Between Radical Promise and Despair: Dalit Literature & Movement in Karnataka
In Their Words: Reflections on Dalit Art and Aesthetics
The Ambedkar Initiative hosted a series of Zoom conversations on the intersection of art and politics under the rubric of “Understanding Systemic Racism” across the 2021 calendar year as the world emerged from the COVID lockdowns, and the United States reckoned with its violent histories of racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Our focus was on the radical capacity of words, images, and sound to reorder the perceptual field, and to engage critically with lifeworlds of caste. Writing and literature has tended to be the predominant focus but there has been renewed interest in sound and performance, as well as image-making for those interested in Dalit art and aesthetics. The aesthetic, like the economic, the social, and the political is a distinctive domain of praxis. What distinguishes it? One of the definitions of aesthetics is feeling. Or, the aesthetic as a mode of ordering, distinguishing the divide between the sensible and insensible. Caste —embodied, granular, tactile —produces a crisis of representation, because it puts the social under erasure. How do we imagine affinity, solidarity, touch, and intimacy?
This is the second in a series of wide-ranging discussions focused on art practice, the work of the hand and the eye, aesthetic training, and the politics of reception initiated by Anupama Rao, who convenes the Ambedkar Initiative and serves as Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The conversation between Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi and Devanoora Mahadeva occurred on March 11, 2021. We are very grateful to Professor Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi for curating that event, which included reading from Devanoora Mahadeva’s work, and an engagement with the prominent theater artist and director, Rangayana (Mysuru), H. Janardhan, referred to below as “Janni.”
Grateful thanks to Divya Malhari for tracking down citations for Mahadeva’s text; to Durga Rajiv Chaloli for editing the initial transcript with an eye to the Kannada terms, and to Samantha DeNinno for editorial and curatorial support.
We have lightly edited the conversation to preserve the intimacy of address and to reproduce the sense of watching thought in action, in real time, which the mode of call and response allows. Parenthetical insertions note when something is being read in Kannada while English translations of excerpts from Mahadeva’s Kannada works were projected on screen for the Zoom audience. We have provided citations to the excerpts from Devanoora Mahadeva's works that the conversation draws upon, with a focus on the first edition where possible. We also provide audio links to four excerpts from Devanoora Mahadeva’s writings — three of which Mahadeva himself reads — followed by Janni’s performance of a short excerpt from Kusumabale.
ANUPAMA RAO: It's a great pleasure and honor to host a rare reading by, and discussion with the celebrated Kannada writer Devanoora Mahadeva. He will be in conversation with literary historian and cultural critic Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. As many of you know, Karnataka has seen a relentless attack on public intellectuals. The killings of M. M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh are well known, but there is a broader effort underway to erase the living memory of insurgent critique and a long tradition of heterodoxy thinking. This tradition is the life-blood of Mahadeva’s craft.
Prithvi has written about Mahadeva and argued for the significance of folk literary epics, as well as other non-elite literary traditions of Kannada, such as the vachanas and Tattva Padas, as the aesthetic forms and genres through which Mahadeva imagines new political possibilities [and] in the process, also challenges the social realist focus of modern Dalit literature. Others have noted that Mahadeva stretches the standard Kannada syntax to an extreme as he jumps from prose to poetry, that his style comprises condensed description, chant-like rhythms, and long, evocative sentences, densely packed with phrases. Mahadeva thus reminds us of traditions of song, performance, and recitation that are embedded in the oral tradition, as the literature of the people.
Today, we are going to start with Mahadeva reading excerpts from some of his work. Prithvi worked with Mahadeva to pick four short excerpts [from Devanoora Mahadeva’s work] that Mahadeva will read. Prithvi will project the English translations as Mahadeva reads. Then, Prithvi and Mahadeva will engage in conversation. We are also going to have a short musical performance in the midst of this by the theater director, Janni, who was the first to take Kusumabaale onto the stage. I have then asked Prithvi if he can speak to the nature of Mahadeva’s literary and political project, about Dalit and Bandaya [rebel, or protest] literature, and the self-perceptions and the auto critiques of the Dalit movement.
This is a very special event, it has been a very long time since many of us have had the chance to hear Devanoora Mahadeva read from his work, and to reflect on his writings. It is a great honor to have him here today with Prithvi and Janni. Thank you all for joining us.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: Thank you, Anu. Delighted to be here, thanks to the organizers, ICLS, and Sarah, and others who put together this event. So, we'll start with the reading.
I just want to add one additional word to what Anu already said by way of introduction to Devanoora Mahadeva. I usually prefer to work on dead authors because they don't trouble us too much. Although we think it's safer to work on dead authors, whether it’s the Vachana poets from the twelfth century or other Shaiva writers whom I usually work on, it's become quite risky these days. But having said that, I must begin with a confession that Devanoora Mahadeva is perhaps one of the few contemporary writers who have compelled me, who have tempted me to read them closely and to write on them.
