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| Dr. Shivarama Kaaranth |
In the summer of 1994 I was in the town of
The meeting was entertaining, not least because
Karanth spoke. Afterwards we repaired to the travellers’ bungalow. There I got
chatting with the great Kannada writer’s chauffeur. With a historian’s interest
in dates, I asked him when precisely had his boss turned ninety. ‘Actually,
sir’, he replied, ‘he is almost ninety-two.’ Then why are they celebrating the
birthday now, I wondered. ‘Because they also need their chance’, he said.
‘They’ were the people of Ranibennur, and
‘their chance’ was the opportunity to pay tribute to a man who was more than a
legend in his lifetime. It turned out that for the past two years the writer
and his driver had been on the road. The white Ambassador that brought Karanth
to Ranibennur had the previous fortnight taken him to
Tumkur, for a meeting to ‘Celebrate the Kannada
Sahitya Sammelana and Dr Karanth’s ninetieth birthday.’ In Mysore
A cat, it is said, has nine lives, Vishnu had
ten avatars. But Shivarama Karanth had as many as sixteen careers. These were:
nationalism, social reform, commerce, journalism, photography, acting, dance,
painting, music, cinema, experiments in education, rural uplift, the
popularization of science (through a multi-volume encyclopaedia designed and
written wholly by himself), the writing of novels (as many as forty-five), the
writing of plays (not less than ninety), and environmentalism. This list is not
necessarily exhaustive, and the man did not necessarily follow only one career
at a time.
Shivarama Karanth was born on the 10th of October, 1902 ,
in the village of
Kota
As a boy, Shivarama Karanth’s ‘attitude to
studies was one of disinterest’. He dropped out of college without taking a
degree. As he put it, ‘I did not have to experience the indigestion of high
marks.’ Still, he was lucky in his teachers. A middle-school teacher taught him
to do interesting things with his hands; to garden and to weave mats, for example.
In high school, one teacher inculcated an appreciation of Yakshagana; another
opened up the library of Kannada literature to him .
Growing up, Karanth was contemptuous of the Vanity’,
the ‘tyranny’, and the ‘narrowness’ of his Brahmin upbringing. He was
disenchanted by his visits to Kashi and Prayag, places he found crowded, dirty,
and full of grasping priests and pandas. Notably, the one holy place
which ‘gave satisfaction and was not culturally jarring was Dakshineshwar ... I
went to the Panchavati garden. That was the field of the Paramhansa’s spiritual
exertions. My feelings for Nature and my reverence for the sage led me to find
more peace there than I did at Brindavan.’
While turned off by faith and studies, Karanth
was enchanted by the arts. He was gripped by the travelling theatre companies
that came to his neck of rural Karnataka — these the southern equivalents of
the Bengali jatras. It was under their inspiration that Karanth taught
himself music. The process of self-training he later described with
characteristic wryness:
It was a fellow
student who taught me to shriek, co shriek in some recognisable raga . . .
There was an open space near our house called naribena (jackal field). I used to go there at dawn and late at
night to do my screaming. . . . Once a jackal came within ten yards of me and
looked at me as if to throw a challenge. I am not joking; it did happen. To
this day I feel that music-learners should find a plate beyond the town limits.
Eventually, Karanth became quite accomplished,
not merely as a singer but also as a connoisseur and composer. His great work
for Yakshagana, the traditional dance-drama of the west coast, was helped
immeasurably by the musical skills and innovations he brought to it. Some of
the most attractive and sensitively delineated characters in his fiction are
musicians and music teachers.
In college Karanth also became a ‘great
consumer of political harangues’. The non-co-operation movement inspired him to
leave his degree halfway and take to the promotion of spinning, this at a time
when ‘patriotism had not yet become a profitable industry’.
In his mid twenties, Karanth started a
correspondence with Mahatma Gandhi. Sadly, we don’t have his side of the
exchange. From the letters printed in the Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, we get a bare idea of what was on Karanth’s
mind. The topics alluded to in Gandhi’s letters include the therapeutic value
of asanas and pranayamas (Gandhi seemed sceptical), the life and
ideals of Ramakrishna Paramhansa, and the moral life of actors. Of this last
Gandhi seemed most sceptical: ‘I should draw a sharp distinction between kirtans
and theatricals. The question of theatricals is very serious, and as you seem
to know all about the lives of actors, it may be as well for you to avoid the
profession.’
