The Bounds: (Woman Unbound Is Woman Unravelled)

By Kamala Narasimha

There are communities in the India of today that find themselves in the cleft stick of having to speak without having a language to speak in. For example, LGBTs, farming communities, the labour classes, the artisan classes, classes of people generally that inhabit the backwaters of society. About 50% of the countrys women hasnt found such a language or medium to express itself. Man has been double-crossing woman, denying her the voice to speak up. In this third novel of the author, there is an attempt to discover unshackled new paths. This novel negotiates with it at two levels. To begin with, her physical body is womans language. She speaks through its enormous performing, creating, authoring ability, its vitality and sympathy with the world. The novel engages in an in-depth exploration of womans independent or autonomous situatedness in life. Woman is not weak. But she is made weak. Without a husband and with no material object or framework as an anchor, Savitri goes about building life not for herself or for her children, but for firming up the bond between her human environment and nature: she does it through decentralizing power centres that . are arrayed in front of her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Sep 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482823349

Kamala Narasimha

The author is Kamala Narasimha. She lives in Tumakuru in the Indian state of Karnataka, teaching education in a college. She is known to be a bold, free-thinking novelist in Kannada. Her PhD is on the education of the disabled She has written the following : Novels: 1. Bhugarbha 2. Aapooshana 3. Haddu Poetry: 1 .bellada madu 2. Ii nela

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Copyright © 2014 by Kamala Narasimha and P. P Giridhar.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

About the Author

About the Translator

Prologue

S. Nataraj Budalu

There are communities today that find themselves in the cleft stick of having to speak without having a language to speak in. For example, LGBT’s, NRMB’s(Not Rich, not Middle class, not Below the poverty line), farming communities, the labour classes, the artisan classes, classes of people generally that inhabit the backwaters of society. That many regional languages in the country find themselves in this plight is another irony. About 50% of the country’s women hasn’t found such a language or medium to express itself. Man has been double-crossing woman, denying her the voice to speak up. For such an entity i.e for man to write a foreword to the words of a woman, like I am doing here, is therefore ironical indeed. I suggest that this is another such attempt. Yet I am writing these words, unable to be arrogant enough to say no to a request to write.

This is Smt Kamala Narasimha’s third novel. This novel is in your hands after a lapse of two years after her second novel Aaposhana was published. It is only for the form of the novel that the spread that facilitates a holistic build of a probe into life is possible. So to manage this is no easy task. At the time of the launch of Aapooshana I had spoken of the gaps that existed in the canvas of the novel. U.R. Ananthamurthi also spoke of such things in his foreword to that novel. I must review my words now.

Language is definitely life-endangering for a woman. If she has to speak, she has to speak for so many communities like hers, and she has to forge new paths of speaking. This novel is one such attempt to discover such new paths. If such a ‘woman’s view’ is possible in the field of creative writing, it would then be possible to hear the substantially real situation of the words of Kannada.

This novel navigates in the world and negotiates with it at two levels. To begin with, her physical body is woman’s language. She speaks through its enormous ‘performing, creating, authoring ability’, its vitality and sympathy with the world. The whole novel engages in an in-depth exploration of woman’s independent or autonomous situatedness in life. Woman is not weak. But she is made weak. To use the words of patriarchy, the ‘weak’ Savitri’s life doesn’t consist in strengthening herself to live her life: It consists in empowering the whole of her life-environment. She is not one who gets ‘from outside’. She is one who gives, or can give, to the world. The perspectives of tradition, of looking at woman as someone who can give, have been obscured. (The most popular Kannada poem ‘Devi Mahatme’ is an excellent example of this view of woman). Without a husband and with no material object or framework as an anchor, Savitri goes about building life not for herself or for her children, but for firming up the bond between her human environment and nature: she does it through decentralizing power centres.

She has a host of power centres, arrayed in front of her. She has restrictions imposed by patriarchal, standardly entrenched traditional and religious power centres, to reckon with. There are various reactions to these centres in the community. These struggles are all struggles of empowering woman. Even man’s reactions in favour of woman are also attempts at such empowerment. One doesn’t need to refute these. Such strifes that are underpinned in concrete materialism do also afford temporary relief. But struggles that stem from an independent footing endevaour to protect its freedom without recognizing power centres.