And again, just building on what Anu said, I see him perhaps as the only successful writer of the past 50 years who has succeeded in thinking about politics through aesthetics, particularly in the Kannada context if you look at his literary experiments. So, with that brief introduction, let me turn to Devanoora Mahadeva and invite him to read two prose passages; those prose passages we wanted to begin with partly because his writing style is that of parables, and they're quite engaging from that perspective.
The first one is called Nanna Devaru and I’ll project the text.
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA:
English Translation of Nanna Devaru [1]
A well-known Kannada weekly used to publish short essays by famous Kannada writers under the heading, ‘My God’ [Nanna Devaru]. Thinking that they might also, by some coincidence, ask me, I had roughly planned what I would write. But then perhaps the editors of the weekly decided I have no god and didn’t ask me. So that rough estimate of my god remained with me.
My god has remained with me as follows:
My god emerges out of the village goddess called Mane Manchamma about whom poet Siddalingaiah once told me a story.
Once upon a time, people of a village got together to build a temple to their goddess. When the roof of the temple was about to be erected, that goddess Manchamma entered the body of an individual and began screaming: “Stop, you fellows.” Prompted by that loud denunciation, villagers stopped their work and stood confused; then ensued a conversation between the goddess and the villagers.
“Hey fellas, what are you doing?”
“We are building a temple house for you, mother.”
“Oho, you are building a temple house for me? Do all of you have houses, oh sons of mine?”
“I don’t have, mother.” Says someone.
“Then I don’t want a house until everyone has a house.”
Manchamma Devi, who said thus, became Mane Manchamma!
Today mother Mane Manchamma is being worshipped in a roofless temple.
In such a roofless temple if you place the Buddha of compassion and egalitarianism, then that becomes my God.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: The next piece is something which compares untouchability with racism, and here Mahadeva uses a metaphor —the metaphor of Khedda [a method of trapping or capturing elephants by driving them into a stockade, outlawed after 1973] which is local to Mysore — by way of comparing the two.
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA:
English Translation of Comparison Between Untouchability and Racism[2]
In South Africa, thousands of Blacks were massacred for protesting against discriminatory apartheid laws. Tens of thousands had to riot in prisons. When such protests intensified, even a congregation of Blacks became a punishable crime. The worst that can ever happen when the law itself turns criminal happened there. Every time I think of this horror, I feel that the repression, cruelty, violence, and the killings which may have taken place in ancient India, to throw out an entire community of people from the varna and caste system and make them accept untouchability, were repeated in more recent times in South Africa in the form of Apartheid.
How do we understand the relationship between untouchability and apartheid? Was the first phase of apartheid untouchability? Or was untouchability the great-grandfather of apartheid? Perhaps, when a mode of segregation and restriction survives for thousands of years misusing religion, religious structures, and gods, it becomes untouchability.
In Khedda operations used for capturing elephants, they dig a deep pit in the forest and make it invisible by covering it with sticks, leaves, and tree branches. Then they beat drums to create a din, forcing the elephant to run towards the pit. Unable to see the covered pit, the elephant falls into it. The trapped elephant is then chained. It is later lifted from the pit and beaten and tortured till it is tamed. The tamed elephant slowly forgets its natural character and becomes the humble servant of its tamer. Servitude becomes its nature. The elephant called the Black in South Africa was pushed into the pit and chained. Attempts were made to tame it through violence and torture. But this elephant, the South African Black, could not be tamed.
But the elephant called the Indian untouchable has been tamed. Since he was tamed in the ancient times, we do not see the cruelty of it all. The one who tamed it has no memory of what was done; the one who is tamed doesn’t know that he has been tamed. Discrimination has spread through society and become naturalized. Cruelty is hidden here, like an invisible ghost, and manifests itself at will.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So the next excerpt is from Odalaala, the novella, which was published in the late 1970s, and the sequence here is from the third section of that novella where the central protagonist Sakavva is inviting her grandson Sivu, to accompany her to look for her rooster, which has gone missing. So, that is the sequence which he will read next.
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA:
English Translation of excerpt from Odalaala[3]
From a hut here and a hut there that sent up smoke signals, the clacking of cooking pots rose and fell, and stopped at Sakavva’s ears like an invitation. Sakavva called to Sivu. When Sivu came out, “Come, son. We’ll go look for my rooster” she said. Following groans of ‘aahm…’ and ‘oohm…’ He said, “Go, granny…if the rooster were around, it would’ve come by now…It’s this dark…I’ll not come.” Stretching her legs out Sakavva said.
“Why son, but I’m there, am I not!”
“So what if you are…?”
“Seeing it’s me…even the messengers of Yama will run away.”
Sivu couldn’t get into his eyes and he stared back like a dope. So Sakavva said: “Their moustaches are as thick as a banyan tree! Teeth are as broad as this doorway.”
“Suppose they drag you away? What then?”
“‘Ayee, come, come, why’d you drag me, demons…I’ll come on my own…walk on…’ I’ll say.”
