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| K.V. Subbanna |
Open a newspaper in Bangalore on any random day, and in any language, and the chances are that you will see a photo of U.R. Anantha Murthy in it. Kannada novelist and English professor, author, activist and orator, Anantha Murthy, is the chief guest of choice at very many literary and cultural occasions — asked to open a library, release a book, mark a death or anniversary, or comment on a film or play.
Truth be told, it is not just in Bangalore (which he chooses to call Bengaluru) that Anantha Murthy is in demand. As a former president of the Sahitya Akademi, he is known (and admired) in all the 28 states of the republic. The English version of his novel, Samskara, is read and taught — in the masterful translation by A.K. Ramanujan — in very many American universities, from which invitations to speak naturally follow. As a lifelong socialist, he has his contacts in Eastern Europe and Latin America, who, likewise, welcome a chance to hear one of the finest public speakers of our age.
Because of these commitments, Anantha Murthy is always on the move — between cities, states and continents. One does not know where he will be next week, or next month: whether in Bangalore, Guwahati, Bangkok or Los Angeles. However, there is one week in his annual calendar that is always fixed, alloted without fail to the same habitation. This, as it happens, is not a town or mighty megalopolis, but a remote village in the Malnad region of Karnataka named Heggodu. Every October, and regardless of the other (and often more seductive) invitations that come his way, he travels to Heggodu to preside over a cultural shibir (workshop) that was started there very many years ago by a man who, in his own way, was every bit as remarkable as Anantha Murthy himself.
His name was K.V. Subbanna. Born in 1936, into a family of moderately well-to-do areca nut cultivators, Subbanna studied at the University of Mysore where he came under the influence of the great Kannada poet, Kuvempu (K.V. Puttappa). After his BA, he returned to Heggodu, where he combined farming with cultural activism. He started a theatre group named Ninasam, began a publishing house, and conducted a culture workshop whose attendees included, apart from the local villagers, clerks, craftsmen and schoolteachers from elsewhere in Karnataka. Aside from book discussions and film screenings, at this annual shibir were premiered three plays, which were then taken by the Ninasam repertory to different parts of the state. And so — as the cultural critic, Sadanand Menon, points out: “A Kurosawa or a Kumar Shahani, a Satyajit Ray or a Fellini, an Eisenstein, a Bergman or a Ghatak, a Brecht, a Dario Fo or an Adya Rangacharya, a Shivarama Karanth or a Devanur Mahadeva, an Anantha Murthy, a Márquez, a Kuvempu or a Bendre, Subbanna managed to convert them all into personal friends of the local community.”
In the world of Indian theatre, Subbanna had a deservedly high reputation as an innovator and institution builder. (His work and influence are insightfully described in a chapter of Rustam Bharucha’s book, Theatre and the World.) In the smaller and more intimate world of Kannada letters, he was equally admired as a writer whose essays ranged well beyond theatre to include poetry, film, aesthetics, classical texts, ecology, and politics. After his death in 2005, a group of followers and admirers came together to translate and edit his major essays into English. We now have the first fruits of their work, in the form of a volume entitled Community and Culture, and published by the press founded by Subbanna, Akshara Prakashana.
K.V. Subbanna lived his adult life under the shadow of the Cold War. But — unlike so many other thinkers of his generation — he refused to choose either side in that war. As he observed in his address accepting the Magsaysay award, “One half of this modern civilization — the capital-centred, freedom-oriented bloc — stressed upon freedom, while the other half — the proletarian-centred, equality oriented bloc — emphasized equality. Nevertheless, do we not today find that both these camps have destroyed both the[se] values? The over-centralised capitalist lobby of the freedom-oriented half has actually been absolutely controlling and rigidly dictating the choices of its people from simple items of food and clothing to ideologies and values, turning them into slaves under the deceptive veneer of total freedom. On the other hand, the over-centralised bureaucracy of the equality-centred bloc has reduced its people to extremely iniquitous states. Thus, both these blocs, their championing of democracy and equality notwithstanding, have in reality been rushing in exactly the opposite direction.”
To these large utopias, Subbanna opposed what the founder of subaltern studies, Ranajit Guha, once called the “small voice of history”. Thus he juxtaposed, to the greedy and profit-maximizing capitalist, the community-oriented peasant; and, to the arrogant technocrat, the sensitivity to nature of the artist. He was deeply sceptical of the cult of expertise, believing that “we have to accept some of the [modern] technology and assimilate it into our lives, but we must not let technology master us”.
In his introduction to Community and Culture, Manu Chakravarty speaks of Subbanna’s “spirit of decentralization”. In more than a geographical sense, Subbanna was far from Bangalore and further away from Delhi. However, even if he did not care for the power centres of modernity and the nation-state, they could not ignore him altogether. The expert and the politician, the capitalist and the merchant — all had to acknowledge what to them was his challenging, combative, and uncomfortable presence.
Subbanna writes that “Ninasam could not identify with any political ideology, but it always tried to debate the issues”. This recalls George Orwell’s dictum: “A writer can never be a loyal member of a political party.” To be sure, Subbanna may not have had a party affiliation, yet he did have a political orientation. Of the spectrum of ideologies on display in 20thcentury India, he identified most easily with democratic socialism. Among the names that run through this book are Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Gopal Gowda, Rammanohar Lohia and Shivarama Karanth. These men and women, all heroes to him, were all in a strict or loose sense democratic socialists. Like Subbanna, they were egalitarian as well as patriotic, despising the Congress for being in thrall to moneyed interests, yet detesting the communists for taking their clues from Moscow or Beijing. And, like Subbanna again, they had an abiding commitment to the locality.
As a human being, Subbanna was distinctive in the range of his friendships; as an activist, in the depth and impact of the institutions he nurtured; as a thinker, in the power and originality of his ideas. The best way to explain the trajectory of his thought is to quote from some lectures he delivered at the Sri Ram Centre in Delhi in 1999. Here, he analysed a trilogy of plays written by the poet, D.R. Bendre, called Hosa Samsara, whose message he summarized thus: “Then, gradually, guided by Bendre’s great poetic genius the play rises to the level of a grand metaphor reflecting an attempt at organising, and orchestrating first the family, the town, the village, the linguistic state, the nation and finally the world and the entire cosmos itself.”
This passage, it seems to me, beautifully sums up Subbanna’s own poetic and philosophical credo. He was rooted in the village of Heggodu, of course, but he simultaneously enjoyed an organic relationship with his Malnad region, his state of Karnataka, his nation of India, and the wider (human as well as non-human) cosmos of which he was also part. In his thought and practice, he seamlessly integrated these worlds — the village, the district, the state, the nation, the globe — without making any one dominant or subordinate. K.V. Subbanna was not a cosmopolitan, nor an indigenist; he was both, and more.
