Ibrahim, the maverick
“Hello. Would you have the contact details of Ibrahim Rayintakath?” asked a stranger via DM on Facebook. When I told the stranger I was not in touch with Ibrahim and did not have his contact details, the person said, “I am impressed by his illustration featured as today’s google doodle. So I wanted to contact him”. What?- I exclaimed! I had not seen that day’s google doodle. So Immediately I checked and it was an illustration whose style, though brilliant, did not seem like that of Ibrahim. I checked if it was actually by him and yes, it was by him. A smile appeared on my face- ear to ear! I kept looking at the google doodle for a while and then just lifted my head a bit to look up at a painting hanging on the wall of my room; a painting of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which Ibrahim had painted for me when we were still students at the film institute (FTII). Looking at both- Faiz and the google doodle of that day- I realized how his style had changed quite significantly, and I was happy that he, unlike many including me, was not stagnating, and was growing as an artist. The smile on my face was still in place and the stretched smile relaxed only when unconsciously a voice from my heart took wings through the lips- Kutty!
Kutty- that is how Ibrahim was referred to and popularly known on campus.
A decade ago… Few months had passed since we entered the campus and our batch of screenwriting was at a crucial junction in developing our first screenplay for submissions. My writing had kept me awake even at an hour when the hostel had gone silent, which wouldn’t happen a couple of hours past midnight. Unable to fight sleep anymore, I decided to shut my laptop and hit the bed. Just when I was about to switch off the light, I saw the water bottle on my table was almost empty. Picking it up from the table, I walked out of the room, to get the bottle filled from the water cooler placed on the floor below ours. As I got down the stairs and reached the floor below, there, next to the lift, stood a lean guy, with sandpaper beard, sketching on the wall. The sketch was a portrait of the maverick filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak! Who is this fellow?- I asked myself in silence, with jaws dropped. Though tempted to ask the man himself, his unwavering focus on his work made it not just difficult but impossible. I stood for a while admiring Ritwik Ghatak being brought to life telling myself, “If God exists and s/he really ‘makes’ us and sends us to earth, maybe this is how s/he worked in the time of Ghatak’s creation”. I filled the water, got back to the same spot, stood for a while more till Ghatak’s painting was completed, and then went back to my room.
Next day I narrated all of this to my roommate Lohit. Incidentally, our friend Maisam, from the Direction dept, was visiting our room then. He said, “That is Kutty. He is from the Art Direction department”. The Direction and Art Direction students had some common classes during the first module and that is how Maisam knew of Kutty, who largely remained silent and recluse from things happening on campus. “Do you know him?” I asked and Maisam answered in the positive. I requested Maisam to take me to Kutty’s room and introduce me to him. Maisam agreed and we went to Kutty’s room. In my mind, I had decided to request Kutty make a painting of Gulzar on the walls of our room. I had shared it with Lohit and taken his consent as well. While discussing this, Maisam had spoken about how Kutty has done paintings of his fav filmmakers on his room wall! When we knocked at the door and Kutty’s roommate opened the door, I could immediately see on the wall a huge painting of my fav filmmaker G. Aravindan! I was floored by how Kutty in his painting of Aravindan had not just done the face of the man but also captured the serenity and calmness of his personality, which was starkly different from the restless personality of Ghatak, which he had captured in his painting of Ghatak too, which I had witnessed just the previous night! Now realizing the extraordinariness of Kutty, I hesitated to ask him if he would do a painting of Gulzar in our room. While I was tossing a coin in my mind, Kutty, who was not visible until then came forward. Maisam introduced me to him. Kutty smiled and said nothing. The smile was welcoming. The coin I had flipped in my mind was still mid-air, Maisam told Kutty why I wanted to meet Kutty. I got a bit uncomfortable and irritatedly turned towards Maisam, almost asking- why did you have to say it? But before I could say anything, I heard someone in the other direction say, “Okay. Will do”. That was Kutty! Now I was smiling ear to ear, which did not end even when the joyful ‘thank you’ came out of my mouth! I immediately asked Kutty, “Please tell me how much you charge for a painting?” Kutty shook his head to say he doesn’t charge. I said, “No, that is not done”, and Kutty interrupted to say, “No, its okay”. It is hard to argue or negotiate with people who are largely silent and keep to themselves. I asked if I could at least get the paints that would be required, and Kutty said no, this time not by shaking his head but by gesturing the same with his hands. We then decided on a day and time for Kutty to come to 404, New Hostel, and do a painting of Gulzar.
Kutty came casually carrying the essentials- pencil, paint, and brush! We moved the bed, cots, and tables in the room and made space for the magic to begin. Kutty stared at the blank wall, made a mental assessment, and took out the image of Gulzar I had given him. Rahul, my classmate, immediately ran to his room and got his camera. “Let me capture the entire process,” he said. Kutty was moving his fingers in the air, staring at the wall from a distance, making an invisible draft of the painting. After a while, Kutty slowly moved closer to the wall. Rahul began to set the focus of his camera. Kutty raised his hand which held a pencil and drew the first line. Click came the sound from where Rahul stood. Magic had begun to unfold.
In the next couple of hours, Kutty brought Gulzar to life in our room. It was like Gulzar had slowly emerged out of the wall. Rahul had captured every stage of the painting on his camera. We proudly said- Now Gulzar is also our roommate! In the end, Kutty posed with the painting for the camera, and Kutty and I together also posed with Gulzar for the camera. These pictures, in a day, went on Facebook. The whole of campus got to know about the painting Kutty did in our room. Some friends visited the room to see the painting and if we ever kept the room door half-open, passersby would peep in and say a word or two admiring the painting. Above all the room’s atmosphere changed with Gulzar coming in, through Kutty. The space which through our living there had already become personal, became even more personal, and our attachment to the room got a bit more intense! Because of Kutty!
Life went on and whenever Kutty and I crossed paths we just exchanged smiles and travelled in our own orbits. But that simple, unpretentious smile of Kutty would recharge my soul. We never met for coffee/ tea. We never sat and discussed cinema or art or even our own lives. But we developed fondness for each other in silence. Some months later, on realizing that I would have to vacate the hostel at the end of the course and with that my relation with the Gulzar painting would come to an end, I requested Kutty to do a painting on canvas which I can carry home with me. He suggested this time we do something other than Gulzar. I had to decide and after much thought, I decided to request Kutty to do a painting of Faiz. I went and bought a good canvas, some paints and brushes in the next few days and informed Kutty about it. One fine afternoon Kutty came to 404 and brought Faiz to life on canvas. Though he had not read Faiz, he almost gave the painting a touch that captured the mood of Faiz’s aesthetics. The strokes of the Faiz painting were different from that of Gulzar, both captured their essence. How did Kutty grasp this? – I still do not know. The magical and mystical nature of creative energy is such, perhaps!
I again took a photo of the painting made by Kutty and posted it on Facebook. Several weeks later one night while sitting and chatting under the Wisdom Tree, fellow student Shwetabh Singh asked, “How do you convince Kutty to do paintings after paintings for you?” and I very casually said, “It requires no convincing. Make a request and he will just do it. He doesn’t throw weight.” Shwetabh expressed disbelief by staring at me with raised eyebrows for a moment. He then told me how some of them had requested Kutty to do a painting for them in their room and Kutty made some excuse! It just made me feel very very special, though I couldn’t understand why he had not agreed to do painting for others. Kutty is a man who follows his heart, his intuition- I realized, and I was glad his intuitive feeling had not come in the way between him and me.
