Between world and home
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Ramachandra Sharma, a gallant voice of the Kannada literary tradition, was deeply spiritual and irreverently irreligious PRAKASH BELAWADI
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MEMORIES B.C. Ramachandra Sharma could be both unsparingly critical and a true picture of grace Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.
It was a Sunday that December in 1992 and the usual gang had gathered at the Gandhibazar office of Lankesh Patrike for a couple of rounds of rummy and harate (chat), both items of entertainment being thinly-veiled fronts for a lively intellectual group vitally concerned with art, personalities and politics — a group that sometimes would not discriminate which was which between the three. There was much for the gang to discuss that evening: The Babri Masjid had been demolished.
A number of artists, including members of the Patrike gang, had gathered the same morning on the steps of Ravindra Kalakshetra to protest against the karsevaks. By evening, the worst had happened. Around writer and editor Lankesh's desk, we were all sitting, a little bewildered by what most of us thought was by far the worst thing to have happened in India after Independence, worse than the Emergency even. B.C. Ramachandra Sharma was crying.
It is difficult to imagine that moment without nostalgia. There are no gangs like that, it seems. Not anymore. Lankesh is dead. Sharma died last week, on Ramanavami day, not a day of any special significance to a man who had no time or space for any god. That was a gang of intellectuals who were deeply spiritual and irreverently irreligious. Neither the politics of the day nor the society of our times could comprehend that "combo" of values. Nobody cries for a thing like that.
Moving tribute
A moving tribute to this bold voice of the Navya tradition of Kannada literature Sharma by writer U.R. Anantha Murthy in a local Kannada daily increases the poignancy of the loss — of the integrity of intellectual thought, of the wit and vitality, of Sharma. Anantha Murthy writes about the times when these writers and poets, as young artists, met and discussed what it meant to belong to their little world and the big world. The poignancy is all the more because the big world of commerce and transactions has swallowed the little world of Kannada and culture which nursed these young artists. There are no such times for the young now.
To us, born in the late Fifties and the Sixties, urban and English medium-educated, a connection with the land and its times was possible only because of people like Sharma. A man who could be unsparingly critical in seminars in matters of literature, cruelly sarcastic to literary groupies and flatterers, Sharma was a true picture of grace with young people who wanted to know a little about poetry and the Kannada genius. A liberal, an extraordinary gentleman, Sharma never allowed his stature in the Kannada literary field or his masterful use of irony to make anyone feel small. "Do you know the number of times Ramanna has been asked to officiate as chief guest because somebody else who was supposed to sulked off at the last moment?" asks Nandakumar, journalist, actor and Sharma's son-in-law. Nandu recalls that Sharma never refused or held his prestige up like an armour. Sharma could be asked by a shy poet to read a new poem, by a young artist to promote his new work without fear of sharp ironical comment, something that came to Sharma so easily. Sharma could take criticism too, easily.
On one occasion when a young actor, in drunken bravado, attacked Sharma at a private party with the insolent remark of the drunken young: "You are not a poet at all. You have written just one good poem." Sharma just laughed and said: "It takes a poet to write even one good poem." On the rare occasion when he got angry and stomped out of an argument, on those wonderful occasions when arguments were so heated over whether Chekov was a greater playwright than Ibsen, it would be a tiff that lasted till next Sunday, when it was time for rummy again. When Anantha Murthy writes of the times in Mysore, Poornachandra Tejaswi of the memories of his father and Kadidal Shamanna, Lankesh of Gopalakrishna Adiga, the sense of disconnect that the urban, middle-class Kannadiga of Bangalore feels is still not bridged. It could be bridged because an essentially urban, cosmopolitan, entirely urbane Sharma was so accessible.
Fond memories
Nandu remembers fondly how on his wedding day, Sharma was upstairs playing cards with his friends from his days in Zambia; how he stole a moment away from the ICU to smoke, with one lung collapsed. "You know, I once caught him banging his chest with his fist. I asked what happened. `I can't seem to breathe,' he said. In his other hand the inevitable cigarette was burning," Nandu says. Not to romanticise smoking, but to romanticise a man who loved life, who cared more for things that he could touch and be touched by, who never felt sorry for himself.
I remember the friendly banter and mock fights that characterised his friendship with Lankesh; how Sharma would puncture a moment of sentimentality about birds with: "The kogile in my neighbourhood drives me crazy with its cooing noise." "Foolish fellow," Lankesh would say fondly. I remember how Sharma would never concede any points to YNK's "light poetry" or Sugama Sangeeta (light music) of Kannada, where a Bendre poem could be juxtaposed without compunction with that of a modern song writer. Sharma was a conservative when it came to literature, a liberal in politics and absolutely cosmopolitan in society. He was impossible with his smoking, often childish in argument, infuriatingly stubborn at time. He was so vital. We will miss him.
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