterfly itself is now transforming from being ignorant to becoming aware of the worldly matters. The assertion at the end of the poem to retain innocent beauty as against accepting the ‘truth’ of science is super. For the boy is here trying to defend not so much truth or otherwise but his own idea of beauty. The sterilised knowledge with its impersonality is violent to its object – is why I think the boy refuses to accept teacher’s truth.

Anyway, here is Alanahalli Krishna’s :

Butterfly and the Teacher

* Shrikrishna Alanahalli

Near the pond in my village,

on the fence next to the well,

just in front of my home even,

such colourful butterflies!

White butterfly with red wings

gray butterfly with black wings

golden bordered – blue, yellow

deep red, coal black, light green…

I would go catching them

each time the colours overflow

the colours turn into butterflies

and bloom in my eyes.

From here to there, there to here

bending, swaying, flying,

my mind following

each of the flight

with colourful butterflies in my head,

and butterfly-like feelings

I would catch them daily,

then let them fly off

or smear the hands with gold dust

or keeping a golden wing hidden among pages,

I would feel happy,

would be filled with pleasure.

2

Suddenly one day when I was in the class of

the new bald plated teacher

when he said: ‘insect turns into a colourful butterfly’.

What I heard was like hot lead poured in my ears

I sat shell shocked.

Insect, cheee, thorny all over

black like the wool of a bear,

by chance if you touch

burning itch all over the body

If you squash it in disgust

Just puss.

Can such a disgusting insect

become my beautiful butterfly?

or is it loud talk of the

bald plated teacher?

The way in which doing the daily lessons

made true the earth going around the sun,

What if this also turns into truth?

No, none of these bald plated teacher’s lessons

no need to learn

This lesson on how my beautiful butterfly

was only an insect.

 

Abdul Rasheed – Kannada’s Basheer

Rasheed is a rare poet. Believe me he will prove to be one among the best. His poems as well as his stories. His eyes see the unseeable obvious. His heart hears the the faintest of voices.

from: mysorepost.wordpress.com

His story ‘Kirti Patake’ (Rag Flag) is one of the best short stories I have read in the recent years. When you read him you will remember Vaikam Basheer. A few good translators should come up and carry him across to other languages. This story occurs on 6th December, the day of the Babri Masjid destruction. The oblique manner of evoking that farce through a lovable character’s entirely funny escapades is superb. Symbolic yet warm, satirical yet humble, intensely literary yet eminently readable – that is how this story is.

He is a fine poet too. Read his poems to see how intensely a poem can be personal. That is to say density of the personal details makes the poem totally objective. He creates a felt world, but does it through an intelligent weaving of details so that the poem grows into an intricate pattern. Vibrantly romantic, such poems of Rasheed defy the requirements of the current fashons.

This blogger in his ignorance has attempted a translation of one such poem:

A Personal Poem

* Abdul Rashid

Your sweat-filled chest

And the grains of sand from the sea inside your toe nail

And the feather caught in the curls of your hair

The scratch marks on your back that you have yourself made

And my grief at not being responsible for any of these.

Your alert indifference,

the grace of the fingers while you stretch your body,

and your generosity of yielding in small measures and withholding,

your crazy confidence that I can be put to sleep

by your flirtatious fingers in my hair!

I blabber and go back to sleep,

see all and cease to be,

touch and see if everything is in place,

returning after sending you away…

 

Dalit Poetry in Kannada II

One of the contemporary Kannada poets whose work I am amazed by is N K Hanumantayya. He has two collections so far: Himada Hejje (Snow Steps – 1998) and Chitrada Bennu (Picture’s Spine – 2006). There was an unnecessary controversy in Karnataka around 2004 about eating beef. At the time Hanumantayya wrote a poem titled: ‘Becoming a cow by eating cow-meat’, an excellent poem, which caught the attention of many and NKH began to be liked by poetry lovers. One such is this blogger.

Hanumantayya’s poems are written in standard dialect. His is not the dialect-based poetry. He is also a very frequent user of symbols:

On this ant

I placed my heavy step

And lifted it after a while.

The ant is still moving. (‘Spine of the Picture’)

Check out this from ‘The image in ant’s maw’:

While asleep in the night’s dark cave

She opened her eyes to the sound of dewdrops falling

Like the stars smiling on darkened bones

NKH sees all the small beings. He is alert to the living beings that we take for granted. While in the ‘Spine..’ poem quoted above he goes on to thank all these tiny beings whose life is forever casually endangered by our activities, his poems also frequently show gratefulness to ’soil’. Creatures populate his imagery. Here is a fine little poem ‘Firefly and me’:

That night unable to sleep

I stepped out

The courtyard was filled

With fireflies.