Recollecting all of this, when a stranger on Facebook asked me about Kutty after seeing the google doodle made by him, I wondered where Kutty was! I had not kept in touch with him after I left the campus. We had hardly spoken, so keeping in touch via email or texts made no sense to me, or rather felt very artificial for our silent friendship. But after all those years now I just wanted to know where Kutty is and wished to get in touch with him. I immediately rang Lohit, my former classmate and roommate at the film institute, who had taken admission in the Direction course and was back on campus. He told me how Kutty discontinued his schooling at the film institute after the first year and never got back to complete it! He also told me that Kutty did not keep in touch with anyone from the batch and so nobody knows where he is! I was shocked. But on reflecting the kind of person and artist Kutty as I had seen him, I realized it isn’t surprising that Kutty did not complete the course, discontinued schooling and did not keep in touch with anyone. He was his own master and will always be- I told myself.
That evening Lohit called to tell me Shahi is in touch with Kutty and said he had collected Kutty’s number from Shahi for me. I was overjoyed when he said this and promptly sent me the number soon after disconnecting the call. Once the number landed in my inbox, I wasn’t sure if I should contact Kutty, because we had hardly spoken and also because he had consciously not remained in touch with many from the institute. Contemplating on whether to get in touch with Kutty or not, I took two days to finally drop a text to Kutty. “Hi, this is Samvartha,” I texted. After a few hours, when Kutty saw the text, he immediately replied, “Man! So good to hear from you” and followed it up with, “It has been long,” and then immediately with something that I did not expect coming. He said, “Did you make any films? If you are making films, I will do the posters for all your films.” Kutty had again brought a broad smile on my face and tears into my eyes! “I haven’t done any films yet. I don’t see myself doing one either. But, in case some miracle happens and I end up doing a film, you can do the posters!” The conversation, as expected, did not last long. But it did not feel abrupt, awkward or anything. Even in its brevity it was complete and fulfilling.
For over a year we occasionally texted each other- never asking how the other person is- but sharing some work which we thought/ felt the other person would be interested in engaging with. Then there was a long period of silence. It is during this phase that I had started working on translation of Nagraj Manjule’s poetry collection unhaachya kataaviruddh to Kannada.
After four drafts when I finally met Nagraj Manjule, had an elaborate discussion with him about his poems and my translation, I had decided to rework on the translation one last time and that would be my final draft. Soon after my return from Pune I began reworking on the final draft and also getting ready to go to Trivandrum for the International Film Festival of Kerala, a yearly ritual friend Rachita and I had put into place. Since it was the final draft I was working on and because my translation had been approved by Nagraj, I had started dreaming about the book coming out soon. I had happily communicated to the publisher Kishore that the final version of the translation will be ready soon and suggested he gets ready to publish the book. Kishore was happy and got into the logistics of it. He said, “Once your manuscript is ready we need to do pagination, get an ISBN, and we also need to get the cover page designed”.
After the conversation with Kishore, I was telling Rachita how nice it is to have her by me when these developments are taking place because she was by me when the whole act of translation began. I was also updating her about the journey the translation work has made and how now we are discussing the final stages. Maybe because I was in Kerala or maybe because I was with a friend from the film institute, or maybe because of both combined, or maybe because of destiny, while being preoccupied with the cover design, about which I was discussing with Rachita, I suddenly remembered Kutty! I jumped in the middle of our walk back to the room after dinner, stopped Rachita then and there and asked, “How about asking Kutty to do the cover design?” Of course it had been years and Rachita couldn’t immediately recollect Kutty. “Who Kutty?” she asked. “arrey!” I exclaimed and said, “Ibrahim Kutty, the one who painted Gulzar on the hostel wall”, I said. “Wonderful!” said Rachita in her signature style. Once we got back to the room, I kept typing messages, editing it, rephrasing it etc to send Kutty, to check if he could do the cover design for my book. I was unhappy with every text I had typed, so I decided to give it time and do it the following day.
Next morning while having breakfast, I decided to send a voice note to Kutty instead of a written text. “You once told me you would do the posters for my film. I don’t see myself doing films. But now I have a book ready to be published. Will you do the cover page for it?” I asked in a long voice note where I also explained about the collection unhaachya kaTaaviruddh and the poet Nagraj Manjule. In no time Kutty replied saying he would happily do the cover page. I was overjoyed. Kutty then said to do an appropriate cover design he wanted me to send him the translation of the poems because he did not understand Marathi! Damn! With a sad face I replied to him saying my translation was in Kannada and not in English. “I understand neither of them,” said Kutty and before I could process it, he said, “But I want to do this”. Kutty and I then got on to a call… I was hearing the voice of Kutty after so long! I was happy that he wanted to do the cover page and that I was hearing his voice after so long. In that joyful conversation without me realizing the coffee on the table got cold. But Kutty and I had made a breakthrough. Kutty asked me if I could do an English translation of the poems and also suggested that I could come up with two books simultaneously. I laughed aloud and told Kutty that I am not confident about my English. Kutty asked me to forget about publishing the English translation, but asked if I could do an English translation of these poems just for him to get a sense of the poems. I wasn’t confident even to do that. So I suggested doing a prosaic English translation of the poems and give explanations for the same. Kutty agreed to it. I told Kutty that I would not do a prosaic translation of each poem but only a few, the ones which I think are important and capture the mood of the collection, sufficient enough to hint Kutty on the kind of cover page he could design.
In the next few days I did a prosaic translation of six to seven poems of Nagraj Manjule into English. All for Kutty. On returning home I added Kutty to the chain mail that was being exchanged between Kishore, the publisher, Prajna who was doing the proofreading of all the drafts and me. Introducing Kutty to Kishore and Prajna, I announced that Kutty would be doing the cover-page and also shared with them his earlier works- of Gulzar and Faiz- for them to get an understanding of Kutty and his works. The two of them happily applauded the decision of bringing in Kutty. In a couple of weeks Kutty sent a design for the cover page, an absolutely new style from Kutty! In a few lines he had explained how he did not want to illustrate any poem’s content but wanted to create, through his art, an emotional atmosphere that tunes the readers to the poems. As much as I liked the idea and the thought behind it, I somehow wasn’t convinced entirely by the cover he had prepared. Maybe it was my own bias which was looking for a certain style of Kutty which I associated him with. But Kutty, being the maverik artist that he is, continuously redefining himself and growing in style, had reached newer horizons. Since my relation with Kutty hasnt been either intimate nor just transactional, I could just sit and write a mail to Kutty explaining what about Nagraj’s poems speaks to me, why I find that voice important, why this collection, this translation means so much to me and where I personally stand in my life, what my worldview is and how this project is a reflection of all that. Kutty, the aloof and silent, did not reply to the mail. But in a few days he sent me a rough sketch of the gulmohar flowers, and in a line responded to my mail which showed how he had grasped the essence of my thoughts just perfectly. The cover design by itself spoke for it too! Kutty again made me smile ear to ear… But it was not for too long. Now, Kutty shared his vision of not wanting to use any available font for the cover. “A handwritten text of the title will go well with this,” he said. I agreed with his vision but how were we to make it happen? Kutty doesn’t know Kannada, and I don’t know how to use technology, software etc. Years ago when Kutty had to write a couplet of Faiz on canvas, to accompany the painting, I had written the text in Devnagri script. It was possible also because Kutty and I were in the same physical space and it was manual. Now we were not in the same space and the writing involved technology! There was a knot which had to be disentangled. Kutty then came up with an idea. He said, “Write the text in Kannada and send it to me. I will replicate it here and then you can check if I have got it right.” The idea appealed to me. But now the problem was this- over the years, unused to writing after making a shift to typing, my handwriting had turned worse than what it originally was. So, I made my parents write on a sheet of paper ‘bisilina shaDyantrada viruddha‘- Kannada title of the book, took an image of it and sent it to Kutty. I had used arrow marks to show how the strokes move while writing. Following the cue, Kutty recreated the Kannada alphabets and sketched the title which looked ragefully blossomed- like the central image of the title poem! With that the cover page was almost final. Kutty shared it on the chain mail and Kishore and Prajna also welcomed it.