The novel is set in Sira, the town near Tumakuru in Karnataka, where two communities are at their fanatical best. Its real protagonists are women: Savitri, Nagamani, Lalithamma, Sharada, Shantha… These women have enormous lust for life. The attempts of these women to extend the few choices that are possible for them are perennially thwarted by these power centres. The skill and patience that the novelist shows in managing the reactions of the oppressed world constitute one of the high points of the novel. The love between Ahmad and Sharade and the details that go to build the picture of their marriage and the subsequent married life are unfamiliar to the ordinary shudra world. For the religiously faithful, who live just for the sake of ritual routines, human relations do not become important. Along with demonstrating a dry inane ritualistic environment, the act of Shyama Rao performing the death-ceremony of shradda even when Sharade is alive determines and provides the space, time and the setting for the action of the novel.

While women are the active vibrant characters of the novel, men have a static and inactive mindset and are for the most part loners. No woman in the novel in contrast lives a secluded sequestered life. The life that Savitri builds in the village is really amazing. Much like a planted plant stretches out and extends its being, Savitri’s life stretches out, thrusts forth, grows, elongates: the long journey of such an ever-evolving life determines the movement of the novel.

It is because of her body that woman celebrates on the one hand and gets insulted on the other. Savitri, who is widowed at an early age, is humiliated and insulted because of her body. Thrusting out, and evolving beyond her bonding with Sitaramaih, she finds new initiatives, new paths and thrusts in life that harness her robustly creatively active disposition. Woman-empowerment in fact means animating the bonds she builds with herself and the world. The success of the political dimension she acquires is also due to this very transcendence. All transgressions that happen here throb with powerful humaneness. The lively vibrancy her personality throbs with in response to all eminently rational, prolife transgressions is in fact a defining feature of the Indian woman. It is because of these transgressions, because of her creative resistance to the environment that woman achieves her ontology, her creative nature. It won’t be surprising if prima facie the novel appears to be designed as a defence of a traditional mode of life. But at the same time the fact such a life is stagnating, decaying and rotting deep inside is visible in the novel.

A weak Shudra world has been depicted not very clearly in the novel. It also makes out how spaces, without an interface with the shudra world, without a give-and-take with the shudra world, are pushed to a stagnant vegetative edge in life. Her contacts and interactions with the community after Savitri enters political life affords, adds new dimensions to Savitri’s life. Evolving beyond her personal relationship with Sitaramaih, it mutates into a persona that throbs intensely in response to the community. Such transgressions seem central to the novel for a variety of reasons. First of all, the fact that the hidebound tradition-bound vaidic Shyama rao’s daughter Sharade’s marriage to a Muslim and the subsequent developments indicate emphatically that the new movements and innovative changes that happen in society happen because of woman. This adventure of hers couldn’t possibly have given her any release from social structures. Both were models of static life. It however successfully creates the anxiety that lives without a voice craving release might end up in grief. The breaking-the-brimming mud pot ritual or ghatashradda that Shyama Rao performs and which appears like an attempt to suppress this desperate transgression can only become an act of vengeance of a weak mind.

Savitri, who comes from the same tradition that denied Shudras education, provides free midday meals to around three hundred students on a daily basis and gives away part of her house to house backward class students: these are not ordinary transgressions. If you come to think of it, no woman comes from inside a tradition. She is always outside every tradition. Like nature. Since tradition is a male construct, it doesn’t apply to woman. It is only along these lines that autonomous structures think and act.

What is most endearing among Savitri’s behaviours is her love and her conduct that is absolutely loyal to her body. This is equal to the natural behavior of a plant that grows to flower and fructify. It is only by the mature restraint that Savitri shows in keeping her lustful love from degenerating into licentiousness, and by the way she behaves that keeps her bodily dignity intact which allows her to reject the power centres that seek to achieve control on her body and mind. All these are female perspectives that one gets to see when woman herself monitors and manages the body-dynamics.