“And then…?”
“Let’s say they do…I’ll walk on ahead. Walk right up to Lord Yamadharmaraja.”
And even as these words went out of Sakavva’s mouth, her wrinkly skin that quivered, the toothless mouth in her face, and her grey hair – they seemed to vanish, and Sakavva now looked like aunt Puttagowri.
“What will Lord Yamadharmaraja do then…?”
“Aah!...He sits on a throne the sixe of our hut, you see…and you [know] the chaps Yama’s messengers drag in…? He punishes them…”
“… And you aren’t afraid of that?”
“… Me, afraid? Ayee…why would I be afraid, my boy? Hunh! Seeing the troubles I’ve been through on this earth…what’s all that anyway? I’ll say that to him my boy,…Tell it to his face, son.”
Sakavva, who in the boy’s eyes was now aunt Puttagowri, is dressed in a white saree – her saree wafting in the breeze – even as she wafted around like a sylph.
“And what’ll Lord Yama say to that…?”
“To that he’ll say…‘well, well, well. Alright, old one. I’m taken in by your courage…what boon do you want, ask.’ He will say that.”
The sylph in the white saree – her hair streaming in the breeze – is now swaying coyly with the earth atop her little finger.
“And when he says ‘ask for a boon’…?”
“Then I’ll say ‘Lord, bless me so that my grandson can rule on earth…that’s all I’ll ask.”
Sivu sat there dreaming it up.
Ruining his dream, Sakavva said “Come, child, let’s go look for my rooster.” Sivu stood up to go. “Go in and bring me a tumbler first.” Ask your avva [mother] for one,” she added.
Sivu’s mother who came out with a tumbler in her hand said, “must you, Mother? Why must you go stumbling in the dark? Let it go…think what’s gone is gone, and keep quiet!” Sakavva, who was leaning back on her arm, pulled herself up. Leaning on her stick, she said, “hand me that tumbler, will you! ‘Let what’s gone go,’ she says! Where to…tell me? Just let it and I’ll show you what I can do. I’ll smoke up dry chillies to my gods and will I let them go without beating them up with my old slipper…” saying thus she held Sivu’s hand and using her staff as the support the fell into the murmuring darkness.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: In my mind, this is one of the more remarkable passages in modern Kannada literature for reasons which will become quite evident as you read through the translation. We can discuss some more of this in a little bit. Now, we will have the performance of Kusumabaale from Janni, and I’ll just set up the translation for that I'll invite Janni to come and recite the fourth section, two pages from Kusumabaale
JANNI:
English Translation of Janni’s Performance from Kusumabale [4]
And in this time
The jolly bustle of the much-awaited fire-walking festival
Strolling along the streets of the upper caste colony,
Was leaping and prancing
In the house of the headman
And back there
Darkness falling
And life slowly getting back to the half dead bodies
Of Akkammadevi and Yaada [Akkamahedevamma’s son] that Siddura
Flung on the grazing grounds,
Akkammadevi sat up,
The tears streaming from her eyes
Flowing up to the pond!
His head resting on his mother’s lap,
Yaada opened and closed his eyes
Rolling them this way and that,
And his body, oh, though it was a dust
How was it? Those tears still flowed?
Lowering Yaada’s head to the ground
Akkammadevi slowly walked –
Walked up to the banks of that pool of tears
And she bowed thrice to the pool, and
Touched the pool water to her eyes thrice,
And thrice she sipped the water from her cupped hands
And praying, dipped saree pallu in the pond.
Holding it up in both her hands
She walked to where Yaada lay
And opened Yaada’s mouth, that bird-mouth
And the water dripping from her saree and
The water ran in Yaada’s body, and also
Ran from Yaada’s eyes.
And to this place the curing wings of Mother Earth
Arriving by way of palm leaves
The spot where Akkammadevi and Yaada sat
Was now a shelter.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: Thank you, Janni. We wanted to provide the audience an experience of how the distinction between prose and poetry just breaks down in these passages.
I will have a few more excerpts that I'll discuss during my presentation in a little bit. What we will do next is to discuss two or three questions, which will draw out Mahadeva’s literary projects, literary sensibility, and also his political concerns. So, we will begin with a question on his literary sensibility. He has been seen primarily as one of the pioneers of new Dalit writings in Kannada. His writings are also marked by constant experimentation, which is quite unusual among his contemporaries and even among his junior writers. I invited him actually to think about and reflect back on his own writing career. What inspired him? How did his literary sensibility actually take shape, and what were the motivations that actually took him down this path?
We translated some of his remarks for the benefit of the audience. As he speaks, you can also read the response.
(Prithvi asks Mahadeva about his literary projects, and his literary sensibility in Kannada)
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA: (Mahadeva speaks in Kannada while the English translation is projected)
English Translation of Mahadeva’s Response
I wrote my first story in a police lockup. ‘The Dark Turned’ could be a rough translation of that very ordinary story. My father was a police constable. I had failed in English in pre-university exams and he thought it was because of my undue interest in storybooks. So, he pushed me into a police lockup with my textbooks. My first story was born there.