Their light made me

Sweat and scream

One of my favourite poems is titled ‘Elephants that melt in earthworm’s mouth’. Here it is in full:

A sculptor

Carved on a mustard seed

Hundreds of elephants and howdahs

And twisted his moustache proudly

And laughed at time rotting

Before that mustard seed.

A small bird

Flew down the electric line

And ate the mustard seed

Shattered, the sculptor

Opened his eyes

There was a mustard plant

Before him

At its bed the elephants and howdahs

Were melting in an earthworm’s mouth.

Violence is common motif in these poems. Often the poems invoke the violence meted out to the community over the ages, sometime to violence in the daily lives of people, creatures. There is sadness about the pervasiveness of violence. Therefore most poems also have macabre images. The author’s preface begins thus:

On this black back

Day and night a cold hurt runs

Are all the dirt-snakes

Sleeping here?

Is my corpse rotting

Every moment?

Nataraj Huliyar who has written a preface to NKH’s Picture’s Spine says that these poems seem to have emanated from the “lonliness, struggle, sadness, bitterness, survival instinct, masochism, and the violence borne of relationships”. The book also has a blurb by Ananthamuthy who says, “these are poems to be read carefully. They have the ability to expand our cognitive ways apart from enriching our emotional world”.

I think the promise that these senior writers find in NKH is justified by the quality of his poems. He is a poet who cannot be read in a hurry.

 

Contemporary Kannada Poetry I

Manjunath S, sometime called ‘Hakkipalti Manjunath’ after the title of his first collection, is now one of the leading Kannada poets. When I first met him in 1988 or thereabout he had come out with his first collection which was quite strongly in the manner of ‘navya’. I remember a long walk I took with him in K R Nagar where he has been living. My friend Shivu KN was with us. Shivu used to do these things in his own romantic manner – meeting poets. But Shivu was very talkative. I have always been bad with words. I dont think I spoke much with Manjunath that time.

I met him in May 09, in Mysore. We spent one whole day together. I have been translating some of his poems into English. I showed him my efforts. He liked some, corrected others, tolerated some. He is a poet of intensities. Even his light verse has to be read for the intensities for us to appreciate them. Best of his poems are in awe of the world around. The perceiving self is tiny, the perceived is full of wonder. This quality of  ‘wonder-struckness’ in Manjunath’s poems is special. It is one of the major ways in which the egotistic voice is undermined.

The following is a translation of ‘Vastu Sthuti’. Suggestions welcome.

Thing Hymn

Salutes to things:May they not harden our hearts

cursing us with muteness, lethargy, dumb sleep.

Several salutes to glittering coins:

may they not jeer and lure us,

trash the truth of ruth

by vanishing from our pockets.

Special salutes to prostitutes

may their eyes of hunger and mockery

not assault poor us,

pitying let them send us on

love’s feebly fragrant trail.

Double salutes to demon and deity,

who knows who is who?

May the man with the knowledge

save his neck;

let no one enslave us

let not death

make a morsel of us while still alive.

 

Dalit Poetry in Kannada

It may not be an exaggeration to say that in the recent past much of the notable poetry in Kannada has been Dalit poetry. The modern dalit poetry in Kannada burst into limelight in the 70s and after with writers such as Siddalingayya. It was also the heydays of DSS (Dalit Sangharsh Samiti). Among the ones that are my favourites is Govindayya. One of his celebrated poems is “A, B, C and …”

Photo: Abdul Rasheed

First and foremost this poem, like much of dalit literature reveals a self-deprecatory gesture. This gesture is an acknowledgement of the suffering endured by the parents, or by extension, being endured by the dalit community. Secondly, it celebrates the access to education and the change made thus possible. Thirdly, it records the systemic nature of opression. The inhumanity of such treatment however has not robbed the mother and father of the ability to find joy. The world continues to be inhuman, yet the dalit life-world celebrates the little joys of success, strength and freedom.

The following translation is only a draft, in need of refinement. Suggestions welcome. If you want to listen to Govindayya reading his poems, including this one,  go here.

Opening my eyes when I began stirring my limbs:

In my mother’s eyes in the dark hut

A hearth was ablaze

Setting his black limbs to the fire

Father breathed through beedi

As lives were in a boil in the boiling gruel

When the feet that had

Crawled-stood-walked within mother’s nest

Halted inside the ischool walls

The up-twisted moustache on father’s black cheek

Fell down to the brahmin master’s feet

Father and mother’s hopes got entangled

With the letters A, B, learnt on the dark board

So did our village, colony, cemetery;

In the well of skeletons

I found a few words

As I descended in further search

The questions that came up

Sprouted limbs and khaki dress,

Large moustache;

I dissolved in darkness!

Still,

On the crooked walls of the ancestral hut

That day when I formed A, B, C

The kisses that mother showered on me are still on my cheeks

The small coin that father gave is still on my string-belt.

