Karnataka   

In monumental mockery words and ideas

The Suvarna Sahitya Granthamale, the reprint of 100 Kannada books (one of them in English) by the Department of Kannada and Culture, Government of Karnataka, commemorating the golden jubilee of the unification of Kannada-speaking areas in peninsular India as one political and administrative entity, has many infirmities and worse: poor production, ‘editing’, an utter misnomer, printing errors, ad hocism, inconsistencies in the choice of the books…one can g o on.

However, all these may be forgiven because of the one good thing the enterprise has done: the reprint of G.P. Rajaratnam’s Mahakavi Purasha Saraswathi.

This sui generis work, first published in 1940 and reprinted in 1965, was long out of print.

I read it for the first time in 1953, in my first year at the English Honours School in Central College, Bangalore, borrowing it from the library without knowing a thing about the work, my curiosity stirred only because the author was my teacher.

He taught, and also intimidated for our own good, the large regular Kannada classes as well as the rather more exclusive section comprising less than a dozen students from different honours courses who had chosen Kannada as a special subject for their Honours Prelims.

Having been utterly captivated, for quite the wrong reasons, with the work of Jonathan Swift, in particular ‘The Tale of a Tub,’ I avidly read Purusha Saraswathi, whose structural complexity and satiric verve was as dazzling as that of The Tale. That first thrill of discovery has not palled even now. The work is also a slice of Karnataka’s literary history, now forgotten. The starting point that provoked this manic satire was that inane dispute over whether the second syllable of the name of the yet-to-be-achieved Karnataka should be represented by the dental nasal (dantya) or the retroflex nasal (mardhanya). The preference to either of these letters was also invested with other kinds of values and prejudices surrounding the complex make up of the Kannadiga character and sensibility, caste and class, indeed the very essence and spirit of Kannadiga-ness. The current usage is Karnataka, not KarNataka, to use the popular way of representing the dental and retroflex nasal in English print.

However, in the late 1930s, this controversy assumed the form of a near life and death struggle for the soul of Karn(N)ataka. This poem exposes the silliness of the dispute by situating these ideas and ideologies, such as they were, within an elaborate invention of farce and satire that encompasses the complex structure of the poem as well as the persona of this supposedly unknown poet, Purasha Saraswati, who bears thirteen high sounding honorifics, entirely a creation of GPR.

The work has mostly tongue-in-the-cheek prefaces by seven of the most distinguished Kannada intellectuals of the day, and is further embellished by more pedantic appurtenances and exegeses like introduction(s), footnotes and commentary by another persona — a five member ‘secret editorial team’ [gupta sampadaka panchaka] whose efficiency and thoroughness provides further opportunities for satirising precisely such scholarly pedantry.

The poem proper, KarnaNataka MahapuraNa, is in three sections. The first section, comprising 50 stanzas, is a reductio ad absurdum presentation of the two sides to the dispute; the second, also of 50 stanzas, is a farcical tragedy entailing the theft — actually abduction — [haraNa] of a harmonium; and the final section is a 25 stanza ‘praise poem’ in Kan-English by one of the commentators, a self-proclaimed scholar in Kannada and English, with three introductory quatrains of acknowledgements and two concluding quatrains, one blessing admirers and the other cursing the critics — all delightful take-offs on dead poetic conventions kept alive by poetasters.

All these, including those in Kan-English, are written in strict classical metre, the sextet bhamini and the quatrain kanda padya, and embellished by numerous, never-heard-of alankaras (rhetorical flourishes), another take-off on vain poetic conventions.

The memorable conclusion in bhamini that hints at the nuances of the satire is teasingly printed in quatrains at the very beginning. There are more teases and mockeries ridiculing every kind of pomposity, including a delightful tour de force of a circular public oration, so beloved of intellectuals of all places and climes.

M.S. PRABHAKAR

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In monumental mockery words and ideas

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