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Eighty years ago,
during the countrywide non-co-operation movement, Mahatma Gandhi asked
Indians to boycott British-run schools and colleges and British-made goods,
and to refrain from working with the rulers. As part of his campaign of
patriotic renewal, Gandhi also launched a broadside against the language of
the conqueror. Thus in a speech in Orissa in April 1921, he described English
education as an “unmitigated evil”. Gandhi even claimed that Bal Gangadhar
Tilak and Rammohan Roy would have “been far greater men had they not the
contagion of English learning”.
In Gandhi’s opinion,
these two remarkable Indians “were so many pigmies who had no hold upon the
people compared with Chaitanya, Sanker [Adi Sankara], Kabir, and Nanak”.
Gandhi insisted that “what Sanker alone was able to do, the whole army of
English-knowing men can’t do. I can multiply instances? Was Guru Govind a
product of English education? Is there a single English-knowing Indian who is
a match for Nanak, the founder of a sect second to none in point of valour
and sacrifice? … If the race has even to be revived it is to be revived not
by English education.”
“Rammohan Roy would
have been a greater reformer,” argued the Mahatma, “and Lokmanya Tilak would
have been a greater scholar, if they had not to start with the handicap of
having to think in English and transmit their thoughts chiefly in English.”
I was reminded of
Gandhi’s polemical words when reading about a protest by some well-known
Kannada writers against the proposal to make R.K. Narayan’s home in Mysore a
memorial to his life and work. Fifteen writers — among them the lexicographer
G. Venkatasubbaiah, the poet G.S. Shivarudrappa, the novelist S. L. Bhyrappa,
and the critic L. S. Sheshagiri Rao — argued that since Narayan was born in Chennai
and spent his early years there, and since even while he lived in Mysore he
wrote in English, he was not really a Kannadiga, and thus the government of
Karnataka need not spend money honouring his memory. Narayan, complained
these writers, “never introduced any Kannada work to the outside world
through an English translation.” Narayan’s betrayal apparently ran further;
he was guilty, it was said, of selling the scripts of his novels to an
American university rather than gifting them gratis to a university
in Karnataka.
Back in 1921, Gandhi’s
criticisms of Indians who wrote in English were rebutted by the poet
Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore admired Gandhi; he had helped raise money for his
struggle in South Africa, housed his sons and associates in Santiniketan, and
given wide currency to the title by which Gandhi became known, ‘Mahatma’. But
this narrow, nativist side to Gandhi was something he could not abide. “I
strongly protest,” wrote Tagore, “against Mahatma Gandhi’s trying to cut down
such great personalities of Modern India as Rammohan Roy in his blind zeal
for crying down our modern education.” Tagore thought Gandhi’s words and
arguments showed that he was “growing enamoured of his own doctrines — a
dangerous form of egotism, that even great people suffer from at times.”
The Mahatma believed
Rammohan Roy was limited by writing and speaking in English. On the other
hand, Tagore insisted that it was through his engagement with other languages
that Rammohan developed “the comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize
the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian
cultures.” Rammohan Roy could be “perfectly natural in his acceptance of the
West,” remarked Tagore, “not only because his education had been perfectly
Eastern,— he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a
school boy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be the friend of
the West.”
Gandhi was put in his
place by Tagore, and the angry chauvinists of Karnataka have been put in
place by two men who are the best-known, and perhaps also the most greatly
admired, Kannada writers now living. The playwright, Girish Karnad, asked to
comment on the statement signed by Bhyrappa, Sheshagiri Rao, et al,
pointed out that “Narayan lived in Mysore, wrote about Malgudi, a place he
created [out of towns and locations in Karnataka].” Therefore, to say that he
was not a Kannadiga was “absurd”. Karnad’s words were weighty enough; and
here they were endorsed by his great contemporary U.R. Anantha Murthy.
“Anyone who lives here and writes on the state is a citizen of Kannada,”
remarked Anantha Murthy. He thought it “very mean on the part of those who
have said Narayan is not a Kannadiga.”
Reading reports of
their statements in the press, I rang up Karnad and Anantha Murty to
congratulate them. Karnad told me he worried that a Thackeray-type nativist
movement was gathering force in Karnataka. Anantha Murty, also speaking in
anguish, recalled how he had written about Narayan and his brother, R.K.
Laxman, in Kannada and discussed his essays with their subjects. As a
long-time resident of Mysore himself, he remembered that Narayan dressed and
looked like a local; his dhoti, bush-shirt, cap, jhola and
slow, unhurried walk marked him out as a “typical Mysore man”.
When Gandhi was
chastised by Tagore, he had the good grace to respond, and recant. He was
not, or would not, be a chauvinist or xenophobe. His defence was then summed
up in these words: “I hope I am as great a believer in free air as the great
Poet. I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to
be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house
as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
These lines of Gandhi
are often quoted as an example of his broad-mindedness and cultural
pluralism. In truth, they had to be wrested out of him by Tagore. That fact
is now mostly forgotten. For these words by Gandhi are commonly reproduced
without the crucial opening caveat: “I hope I am as great a believer in free
air as the great Poet.”
R.K. Narayan did not
write in Kannada, but his works sensitively portray the people, culture and
landscapes of the state of Karnataka. His 1938 book, Mysore, remains a
classic of travel-writing; still valuable for anyone who seeks to know about,
or visit, the shrines, towns, and water-falls of the southern part of the
state. The Malgudi of his novels was almost certainly based on the town of
Nanjangud, on the banks of the river Kabini, some 15 miles from Mysore. The
name, Malgudi, was made up from the names of two venerable Bangalore
localities, Malleswaram and Basavangudi. The restaurant-owners, printers,
shopkeepers, teachers, housewives and students who people Narayan’s stories
are as authentic Kannadigas as one can get. Which is why the television
serial, Malgudi Days, was such a hit in Kannada and among Kannadigas.
And it continues to be watched, 30 years after it was first made, available
in DVDs that can be downloaded from the internet.
I hope the Kannada
writers who claimed Narayan was, so to say, a ‘foreigner’, have the good
grace to withdraw their protest after this necessary intervention by Karnad
and Anantha Murty. To admit that one was wrong, or mistaken, is in the best
traditions of writing and scholarship. Besides, there is the example of
Gandhi; if he could rethink his impulsive xenophobia, so can the rest of us. article by Ramachandra Guha
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Google on Friday paid tribute to writer R.K. Narayan on his 108th birth anniversary with a doodle on the search engine's homepage.
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