A topic that preoccupied Karanth at this time,
as it did Gandhi, was sex and marriage. Gandhi offered the view, presumably in
answer to a query of Karanth’s that wet dreams were ‘undoubtedly harmful’; for
they released seminal energy better ‘husbanded and reserved for reproduction,
when the latter is desired, or transmutation into spiritual energy.’ In
response to another question, Gandhi assured the young seeker that to promote
widow marriage—as Karanth was then doing—was not inconsistent with brahmacharya.
Still, he saw it as a concession to human frailty: ‘when I advocate the
marriage of child widows, I presume that they want the pleasure which all
animals seek and some human beings only can restrain themselves from seeking.’
The insinuation that brahmacharya was somehow
superior to married life, Karanth came to reject, even as he disregarded the
Mahatma’s advice to stay away from the theatre. But he continued to work in
khadi and swadeshi for five years, till about 1927, by which time the
‘Nationalist Movement in our region was cold like stale porridge.’ Fortunately,
Karanth had already started writing fiction—detective novels, to begin with—as
well as plays.
While still in his twenties, Karanth acquired
the taste for very long walks through the southern countryside. He would walk
through forests and swim across rivers, carrying little, sleeping in disused
temples or peasant homes. Some of these journeys were made for pleasure, others
to educate himself about the culture, the ecology, -and the artistic
traditions of his land.
When he came to plan a children’s
encyclopaedia, in the 1930s, Karanth was dismayed by the ‘intellectual
thinness’ of the Kannada country. There was a way out: he would research and
write the thing himself. His Bala Prapancha was
followed by his science encyclopaedia. Then, provoked by a badly produced
government book, he researched and wrote an illustrated history of
architecture. All these works were to have an enduring impact. There were also
other, relatively minor literary productions, among them a translation into
Kannada of Hamlet. His contributions to
dance and fiction, by no means minor, I shall come to presently.
Shivarama Karanth married late, when he was
well past thirty. In his memoirs he is reticent about telling us what first
attracted his wife to him. All he tells us is that she was a gifted dancer, and
from another caste. The lady was more forthright. Karanth, she recalled, was explaining
to his troupe how to make costumes for the characters. As he began to cut
colour paper in different shapes, Leela’s eyes ‘observed the movement of his
fingers. What speed! What skill! I stood there, completely lost, looking at his
hands. ... At that moment, I felt an intense desire to be near those hands . .
. What I yearned for, for the first time in my life, was to possess those
artistic hands of Karanth’.
The critic C.N. Ramachandran, who quotes these
words, also quotes an appreciation of Leela Karanth by her second son, Ulhas.
‘It was our mother who shaped Karanth’s life’, remarks Ulhas: ‘She was the
backbone of all his endeavours. She was also quite well read, and she dedicated
all of her talents to her husband. She took care of all household
responsibilities. I remember now that mother also, like our father, was an
atheist; and she used to read and explain Bertrand Russell for us.’
Karanth’s standing was not hindered by his
appearance. In his later years, especially, he made for a striking figure,
dressed in spotless white dhoti and kurta, with an impressive face framed by a
silver mane combed backwards. He was charismatic and, it must be admitted, at
times intimidating. As his associate L.S. Seshagiri Rao has written, he ‘could
be brusque and withering’, and, especially as he grew older, ‘impatient of
criticism, and dogmatic’.
Some admirers liked to call Karanth ‘Kadala
Tiratha Bhargava’, the Lord of the Coastal Lands. This seems to be a mistaken
title, not least because it was originally given to Parusarama, that fervent upholder
of the Brahmin way of life. I prefer what Sharada Prasad once called him; ‘The
King Elephant of the Southern Forests’. Like the king elephant Karanth
dominated the landscape by the sheer bulk of his achievement. Like him, he
roamed wherever his fancy took him. And like him, he could go sometimes into
periods of well-directed rage.