The time and effort that went into translating unhachya kaTaaviruddh is a story in itself. It took over 6 drafts and the story spans between 2016 and 2022. The process of translation which began in full force in the 2018 monsoon, reached a final stage at the end of 2019 Dec. The plan then was to release the book in 2020 April. When the pandemic hit and the planned release of bisilina shaDyantrada viruddha had to be postponed indefinitely, it ached my heart very much. In those days I have just watched the cover page designed by Kutty and felt better.
In the time between 2020 and 2022 when the release got delayed, I narrated to all my students, batch after batch, the story of translating Nagraj’s poetry collection and also showed them the cover page designed by Kutty. When the world was moving at a different pace and life was flipping between the real and the unreal, and the journey of translation began seeming distant and hence a bit unreal, the cover page made the entire journey seem real. I held on to it.
During this phase, I did get frustrated several times and expressed it before Nagraj Manjule. At times I urged him to agree for an online release event. But Nagraj Manjule convinced me in return to be patient, wait for things to get back to normal. “When you have put so much of effort, why not have the book released in a celebratory manner?” he would ask. Then one day he said, “Even my film has not released because of the pandemic. So I understand your frustration. Let Jhund release first and then after a month of its release, let us release your book”. Those words convinced me entirely.
In Feb 2022 when the release dates of Jhund was announced, I could slowly see my book also coming to life. A conversation with Nagraj enabled us to decide on a tentative date for the release. I immediately dropped a text to Kishore and Kutty to get ready for the final lap of the journey. My enthusiasm was out of control and in consultation with Rajaram Tallur, the preparation began. But there was no response from Kutty. Weeks passed and Kutty hadn’t responded. I sent reminders. No response. Knowing Kutty’s elusive and maverick swabhaava, his sudden disappearance wasn’t surprising. But then, I was getting worried about both- Kutty and the book. So finally I sent a melodramatic text saying it was urgent and Kutty replied saying he has been unwell and has moved to his hometown and his laptop, in which all the works are there, is not with him! My concern about both reached next level. But it is not possbible for me to prioritize anything over human life. Hence, I decided to ask Kutty to not worry and take care of himself. But by then Kutty said its possible that the raw files of the page are on his mail which he can access. He asked for some time to look for it. In a couple of hours the raw files landed in my inbox. On the other hand, by then, the inner pages of the books were designed and ready. Now the cover page was wedded to the inside pages and made ready for print. And in a day, the book was sent to the press.
Few days later Kishore sent some images of the published book. People from the press had clicked photos and sent it to Kishore, which he had forwarded it to me. The quality of the image wasn’t that great and as a result the book cover looked a bit weak. My heart became heavy. But I did not know what to do but hope that the books in real look much different from what it looks in the photograph. That night when Kishore and I spoke, we decided that it would be better if the books are sent to Udupi directly where the book launch event is happening rather than sending them to Bangalore where Kishore lives and then him bringing them to Udupi. Two days later the books were sent to Udupi from Bombay where the book was printed. With my friend Vivek I went to the bus-stop to collect the cartons that carried the books. I was keeping my fingers crossed while driving back home with a carton of books before me, and Vivek sitting behind me on the scooter holding one carton of books.
On reaching home, very anxiously I opened the carton and against all my fears, the book cover had come out extremely beautiful. I held the book in my hand like a young girl holding her birthday gift- a frock that she had desired for long! After checking if the print of the inside pages are fine, and showing my parents the copy, I immediately rang Kutty. It was a video call for I wanted to show him the book. I wasn’t sure if he had recovered, and if he would answer. To my luck Kutty answered and I saw Kutty’s face after almost 9 years! He was smiling, as he always did, ear to ear, and on seeing his face, I too was smiling ear to ear. I showed him the book, with twinkle in my eyes. He got super excited and said, “Oh! Finally!” and I joined him in repeating, “yes, finally!”
Unfortunately Kutty couldn’t attend the book launch event. Few days after the launch, I sent Kutty a copy of the book. When it reached him, Kutty sent an image of it via whatsapp. I could imagine him smiling ear to ear. I texted back asking if he is happy with the outcome. “Definitely am!” he said and added, “Its the first book cover I’ve made.” It was followed with a “Haha” which made me first go “Oh” out of surprise and then laugh with Kutty hahahaha.
I secretly want to believe that many might have approached him for a book cover, but he refused to do it. Maybe some day some Shwetabh will ask me, “How did you convince Kutty to do the cover page?” I wouldn’t have an answer for that. But I would have this long story of my strangely beautiful association with Kutty to share, and a beautiful cover-page to flaunt!
bell hooks, my friend
bell hooks is no more.
thank you, my friend, for being the friend you have been to this stranger all these days!
yes, bell hooks is a friend though I haven’t met her even once.
It was in the summer of 2019 that I finally picked up the book All About Love after it being there in my personal library for nearly three years then. while reading it I was so deeply touched by every sentence that I just wanted to pick several expressions, phrases, sentences, and passages from the book, hold them by their hand, and kiss them! by centering politics and life around the idea and practice of love and stressing on ‘love ethic’, bell hooks theoretically and intellectually concretized for me a worldview which until then was unconsciously being formed in the same direction under the influence of the words of Shailendar, Paulo Freire, Basavanna, Kabir, Gibran etc.
after reading her All About Love, i quickly picked up Salvation, her second book in the four-book series on love. it made it possible for me to view the world in a very different way since it dealt with black people and love. while reading it, i was constantly engaged with the thought of how one could view the Indian marginalized sections from a similar lens of love. it only humbled me and widened my horizon and made my heart even more tender.
next, i picked up her The Will To Change, and, no exaggeration, while reading this book it did not feel like reading a book. i never thought i would weep reading a non-fiction book, but while reading The Will to Change i wept endlessly like a child, like weeping in therapy sessions. it certainly was therapeutic to an extent. The Will to Change deals with ‘men. masculinity and love’ and it addresses with great depth and more importantly with great compassion and kindness, the pressure of patriarchy on men; an issue that i have been trying to articulate for a long period of time. reading this book, as said earlier, did not feel like reading a book. it felt like making a new friend who heard the silence between my heartbeats, the unvoiced cries within me, and then just put her arms on my shoulder and silently said, “I understand you.”
my friend, your books Communion and Where We Stand remain half-read and stare at me from my bookshelf. there are many more books of yours, my friend, that i wish to read and I will certainly read them and keep you alive in my living of life and in my whole-hearted attempt to practice of love ethic.
bell hooks, my friend, you are the only author other than Galeano whose hand I wished to kiss. it will never be possible. but your arms will always be around my shoulder and in its warmth, I will feel more and more grounded. thank you for being yourself, my friend.
rest in love, bell hooks.
