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A Kannada connection

A portal that has kept Kannada literature vibrant on the Net turns five

A Net search on "Kannada literature" yields about 500,000 results. In fact, with some exceptions such as Tamil, Hindi and Bangla, hits for most Indian languages fall somewhere in this region. A similar search on "English literature" would give you close to 300 million results. Hardly surprising, considering how language is one of the most important markers of the digital divide.

But even as English is increasingly becoming the language of information technology, there are parallel efforts at bending it to suit the local needs. One such bridge-building effort is kannadasaahithya.com, a portal that has been putting Kannada literature on the global information network for five years now.

Says Shekharpoorna, the editor of the portal: "Modern technology is immensely powerful. It can create, sustain or destroy. We must put our stamp on all major tools of modern technology in order to ensure that cultures, as well as the languages that sustain those cultures, are not swallowed up by the dominant language forces governing technology."

Over the last five years, the portal has put a significant body of the works of Kannada writers on the Net both in Kannada and in translation, ranging from U.R. Ananthamurthy and Chandrashekhar Kambar to younger writers such as Vivek Shanbhag and Mogalli Ganesh. The content includes short stories and entire novels, besides an interesting collection of non-fiction work too. For instance, you can access here the text of Gokak Committee recommendations and the High Court's judgement on the medium of instruction.

Shekharpoorna says that besides building content for the portal, an equally important effort of kannadasaahithya.com has been towards building a community of users who feel passionately about making Kannada's presence felt on the Net. And the portal has been pretty successful in this direction too.

One of the youngsters the portal has roped in is Raghava Kotekar, a software engineer. As part of the technical support group, he has been spending hours building a content management system that makes the process of building a portal easy for anyone who has the content but lacks technical training. "I think it is important to localise computing because language should not become a barrier to technology, and through it, to knowledge as a whole," says Raghava. A demo version of this software is already available at sampoorna.kannadasaahithya.com/users.

Another software engineer, Rudramurthy, has released a spell-check for Kannada, as an add-on tool for Microsoft word processor. Shekharpoorna emphasises that the need of the hour is not just being competent in terms of content, but also having the technical sophistication to make that content accessible.

Besides all this, running a portal also involves hours of hard labour and that is coming from a band of enthusiastic youngsters such as Kiran M., who spends hours keying in huge chunks of text in Baraha software. This is necessary because there is no optical character recognition (OCR) in Kannada yet. He has keyed in the entire text of a Na. D'Souza's novel, Igarji Suttalina Hattu Manegalu, running to 350-odd pages and is right now keying in the novel Avadheshwari by Shankar Mokashi Punekar, a portion of which has already been uploaded. This laborious work, Kiran says, is his way of expressing gratitude to a language and a literature as a reader. Rohith Ramachandra, based in Pune, is overseeing the entire network of keying in work. The team hopes to, over a period of time, put the voluminous Kumaravyasa Bharata on the Net.

The portal also has supporters like Ravi Krishna Reddy who say that kannadasaahithya.com has inspired them to carry the ideal forward. Says the software engineer based in California: "It has driven me to start vicharamantapa.net that has over 1,000 vachanas online and is dedicated to egalitarian and rationalist literature in Kannada." He plans to launch a magazine and a portal that will provide hourly news updates in Kannada.

Vivek Shanbhag, who has been involved with the site as a writer and more recently in the course of a debate on copyright issues, says that efforts of this kind are "significant at a time when the concept of a Kannadiga has gone beyond geographic boundaries". He would like to warn though that Net is an exacting medium and the Net users don't stand any sign of indiscipline such as delays in updates.

Shekharpoorna admits that garnering enough manpower to keep the portal constantly alive and expanding is a challenge and would welcome help from all quarters. Login to kannadasaahithya.com for more on how you can contribute.

BAGESHREE S.

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