His little community world
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K.V. Subbanna, who has been conferred with the Padma Shri this year, has in the quiet ways of Malnad, reversed the unidirectional flow of cultural, literary and intellectual energies, writes RAJENDRA CHENNI
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K.V. Subbanna refuses to be framed by intellectual categories and theatrical models. -- Photo: Courtesy K.S. Rajaram (From the cover page of K.V. Subbana Avara Ayda Barahagalu).
A PROFOUND sense of community distinguishes everything K.V. Subbanna has done. Heggodu, a tiny hamlet in Sagar taluk, `no bigger than one's palm' has, in the quiet, unassuming ways of Malnad achieved the impossible. It has reversed the unidirectional flow of the cultural, literary and intellectual energies, which in post independence India has been from villages and little towns to the cosmopolis.
Subbanna himself has written with regret and conscious nostalgia about the little towns such as Sirsi and Sagar, which once upon a time nurtured strong cultural and artistic traditions. These small towns and the little communities which inhabited them kept the traditions alive without a conscious intellectual effort. In music, dance and folk theatre, these communities adapted and moulded art forms to the changing needs and pressures of contemporary society. The Gandhian movement had also infused them with a moral fervour and political consciousness they had not known before. Ironically, as it has happened in many postcolonial societies, political freedom also brought with it the mega dreams of industrial progress, `modernity' and a collectivity called nation, which wanted to swallow up the little communities. The city and the cosmopolis also became the repositories of the cultural capital. With this it also came to be accepted that knowledge could be produced in a specially created `modern' institutions such as universities, research centres and cultural centres, which had an urban and even international aura. In short, it turned out to be not the end of the empire, but the end of Gandhi, the author of an eccentric, anti-modern treatise called `Hind Swaraj'.
Reconstruction
It is in this brave new world that Subbanna decided to reconstruct his little community at Heggodu. Neenasam which began as an experiment in community theatre gradually evolved into a cultural space to which plays, films, books, music and ideas would travel from all over the country to be experienced and evaluated by the community. Soon it was the cosmopolis, which began to see Heggodu. The Shivaram Karanth theatre at Neenasam has played host to plays from all languages performed by all kinds of theatre groups.
The Neenasam repertoire aptly called Tirugata takes three plays every year to all parts of Karnataka. The Samskriti Shibira (cultural workshop) held every year in October has become an annual pilgrimage for anyone interested in culture. Subbanna's Akshara Prakashana has published some of the finest writings in Kannada. The Sahitya Shibiras (literary workshops) of which over 100 have been conducted in all parts of Karnataka have initiated hundreds into the art of literary appreciation. K. V. Subbanna himself doesn't see this impressive catalogue of achievements as extraordinary. For him, the living community in Heggodu is the final arbiter in all ethical and aesthetic matters. He admits that like Gandhi's ideal village, this community could also be an imagined community. But he is also keenly aware of how the history of post-independence India has impacted upon the community. His own literary-critical writings throw up very original insights because of his sensitivity to history. His introduction to Loka Shakuntala, a yakshagana adaptation of Kalidasa's Abijnana Shakuntalum interprets the play as a dramatic enactment of "palace culture" (monarchy) usurping the "ashrama culture" (tribal culture), something that Kalidasa had witnessed in his times. Writing long before Romila Thaper's scholarly book on the play was written, Subbanna emancipated it for readers like me from the "king jilts young ashrama girl" frame and relocated it into its real history of empires trampling upon tribal communitarian values. In his most recent work on Kavirajamarga, the ninth century Kannada treatise on poetics, Subbanna makes it a cultural text which is open to the post Foucault debates on language, discourse and history. His little monograph on Kuvempu revisits Kuvempu as a site of the cultural paradigms which have shaped modern India.
Profound understanding
In fact the monumental collection of his writings of five decades Are Shatamanada Ale Barahagalu (2004), needs to be read as a cultural historians impressive oeuvre, integrating a strong sense of history and a profound inside knowledge of cultural forms. It is this holistic view, which helps
Subbanna in recalling Pu.Thi. Na's Gokula Nirgamana, a poetic play about Krishna's departure from Gokula as a play about India's rural communities, devastated by ruinous ideas of progress. These writings are a record of the departure of the rural communities, elbowed out by urbanisation, commercialisation, and the dreams of technological progress which turned out to be nightmares. Subbanna's community is not a nostalgic resort untouched by history. Its arecanut growers have been lured by the gutka kings to turn areca, a cultural icon into a commodity. Members of his own sub-caste have established a caste organisation, believing that it would somehow not affect the secular attempts to abolish caste. The hydel project at Linganamakki and Jog has only brought eternal darkness to the eco refugees. Yes, it is a community open and vulnerable to politics and history. It is a site of conflict and contention. But this is also for Subbanna the repository of all the knowledge and aesthetics he needs. Chewing betelnut, in his diminutive Malnad manners, Subbanna says he needs only that which he can recognise in the little community. Any claim beyond such recognition would only be intellectual arrogance.
While Subbanna himself refuses to be framed by intellectual categories and theatrical models, especially because he is suspicious of the colonial distortions they bring with them, his work has its significance within the nationalist paradigm. Of course, he avoids essentialist categories and refuses to fall back upon the notion of a pure, uncontaminated site called the native which remains untouched by history. In his work on Kavirajamarga he constructs `Kannada' as a continuity shaped by geography, history and politics. Instead of making any claims about the tolerant, generous nature of Kannadigas, Subbanna talks about the compulsions of cross-cultural contacts, multi-linguistic contexts and the heterogeneity of sub cultures, which have made `Kannada' basically pluralist. There have been very strong critiques of the cultural texts which he presents and interprets as expressive of the Kannada sensibility. Of these, the famous `Song Of The Cow' (Govina Haadu), has been read by Dalit writers as a classic case of cultural politics by which the tiger is represented as the villainous hunter just because it is an animal of prey. Similarly, the folk poem Kerege Haara has been interpreted as an example of patriarchal discourse which celebrates the human sacrifice of the young daughter in law. These disagreements do not take away anything from Subbanna's proposition that `Kannada' is a historically conditioned category. Subbanna's life and career are evidence enough to hope that it has not been the end of Gandhi after all.
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