The Kannada modernist movement in literature was at its peak then. I spent a lot of time with those writers and even wrote a few stories under their influence. But I felt they did not come naturally to me. I then wrote three other stories, each different. One was like a report, another lacked a center. However, all had one thing in common: instead of being introspective and individual-centric, they were stories of my community. Retracing those steps, I can probably say that my individual sensibilities were at that time displaced by a keenness to trace the sensibilities of my community.
The stories, along with Odalaala and Kusumabaale, that I wrote afterwards, were tagged ‘experimental.’ Was I trying to pioneer change when I began writing? Looking back, I cannot see myself at the vanguard of any movement. Latvian writer Inga Able has this to say about the creative process. “A person lives in his/her language like a fish in water. That’s why authors do not know that much about their own work.” This must be so in my case also.
Whatever it was, these undirected, vagrant steps in the dark themselves put me on the course and gave me a sense of direction. There on, my writing came to be more “oral” and “folk.” But not exactly! For whatever needs to be created, those objects and those lives, they must be waited on, listened to, ever so keenly, until language happens, in and through the letter and word.
Was my writing experimental? The great ninth century Kannada poet Pampa refers to the dialect of Puligere where he lived as the “kernel of Kannada.” Drawing from this dialect, Pampa distils the language of his poetry. In a similar vein, my narrative language came from the Nanjanagud region. Did then language get embodied the way a sculptural image is made from the tank soil of my region? I used my dialect of Kannada as the ‘kernel’ of my writing. Today, our modern world uses language like clothing and as a medium to express thought and experience. But in a creative work, language is like the skin of the narrative. Not just one’s skin, but one’s five senses too.
So then, how will rational consciousness enter into a literary work which emerges out of the community which is in the state of coma? Since it is a work of art, it must emerge out of experience. Perhaps, that will happen like the underground water which will come out only when drilled? And like the tree within a seed, which is in the state of hiding the possibilities of tomorrow. Moreover, as there are few people who could read among my own, who must I write for? If I wrote for the elites, I would be handling the experiences of my people as something of anthropological interest. It would be like rubbing salt into open wounds. If, at the core, the sensitive act of creativity means becoming another being, how was I to come to terms with preserving the beacon light along with bearing the burden of untouchability? If I saw myself to get to the collective consciousness of my people, it was more likely that I could configure a collective memory from there.
This might be why a student of literature from the Santhal tribe in West Bengal, on reading one of my stories, was heard arguing vehemently and saying, “This is my story, the story of my tribe. And the writer definitely is from my tribe.” I am grateful to him.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: My second question, after inviting him to speak about his literary sensibility, has to do with how he understands the Indian society and how he manages to reconcile the contradictions that are quite evident in our midst. And I wanted him to reflect on this partly because I find him to be one of the most unique thinkers insofar as his ability to reconcile contradictions is concerned. This comes across quite strongly in the way in which he discusses Gandhi and Ambedkar, and therefore I requested him to talk about his own understanding of the Indian social world.
(Prithvi directs this question to Mahadeva in Kannada)
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA: (Mahadeva speaks in Kannada while the English translation is projected)
English Translation of Negotiating the Indian Mind [5]
When I think about how the representative Indian mind works, I always remember an incident involving the farmers’ leader Mahendra Singh Tikait. He had once agreed to attend two farmers’ conventions on the same day and the same time in two distant towns in Karnataka – one in Bengaluru and the other in Hospet in Bellary district at the other end of the state. There was much curiosity, anxiety, and confusion on which of the two he would choose to attend and there was speculation on it for days on end. It was a treat for the media!
Finally, he arrived at the Bengaluru airport. The media people were on him the next moment. All of them had one question – “Which way are you headed?” One was organized by former prime minister H. D. Deve Gowda in Bengaluru. Former minister and the then state Janata Dal (Secular) party president Vaijanath Patil stood smiling next to a posh car to take Tikait to the program organized by Gowda. On the other side, beside an ordinary car, stood an ordinary activist sent by the farmers’ leader and founder of KRRS, M. D. Nanjundaswamy. Journalists kept repeating the same question – “Which way are you headed?”
Tikait adjusted the loose cloth he had slung across his shoulder with a flourish and said: “I will head to where the real farmers are.” He took long strides to the car sent by Nanjundaswamy.
This is perhaps the wisdom of a representative Indian mind.
On another occasion, after attending yet another convention organized by Nanjundaswamy, he was taken to a travelers’ bungalow to rest for the day. Looking at the room in shock, he complained that the place was too luxurious, the light too bright, and the bed too big. “I can’t sleep in such a place,” he categorically said. Though Nanjundaswamy tried to convince him that it was only an ordinary travelers’ bungalow, Tikait was adamant like a child. Finally, the organizers gave up and arrangements were made for his stay in the home of a farmer who had a rope-cot to spare. Tikait felt at home in a room where the smell and sound of the cowshed wafted in. He slept soundly.
