Chandan Gowda’s Another India: Events, Memory, People (Rs 599, Simon and Schuster) is a collage of writings with a deeper purpose. The book, which mostly draws from previously published articles by the author, describes and reflects on the coexistence of worlds within a world that is India.
Gowda explains, “My writings, which took various forms — interpretative essays, narrations of little remembered historical episodes, retellings of mythic and folk tales, sketches of personalities, among others — sought to celebrate the living moral and aesthetic imaginations occluded in modern society.” The state of Karnataka, with its epics, people, film industry, deities and much more, is the focus of most of the book. Not all of the author’s protagonists are famous Indians, but the choices reveal his desire to depict the true character of India. The mythic and folk tales serve as a reminder that we, as a people, have nurtured these stories since time immemorial.
The past cannot be delinked from the present. The faint shadow of social memory exists, whether or not we sense its presence in our day-to-day lives. One of the writings revolves around Rama Dhanya Charite, a poem by the 16th-century saint Kanakadasa. In it, rice views ragi as an inferior grain. Eventually, Lord Rama puts rice and ragi in prison for a “test of endurance”.
Rice goes stale, but ragi remains fresh after six months. The dispute symbolises the social tensions between “the privileged” and “the non-privileged” castes. Centuries after Kanakadasa wrote the poem, casteism is undeniably present in our society. This resonates in an essay on the barber or the hajjam, which refers to a story narrated by the jester Tenalirama, who shows that it is impossible to make the high and the low change places in society.
The collection is the outcome of Gowda’s interest in a vast range of subjects, among them popular cinema. One of the essays is on the Kannada superstar Dr Rajkumar, which celebrates his presence in the lives of Kannadigas and explains what the films of the genre-hopping matinee idol stand for in the broad cultural context. He notes that the star remains a “deeply familiar point of reference, a point of entry into a world of belonging.”
The author aspires for precision. Many of his writings are short. When he embarks on longer excursions that capture his subjects in some detail, he retains the essence of his style with a fair degree of success. Even when he discusses a relatively minor topic, such as the translation of William Shakespeare’s plays into Kannada, an initiative of the Palace Theatre Company founded by the Maharaja of Mysore in 1881, he keeps the reader interested.
Gowda frequently surprises with his preference for the unusual and the less known in his attempt to show what makes India what it is: a vibrant place where the past lives on amidst change. He also finds space for the familiar, such as when he talks about Rabindranath Tagore’s Sriniketan or discusses Dr Ram Manohar Lohia’s thoughts and his time in the United States.
He explores the connotations of the word mela and discusses a remarkable work such as In Search of Dignity and Justice: The Untold Story of Conservancy, a book of photographs by the Mumbai-based photographer Sudhakar Olwe that captures the plight of sanitation workers. He also writes about the influential Kannada writer Kuvempu, who urged people to opt for the simple Mantra Mangalya weddings, which, among other things, prohibits dowry, keeps wedding expenses to a minimum and allows marriages across religions and castes.
Variety is the highlight of this short book, which is of the kind that can have equally enlightening sequels
in future.
Ghosh is a freelance journalist and author.