II
In the 1970s Shivarama Karanth moved from
Puttur—where he had lived for forty years—to the village of Saligrama
Not long after I met Karanth, I was looking at
some old microfilms in Delhi Bombay Bombay South Kanara ,
followed by a talk by Karanth on the history of the art form. He had spoken of
the dance’s fusion of rural life with a mass audience, of its forms of dress
and makeup, and of recent innovations in music and presentation.
This, then, was the island city’s first
exposure to Yakshagana, as reported in the Bombay
Chronicle of 28
November 1936 . Later, I came across a reference to the trip in
Karanth’s memoirs. ‘I gave quite a pompous lecture in English. It was attended
by people of Bombay
I remember reading that faded microfilm with an
almost indescribable feeling of wonder. This was 1989, and I had just
interviewed Karanth about his environmental campaigns. Now, I was learning of
his pioneering work in the promotion of Yakshsagana, as described in a
newspaper report fifty-three years ago. I have known many remarkable Indians,
but this experience might help explain why for me Karanth commands a place all
his own.
If one were forced to rank Karanth’s multiple
careers, one might— reluctantly—allow chat Yakshagana and the writing of novels
should share first place. He both revived and redefined the dance-form of the
West Coast. He rediscovered many ragas that were traditionally part of the
Yakshagana repertoire but had fallen into disuse. He did away with dialogue,
making songs and dance do its work instead. He added new instruments, linked
dance rhythms and music rhythms, and searched for and trained talented young
artists. Most significantly, he brought down the average time of a performance
from eight to three hours, thus allowing Yakshagana to make its peace with the
rushed modern world.
In the field of fiction, Karanth was
prodigiously active, in part because he did not bother unduly about theory or
technique. If you have something of your own to say’, he remarked, ‘technique
will come of its own accord. If you are true to your experience and the values
that your own life has taught you, if they are not borrowed values, what you
say will find the best form.’
The first of his novels to have a wider impact
was Choma‘s Drum (translated into English
by U.R. Kalkur) Its central character was an Untouchable whose dream, or fantasy,
was to cultivate his own plot of land. Meanwhile, he worked in the fields of a
landlord half his age, his children labouring with him. He drowned his sorrows
in drink, and by playing his drum. Stick in hand, he ‘coaxed out of the [drum]
the monotonous sound, damadhamma dakadhakka. There was never a new
rhythm, never a new timbre in the sound. But he played it with all the pride of
a mridangam pandit.’
This early novel, like the ones to follow, is
replete with descriptions and images of nature: of animals, trees, insects, and
landscapes. There is a vivid account, drawn undoubtedly from personal
experience, of a walk from the coast to a coffee plantation on the crest of the
ghats. Bur the human world is described with a biting irony. Consider these
samples: ‘The hut was his own—when not claimed by rains and storms’. Their
dinner would be before dark, for no lamp had ever been lit in Choma’s hut. What
precious thing did they have to do at night to need a lamp?’ ‘Plantation
Choma’s Drum has been compared to Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. The novel it reminded me of, however,
is Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja, which too
was published in the 1930s. There a tribal has his land taken away; here a
Dalit can never own land. Both look to the forest for sustenance but are
thwarted by the state. Both are forced to seek consolation in drink, both
forced to burden their-young with their sorrows. One novel is set in Orissa,
the other in coastal Karnataka. Separated by five hundred miles of territory,
the novels are united by a mood, a moment, and a movement: the Gandhian
struggle for social reform.
Another of Karanth’s novels available in
English is a story of courtesan life, translated by H.Y. Sharada Prasad under
the title, The Woman of Basrur. The
rendering is feminist, but without advertising itself as such: it is sensitive
and subtle without ever descending into stridency. There is a noticeable
empathy with the courtesan: with her desire for acclaim, her devotion to her
art, the haphazard life she leads in roaming theatres. Karanth penetratingly
probes her hopes, fantasies and suspicions. The fickleness and animal feelings
of her patrons are described with dry wit.