This is perhaps the simplicity of a representative Indian mind.
But the same man, at a later point in time, violently opposed inter-caste marriages. He went to the extent of saying the hands of those who marry out of caste should be chopped off.
This is perhaps the cruelty of a casteist, feudal, representative Indian mind.
Gandhi saw better the first two – the inherent wisdom and simplicity of the representative Indian mind.
Ambedkar saw better the last – the inherent cruelty of the casteist, feudal, representative Indian mind.
How do we perceive the wisdom and simplicity, while rooting out the cruelty, thereby inculcating dignity and humanness into the representative Indian mind? This is the challenge before us today.
Both Gandhiji and Dr. Ambedkar believed that “untouchability isn’t the problem of the untouchables.” In other words, untouchables are the victims of caste system. Therefore, the problem lies among those who practice untouchability. But today, the writers, artists, journalists, and other wise and discriminating minds of India have remained quiet, saying “untouchability is the problem of the Dalits.” This saddens me.
Gandhiji characterizes untouchability as a sin. Ambedkar calls it a crime. We shouldn’t see these two perspectives as contradictory, but rather as two eyes.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So the last question that we wanted to address has to do with his worldview, which builds on this capacity to seek simplicity, wisdom, and cruelty in the same sense of self, in the same self-conception. I asked [him] to think about how his worldview was shaped, and he chose to read a short paragraph that he wrote in which he used, as an example, one of the tribal communities, the practices of a tribal community, and then contrasted that with conceptions of egalitarianism, which come from socialism and other left-oriented doctrines which were part of a progressive tradition in Karnataka. So I invited him to read this as a way of exemplifying his worldview.
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA: (Mahadeva reads in Kannada while English translation is projected)
Projected English Translation of Mahadeva’s Narration (‘Para’ under the Pipal Tree)[6]
What is your vision of life and the world? Grand questions like these are often thrown at me. My tongue falters if I try to use big words and jargon. But what flashes before my eyes is the practice of the “Para” among the Dombaru community, a traditional community of acrobats.
This nomadic community of entertainers often hold a feast called “Para.” They gather together in an open field under a big tree, cook whatever grains they have gathered, and eat together. Before they start eating, they count people who were unable to make it to the feast for various reasons. They may be people old and infirm, ailing or pregnant. They keep aside the share of those absent before they begin to eat. A pregnant woman gets two shares, counting in the child inside the womb. This, I could say, is my “world visions.”
The Pipal tree over the heads of Dombaru – of brotherhood, equality, and egalitarianism – was the same tree under which Gandhi, Ambedkar, Lohia, and our Vachanakaras sat. Let us bring Marx too under the same tree. In fact, we might do well to give all the others a bottle each of the blood of Marx who had a vision of the world where wealth is equally distributed.
Yes, this grand tree has been felled by the winds changing times. Indeed, it has been felled by the ever-hungry bakasura of capitalism that has robbed people of all their human values. Globalization has successfully propagated the grand myth that the Pipal tree died a natural death.
But, let us remember that this tree that we have declared dead can come alive from anywhere, even from the crevices in a concrete jungle. A sapling can be born in another place, getting acclimatized to the quality of the new soil. It can sprout, breaking through the walls.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So that concludes our second part, which is our interaction on those three questions that we wanted to discuss. I’ll try to build on this and speak for the next fifteen minutes on what I think of his thought, his writings, and also about the Kannada Dalit movement. So those are the broad themes that I would like to cover.
In the title that we chose for this session, we used the term “radical hope,” and that was by choice because I see Mahadeva in particular as the embodiment of a certain kind of radical hope. If you saw even from this last passage that he read his last response, or from the excerpt that he read out from Odalaala, where Sakavva is searching for her lost rooster, but she's also – in her conversation with her grandson – demonstrating a certain kind of courage, which is the source of radical hope. And that is where I'd like to situate Mahadeva’s location, so to speak. When Sakavva says that her struggles on this earth are greater than what she might actually encounter in Yama’s hell.
You know, that is what gives her the courage to continue to struggle, to continue to persevere. When she talks about how she's going to punish all her gods if they don't ensure that her rooster is returned to her. That is the kind of courage which is at the heart of a new radical project that Mahadeva sees, and this I want to situate by way of a discussion of some of his writings.
I've two or three more excerpts that I'd like to take you to, to give a flavor of his sentence construction as a way of exemplifying what Anu talked about initially – about his syntax, about the way he builds his characters, and so on. So, there are three or four points that I quickly want to make about Mahadeva, and then I'll connect that to the broader project of the Dalit Bandaya literary movement in Karnataka. And again, in honor of Mahadeva’s own project, I don't want to bring in whether it's someone like Jonathan Lear in talking about radical hope, or in seeing the kind of effort that is put in order to overcome “resentment,” as Nietzsche would say. I’ll try to stick to the texts themselves and to the context of Karnataka to make some of these broader points.
