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Er... are you... Kannadiga?

How many of us catch ourselves speaking Kannada with trepidation in our own Bengalooru? The tell-tale marks of a true-blue Kannadiga are fast disappearing in a blur of identities, mulls DEEPA GANESH on the eve of Rajyotsava

SEEING IS BELIEVING? Sometimes, the hippest of faces startle you by speaking Kannada PHOTO: SAMPATH KUMAR G.P.

It's a dilemma. You're not sure what language you should be speaking in namma Bengalooru. Of course, there aren't too many Kannada-speaking people in swanky malls (a friend wickedly calls them "software masks") that have mushroomed in our city. If you discount those dazed visitors from small towns on a sightseeing trip, that is. People, including upwardly mobile Kannadigas, give them withering looks. But the halli cousins are too busy with their aim-and-shoot cameras against those show windows they hardly take any notice of the disparagement. One is duly surprised when one of the personnel in the sparkling clean environs of a coffee shop actually catches bits of your hushed tones and eagerly asks: "Kannadadavara, madam?" But just the other day, when you asked the lady buying beans in Gandhi Bazaar from a pushcart vendor "Eshtakke kotta?" she made you feel sheepish with an impatient "Kya?"

It is the same about looks too; the idea of local looks no longer exists. Like a typical Kannadiga, you assume that woman — salwar clad, sindhoor-adorned, hair stylishly coiffured — speaks Hindi and she surprises you by answering to you in Kannada. To compound your confusion, you have complex, non-region specific names like Rohan, Aryan, Anahata, Ishita as against the good-old Gauri, Lakshmi, Ramesha and Srinivasa.

Even as one recognises the fact that world over cultural and language identities are in a flux and that economic vulnerabilities of a non-western culture have been often dubbed as cultural vulnerabilities, you cannot but help wonder what the poet laureate Kuvempu meant when he said: "Elladaru iru, entadaru iru, yendendigu nee Kannadavaagiru."

If there is something called a Kannada identity, what is it? Is it what the late writer-thinker K.V. Subbanna says in Nanna Kannada Jagattu: "When I came into this world, my parents and my family fed me with Kannada words, and these words helped me perceive the world. Without these words I'm left with no perception, no response. Then I'm deaf, dumb and blind; just a stone. No world exists for me."

If this is what Subbanna believed till his very end, speaking of a changing world, the famous poet A.K. Ramanujan and writer U.R. Ananthamurthy who inhabited global contexts, observed the differences between the mother tongue and English as the language of one's emotion and language of the world respectively. But with rapid strides in technology and English occupying much larger spaces than ever before, the world of the mother tongue is shrinking. Most urban families, irrespective of what their mother tongue is, mostly speak English inside and outside of their homes.

Multiple identities

Kannada critic H.S. Raghavendra Rao feels that multiple identities are a big achievement. For Karnataka, it has resulted in an upsurge of marginalised identities not just in term of a political unification, but even in terms of the mosaic of cultural identities it has created. But talking of bilingual identities, HSR says this is mostly an urban phenomenon and true of only certain ranks of society. He argues that in societies where there is no alternative, cultural nuances are fast disappearing to be replaced by cruder forms of expression. Language, he says, is not merely a sensory experience, but also an intellectual one.

Acclaimed short-story writer Jayant Kaikini says bilingual identities are not of recent origin. "It has had a cascading effect in the recent times." Jayant, like Subbanna, believes that language is all about emotional images and memory: one's inner world. For him, language has to simply be a community experience, pushing every other difference to the background. In his characteristic style, he explains this invoking the image of a fair. "The deity is never central, it is the coming together of a people — the joy, the happiness, the celebration — of a shared experience." For him, a perfect Kannada identity is not just about passion for the language but also about a good human being. "The increasing self-centredness among people leaves me disturbed. In the true spirit of Kannadavaagiru, feeling for the language and feeling for a community can never exist in isolation."

In the same tone, HSR adds that if in justifying a western lifestyle, the new identity stresses on individual and pushes social realities into oblivion, then post-modern ideologies are dangerous. The Navya writers, though modern in their thinking, rested their cares with the world. It never was a value-neutral stand. "I'd rather go with Chomsky or Medha Patkar who don't hesitate to take a stand rather than post-modern philosophers with their defeatist cry-baby positions," he reasons.

Large-screen reinforcement

Cinema, a strong force in our lives and a reinforcement of our community identities, has also, like our society, entered a value-neutral state. The consumable hero of the liberalised market has no history as Sudhanwa Deshpande in his remarkable essay, The Consumable Hero of Globalised India, puts it. "The new hero belongs to the high-income group, has a jet-setting lifestyle and shops overseas. He has no history he cares to recall." A generation before liberalisation, the hero's father was solidly middle-class and even while battling a personal angst, our hero was representative of a larger cause, a community. Look how Shah Rukh Khan (Filmfare, 2001), the super hero of our times, brilliantly encapsulates this `identity-less', individual-centric breed of Indian cinema. "If the 1970s hero was anti-establishment, as a yuppie I promised a better world. The yuppie doesn't bash up a truckful of goondas. He's smarter. He doesn't have to kill in the battlefield, he can make a killing in the share market. The yuppie believes in capitalism, not communism. Actually, he believes in a `ism' every day."

And so rightly, you no longer recognise people by the language in which they speak or where they come from, but from what brands they wear and what job positions they occupy.

Oh, he's a BPO employee, a geek and so on. Of course, these categories are easy to recognise, for they wear enough telltale marks, beginning from the manner in which they speak to the kind of ammunition they carry.

"Globalisation is a real threat, because language is after all a way of life," argues activist Shivsundar. He explains how Kannada life is not merely a cultural one, but also has an economic agenda. Globalisation, with its inclusivist agenda, will help individuals thrive and annihilate masses.

This is true of any language identity. But even with all its anti-community agenda, the highway beckons. The boy at that candy store in that multiplex was clearly not comfortable with his English. This time I was right, he was a localite. "Ooru Mandya, madam... came here for better opportunities... " After a soul-satisfying conversation in Kannada, he bowed and in his own brand of English said: "Come again, madam." What gave me comfort, even as I admit to straddling two worlds, was "Kannada naadina veera ramaniya... " that the auto driver played for me on my way home.

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