The novel spans four generations. Its core is a
memoir of the legendary courtesan Manjula, found in an attic by her grandniece:
this, the serendipitous discovery of forgotten texts, is a literary device more
recently made popular in English fiction by A.S. Byatt’s Possession. The tale is told entirely from the woman’s
point of view. ‘To earn a moment of joy, a woman had to undergo a hundred
moments of suffering.’ ‘But can a courtesan’s daughter buy, off the shelf,
someone in whom money and virtue are combined?’
When a lover gifts Manjula a bracelet, she
‘felt as if soaked in syrup’. At other times she yearned for human
understanding: ‘silk is soft to the touch, it is true, but can silk soothe the
ache of the heart?’ There is a brilliant description of her feeling let down by
a patron who had but one thing on his mind.
I thought I would be
like a basket of bright and fragrant flowers offered in music. Instead I was
the goat sacrificed to the demon. He was a hungry animal and I was only a lump
of flesh. From the moment he set foot in my rooms he acted as if I was someone
without a mind and feelings.
Manjula’s last lover is the swami of a mutt,
who would visit her under cover of darkness and in disguise. This is a
characteristic comment on the hypocrisy of an enforced asceticism: Karanth had
little time for the forms and pieties of his ancestral religion. The critic
C.N. Ramachandran observes that Karanth’s novels are invariably biased towards
women and against holy men: these he saw as humbugs, or as having run away from
home to escape their responsibilities. And yet, in a bitter paradox, when he
died in December 1997, this great anti-ritualist and rationalist was cremated
amidst the chanting of Vedic hymns.
As both Gopalakrishna Adiga and U.R. Anantha
Murty have pointed out, the strengths of Karanth’s fiction are also its
limitations. ‘What strikes us most’, writes Adiga, ‘is his sincerity and
earnestness.’ The characters, dialogues, situation and story are ‘so authentic
that [they] become a part of our own living experience.’ However, there is in
Karanth’s writings ‘throughout a lack of imagery. Only when a novelist’s
intellect, feelings, contemplation, values, dreams, memories at the conscious
and unconscious levels—only when all these ingredients are cooked to a
delicacy, does it create a new experience for the reader.’ Likewise, Anantha
Murty comments that in becoming his people’s ‘most authentic writer1, Karanth had to rigorously exclude the aesthetic and poetic dimensions
from his fiction. Since humans for him are the product of specific social
relationships, he cannot write about the intensity of mystical experience or
the agonies of the alienated individual. His novels are rich, readable,
authentic; yet they ‘do not contain invisible eddies that catch the reader and
draw him into subliminal depths.’
III
The bravest act of my writing career was to
suggest in the pages of a Calcutta
The range of Shivarama Karanth’s achievements
bears comparison with Tagore’s. So, more intriguingly, does the pattern of his
life, and the choice of his particular passions. Consider the following.
Like Tagore, Karanth wrote as much for the
young as for adults. Generations of Kannada schoolchildren grew up on primers
written by him. And he took care to have these well illustrated: the painter he
chose for the purpose being K.K. Hebbar, in this respect the exact Kannada
equivalent of Nandalal Bose. His children’s encyclopaedias were also
attractively produced: he took many of the photos himself, and even had the
colour separations done in Germany
Karanth was proud of his work for children.
Apart from the books he wrote for them, for some years he ran an experimental
school with its own kitchen, fields, and menagerie. The children were all boarders
and paid no fees. Much time was spent outside the classroom, in the forests and
on the river or sea, and in watching or participating in theatre and music. The
great Kannada writers, singers and dancers would all come visiting. In the
school Karanth himself was always accompanied by a huge red Malabar squirrel,
its tail stylishly draped around his neck.
Like Tagore, again, Karanth was an
environmentalist before the time of environmentalism. He, too, was made by the
gorgeous landscapes in which he was reared. ‘I am in love with my region, and
dote on its landscape’, he once wrote.
I could not understand
why such a green stretch of land was made so grey in books of geography . . .
