The inner strength
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K.V. Subbanna will live on forever, as both memory and reality
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Kuvempu's Kanooru Subbamma Heggadithi, Shivarama Karanth's Marali Mannige and U.R. Ananthamurthy's Bharatipura have always reminded me of K.V. Subbanna. Subbanna was the flesh-and-blood manifestation of the characters who inhabited these classics. What was truly remarkable was the manner in which this beneficiary of western education shunned a world of bright prospects to go back to his own humble roots — to negotiate an old, traditional way of life and lend it a new meaning with his heightened perspective.
A negotiation out of which emerged a highly individual self that was both local and global at once.
For us, the watershed generation born into the fading old world but grew up in a world that was fast globalising, it was forces such as Subbanna who gave us the strength to stay rooted. It was he who never shied from saying he wasn't comfortable with English, who gave us the conviction to proudly go about with our Kannada identity even within a shrinking cultural space. He, like Gandhiji, was an invisible source of strength to many.
Even as the entire world gushed over Peter Brooks's Mahabharatha, Subbanna was annoyed by such "appropriation of cultures".
He had contempt for the "obsession with excellence"; he was outraged by cultural manipulations such as "beauty contests" which fettered us to male-oriented, westernised aesthetic standards. And this he did from his own littleHeggodu, far from the happening cities.
Subbanna did what he did not to seek attention or to acquire the tag of a progressive, but because he saw an emergency to respond to immediate issues.
It was this quiet truth about Subbanna, who never felt the need to be pretentious among an increasing tribe of people keen on wearing their progressive identities on their sleeve, that one found reassuring.
It was in September 2001 that I called him on his winning the Kalidas Samman. He promptly faxed his hand-written answers to me in Kannada ("Naanu Kannadadalli kalistini, neevu adanna English madkolli," he had said, urging me to translate his responses.) Subbanna insisted people perceive Ninasam not simply as an ideal dream institution, not even as an institution that was just engaged in unusual activities, but as a "very tiny expression of the inner turmoil of contemporary Kannada-Bharatha".
In his essay Gokula Nirgamana (named after Pu.Thi.Na.'s poem), Subbanna observes that Krishna's journey from Gokula to Mathura is a celebration of the synthesis of the worldly and metaphysical, the social and the spiritual and the political and religious, which, he further recognises, is the culmination of memory and reality.
Like Krishna, Subbanna has left his Gokula, but will live on forever with its people as a constant source of strength, both a memory and a reality. "Iddaddu dita avanolidaddu dita naavu/ nalidaddu dita baha nechchu dita." (He lived, it's true, he loved, it's true/ we rejoiced, it's true, we deeply cherish him, it's true.)
DEEPA GANESH
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