Two or three points that I want to quickly draw your attention to - one is that Mahadeva is creating a new literary language and that language is coming from a dialect. In his response to how he shaped his literary sensibility, Mahadeva talked about Kannada’s adikavi, the first poet, Pampa, and how Pampa used the kernel of Puligere in northern Karnataka as the source of his literary language. What Mahadeva does – completely unusual in modern Kannada prose writing – is to use a dialect and the rhythm of the spoken language, [and thus] completely breaking the monopoly of how fiction and short stories had been written until then in formal Kannada, including for descriptive passages. Mahadeva begins to use the regional dialect spoken across castes, actually.
So, this new literary language sort of brings back an egalitarian spirit which enables Mahadeva to extend the limits of realism, whereby he's constantly anthropomorphizing things by creating characters out of phenomenal things. So, the thing which “experiences” is not the human being, but it could be an organ, as we will see in one of the examples that I'm going to read out in just a second. The agent who experiences an experience, for example, might simply be tasting porridge, right? But, the agent is the tongue and not the child who possesses that tongue. And those are the kinds of strategies and moves with which he's actually telling us a narrative about depravement, about exploitation with great depth. That subtlety is something which is really unusual in [Mahadeva] and [it is] not achieved by later writers, and that marks the craftsmanship of Mahadeva's writing. And it becomes more clear when we look at some of the examples that I have.
What I'm trying to say is - it's not simply the adoption of a dialect as literary language, but what he does with the dialect, the craftsmanship that he demonstrated, as I was saying, wherein the agent who is experiencing, or the fact that [is the] phenomena, actually become characters. From an old woman, her worry actually separates itself out, sits next to her, and begins a conversation. So those kinds of narrative moves, those kinds of formal innovations, actually mark a new aesthetic that he brings in.
Mahadeva's writing escapes from this constant complaint against much of Dalit writing – particularly in Kannada, but this is something that you might find in other languages also – where poetry becomes ideological or stories become too obvious and self-evident. So, in these ways, what Mahadeva is trying to do is to build a literary style, a literary form, wherein the distinction between fiction and poetry, prose-writing and poetry, story and poem breaks down.
But the point is then to ask, what is the source of this? This is not something that he is inventing from his literary mind, so to speak. What is actually quite distinctive, what is quite interesting is the way in which it is rooted in a local community. So not only the language is coming from a dialect, but the wisdom of that, the narrative structures, and the worldviews at play are all coming in from that community. So, the region of Nanjangudu which is just south of Mysore, about 20 kilometers south of Mysore, that area is providing not only the dialect, the vocabulary, the words. But it is also providing the wisdom, the narrative structures, and worldviews.
What do I mean by all this? There is a location in the form of identification with the local community and in taking its cultural resources. But it's also a deeper connection that he's trying to build with folk epics of that region. Vachana traditions, which go back much further than the folk epics, which are [from the] early modern period 15th, 16th, 17th century texts which continue to be recited and listened to even now. And then you have philosophical poems called tattva padas. And of course, he's also opened himself to world literature during his formative years and in any conversation with him is often prefaced with a reference to an Aboriginal writer from Australia or a writer from one of the former Soviet republics, or with someone like Marqués or Tolstoy, for that matter. So classics, folk poetry from across the world, they all become part of his oeuvre, his inspiration.
This deep rootedness in a community, not just in the sense of having his origins there, but by taking the wisdom of the narrative structures from folk epics, he manages to sort of bring all that into his literary works. And therefore, when Janni was singing one section from Kusumabaale, to the listener it appears like listening to one of the folk epics because the narrative form actually comes from there. If you look at different editions of Kusumabaale, for example, in some editions, it is actually organized more like a folk epic wherein lines are actually broken down based on the rhythm of those folk forms.
And finally, the last point that I want to make – in addition to the points about a new literary language, rootedness in the community from which he derives – is [about] Mahadeva’s approach towards progressive traditions, contemporary progressive traditions, in the second half of the 20th century. In some other work, I've been writing about the emergence of a progressive consensus in the 1950s and 1960s, in the Kannada-speaking regions in Karnataka. This progressive consensus actually stands on four pillars: a) prominence, primacy to Kannada language; b) decentralization of power, and then; c) land reforms are very important, and then finally, d) an anti-caste discourse, which also accommodates reservations, affirmative action. So, these four aspects actually give direction to how social change should occur in Karnataka. Unlike West Bengal or Kerala or other states of India, if social change took a different form in Karnataka, it was on the basis of this progressive consensus. This is an argument I have been developing in other essays that I've written in recent times.
