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Tiger by the tale
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Belliappa's book packs in some delightful details on Coorg culture
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Girish Karnad said being the son-in-law of Coorg, he was qualified to release C.P. Belliappa's book. — Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.
THIS IS the kind of book you would read on a lazy Sunday afternoon, tucked under a razai, and curse your fate for having to go to work the next day. C.P. Belliappa's Tale of a Tiger's Tail and Other Yarns from Coorg (Roopa & Co, Rs. 95) is a collection of short essays on the little, delightful details of Kodava life, drawing from folklore, quasi-historical anecdotes (for they don't quite sound like "whole truths"!), and personal experiences. It has a relaxed, enjoyable pace and steers clear of serious historical and sociological takes on Kodagu and Kodavas.
Karnad on Kodavas
The book was released earlier this week at Crossword by Girish Karnad. Speaking about the "charming book", the Jnanpith Award-winning writer said he was eminently qualified to release the book being the "son-in-law of Coorg" and having the zeal of a "new convert" about the Kodava culture. His wife, Saraswati, had turned up for the release in a Kodava-style sari (unlike most other Kodava women in the gathering) and was overheard telling a friend: "It takes a half-Kodava to do it!"
Going back to his early initiation into the Kodava culture, Karnad recollected Panje Mangesh Rao's famous nursery rhyme Huttari Haadu and how children were warned when they didn't go to sleep: "Kodava palya will take you away!" After marriage, he had a more intimate interaction with the robust Kodava culture. Karnad recollected how he was shooting for a film in Kodagu when a party was thrown in honour of General Cariappa for being made Field Marshal. He was invited (by virtue of being the "son-in-law of Coorg" again) and he was not fit to shoot for the next two days!
One sees this "tremendous vitality" of the Kodava culture in several essays in Tale of a... Karnad quoted one in which a woman welcomes her husband and his second wife at the threshold of aiynmane (the family home) with an odi-kathi and threatened to do serious harm if they step in. The brave man builds another aiynmane for his new bride, and his tribe, of course, swelled!
This reporter's personal favourite is Origin of Manepedas, which is a hilarious account of how the Kodava families came to have their family names. Most essays in the Yarns on Pets, Pests, Birds and Bees section are equally entertaining, with wonderful detailing of the foibles of an urbanite getting used to a rural life and those of thoroughbred urban tourists in rural settings.
Among the other fascinating essays in the collection are Princess Victoria Gowramma of Coorg, on Chikka Veerarajendra's daughter for whom the king nurtures "English" dreams. Check out one of the names of the historical characters in this story: Edith Victoria Gowramma Campbell! Equally interesting is Son of a Gun, about the Kodava belief that one becomes a gun in afterlife.
One wishes, though, that Belliappa's editor had been a little more ruthless and dropped the non-Kodava, not-so-funny (some even a little inane) essays from the collection, especially those in the last Potpourri section and the likes of The Story of Dhanalakshmi, which simply don't sit well in the collection.
Never Coorgi
This reporter had a bit of education in the course of reading the book: that there is no such thing as a "Coorgi" ("We are Coorgs, from Coorg and speak the Coorg language.") One wonders, though, why Belliappa much prefers the Anglicised "Coorg" to the more native "Kodava" and "Kodagu".
BAGESHREE S.
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