None of the details here is trivial. Movements in life are pretty much like these, little moves and movements happening at a slow pace. The mind that observes closely and documents them sensitively must be compassionate. There is a great deal that woman needs to speak out. We haven’t as yet listened to it. We need to prepare to listen to it. There is an inquiry into life that a woman wants to present to us. There is a female consciousness that is constantly at work watering and nurturing the harmony of the relations of the world alongside. These two things are absolutely necessary for the health of our society. This is in fact the way of the novel: of facing several phases and dimensions of life. The main points that the novel is putting forth are: woman’s eye-view of the world, inquiry into life in its autonomous footing and transgressions that nurture life and its sources, life-giving life-nurturing enabling and empowering deviations. All these play themselves out in their natural spaces. These are genuinely prepared to walk with healthy minds that are willing to walk the distance with them.

Kamala Narasimha is a serious student of literature.

She can think and act independently and she has a concern for social spaces. She works in the field of education, finding contentment therein. Her immense lust for life finds expression in poetry and creative fiction. As this is her third novel, she has executed it in a mature level-headed and balanced manner, in a way that does meet readers’ expectations. To be done with talking about a novel in a few sentences, as I have done here, wouldn’t do justice to the novel. I have put forward the woman’s eye-view of things the way I can. Such a view has become possible in Kannada literature only through novels.

Kamala Narasimha is an important Kannada novelist. Congratulations to her!

TRANSLATOR’S REMARKS

a.  Cognitive legibility amounts to translatability.

b.  Whatever is intelligible is translatable. Whatever is intelligible is by definition subject to externalisation, and whatever is subject to externalisation is by definition subject to translation.

The following remarks seek to pave the way for a prolegomena, a framework, or a scaffolding for a theoretical understructure of the phenomenon of translation, seeking to articulate what it is and what it is not, what it could be and what it could not possibly be.

In its internal weave, translation is a complex, rich, and varied phenomenon, and in its external function, it is a life-giving, life-affirming, life-nourishing, bridge-building, bridge-repairing, barrier-breaching, breach-filling globalising, synergizing humanising exercise. Much like language itself, which, in its internal architectonics, is such a rigorously elegantly rule-governed, involute, complex, rich, varied, thought-facilitating and mental-world creating enterprise and in its external function, is such a life-giving, life-creating, light-creating, light-giving, knowledge-building and -giving, civilization-building, evolutionary enlightenment-targeting, Self-building socially synergising exercise. I am not sure if translation is best seen as a cluster concept, or that the definitional thrust of translation should be an open one. One needs to do some sorting, taxonomising and modularising, in case and after it is accepted as an open-ended cluster. These remarks will claim that it is necessary to pin down things in any credible academic discipline before it endeavours to elucidate the place translation has in the history of ideas. There is doubtless some epistemic muck attached to translation at present in regard to how it relates to language, bearing on questions of translatability and untranslatability, and equally importantly, on how it is conceived as an academic discipline. One characterisation of this muck in relation to literary translation is ‘prescriptive anti-essentialism’. Except for a few people like the redoubtable Wittgenstein who made sublime sense while taking about language, quite a few other non-linguists (e.g Derrida, Tejaswini Niranjana, Quine, Steiner, Eco and some others) have been remarkably off-target in what they think about language. They have either overshot the target or missed it by nearly a mile. It is necessary in the interest of the pursuit of truth to outlast, and move beyond, them. Some hint of the untenability of such naive and theoretically uninformed postures about the nature of language and the nature of the phenomenon of translation is beginning to be available in the literature in the form of Clifford (1997), Giridhar (2005) and Singh (2004) inter alia. One such miscued shot (by Quine) has been successfully caught, among others, by Dasgupta (1989). On the positive side, of course, one needs to talk of how and why the place of translation is secure in the history of ideas, how it is such a powerful, life-giving, life-nourishing act and to explore how — while it creates conditions for globalisation — it pulls the lid off, sustains and fosters the important differences that mask the essential equally important grounding sameness of us as human beings. Without assuming an air of completeness or finality, we need to look into this, in terms of examining the sites of literary translation and expository knowledge-translation. If poetry is untranslatable, we need to see why. We need to elucidate the dynamics, mechanics and the source of the element of ‘unself-identicality’ that inheres in the transcendent original. One reason why poetry is untranslatable is that while being transcendental, the original is arguably not self-identical (Sarukkai 2001). As we argue, it is difficult however to see how discursive texts are not self-identical. An automobile manual, for instance. If, as we argue, all intelligibility is necessarily subject to translation, then whatever is intelligible including poetry must be translatable. Is it the case that intelligibility works at cross purposes with a text being not self-identical, with the nonself-identicality of these texts? In any case we need a theory of semantic competence/performance, a theory that is diacritical of a principled dichotomy between grammatically determined meaning and extragrammatically determined meaning, something that Chomsky failed to do with any success (Cf Katz 1980). To deny the existence of extragrammatically determined meaning may be presumptuous. We are nowhere near a theory or explanation of such extragrammatically designed worlds in literary cosmoses despite a long hoary bequest in poetics that man has been heir to. One needs such a theory partly to explain the fact that (literary) originals are not absolutely self-identical, an insight first noticed by Benjamin (1923).