So, Mahadeva actually has a close affinity to this progressive consensus which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. And it [was] implemented as a part of state action in the 1970s and 1980s, both by governments led by Congress chief ministers and chief ministers from the Janata Dal. However, this progressive consensus sort of broke down by the 1990s, which led to the emergence of a radical right in Karnataka as well. And that takes us into a different terrain. The point I wanted to make here is that the affinity with progressive writers and ideologies and movements was there, but Mahadeva has always been eclectic and reconciliatory in his approach, where the objective is always to find ways of recognizing the other, as a way of coming up with such conceptions. Again, I hate to do this in a Levinasian way of recognizing the other, and keeping ethics at the core of this. However, this is what makes Mahadeva quite unique to my mind. And, in the interest of time, what I'm going to do is to just look at one example, each from Kusumabaale and Odalaala, just to highlight the points that I made.
If you look at the first example, for instance, the first excerpt:
(Prithvi reads from Odalaala and provides the English translation without English projection)
“Sakavva’s four pillared courtyard hut” – that is the agent [or] the subject of this sentence – “had let its body into the earth and stood with a tile-, hay-, and coconut frond-face”…
“Since Sakavva’s skin wasn't in sync with her bones, the skins of her body remained by itself, independently moving on their own volition.”
You get a flavor of how language is being used in instances like this to achieve a very different kind of effect. In translation, it becomes very difficult to bring in the impact of some of the word choices. But I don't want to dwell much on the translation question.
The second example that I want to read out from Kusumabaale is from an episode where there's a brief conversation between a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law.
(Prithvi reads in Kannada and provides the English translation without English projection)
“Basappa Sami, having planted his body and mind in the book of purana and having sat without raising his head, when the right time came along, without raising his head, said: ‘Who are you mother? What is the reason for you, a stranger, to come?’ ”
What doesn't come true in the translation is how some part of the dialogue is inspired by the book that Basappa Swami is reading. He's reading a purana and it's a performative text. And in that, quite often, you see women, or characters, being addressed in this form[7].
(Prithvi recites in Kannada)
“Who are you mother? What is the reason for you, a stranger, to come?”
This is a standard dialogue that you might find in a play. This incorporation of such aspects and craftsmanship is what I was trying to get at with my first example. Such examples, you find them all over, and again, in the interest of time, let me conclude by connecting what he's trying to do with both the Dalit literary project and the Dalit movement and how the Dalit movement is being seen. Again, I’ll try and limit my remarks to how Mahadeva himself is seen in this context.
So just a brief background: if you look at the beginnings of Dalit literary culture in Kannada, it begins in the 1970s, although you have some earlier writers from the early-twentieth to the mid-twentieth century itself. And here you can think of what emerged in the 1970s as coming out of a crisis in literary belief. How is a new literary culture emerging? It is emerging out of a crisis in literary belief. And what is the crisis that we see here? It's two-fold. One, you have a new generation of writers, just like Devanoora Mahadeva, bringing in their experiences, modes of writing, vocabulary, dialects, and unfamiliar worldviews into the literary mix. They're also demanding new literary criteria to evaluate such books, for such literary works, be created. That's the demand. And this is a demand that you see across India for a new distinctive Dalit aesthetics. You see that in the works of Om Prakash Valmiki, for example, in Hindi, [and] Sharankumar Limbale in the Marathi context.
So, what is the general way to understand this new emergence? Here, the insistence is that there should be a connection between life and art, and art and literature should become instruments for political projects, political purposes. And D. R. Nagaraj, writing about this phase of Dalit literature and the limitations that it has to try to overcome, recognizes three features which are important in this regard. The first feature is that exploitation and pain become the only cultural memory that you need to explore in your writing. I mean, this is something that you will find in Marathi autobiographies or in Kannada poetry or fiction. And in some ways, you know, Mahadeva escapes this limitation through his craftsmanship. So, not only is this cultural memory seen as the only viable material for literary expression, it also sort of holds Hinduism as the agency responsible for this sort of constrained cultural memory. And then the second point is a psycho-political, psychological, political state alternating between anger and self-pity. So, these are the only two possibilities which are seen as necessary for literary expression. And finally, there's a faith in modernity or modern civilization as the only liberating possibility. These become the standard ways in which Dalit literature and Bandaya literature find expression.
Here is where Mahadeva, through his rootedness, becomes quite, quite different. And that is again seen as a compromise on the part of his compatriots actually in the Dalit movement. This is the last point that I'll make here, when they sort of produce self-critiques after about four or five decades of the Dalit Bandaya rebellion movement, you have multiple themes which emerge as part of this self-critique. You have an effort to reconstruct the struggle itself, the choices made by the Dalit movement, and so on. There are sociological efforts to provide insights about the status of Dalits and what it means to be a Dalit and the idea of the state of being a Dalit itself. And then you also have a limited effort to sort of explore comparatively the experience of Dalit struggle in different states.