The Untranslatable Poetry
In the year 2017 when the publishers of my first book sent me the complimentary copies of my book, I showed it to my mother with great pride. My mother smiled reading its title ‘rooparoopagaLanu daaTi‘ and asked me what was the book about. I told her it’s a compilation if 74 poems from across the globe, from different languages, translated into Kannada by me. She said nothing after that went back to cooking, and I got back to my room.
In some time Amma knocked at my door and when I opened she held a bowl of gaajar ka halwa… She scooped out a spoonful of halwa, put it in my mouth saying, “I dont understand poetry, but I am very happy for you.” There was mist in her eyes.
As I got back to work station, with halwa in my mouth and tears in my eyes, I realized that the best poetry is mother’s love. That, I realized, I will never be able to translate.
***
That evening when I natrated this to my friend Randheer Kaur, she recollected a poem by Surjit Patar, originally written in Punjabi, and roughly translated it for me into English…
The poem by Surjit Patar in the translation of Gurshminder Jagpal reads:
My mother could not comprehend my poem
though it was written in my mother tongue
She only understood
son’s soul suffers some sorrow
But with me alive
wherefrom did his sorrow arrive
With utmost keenness
my unlettered mother gazed at my poem
Look!
The womb-born
conceal from mother
and confide sorrow in papers
My mother picked the paper
and held it close to bosom
Perhaps, thus
would get closer
born from me.
(Originally written as an Instagram post on 2021 mothers’ day)
From Speaking Silence to the Poetry of the Unuttered
I must begin by confessing I am not an official student of Pattabhirama Somayaji (Pattabhi from here on), meaning I haven’t been his classroom student. Yet, I do consider him my teacher and me his student. I doubt if anyone who comes in contact with Pattabhi can escape being his student, for everyone who crosses paths with him will have their horizon widened.
Pattabhi and silence
It was mid-April of 2006. A solidarity protest held in Udupi, in support of the hunger strike that Medha Pathkar had undertaken in Gujarat. By the time I, still a PG student then, reached the spot- outside of the the then Taluq Office, Udupi- after classes, the solidarity event had already begun. It was the first-ever protest I took part in, and I was not familiar with many of them who had gathered there, except a couple of them. As I joined the gathering, one of the senior activists who I knew, said, “I am glad you came,” and then pointing at a man in a long kurta, seated amidst the protestors, continued, “Pattabhi spoke just before you arrived. You missed it.”
Throughout the solidarity event that evening, I kept seeing how Pattabhi was being respectfully greeted by everyone who joined us eventually, and everyone who greeted him got a wordless charming warm smile in return. The silence, I could sense, wasn’t silent. I found that non-silent silence extremely intriguing. When the solidarity gathering came to an end that evening, someone who I held in respect back then said, “Come let me introduce you to Pattabhi”, and I excitedly followed the man. Pattabhi was standing in a corner and smoking a cigarette. When introduced, Pattabhi just raised his hand, with the burning cigarette between his fingers, exhaled the smoke, and just smiled without uttering a single word.
That is how I got introduced to Pattabhi and his defining non-silent silence and his charming warm smile.
Pattabhi and minimalism of spoken-words
It was a long long evening in Sagara at the residence of Vrinda and PV Subraya. The latter was Pattabhi’s college-mate in Mysore. By this time Pattabhi and I had become friends who exchanged texts occasionally. As soon as a senior friend and I reached PV Subraya and Vrinda’s place, Pattabhi keeping aside his glass of whisky, welcomed us with a warm embrace.
That evening, my senior friend, who was a former colleague of PV Subraya, narrated the story of an unrealized dream. When working in Sagara, our friend, wanted to build a small hut in the backyard of PVS and Vrinda’s house and live a humble life. Prior to the teaching job at Sagara, the friend had worked in Jharkhand with a documentary filmmaker and worked in the midst of the aboriginals there. Expectations and pressure from the family had compelled him to quit the life of an explorer and take up a job in Sagara. There he wished to live a minimalist life, in a hut. But within a year, he had to leave Sagara for a job he got in Manipal. Narrating all of this our friend very emotionally said, “I took up the job unwillingly. But I am happy that I have been able to take arts and ideas into this otherwise corporate setup. I have been trying to churn thoughts and dialogues on issues that matter in this otherwise indifferent setup. I am not satisfied, but I am happy that I am able to do these.”
Listening to all of these patiently with his legs crossed and his index finger on his mouth, Pattabhi, without any hesitation and yet without any condescension, said, “It is good that you are doing this job of sensitizing blindfolded people. But, what is the state of the hut?” He said nothing more. Even we had nothing to say after listening to his minimalistic response.
This conversation has always stood as an example of Pattabhi’s silence and also his quality of not mincing words and not wasting words.
Pattabhi’s speeches & lectures
When I joined The Hindu (Mangalore office) as a reporter, in 2008, one of the initial assignments I had was to cover a protest meet, where Pattabhi was also present. The protest wasn’t held by the organization which Pattabhi identified himself with. The organizers had prioritized speakers from their organization. A reporter who stood next to me, who did not know of my friendship with Pattabhi, getting impatient with the on-going speeches, said in frustration, “Why are they not handing over the mic to Prof Pattabhi?” I looked at the reporter with surprise. A reporter waiting for the speech of a particular person at a protest and getting angry over the delay of the speech, said so much about the street speeches of Pattabhi. Acting naïve, I asked the reporter, why was he waiting for the speech of Prof Pattabhi and I clearly remember him telling me, “At such protests, almost everyone speaks the same stuff and most of them are predictable. But he is someone who brings in a new perspective and brings in fresh thoughts and insights.”
During my tenure with The Hindu, Mangalore, for professional reasons I had to interact closely with the the then students of Pattabhi. This was in 2009, after the infamous attack on women at a pub in Mangalore. Following the attack which brought the national media’s attention to Mangalore, several protests were being held and Pattabhi was making several furious speeches. One of his statements to a TV channel irked the members of ABVP in the college he was teaching and those students went on strike demanding the expulsion of Pattabhi. When I went to report this occurrence, the students of ABVP mistook the name of the newspaper I was working for as a pro-Hindutva paper. They not just told me how they were backed by “higher-ups in the party” to protest against Pattabhi but also confessed to me that most of the times in class they instigate Pattabhi to speak of “controversial subjects” that are “political” in nature. Even the protesting students, backed by the VHP and BJP, considering me a friend (since I worked for HINDU paper) told me that though they would get irked by the statements Pattabhi would make in class and disagree with his politics, they still consider him to be, “a good teacher and an extremely knowledgeable person.” At the same time, I was also speaking with the students who stood in support of Pattabhi and against the ABVP students. These bunch of students who knew me for my political and ideological leanings would tell me at length about the lectures of Pattabhi and I can strongly remember some of them telling me how Pattabhi showed more interest in them getting an education than their family members. “It is not just his affection but also the kind of issues he addresses in class and the way he looks at and analyses literature which instils strength in us, grounds us,” one girl had told me.