In some of its sundry areas, translation as a phenomenon has not been perspectivised as well as it could or should have been. There is C need to elucidate and objectively correlativise this intuition in some of its ramified facets and phases. One needs in particular to

•  clear away some cognitive clutter, some epistemic muck that attaches to translation in its interface with language.

•  address the triangular space between man, translation and culture.

•  try in a less definitive, less complete, more ruminative way to technicalise or cerebralise the distinction between discursive-discourse translation and human-discourse translation, between knowledge-translation and literary translation, an important consequence of which is that the site is thrown open for a mulitiplicity of translations in the one and not in the other. This is prior to elucidating other ramified consequences that this distinction could lead to, hazarding the possible lines and contours of the site of literary translation, the meeting ground of two sociocultural ethoses in the light of what has transpired on the site i.e. what mediative negotiative appropriative, exppropriative conflictive osmotic struggles, battles, skirmishes, blood transfusions, and exchanges have taken place on the site.

THE DEFINITIONAL IMPULSE

One needs to remember that when one is talking about translation, the analysis definitely proceeds from language. There is no translating the blank page, the absence of the linguistic word, is there? On the other hand, one could obviously talk about translation without talking about language at all. In a word, we can’t translate the blank page i.e the absence of language: we need language although we needn’t talk about language while discoursing about translation! We need language to talk about non-language as translated. This is a situation where one needs x although x need never be the topic of discourse, although x is possibly considered not worthy of attention. Why do we need x? We need it for us to be able to talk about non-x made possible by x. Incidentally, the very fact that one could talk about nonx without talking about x in any sense, the x that in fact carries non-x, is an eloquent comment on the separability of x and non-x. This important aspect of the language-nonlanguage interface needs to be noted.

2.1 When one says ‘every translation is a translation of a translation of a translation’ or when one says ‘I am a translated being’ or ‘(original) creative literature is also translation’, or If translators are readers of the source text that they translate, scientists are readers of the ‘book of nature’ which they then translate. (the last by Sarukkai (2001) taking the cake), one is talking of a sense of ‘translation’ which is different from the sense one means usually when one talks, let’s say, of the Kannada translation of Macbeth or the Hopi translation of the novel ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’. The claim is that while translation could be a cluster concept across cultures, for comments on which see below, in an academic discipline, notions must have some definably technical charge. The argument is that modularity is the best way to pursue knowledge unless there is proof to the contrary. There is something seriously wrong if we are to say in regard to

1.  Tom and Benjamin are translated beings.

and

2.  Tom and Benjamin have translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Gikuyu.

the meaning of the lexeme ‘translate’ is the same because of what have been called ‘family resemblances’. One needs to examine the two uses separately, in a modular fashion before arriving at a decision. There are any number of obvious differences between the two. For starters, Tom and Benjamin in sentence 1 may be congenital deaf-mutes, whereas that can’t be the case in sentence 2. Which is to say language is necessarily involved in the latter while it need not be in the former. What the translation is from and into is not clear in (1), while it is in (2). Such differences are solid enough to actualise a difference in kind.

