The little Kannada cosmos
DEEPA GANESH
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The Neelakanteshwara Natya Sangha set up by the late K.V. Subbanna envisaged the Gandhian ideal of a community consciousness
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PHOTOS: COURTESY K. S. RAJARAM
LOCAL AND GLOBAL The Ninasam auditorium in Heggodu; K.V. Akshara
If poet laureate Kuvempu earned the title Vishwamanava, it was not because he was constantly touring the world. It was the poet's global consciousness, even while being rooted in his own Malnad home that earned him the name. In fact, the only time he stepped out of the State, and with great reluctance was to receive the Jnanpith award. The only other person, who lived with his community and brought the world, literally and metaphorically, to his home was K.V. Subbanna. His non-urban experiment, Neelakanteshwara Natya Sangha came into existence even before the Ekikarana, and continues to be the embodiment of a "Kannadaness". His son K.V. Akshara, an eminent writer and theatre director, is now at the forefront of Ninasam's activites and carries forward the Ninasam dream.
Excerpts of an interview with Akshara:
Ninasam was born in the year 1949, an important point in history. It was just after Independence; the country bursting with new dreams . It was also a year after Gandhiji's death, who had great faith in the community consciousness. Kannada nationalism, an offshoot of Indian nationalism had begun to take shape, to culminate in the Unification. Was K.V. Subbanna thinking of a model based on all these factors when Ninasam came into being?
By hindsight, one can say that Ninasam is a response to all the events that you mention, but none of these were consciously conceived when Ninasam was established. Let me quote a series of excerpts from an essay Ninasam: The Springs of Inspiration that my father K.V. Subbanna wrote. In this he talks in retrospect about the forces that shaped Ninasam. He writes how the shaping of modern Kannada theatre itself was an attempt at Ekikarana.
"The Yakshagana form, even within its limited geographical domain of South and North Kanara districts has seen grandeur that surpasses even that of Company theatre. Between the two, Yakshagana came to influence the life of its community far more intimately, intensely and deeply. Like rice, porridge, and coconut oil, Yakshagana, too, was a natural and indispensable part of everyday life of these districts, across barriers of caste, creed, and class.
As against the Yakshagana, the northern parts have Doddaata, Sannaata, Dappinaata, Shri Krishna Parijatha, and Sangya-Balya, to name a few. There could be at least 50 such traditional forms in today's Karnataka; living and flourishing, as if they have their origins in contemporary times. Apart from these two, traditional theatre forms and company drama, there exists a third form in Karnataka, modern theatre. It has by and large been an amateur endeavour. Whatever be the individual history of each of these strands, it is a fact worth noting that these three forms have never remained insular in Karnataka. On the contrary, they have always had a living interaction; at conflict with each other as also drawing influences and inspiration and bringing about a meaningful and creative confluence. This natural process is what constitutes thebody of Kannada theatre culture as one finds it today." If this was the unificatory instinct, then there was the distinct feature of community theatre activities in Karnataka, which has shaped the actual experiential world of Ninasam.
"Even a routine theatre activity in a small community affords undeniable proof of the community consciousness. In such communities one knows one's co-artistes as well as one's audience. Therefore the many choices one has to make are governed by the collective conscious or unconscious of one's community. It is not a mere theatre context but a collective socio-political-cultural context where individual choices have to be tempered with a genuine and profound respect for one's kith and kin, in the very midst of whom one has to live one's life and act one's convictions and concerns." This dual commitment, to one's own self, and to one's environs, is, in fact, what transforms the seemingly mundane act of staging a theatre piece into a socio-cultural process. My father also speaks of the larger historical processes at work in those times. "India had just gained Independence and there was an unmatched fervour for committed national reconstruction work. The great Gandhian dream of modern India as a nation of healthy, happy, villages fired our imagination... It was a vision at once of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, an extraordinary and yet utterly practicable utopia and decentralisation, non-violence, freedom and democracy, embracing in one sweep every single human being as well as the whole of mankind."
This multidimensional historical context, I think gave birth to and nurtured Ninasam.
Ninasam is primarily a Kannada experiment that moves on to occupy other realms too. Does it have a distinct, palpable Kannada identity? If it does, is it a conscious political choice for an Institution that otherwise doesn't project any explicit ideological position?
I believe that most people living in Karnataka have multiple identities, and the "Kannada identity" is one of them. Ninasam is no exception; it is situated in Karnataka, and its work is largely intertwined with what is happening in Kannada language and literature (this becomes clearer, if you compare Ninasam with NSD, which has almost no connection with any language-literary tradition, not even that of Hindi). And this is also because Ninasam works in coordination with Akshara Prakashana, its publication wing.
But at the same time, Ninasam also represents a non-urban, non-commercial theatre, which forms the basis of most of its extension work, such as the Tirugata repertory. Though Tirugata, Ninasam's repertoire is "cosmpolitan", the way it operates is completely "local". It travels in Karnataka, touching almost all regions and avoids falling into the "mega-festival circuit". Thus Ninasam attempts to sustain its "Kannadaness" while being open to the world at large. This I believe is also the best way to deal with anxieties created by identity politics - to remember and reinvent one's "other" identities, even as one is being pinned down to any one of them.
Ninasam don't have a clue about its ideology, because it believes in doing certain "immediate cultural tasks" related to what it perceives as useful to people living around.
Is identity a geo-political issue? How has it been constructed in the last 50 years?
The manner in which identity has been constructed in the last 50 years has made it a singular one and pre-dominantly geopolitical. As the late D.R. Nagaraj argues, it is "anxiety ridden nationalism", a dominant strain in the identity politics of Kannada, pushing other more accommodative varieties of nationalisms to the margin.
The best example for this, is the `nationalist' Kannada poetry, poems written in Kannada about Kannada and Karnataka. Most poems are set to march beat and abound with metaphors of militia ("Baarisu Kannada Didndimava"). Many even invoke an imaginary "enemy" ("Uriyito Uriyitu Hageya Hata Manemata"). In some other poems, Kannada is a geopolitical space offering a variety of "visual treats" to the imaginary tourist ("Jogada Siri Belakinalli"). Poems which subtly problematise the concept of the Kannada nation, have never been very popular.
The role of language and dialect in identity construction is becoming crucial in post-modern times with other traditional markers of identity being weakened.
For a theatre practitioner like me, question of language as a marker of identity belongs to the experiential world. When I rehearse a play with the students of Ninasam Theatre Institute, I confront a set of people representing many regions/dialects in Kannada. In this multicultural context, do I "standardise" and erase all their dialects? Or do I democratically allow all the dialects and create inconsistent and even incoherent texts? The typical "post modernist" approach would be to abandon language or create hybrid mixtures of languages, eventually making language almost into a component of the "sound effects". But we would like to give an equal space to each dialect, while treating dialects as carriers of "meaning", embodiments of different worldviews.
Based on the Ninasam model, why haven't there been other such experiments?
Ninasam does not offer a model, it is only a process. Someone once asked my father a similar question. He had said: "I have not tried to identify such people or organisations. But I have confidence that I have been a very small link in the chain of such activities in Karnataka — in India — probably in all third world countries.... There is a search going on, probably a futile search. I am one of the elements in this search... "
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