On evenings when I would be relieved from the office of The Hindu a bit early, I would go meet Pattabhi at his residence. The nature of daily reporting did not allow me to engage with the kind of reading and writing which stimulated me. The easiest way of compensating for all of it was to spend some time with Pattabhi. It is during these informal sessions where Pattabhi and my bonding strengthened.
On such evenings, I got to hear Pattabhi at length. Those were neither street speeches, nor class lectures. Yet they were both and more. If Pattabhi’s street speeches were filled with insights and interpretations, like a literary class, his literary classes were marked by political consciousness, like street speeches. The same was a part of personal conversations in private spaces too. In strange ways the political, the personal, and professional came together in Pattabhi and not just became one but went beyond all the boundaries.
Pattabhi and anger
You are not a friend to Pattabhi, if you have not been subjected to his anger; anger which is not an outburst but anger which boils like water, with bubbling expressions in language, and then cooling down over time.
“Please bear my cross with you,” once came an SMS from him. Who fights so gracefully and artistically?- I had wondered!
Once Pattabhi and another senior friend of mine had a disagreement and the conflict went on for long. It was a difficult situation for people like me who were younger to both and held both in great respect and affection. Pattabhi those days would repeatedly make obvious his anger towards the other senior friend of mine. Probably it was his child-like notorious way of testing my loyalty. I don’t know. So he would refer to the other senior friend as “dushTa” (evil). Once when I mentioned this to another friend of my age group, he very playfully asked why Pattabhi was being so decent even in his rage. Until he mentioned it in a joking manner it hadn’t occurred to me that even in his anger Pattabhi was maintaining a dignity of language!
The same fight between titans continued for some more time and it angered me more because I had failed to bridge the gap between two senior friends of mine. Also, I felt some of Pattabhi’s anger, triggered by his fight with the other senior friend, was being displaced on me. I was hurt by it to an extent. When I confronted him with this complaint, Pattabhi in his signature style, said, “You are holding him on your head (an expression in Kannada equivalent to ‘putting someone on a pedestal). So when I spit at him (a Kannada expression for verbally expressing anger), a bit of it falls on you too. If you wish to escape it, you must not carry him on your head.” I was floored by the image he brought in! There were metaphors even in angry expressions! For a moment I forgot everything and marveled at the literariness of that expression.
As much as I have respected Pattabhi for always having a space to fight with him, and for him to fight with his dear ones, I have equally respected him for the way he fights with his friends without abusing the language. It only shows how language is such an important tool for Pattabhi and knowing its strength and its power, he doesn’t want to mishandle the tool, even in a fit of anger!
Pattabhi’s poetry
Having tried to map Pattahi through shades of his communication, I must confess, in the end now that I have always struggled to decipher his Avant-guard poems. Jokingly I have said some of my friends that when Pattabhi writes poems in English, I feel I do not know English and when he writes in Kananda, I feel I do not know Kannada. Maybe, along with English and Kannada, I also do not know poetry. Possible. But I have always believed that his poems, which I cannot say I have understood in its entirety, is another extreme of his loaded silences, and I cannot but have my jaws dropped at the poetry that is not just an excellent play of words but also says more through the unsaid than the said.
Pattabhi’s range between speaking silence and poetry of the unuttered is just amazing!
Conclusion
When requested to write for this volume, I initially wanted to write about the loneliness of Pattabhi, drawing the title from Arundhati Roy’s essay on Noam Chomsky. In the intended essay, I wanted to explore the political, literary, and emotional aloneness of Pattabhi. Probably it is the fate of the unconventional and those who are above and beyond the set frame-works to end up being left alone, like an island in an ocean. That was about his political and literary loneliness. But what has always haunted me is his emotional loneliness and have never dared to speak of. When I started to write the intended essay, I found myself trying to explore and understand- through writing- the emotional loneliness of Pattabhi, more than the other- political and literary- loneliness of his. Not just because I wasn’t sure if my understanding is right, but also because of some inexplicable reason, I abandoned that essay and began to write this. But the attempt to write the intended essay made me realize that Pattabhi for me has been more of an emotional connection than being just a comrade of concern or guiding light in literary sensibility. Now, that emotional connection can be best explained only through silence or probably by the unuttered in the spoken.
I have not just admired Pattabhi in all these years, I have also had severe fights with him, disagreed with him and his actions. I have felt he is wrong on some occasions and has seen how he has been wronged on some other occasions. All shades of emotions have colored my relationship with Pattabhi, but the constant undercurrent always has been that of love. Probably it is only love which makes space for togetherness with disagreements, and acceptance of humans with all their flaws and shortcomings.
***
Article written for oDalu: oDanaaDigala oDalaaLa, a festschrift for Prof. Pattabhirama Somayaji ideated and edited by Rajalakshmi Narasajjan with the assistance of Shareef Salethur.
Pattabhi is retiring on the 31st of this month.
Relationship with Languages
Someone with whom I shared an intimate bonding, once told me, “I can have sex only in English.”
Their words made me reflect and I realized I feel hungry in Kannada, think in English, experience pain and love in Hindustani, and my struggle with mental-health is in all three languages.
Some people like me are torn between languages.
Kannada has given me the earth to be rooted in, English has granted me the sky to fly and Hindustani has tempered my heart to feel a connection with things. But the language of my inscape always is: silence.
I have a complicated relationship with languages.
(Note written on the occasion of International Mother Language Day observed on 21 Feb)
Simple Solutions
Couple of years ago a friend told me about a Skills Workbook for those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) that she was suggested to refer by her then therapist. “I am benefiting from it, Sam” she said, silently suggesting I too read and use the Workbook for my own betterment. I wished her good and brushed aside the matter for I had become too cynical and skeptical about mental health practices in general and especially books on mental health that promise help!
Few months ago, however, when I also began looking within (along with looking around) and re-evaluating my thoughts around mental health issues & mental health practices, I remembered of the Skills Workbook and thought of putting myself through it. I contacted my friend and asked her for the exact title of the book and the name of the authors. Giving me all the required details, my friend said, “On bad days I find those skills extremely helpful and am grateful to that book. But on brighter days I find that book quite stupid.” I was a bit desperate those days to find a way out and did not care what my friend thought on what days. (I did not mind what she said either.) I wasn’t ready to reverse my decision since I had already convinced myself to go through the book and the techniques it offers. Soon after the conversation with my friend, I decided to place an order for the Skills Workbook. The book was available for buying on an online book buying platform. But it was expensive. Quite expensive for a freelancer like me. But I was tired of my burdened self and was desperately looking for a way out too! I placed the order for the book.
In a few days time the book was delivered at my home address. I was excited.I opened the book hungrily and began to read without any delay. But as I flipped through the pages I found myself becoming angry. The skills and techniques offered and suggested in the book were extremely simple and appeared simplistic to help me and solve the issues which has been bothering me for ages now. “Is the solutions are so simple, why did I have to suffer so much for so long?”- I asked myself. I have been so entangled in my struggle for years that I had come to believe that the way out is difficult and a complicated one too. A solution as simple as the ones offered in the book, felt like being told that the problem also is a simple one! My struggle and the scars gifted by the struggle felt insulted and trivialized by the offering of such simple solutions! Also, what added to my anger was the fact that a book offering such simple solutions was so expensive! But since I had paid such a huge amount to purchase a personal copy of the book, I decided to continue reading.