Notice that the above mix-up has nothing to do with culture. What follows is a discussion of translation as it is culturally coloured and configured. Prima facie it is less of a muddle if TS allows culturally configured differences in the definition of translation. The submission even here however is that the grounds for saying that the differences that do exist between cultures as regards how they view translation are not as irreducible as they appear, are not as irreducible as the Tourian definition of translation of any target language text which is presented or regarded as such within the target system itself, on whatever grounds (Toury 1982) suggests. I mean it is difficult to conceive for example an ethos which considers interlinguistic transmission of an automobile manual as anything other than transmission of bare information. At the least one of the possibilities of interlinguistic translation of an automobile manual for instance must be the culture-neutral transfer of bare denotative information: cognitive translation or translation of what has been called ‘cognitive texts’, discursive texts as opposed to human texts, is clearly on a completely different footing. Otherwise the dissemination, secularisation and democratisation of knowledge, which are universally acknowledged to be among the functions of translation, which in fact give translation its place in the history of ideas, would be empirically vacuous claims. There is something seriously wrong if a translated legal document is allowed to be coloured by cultural intervention, allowed to be manipulated by agendas except solely in pursuit of the eternal human values of freedom, equity, justice. Or if a non-communal literary piece is given a communal colour in translation. Or a non-carnal piece is carnalised. The Igbo word for translation means ‘deconstruct and narrate’. I would be surprised if the Igbo translation of a manual on geriatric care would mean deconstruct it and rewrite it the way one wants. This can not be. And should the internationalisation of Translation Studies, one wonders, mean ‘cultural self-definition’ and ‘self-representation’ of this kind.

My submission is that human groups may have their own valid culturally configured definitions of the phenomenon of interlinguistic transmission of embodied linguistic texts, definitions, as Tymzscoko (2005) avers, that allow various cultures to identify factors that enter into their decisions to identify certain phenomena as translations and reject others as not translations, the types of correlations there are between these identifications and other cultural processes and products, the correlations there are between such determinations and social conditions, and the like. There could be mode 1 of interlinguistic transmission, mode 2, mode 3, mode 4 and so on within the culture. If the processes and products these modes entail are perceptibly different, then there is no meaning in saying there is only one concept called ‘translation’ and we have a cluster definition of this concept so as to accomodate how every human ethos views it. I am, in other words, submitting that for each of these modes that have their own definably obvious diacritics, the definitional impulse must mean closure.

There are two things:

a.  the noncultural mix up and

b.  the cultural mix up

In the first of the above, the definitional route must meet a dead-end for the various senses of the word ‘translate’ discussed above, as exemplified in utterances like

a.  I am a translated being.

b.  Life is a translation.

c.  Original writing is a translation.

d.  I have translated my weaknesses into strengths.

e.  He couldn’t translate his dreams into reality.

f.  I have translated music into painting.

g.  Scientists read the ‘book of nature’ and then translate it.

h.  My wife is my translation.

i.  All my kids are faithful translations of me.

j.  All my friends are my translations of my ideas.

k.  I have translated my talent into cash.

l.  The world is a translation of God by God.

m.  Will the turn-out at the rally translate into votes?

n.  Mona has translated Moby Dick into Moyon Naga.

o.  We should help translate scientific and technological advancements into innovative and affordable technologies and health solutions.

         (This is the goal of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) of the Dept of Biotechnology of the Government of India)

