“I’M MARRIED TO THIS CITY. Where’s the space for another relationship?” So opines Satyajit, one of the characters of Jayant Kaikini’s story collection, No Presents Please, who finds himself at home in Mumbai. Unlike Kaikini, Satyajit is not a foreigner to the city. He has shifted to different suburbs and locales in the city over the course of twenty years due to different job placements. At the same time, there is too much heart in the sentence for this thought to belong only to Satyajit. One cannot help but think of Kaikini himself, who transported himself from the Konkan Coast to live and work in Mumbai. It is the sort of thing that someone who found love in a city that they discovered later in life would say.
Consider a piece of writing about a different city:
The State of Minnesota is well-known as the ‘Land of Ten Thousand Lakes’… Those who visit the state in the months of July or August are so enthralled by its tall maple trees, the fawns that stray onto the backyards, the clear blue sky and the lakes and streams along its many walking trails, that they easily forget the ‘10 below’ temperature and piles of snow in the winter that follows. We too were enticed…
The “we” here could belong to Guruprasad, from the author Guruprasad Kaginele’s Hijab, who shifted to Minnesota alongside several other Indian immigrants to practise medicine for a small-town community. And yet, this “we” is purposefully inviting, purposefully inclusive. We are invited to cherish a place, to witness its beauty and be a part of it.
Bombay and Minnesota—two locales very far from each other. In the context of Kannada literature, which is the space from which Kaginele and Kaikini both write, it would be equivalent to the distance between Hubli and Mangalore, as different as the Tulu speakers of Dakshin Kannada and the Kodagu of Madikeri. Given the realities of an increasingly globalising world, though, it would be inevitable that regional literatures would shift too. In the 2020s, and in Kannada literature, —global human—is no longer just seen as a term from the pen of the illustrious poet Kuvempu. It has influenced many thinkers and scholars from Karnataka. A lot of the literature coming out of Karnataka remains local, set in small villages on the coast of Dakshina Kannada or in the ghats