To my surprise, as I kept following the simple techniques suggested by the book, I realized those simple skills were slowly helping me manage myself, my emotions, and my life, slightly better. I took some time to recognize this, realize this and then acknowledge it. My ego was coming in the way. But when I finally acknowledged it, I realized that usually the answer for even the most complicated things are not just simple but lay in the basics. The solution, I began to realize, is in going back to the basics of life. And the basics are always simple! (Though the way to getting back to the basics of life and the simple solutions is a tough journey to make.)
“Poetry for him is an Ordinary Mystery.” : Guillermo Rodriguez on A.K. Ramanjuan (Interview)
Samvartha ‘Sahil’: My first question or rather a request to you is to define the corpus of AK Ramanjuan (AKR) through an image or a metaphor and explain the different dimensions of AKR that get reflected in that image/ metaphor.
Guillermo Rodriguez: There are a series of crucial metaphors in AKR´s life and poetry, and many of them are related to nature, such as the (upside down) tree, the orange (fruit) in the tree, the snake etc. But I would say that (window-)glass is perhaps one of the most enigmatic and powerful images in AKR`s poetry as well as in his aesthetics. He once scribbled in his diary notes, “glass is good, it reflects to the outsider and refracts for insiders”.
Guillermo Rodiruguez
That is, depending on the point of view (where you stand) and how light hits the glass, you may either see yourself in a mirror reflection or see through the window to the external world, to the outsider who in turn may not see you standing behind the glass but see his own reflection. The window-glass is therefore a metaphor of the complexity of the human “self” which is invested with an inner and outer “vision” and composite “relations”. And glass is fragile, as is “the self”; it can break into pieces. Ramanujan´s choice of glass metaphors also testifies to his kaleidoscopic view of the world and to his belief that “truth is only in fragments.” In his poetry there are abundant glass and mirror metaphors. He often plays with perception, view points and optical effects, showing us how an image can be constructed from a concrete visual sense impression and then move beyond the particular in concentric circles, expanding meanings and reflections; thus performing a poetic play of mirrors, as it where. The related concepts of reflexivity and self-reflexivity were also a central to his understanding of Indian literature.
SS: Can you map the ‘becoming’ of AK Ramanjuan, tracing his journey as a writer and thinker? It would be great if you can mark the major milestones and turns/ shifts of this ‘becoming’. I mean evolution of his intellectual and creative self.
GR: There were several crucial moments and milestones in AKR`s life which defined his intellectual evolution and writing career. In 1943, for instance, when he was barely fourteen years old, AKR failed a final exam in history, which made him turn to writing prose and poetry in Kannada. Another decisive moment in his youth was when he threw away his sacred thread, thereby shunning his Brahmin tradition and legacy; instead, he embraced rationalism, existentialism and other philosophies, as well as medieval Kannada Virasaiva bhakti poetry which advocated an anti-brahminical revolutionary stance. Years later as a Professor of English in Belgaum in the early 1950s he was drawn to folklore and collected oral tales and women narratives. This was also a very fruitful period in his life as he began to flourish as a poet in English. In 1958, tired and disappointed with teaching English, he decided to study linguistics in Pune which eventually took him to the USA in 1959 as a Fulbright Scholar. His moving to America, and his constant “in-betweenness,” crisscrossing between disciplines, traditions, cultures, and tensions, moulded his multicultural intellectual profile and fed into his creativity. Linguistics and structuralism as a young researcher and professor in the U.S. in effect became the foundational ground on which his intellectual “toolbox” rested. This, along with his accidental discovery of an anthology of Tamil classical Sangam poetry in the basement of a library at the University of Chicago, marked his scholarship as well as poetic style which stayed with him throughout his career. In the latter phase of his life his structuralist convictions were shaken by post-structuralist theories (the later Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida etc.) which he also absorbed creatively into his own thinking and work as a writer.
SS: Like the title of his essay 300 Ramayanas we can say that there exist 300 Ramanujans, though 300 might sound a bit of an exaggeration. But the Ramanujan as a poet, as a translator from English, as a translator to English, as an essayist, as an anthropologist, as a writer in Kannada, as a writer in English, as a reader in Kannada, reader in English, reader in Tamil, as a researcher. How do these various facets of AKR flow into one another and influence one another? As an interviewer, on behalf of the (imagined) readers I request you to elaborate on this with some examples.
GR: AKR`s life and work was multi-layered. Moving from his native Mysore to Chicago and around the world, wherever he went and worked he continued to enlarge his multidisciplinary outlook both as a scholar and artist. This heterogeneity was further nurtured in his manifold professional engagements at the University of Chicago. He stated in an interview conducted by Chidananda Das Gupta in 1983: “One of the fortunate things of my life is that I have been able to keep the miscellaneousness interests of my youth alive – because I landed up in a place where this was formally recognised. It’s good to feel that these interests are not hobbies I pursue outside my field.” In AKR’s intellectual and artistic “miscellaneousness” there is, however, a continuous dialogue and reflexivity, which were also characteristic principles of Indian literary texts as he stressed in his essays. The multiple traditions, languages (mainly English, Kannada, and Tamil) and disciplines AKR absorbed therefore formed a very creative interaction in his self and in his work encompassing the diverse scholarly interests, the poetry, as well as the translations. In his work as a scholar and translator he imbibed terminology from linguistics, literary theory, classical Tamil and medieval bhakti aesthetics, cultural anthropology and other disciplines which he constantly revised. And his interests remained always in balance between the “higher” arts and disciplines and the popular forms of expression such as traditional oral tales or proverbs. These multiple realities were not independent variables but inter-dependent branches of the self.
SS: Is there a Ramanjuan way of crafting words, inclusive of his pre-verbal thoughts, and what defines it?
GR: The process of writing for AKR is cyclical and open-ended. There is no conclusion in poetry; poems for him, as Valery said, are “only abandoned.” He did not believe in a pre-verbal, original form before it comes to the poet, that is, in the existence of the poem before it is written. As a trained linguist he was very conscious of language and for him only through the process of writing and re-writing and revising did the poem come into being, as “a form emerging like a face in the water.” As he explained, poems often started as a ”stir”, but then they needed to be carefully nurtured and cleaned up until they matured, lest they got “lost” or spoiled. This we learn, for instance, in the poem “Children, Dreams, Theorems.”
SS: Can you elaborate a bit on AKR’s fear, while writing, of not being able to write poetry again? And please throw light on what does this fear speak at large about the writer AKR.
GR: One could say that AKR’s suffered from an acute existential anxiety, and this became almost a chronic state. He was constantly “looking for the centre” and to deal with his recurrent fears and personal depressions he often sought advice in psychology. But writing poetry also became a way of finding himself; poetry could simultaneously be the cure and the site where his existential tensions were creatively expressed. Even a good number of his early poems from The Striders (1966) deal with the anxiety with which all poets look for inspiration and tackle his worst nightmare: the fear of the self-conscious poet whose mind is full of images, phrases and words of other poets, but who is not able to make them his own. This fear, along with his primordial fears (various types of animals, but also sex, death, drowning or falling etc.) haunted AKR throughout his life.