The beach at Karwar would enslave anyone. The crowning glory of Malnad is the Jog Falls
In the 1950s Karanth worked for the plantation
and preservation of trees and forests. In the 1970s and 1980s he launched
campaigns against polluting industries, destructive dams, and—the ultimate
threat to human and natural life—the nuclear establishment. In 1979 Karanth
inspired a popular movement against a hydroelectric project on the Bedthi River
In 1982 he translated the first Citizens’
Report on the Indian Environment. Then, after the Chernobyl Northern
Karnataka . Karanth even stood for a Lok Sabha election on an independent
‘green’ ticket: although he did not make a single campaign speech, and lie had not
the money or muscle power of the established political patties, he still got
60,000 votes.
Karanth’s ecological sensibilities also found
their way into his fiction. The first pages of The
Woman of Basrur speak of the landscape and of how man has made and
unmade it. The town of Basrur
Once a thriving port, trading to Portuguese Goa
and beyond, the town was now derelict.
All the glory chat remains in Basrur is the
glory of green—the bright green of the tops of palms, the light green of paddy
squares which stretch from the outskirts of the town up to the sea, the deep
green of the patches of sweet-potato and chilli. . . . , and the still deeper
green of the copal trees which stand stately, looking down upon bush and thorn.
The parallels between the lives continue. Like
Tagore, Karanth experienced acute personal sorrow—the death of a beloved child,
the suffering of his wife from depression. Karanth too accepted honours from
the state and, in a moment of principled anger, returned them. Tagore gave back
his knighthood after the massacre at Jallianawala Bagh. Firty-six years later,
Karanth returned his Padma Bhushan in protest against the imposition of the
Emergency. As he wrote to the president of India
In 1922, I like many
others, joined Gandhiji in the Non-Cooperation Movement in order to serve my
motherland. I felt I was doing my bit m righting for the freedom of India
We all felt happy when
freedom came to India
Today, at the age of
74, I hang my head in shame at the turn of events. I don’t believe that a
single soul has a right to bypass human freedoms under any cloak.
Though for decades I
have refrained from active politics, I feet impelled to protest against such
indignities done to the people of India
May truth prevail over
untruth.
Both Tagore and Karanth travelled widely abroad
and wrote about their experiences. (One had family money and generous patrons,
the other did what he could with a lean purse.) Both were always experimenting
with new ideas, new careers. All their geese did not turn out swans. Where
Tagore failed or exceeded himself is for the Bengalis to say. But of Karanth it
can be safely said that he was a lousy painter and a worse film-maker. He made
what is possibly the first Kannada feature film, in the 1930s—fortunately
perhaps, the cans of film perished in a fire at the end of the shooting. Years
later he made another feature. A young Kannada writer who otherwise reveres
Karanth and his works told me simply that it was a ‘horrible film—horrible. Apparently,
Karanth would shout ‘action’, and turn his eyes away from the shot. He would
call ‘stop’ when he felt the dialogue had run its course. When I first compared
Tagore to Karanth, I thought I was being novel. But then H.Y. Sharada Prasad
alerted me to the fact that another writer had long ago made the same claim.
As it happens, this writer was a Bengali, and a rather learned one—Suniti Kumar
Chatterji. However, as Sharada Prasad points out, while the two men were alike
in the many-sidedness of their genius, they differed in one respect. ‘There was
a grandeur about both, but Tagore was the sage, a modern-day rishi, a
man who gathered disciples around him and relished his title of Gurudev.
Karanth remained a fierce individual, a lone tusker who sought no followers, built
no sect or ism or institution, and spurned the role of a preceptor.’
Recalling his student years, Karanth wrote that
his mind then was ‘full of Swadeshi, social reform and Shantiniketan’. Where
the prescribed texts in college were the works of Kipling, he chose to read
Tagore instead. He wrote to C.F. Andrews, asking whether he should study in
Santiniketan. Andrews encouraged him to go, but his father vetoed the idea,
apparently on the grounds that Bengali Brahmins were so degraded that they even
ate fish. A peculiar reason, but perhaps in the end we should be grateful that
Karanth did not go to Santiniketan. For he might have fallen fatally under the
spell of Tagore, to become a faithful disciple instead of what he became unaided:
his own man. - Article by
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