At the least it must mean closure for the sense in n) above as against the rest viz a) through m), and o). In the second namely the cultural mix-up, each of the modes of interlinguistic transmission viz, translation, adaptation, original writing, paraphrase, summary, inspired original creation, intersemiotic transmission must mean closure across cultures. This tack is what would facilitate epistemology. Culture x has this mode or modes of interlinguistic transmission and culture y has the other mode or modes and so on. But these modes are defined cross-culturally. The take in a culture that views x as translation and y as nontranslation while there is a culture that views the same x as nontranslation and the same y as translation is suspect in as much as its epistemological spin-offs are suspect. In illustrative terms, what does it mean to say the concept of translation in India meant ‘rewriting’ and this view is different from the Western view? What it means epistemologically is that there can’t be any across-the-board examination of this phenomenon called translation simply because because of internal cultural processes, what is called ‘translation’ in culture x is not considered ‘translation’ in culture y. What is ‘adaptation’ for you is ‘translation’ for me and what is ‘translation’ for you is ‘rewriting’ for me and what is ‘transcreation’ for you is ‘original creation’ for me, what is ‘translation’ for me is ‘original creation’ for you, what is ‘inspired creation’ for me is ‘translation’ for you and so on. Then we could only have cultural-internal investigation into a muddle called ‘translation’. If everything is translation, nothing is translation. Everything about translation is then culture-determined, the sociology, the ontology, the philosophy, the phenomenology, the politics, the neurophysiology, the linguistics etc. of translation. One wonders if this is okay. If this reveals deep insights into how a culture organizes itself, it could make sense. Otherwise, a blanket culture-specificity of the phenomenon of translation is suspect. This needs looking into. It is not that simple.

It must be a culture-free axiom of translation qua phenomenon. For example, translation is a ‘decisional act of ethical responsibility’, as indeed are all products of human consciousness. The resemblances in sentences (1) and (2) above and sentences (3) and (4) below

3.  His words never translate into action

4.  I translated my weaknesses into strengths

are to be sure not fortuitous at some level of the etymology and history of the word ‘translation’, but they belong for sure to different orders, to different planes of existence. So that to consider them manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon would lead us up and astray upon an epistemological and ontological garden path.

There are numerous misconceptions and misconstruals because people turn a blind eye to the aspect of translation that has to do with language. (My commentary on these would have a reining-in effect on the implications of centrifugality, nonstability and evanescence that the fact that the transcendent original is not self-identical implies). This is despite a Catford or a Nida or a Roger Bell if you will, who have done significant work on what may be called the ‘Linguistics of Translation’. Even Catford is guilty of nontruisms: for example, he claims that a sentence in language x has a meaning that belongs uniquely to language x. This is not true or cannot be true, pace what postmodernists and other literary cognoscenti think. It is much like saying x has a hand or a leg which is uniquely different from the rest of humankind. Neither the sound nor the meaning is unique to any natural language. Both are quarried from a single universal stock that all of us humans inherit and share by virtue of being humans. Natural languages are functions of the common biological infrastructure that we humans share of sensory-motor and cognitive abilities.

All interlinguistic translation needs to proceed with the premise that everything that is intelligible is subject to translation. This is because we hominids are all biologically and cognitively prewired identically, and all humans share the material that goes into the making of linguistic meanings. All linguistic meanings are quarried from the same cognitive bedrock. This is of course not to say that everything is translatable. For example, phonologically contrived feedback to some kind of effect does not port across linguistic boundaries.

If my translation ‘The Bounds’ of the Kannada novel HADDU is a reasonably successful translation, as it could well be, then it is proof of the thesis of the power of natural language to express everything humans are capable of expressing, no matter what the source language is, subject, as I said, to the proviso of the constraints that derive from the nature of natural language. It is distinctly possible, I believe, for capturing the source language sensibility, and making it at home in, target language art, subject again to the constraints that natural language imposes on such a process. I don’t agree that translated meanings lose the authenticity of the original experience. This feeling is pretty impressionistic, much like the false belief that the sound itself becomes the sense in literature and by that token, seemingly irredeemably, subjective.

Although a tad stodgy, a tad flatulent, a touch credulity-straining, THE BOUNDS qualifies in my view to be called good ‘creative literature’. Atleast it has the promise of good literature. Unlike many Kannada novels I have read, it is much more than an archival recitation of known facts. Literature is by no means an archival documentation of empirical facts. To depict caste, for example as it exists in Indian society, and to do nothing further about it, would NOT be literature, should not amount to literature, it seems to me. Many a piece of Kannada creative fiction do precisely this; Illustrating the absence of what I think should be a necessary feature of genuine value-creating literature are novels like Dharmashree, Tabbaliyu Niinaade Maganee, Vamshavriksha, which seem to justify a barbaric social category called ‘caste’. Talking about the author’s fiction after a meticulously detailed analysis, Zydenbos (1996:203) says as much:

…The caste system is endorsed as a matter of course…

Not just about caste, but about other variables that surround the human being, what such pieces of ‘creative fiction’ do, in Zydenbos’s words, is as follows:

If in Vamshavriksha we already see that Bhyrappa delights in religious obscurantism, in Dharmashree and Tabbaliyu Ninade Magane, we find a literary expression of an Indian variety of fascism. Numerous passages in the novel are not much more than propaganda for the RSS, an extreme right wing of Hindu, anti-Nonhindu movement. The RSS also figures prominently in Bhyrappa’s Tabbaliyu Ninade Magane. Dharmashree, Bhyrappa’s anti-Christian fantasy (in which he vents his contempt of other people as well: people from ‘lower castes’, people whose skin color is dark, foreigners, Muslims, nonvegetarians, people who speak incorrect English) can be read as an interesting case study of the right-wing political and quasi-religious frame of mind …

(Robert J. Zydenbos(1996) The Calf Became an Orphan - A Study in Contemporary Kannada Fiction (French Institute of Pondicherry, p:108))

This is a case of a Hitlerian kind of supremacism. Belonging as they do to what may be called the ‘mafia of the human soul’, supremacists of no kind - caste supremacists, religion supremacists, skin-pigment supremacists, race supremacists, gender supremacists, nation supremacists, food supremacists, language supremacists - can by definition produce (great, value-creating) literature, in my view. All art, including genuine literature, should as an axiom protect, promote and enhance life and civilization and the eternal human values of freedom, equity and justice. No matter what the state of the society it originates in is, whether it is casteist, racist, fundamentalist, sexist or whatever, literature should enhance the reader toward growth, glory and grace, deepening her sense of being, of life and living. Otherwise why should one call it ‘art’? How can someone who endorses caste as a matter of course, as if caste is the natural order of things, be a drushtaara (=visionary), or a srushtaara (=creator) and/or a vaktaara (=spokesperson (for a whole generation of human beings)), which is something all artists ought to be? The redoubtable Shree U.R. Ananthamurthy says somewhere, and rightly, that the poet ‘makes the mundane look as if swilled out with the divine’. Why doesn’t he, and other litterateurs, do the same to social space, make social space look ‘as if swilled out with the divine’? They need to realise that the quality of an ethos is more important than the ethos itself. Much like the quality of life is more important that life itself. Since it is more explicitly articulate than other arts, literature should take the lead in battling the thick ornery walls of misperception (like caste, for example) ruling social space. That litterateurs seek, instead, to perpetuate an unacceptable ethos through their literature should be unacceptable to every (rational) Kannadiga.

We, human beings, belong to one another. In each of us, as Jiddu said, is the rest of mankind. That the Kannada social ethos, as indeed Kannada literature, must be overarched and dictated by the three-faced God of freedom, equity, justice is an incontestably deep rational thought. That equality must be in the air we breathe ought to be every Kannadiga’s stance. At least some, if not a sizeable chunk, of Kannada poetry belongs in the world-stage, but I have always been underwhelmed by the typical Kannada novel, including the allegedly canonical peak of sanskaara, which slips through your fingers. Despite their pretensions to depth, they are a far cry from what may be called ‘value-creating art’. That all human beings are equal, free and are subject to natural justice is an axiom of human ontology every writer ought to know. Since there are obviously writers who are, quite culpably, not aware of this axiom, or since ‘literature’ apparently has room for such writers, one is forced to conclude that either ‘literature’, in the true sense of value-creating art, as a(n) (intellectually credible) discipline, hasn’t come of age, or the Kannada society has yet to come of age as a thinking, and a deeply rational, society. It still has a long way to go. It is still at the ‘predator stage of human development’, some groups behaving like ‘social predators’ and some seemingly happy behaving like ‘predatees’. Caste is a social, moral and intellectual horror simply because it is a socially or externally foisted, and yet value-judged, social construct. Indians need to be educated about this. (This ought to in point of fact be one of every Indian government’s prioritized programmes.) But one could go further and propound that, with the existence of God ever in doubt, and with the nonexistence of a God that can dent the cause-effect sequence and the