SS: AKR seems to have been fascinated by what we can call ‘ordinary mystery’. Do you see this as an undercurrent across his body of works? How does he arrive at these ‘ordinary mystery’, articulate them and decipher them in his works?
GR: I deal with this interesting issue at length in my book When Mirrors Are Windows. AKR’s poetics is aware of the metaphysical dimension of artistic grace, yet in his poetry he wanted to show how poetry is different from divine inspiration in that it “works” somehow like ordinary life. He developed a pragmatic attitude to art and life. And so his concept of grace does not recognise a superior force; AKR sees art as a special type of event that can happen anytime, it may come as natural “as leaves to a tree, or not at all” (a quote he borrowed from Keats). Poetic inspiration is therefore expressed as a paradox, for him it is an ordinary mystery: “Poetry happens unbidden and has to protect itself,” he said in 1980 in an interview by Murali Venkatesh, “it’s a mystery, but mystery itself is ordinary. Only we make of it something miraculous.”
Even if the right images and words come to the poet, the origin of imagination still remains a mystery to him. So many of the poems, and in particular, the ones he wrote during the last phase of his life and which are collected in “The Black Hen” (published posthumously in 1995), deal with this “mystery” and play with the notion of poetry writing. One only has to read between the lines to see that there is as meta-poetic undercurrent in much of AKR`s oeuvre that attempts to illustrate or perform the “ordinary mystery”.
(Interview conducted via email in March 2018 for Ruthumaana and published on AKR’s birth anniversary – 16 March- in the year 2020)
Gulzar 85
Yesterday, the 18th of August 2019, Gulzar sahab turned 85.
In the year 2012, Nasreen Munni Kabir came up with her book of conversation with Gulzar titled ‘In the Company of A Poet’. Eagerly waiting for the book I had pre-ordered a copy for myself. When my copy of the book arrived, I was on my way out of the hostel for late breakfast at a nearby shack. Excitedly I collected the book from the courier boy at the gate of the hostel, tore open the cover hurriedly and began reading the book as I marched towards the shack. As I kept reading and walking on the footpath, I rammed against the electric pole. My leg got injured. It wasn’t a major wound but still a wound. I limped to the shack continuing to read as I limped.
I might sound silly or even stupid, but I wanted to preserve that wound. I dint want it to heal because to me it was a sign of the maddening love I feel for Gulzar sahab. I wanted that wound to be over my body, like a badge of love. I was sad as the wound healed and it was the only time I mourned the healing of a wound.
There are plenty of other invisible wounds deep within me, that refuse to heal. Those wounds are occasionally consoled and comforted by the poems and songs penned by Gulzar sahab.
Thanks Gulzar sahab.
The Unbearable Loneliness of Being
There was a boy in our college in Manipal who is the loneliest person I have known in my life. For now let me call him Mr. A. When I joined the college for PG he was in his undergrads. People used to avoid him saying he is too creepy. There was one story which his classmates would recollect to all newcomers and warn them to stay away from him. The story goes like this: The entire class in their first semester first month were asked to visit the anatomy museum which is nearly a kilometer away from the college. It began to rain while they were all walking to the museum. Not everyone had an umbrella since most of them had no idea about the erratic Manipal monsoon, since they were new to the town. But our man being a local boy was carrying an umbrella. One of the girls asked him if she could join him under his umbrella. Mr. A let Ms. M share the umbrella. When the two reached the museum, we were told, Mr. A dropped the umbrella, held the hands of Ms. M and asked, “Will you marry me?” Not just Ms. M, the entire class freaked out. But eventually for them it became a story to be told, a joke to be laughed at. When I was first told of this, I too found it quite strange and I too had laughed. But over the years while interacting with Mr. A, I have regretted having laughed once about that story of a monsoon walk.
How lonely could one be if he has to ask you to marry him after walking ten steps together under the same umbrella?
Once the same Mr. A was with a classmate of his in the canteen, discussing an assignment which the two of them had to do it together as a team. This was the second assignment the two were doing together. At some point of the discussion Mr. A and this other person began to have some disagreement and Mr. A asked the other guy, “macha, why are you getting angry macha? Am I not your friend?” The other guy coldly said “No,” and there was a sound of glass breaking and blood on the table! Mr. A had crushed the tea glass he had held in his hand! He had to be taken to the hospital, he lost the only person willing to do group assignments with him, more people found him scary and he became more isolated and more lonely.
How lonely can a person be if doing two assignments together (when the entire class refused to work with him) makes him feel his co-student is a friend? How lonely he must be to be holding that person so close that he would crush a glass in his hand on being told that he is not a friend?
It is easy to say he is scary, it is sensible to suggest to him counselling etc. But can we understand that loneliness?
Loneliness has brutal ways in which it makes us function. Had read somewhere that Vincent Van Gogh used to consume yellow paints to get rid of his sadness and get happiness inside of him. While the world can wonder what relation does the yellow paint have with happiness, the man saw some relation and was willing to try it out as a way to happiness and out of sadness. In that passage the author opined that if one was terribly unhappy and equally willed to get rid of it then s/he would certainly give even the maddest of ideas, such as consuming yellow paints, a shot. Going ahead the author pointed at how consuming toxic yellow paints was not much different from taking drugs or falling in love to find happiness. They too run the risk of causing overdoes or heartbreak, like yellow paints can damage the internal organs! In the concluding line of that passage the author remarked, “Everybody has their yellow paints.”
In our loneliness we are capable of reaching out to much more harmful yellow paints than what we would reach out to in sadness or a prolonged state of melancholia.
Loneliness, sadly, doesnt get answered even if we surround ourselves with people, books, work etc. Loneliness demands love from life itself and life, especially when lonely, is unkind. Loneliness makes us do things we otherwise wouldn’t do, which we would regret later on, which hurts ourselves and others too. One can’t help it. One can’t escape it. Loneliness is an invisible decaying of life and life source itself.
To my mind, loneliness is the actual opposite of love. Not hatred. Not indifference. While love bridges the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, hatred doesnt break that bridge though sets fire on it. Indifference turns the bridge irrelevant and meaningless by making the ‘other’ invisible to the point of non-existence. But loneliness making the ‘self’ and ‘other’ significant, blocks the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ by making the ‘self’ do things which makes it more and more unlovable to both; itself and/ or the ‘other’. Also, loneliness begins with the point of the ‘self’ feeling/ being unloved.
Songs For Dark Times
Bertolt Brecht, the German dramatist and poet, in a poem asks if there will be songs in the dark times, and answers the question as, “Yes there will be songs about the dark times.” Nada Maninalkur who now is on an all-Karnataka journey asks and also answers the possibility of turning songs into light, not just to walk cutting through the dark times but also to fight the darkness.
***
As Nada Maninalkur sings the song by Janardhan Kesaratti which asks the listener to cleanse the dirt accumulated in the mind (manssiganTida koLeya tikki toLeduko) he pauses to ask, “How many of you feel healthy?” and the high-school students raise their hands. “Do you notice that all of you have raised your right hand?” asks Nada and the students wonder what is so unusual about it. When Nada follows it with, “Why do you raise your right hand always when you have to ask a question in the class or know the answer to a question asked by the teacher?” the students are pushed to think why for the first time. Nada helps them to find the answer when he says, “We have all been schooled to think that right hand is superior to the left, like white is superior to black. This hierarchy and discrimination is taught in the form of culture.” The students are visibly unsettled by the new thoughts but also have started finding such hierarchy wrong.