 

Kannada Novel by Ashok Hegde

In this post I want to describe a novel by Ashok Hegde who writes stories and novels in Kannada. He is an important contemporary writer in Kannada. His story Darkness, translated here, is a very significant reflection over the IT urban culture. More about that in the next blog. Here goes Ashwamedha.

Ashok Hegde

Ashwamedha means the ‘Horse Ritual’ refering to an ancient custom of emperors. But in this novel there is a revival of this, not by a King but by a Head Priest of a Brahmin monastery. This transformation is symbolic. Again, it is being undertaken not to assert the secular power as in the ancient custom, but the power of brahmins and caste system. Stories of this kind sometime become blind to the abilities of the oppressed. But this novel presents the caste politics in an enabling optics. Below is a description.

Ashwamedha is a novel about transformation. A transformation willed by people tired of being the bearers of the burden of the society all their life. A transformation that is violent in its desire for change and the mechanism adopted for effecting that change. A transformation that is accompanied by violent resistance as well. The novel describes the conscious will of the people about this social transformation and the mobilization undertaken to bring it about. The focus of the novel is the everyday life of a village society united in its cohabitation of the same ecological sphere but stratified hierarchically into a caste-economy. In tracing the gradual emergence of an emancipatory energy in the feudal village, Valligadde, Ashwamedha, through the practice of dense description, builds up a culturally resonant narrative.

The social world of Ashwamedha, has roughly three layers reflecting the differentiated socio-economic life of the land-owning Brahmins, semi-independent Idigas, and the dependent ‘Harijans’. In order to reveal the friction within this village society, the novel employs two challengers to its orthodox life. The first is the arrival to land-ownership of a total outsider, Rajiv Gaitonde, whose ‘foreignness’ becomes the catalyst for the initial rumblings of change. The second challenge is from within and is gendered. Nirmala, the daughter of one of the Brahmin families of the village elopes with Krishna, a ‘Harijan’ labourer. Further, when Krishna fails to marry her, she returns only to live with his mother Devi, as a caste-transformed woman carrying the mark of caste-disruption through out.

These two challenges – external and internal – grow into serious subversion of the feudal caste-economy of the village primarily because of the Idiga community. This community, in this novel, indicates the fruits of the processes of democratization in the post-independent India as it reveals how far social energisation has taken place due to such state initiatives as land re-distribution. The Idiga community leader Rama Naik becomes the centre of the social transformation with active assistance from Rajiv Gaitonde. While the latter’s participation in the affairs of the village begins with a personal conflict, it acquires programmatic dimension with the coming together of Rajiv Gaitonde and Rama Naik.

The conflict among the caste communities of the village is represented through the conflict between individuals such as Subraya Hegde, Rajiv Gaitonde and Rama Naik. But that these conflicts are symptomatic of the larger malaise, that there are systemic structure engendering such conflicts, becomes clear with the involvement of the Brahmin ‘Math’ (monastery). From this point onwards the novel begins to focus on the manner in which caste, feudal economy and the religious orders are united in the perpetuation of a brutal and exploitative caste patriarchy.

Rama Naik mobilizes his own people and with assistance from the state-level political class is able to set up a school. The idea for establishing a school comes from Rajiv Gaitonde as an alternative way of channelising social effort and money than celebrating the religious fair. The fair becomes a symbol in the novel for the tradition of exploitation of the lower caste communities. In rejecting to contribute to the fair, Rama Naik’s community stages the first successful subversion of the socio-cultural power of the Brahmins. The new school is not only an opportunity for the children to go to school, it also opens up a new mode of economic exchange in the village as cash becomes the mode of paying for labour rather than grains. Further, there is a symbolic suggestion of the new path charted out by the school as it is an English medium school. Thus, English becomes the counter to Sanskrit as the language of socio-cultural power.

The rest of the narrative focus in the telling of the story of transformation relates to a ritual. The novel risks imagining an unrealistic ritual in order to force a symbolic confrontation between the exploitative social structure sanctioned by religion and a democratic one. The ritual is puranic Ashwamedha, i.e. the procession of a horse demanding acquiescence. Aptly, this is undertaken by the religious ‘math’ in order to assert the continuing power of Brahmins in the society. But contrary to expectations, the horse is stopped by the Idiga community.

At the backdrop of this story of challenge and counter-challenge through the ritual of horse-procession, inhuman acts of retribution are planned by the religious head. The village, by the end of the novel is pulsating with violent energy. The novel stops at the eruption of the confrontation between the orthodoxy and the new social order.

Ashwamedha narrates in an uncomplicated manner a story of social developments under individual, communal and state initiatives. Through rich symbolism and detailed description of the everyday life, the novel builds up a story that is at once readable and is a serious social commentary. The social documentation that the novel offers is valuable as the historical juncture of 1980’s is narrativised here. The germination, growth and the explosion of social change in a small village is presented in the novel with utmost concentration to the temporal and spatial particularities.