Interview with Srikar Raghavan: Exploring Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka in Rama Bhima Soma

Your book looks at modern Karnataka’s cultural landscape through a blend of social history, literary analysis, and reportage. How and why did you develop this approach to essay Karnataka’s journey from a society focussed on equality to today’s neoliberal environment?

Ultimately, I’m a student of literature and history, and I knew from the outset that I wanted to approach this narrative through Kannada literature (fiction, autobiographies, periodicals, and other assorted sources), while also supplementing it with personal interviews, reportage, and scholarly research. That said, I kept the formal structure of the book open to innovation, having also decided to avoid a strictly chronological approach. This helped me combine reflections on art with investigations into political activism, mix biographical sketches with social history, all the while toggling between my own thoughts and those of my interviewees.

I started researching on the book during the pandemic, so I just procured all sorts of Kannada books and set about reading them. Soon, I was seeking out interviews with writers and activists who had lived through these times, and one thing led to another. There was so much to absorb. The book was spurred by my own quest to understand our present political moment, and Karnataka began to feel like a microcosm of the various socio-cultural debates we are surrounded by. I am also a big fan of the history-of-ideas genre, and wanted to do something along those lines for the Kannada milieu.

What was so effervescing about the 1970-80 period that gave an impetus to conscientious Kannadigas to work for so hopefully towards achieving social justice and equality?

The chaluvalis (movements) in Karnataka were very much a part of the post-1968 effervescence the world over: a young generation embarking on paths of great idealism and moral fervour after having decided that the world is too rotten to be endured passively. As a responsible and rebellious people, Kannada society simultaneously energised an astonishing range of causes: labour struggles, massive farmers’ mobilisation, feminist affirmations, a powerful Dalit upsurgence, street theatre, environmental movements. An activist I interviewed vividly recalled how they used to throng jails in huge numbers, and how this contrasted sharply with the intense stigma that now accompanies imprisonment.

The Emergency supplied a strong feeling of dissent (many framed it then as a second freedom struggle) that sustained and nourished anti-establishment sentiments. At the State level, Chief Minister Devaraj Urs had risen to power after marshalling a coalition of backward and minority communities, setting in motion ambitious land reforms and reservation policies. This regional atmosphere too contributed to the unprecedented churn of the Kannada conscience.

For the reader, it is important to understand the conceptual binary that you draw between the marga and the desi as you begin your foray into the morass of Karnataka’s cultural past. Why is this important to understand the contours of Karnataka’s cultural journey?

Yes, the very first chapter is titled “Marga, Desi, and the Battle of Identities”, and in a nutshell, we may call this the cosmopolitan/vernacular binary. This might seem rather abstract and exalted, but in fact I suspect we all have some vague conception of such a binary in our heads in our own ways, which is why I was able to find so many resonances of this metaphor across Kannada culture. It symbolises an eternal struggle between the local and the universal, and is a helpful tool in deconstructing our present post-colonial predicaments too. The first extant Kannada text, the Kavirajamarga of the 9th century, is also perhaps the first text in the world to self-consciously theorise the vernacularisation of a cosmopolitan language, namely the fusion of Kannada with the Sanskritic paradigm. This consciousness keeps turning up across Kannada texts for centuries.

In the 20th century, Kuvempu and his cohort inaugurated the Navodaya renaissance in Kannada literature, which was very much kicked off by the encounter with the Anglophone world. Yet, they were acutely conscious of their desire to fuse nativity with modernity, and this gave that generation a measure of broad-mindedness and universal concern, values that also characterised the Indian freedom struggle. Many decades later, the scholar D.R. Nagaraj would argue why genuine desivaada was the most effective cultural and philosophical riposte to the exclusionary nationalism of the Hindu Right. He believed that neglecting such a project, just because it carried a whiff of pride about our past, would prove to be a costly decision. I found myself in complete agreement with Nagaraj’s diagnosis. Even as he acknowledged the naivety that often accompanies it, Nagaraj saw desivaada as a way of tempering our thirst for self-determination with the humility of our plural pasts. He died much too early and this project remained unfulfilled, but he still remains one of the most enduring and stimulating thinkers of his generation.

It is interesting that you chose to explain in some detail what socialism meant for the followers of Ram Manohar Lohia in Karnataka. What did it mean to be a socialist in the time of Gopala Gowda and Lohia, and how did they see themselves differently from communists and Nehruvian socialists?

Well, Nehruvian socialism was mostly a political rhetoric that saw itself as a non-aligned middle between capitalism and communism. The socialists who split from the Congress under Lohia wanted to organise the masses through vigorous mobilisation at the grassroots level. This came with the realisation that the regional rungs of the Congress leadership represented an unyielding landed elite that could only be challenged through stiff democratic opposition.

For Lohia, caste and patriarchy were the two foremost evils to be confronted head on, and his vision of transforming politics into the task of cultivating a kind of dynamic indigenous genius proved hugely inspirational to an entire generation of Kannada writers, including Poornachandra Tejaswi and P. Lankesh. The writer U.R. Ananthamurthy famously decided to write only in Kannada having been inspired by Lohia’s call for decentralising knowledge traditions. This rootedness naturally found itself at odds with the radical atheism and cultural rejections of communists.

A recurring theme that recurs in your book is that of Gandhi, who features in it either in a direct or tangential way. What makes Gandhi’s ideology relevant in Karnataka’s social movements even today?

The admiration for Gandhi goes back to the freedom struggle and Kannada literati of the early 20th century were, by and large, admirers of Gandhi. Pandit Taranath, D.V. Gundappa, and Kuvempu, to name a few big figures. In this sense, he is writ large over Kannada culture, and I discovered that many in the splintered Left found in Gandhi a way to reclaim a sense of morality and selfhood they’d lost during their fervently Marxist youth, and Prasanna Heggodu exemplifies this phenomenon. Devanuru Mahadeva, the celebrated Kannada novelist, moved me when he proclaimed that he belonged to an older generation that still nurtured Gandhi in their minds.

Gandhian environmental activism remains the strongest (and most time-tested) strategy for civil society movements to successfully respond to climate change. In my final chapter, I meet Du Saraswathi, a poet, performer, and Dalit activist who has been intimately involved in mobilising sanitation workers in Bengaluru. She told me she had always held Gandhi in regard, from childhood, and she also reflected sensitively on Gandhi’s flawed idealism when it came to caste. Of course, the faux-nationalism of our immediate present has also contributed amply to the relevance of Gandhism as a sincere pluralism that can successfully challenge the powers that be.

In your intellectual and physical excursions through the book, there is a glaring absence of discussions about movements and personalities from the Kalyana Karnataka (the northeast region of the State). Is there a reason for this?

I write in the introduction that I could not hope to reach all the State’s corners, and that behind the few names mentioned in the book lie a hundred others, equally important, whom I could not include. Though references to many of the Kalyana Karnataka districts turn up here and there, the farthest I physically travel to in the book is Ballari district, to meet the novelist Kum. Veerabhadrappa, whose novels actually evoke the Karnataka-Andhra border region a fair bit, because he lived there for many decades.

Ultimately, this book is a personal journey more than a comprehensive survey, and I knew that this would create incomplete portrayals, that the book would be a kaleidoscopic jumble of ideas and places. I do talk about the 12th-century Sharana revolution (in whose memory Kalyana Karnataka has been named) throughout the book because it still exercises such an ineluctable influence over Kannada culture, but I had to edit out a lot of stuff about the pre-modern history of Bijapur and the Adil Shahi sultanate because of space constraints: and an unfortunate consequence of this was that it cast more pall upon the region and its extraordinary cultural heritage.