Nada Maninalkur has been travelling across all the districts of Karnataka since August, 2018 with around 50 songs which speak of various issues like gender, caste, superstition, social inclusion, pluralism etc. When Nada announced his ‘Karnataka Yatra’ on social media, individuals, organizations, educational institutions from all districts invited him to come perform for them and promised audience too.
In a B.Ed college, a set of students who earlier walked out of the concert by Nada come sit by him while having lunch post-concert. They say, “We disagree,” in a self-guarding tone. Nada smiles and continues to eat. Later when he is about to leave the campus the same students come to him again and say, “We have been thinking about it. But still we disagree.” Nada says, “I am glad you are thinking,” and continues to say, “My job is done.”
The back story of this story goes like this:
At this particular B.Ed. College, Nada decided to begin the concert by singing kalisu guruve kalisu, a song which originally is a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to his son’s teacher. Like the method he employed for this journey, this song rendition too was paused for conversations after every stanza. At one point the conversation moved to the popular Kannada folk song govina haaDu (song of the cow) which tells the tale of a tiger killing itself after witnessing the truthfulness of a cow named Punyakoti who it wanted to eat earlier. Nada Maninalkur, referring to this song, spoke about poetic imagination and its politics which made some among the audience uneasy and restless. Next when Nada sang the song, namma elubina handaradallondu, (There are places of worship- temple masjid church- and Gods in our skeleton) a bunch of students got up to say, “This song is unscientific. How can there be a temple or a masjid inside us?” Not satisfied by the question they raised, the statement they made the students also walked out of the concert. Later at the mess he met the same set of students who came to him to register their disagreement yet again.
Recollecting these episodes Nada Maninalkur says, “Change is a process. When the first stone is thrown it stirs the water and muddies the water. But slowly it also creates ripples.” He continues the conversation to say, “Songs by themselves are inadequate. But they can initiate a dialogue in a much effective manner than a lecture or a sermon. Hence I use songs while the most important thing for me is to have a dialogue with people.”
Nada Maninalkur who started Arivu, an NGO, in 2012 arrived at this understanding slowly through personal experiences. The one major incident that made this realization dawn on Nada was a series of programmes they held after an infamous rape incident of a young girl in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. The Arivu team visited college after college and discussed body politics using theatre, songs and literature. That made students open up, though it made the lecturers uncomfortable. “Education is left with no space to think alternatively and think rightly. This space needs to be filled and songs can become an effective and immediate way to build bonds and initiate a dialogue,” says Nada and recollects another story from the same time period.
A lady teacher who came from a conservative family came in contact with Nada and team while they were working with some of her students. Over a period of two years the teacher who earlier would insist on purity of food, water and not share her food or water with anyone, eventually cast off her casteist worldview and now holds a liberal outlook. This was possible, according to Nada, only because of a continuous interaction with humanistic ideas and continuous dialogues with fellow humans, outside the boundary of caste class and gender. Now the same teacher helps over 200 students a year to shed off their biases and reinvent their ‘self’, says Nada.
In Nada’s opinion, “In our growing up years we spend most of our time in educational spaces and hence it is important to speak in educational spaces.”
“Working with ‘Self’ is important,” opines Nada and elaborates on it. During this ‘Karnataka Yatra’ at a school in the district of Shimogga when Nada sang a song on menstruation, the dialogue with students arrived at the issue of Shabarimala. During this discussion a student said, “Respecting belief and practice is a part of our democratic values.” Nada spoke the importance of respecting people’s faith and practice and went to speak about the beliefs and practices which harms human, like caste etc and also narrated the story of Nangeli. The student then agreed with Nada when he said, “We need to get rid of beliefs and practices when they do not respect human dignity and doesn’t believe in equality.”
In other schools, Nada remembers, whenever he sang the song on menstruation, the students would either giggle or put their heads down in embarrassment. In a school, he recollects, a girl who spoke about menstruation covered her face with a scarf while speaking. The girl said that this issue is not discussed in a normal way even among girls. “We are made to believe that it is a shameful thing,” Nada says and adds in a firm voice, “We haven’t worked on ‘self’ and hence we fail to build on the idea of rights and justice. First we need to realize and make people realize that the dignity of ‘self’ is of utmost importance.”
Though most of the concerts of Karnataka Yatra have been in schools and colleges, Nada as a part of this Yatra has also performed in Temples, Masjids, Central Jail. He has also accepted invitations of activists, youth groups, journalist circles etc. In all these places, he says, he would first asses the audience and on the spot makes a choice of the songs to be sung for them. He has been singing 4-5 songs in each concert from his archive of around 50. Most of these songs are from contemporary Kannada poets. But his archive also includes verses by the 12th century Vachana movement and of saints like Shishunala Shareef, Kabeer etc.
Even when Nada is in the last leg of his Yatra, to his credit, not even once he has been stopped from singing or discussing in any of the districts of Karnataka. But yes there have been discussions of high voltage, which is okay according to him since there is still dialogue happening there. This, he says, is the power of songs. It makes you introspect, he opines, and it doesn’t have the aggression which one way communications such as lectures and seminars carry. Songs make space for a dialogue, for conversations to take place, opines Nada. The proof, he says, is seen in the invitations he got from teachers in several schools to teach the same songs to the students and also the invitation he received from some teachers to come stay with them for that day. The students, he says, either openly come and talk to him or write letters to him or tag him on social media and thus express their acceptance of and appreciation for the pedagogy he employed.
Nada also has some funny anecdotes to share like instances where people considered him to be a religious saint and would come and offer dakshinNe (money offered in kindness) and a particular instance where someone equated him with an extreme right wing speaker saying, “You too travel to inspire the youth, like him.” Nada’s reply to this person was simply, “I am not here to inspire youth but to sensitize the youth. That is the difference. Also, he speaks politics and I speak about humans and human self.”
A friend of Nada suggested him to bring out a CD of these 50 songs with which he travelled across Karnataka and Nada politely rejected the idea. His reason for it is spelled out like this: “If brought out as a CD, these songs will turn into a commodity of entertainment and it will just become one with the innumerable songs of this world which some sing and some remember. To me the dialogue that these songs initiate is important.” That is precisely why Nada says that when he was asked to teach these songs, he suggested a one month residential workshop, “because it is not just about learning the lyrics of the song in a particular tune and singing it in a melodious manner. It is not about songs but responding to the times and holding a dialogue. For that one needs to be trained in things other than music.” Nada himself isn’t a trained singer nor is he trained to play the two stringed instrument he plays.
“When I started this journey, I started with great despair. But this travel has made me hopeful. I have learnt during this journey that there are innumerable human beings out there in the world who are doing several work in small scale which is making a positive impact on some life. There are unimaginable number of people who in their daily lives are keeping the spirit of humanity alive. This they are doing not because they think it is their duty but because it is their default nature,” says Nada before he continues with his journey with songs in his pocket.
Crazy Mind's Eye 