But what marks the critique is a sense of despair, a sense of vishada as we might call in Indian languages. And so, one activist actually says: “our friends who were like fireballs in the early part of the struggle, lost their quality of burning coal and have now turned into a piece of lifeless charcoal.” This is a critique of the experience of Dalit struggle, which was seen as pure and pristine and intense in the early part, and which is something that the activists want to recover now. But, on the other hand, there is also a despair over the splintering of the movement, and the compromises made by Dalit activists who became part of the middle class, and were thus not as committed to the struggle, to the movement, as they were in the initial phase.
This re-engagement is actually a quite interesting phenomena of the last seven, eight years. You have several new anthologies, which have come up in recent times, and all of them have tried to sort of look at the past experiences of the last three-and-a-half or four decades by way of looking at two possible failures. One is what they define as the failure of leadership. The other is a loose ideological commitment to the cause of Dalit struggle. So, these two are again, you know, interesting in the context of Devanoora Mahadeva, because he is seen as the poster child in some ways for this failure. And his worldview, his approach to the traditions and culture itself, his interest in seeing the human and the other, these are seen as suspect in a political scenario, where it is necessary to be disciplined to the message, to be committed to organizing the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti, and so on. From all those perspectives, from the perspective of the Dalit movement, what we often see as the strengths of Devanoora Mahadeva are, you know, considered as weaknesses, as limitations. So let me stop here so that we have some time for discussion and Mahadeva’s here and will be happy to respond to questions which might come up.
Photo Credits: Anupama Rao
ANUPAMA RAO: Thank you so, so much, Prithvi and Mahadeva both, and Janni. This has been an extraordinary session with all three of you. Prithvi, I was really hoping to ask you to read that part from Kusumabaale, [which you mentioned above, as the dialogue between the brother-in-law, and the sister-in-law], where Akkamahadevi appears as the dust on Basappa Sami’s feet. I was hoping that you could just read it. It'll become clear why. I'd like to go back to the vachana tradition. I have some questions for you, but I think also this question that you've opened up around the question of, you know, the longer tradition that Mahadeva is really connecting with.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So let me read that out.
(Prithvi reads an excerpt from Kusumabale. included here in the English translation without English projection)
“There, the air itself was tightening as no one was breathing, thinking him saying that much itself was favorable to her, Akkamahadevi said: “it's me, brother in law, the dust on your feet…” without even a single line getting raised or altered, Basappa Swami’s voice said: “if there is a word other than brother in law, say it.”[8]
I mean, obviously, the linkages to Akkamahadevi from the twelfth century [are] there. One of the other reasons why I chose this passage for today's discussion was also because, you know, if you look at the end when it's not Basappa Swami who is rejecting her, it’s his voice. So, I think those are the kinds of subtle nuances that I am taken by while reading his fiction. Anu, you had a question.
ANUPAMA RAO: I wanted to give our audience time to collect their own questions. We are all taking in so much of what you've said, and what you've read. But I wanted to ask you to read that excerpt for two reasons. One, I wanted to ask you about how you think about the question of the vachana, the tongue, the word, and how this poetic form of the vachana brings the world into being. Of course, this is what Mahadeva told us. He says, “I'm waiting upon language to happen in and through letter and word.” And he talks about language as skin when he's discussing [the craft of] writing. One really broad question is about language as anticipation, as waiting. But also, language as terribly concrete, having materiality. One is really struck by this, especially while hearing Mahadeva recite today, and you and Janni reciting as well. I will not call it reading. Mahadeva is a poet-philosopher. I mean, that's what seems to be taking place: thinking poetically and philosophically about language.
And I think that's what you are sort of gesturing to as well, that there is a way in which, you know, there's a kind of condensation of the word-image that opens up a millennial trace, not just a tradition. So, the calling up, and again here it'll just be a broad comment and then I'll stop. But I'm very taken by the fact that Mahadeva begins with the temple without shelter and ends in what he said to us with the Buddha, with the Vachanakaras and with Marx, and asking us to partake of Marx's blood as a form of sharing. And Janni’s own performance is also about shelter, right, there in that space where they were together, we found shelter.
There is something really extraordinary, it seems to me, that's happening here about an imagination of sociality that is both archaic and remembered, but it's being reconstituted through the work of Mahadeva’s own writing in a kind of radically altered, new way. I don't know that anybody can speak to their craft, you know, when one is making a comment like this. But if either of you had some thoughts on this, it would be great to hear. I have one other question and we'll wait for questions from our audience. So, I think many of them are just with you and taking in what you've all been doing and saying.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So, I think you are absolutely right. I mean, this is what I meant in the sense of the materiality of language, [language] also can be very concrete, very material. There’s an act of imagination involved in making Akkamahadevi a contemporary to us, or in making other vachanakaras contemporaries to us, [in] bringing in Buddha and Marx into conversation, not in a sort of rigid ideological way. This is a very different kind of hermeneutics when you try to combine, in what seems to me, you know, using the wisdom of the community as such.
This is the other thing that Mahadeva was talking about in his response to my question about sensibility, when he said it's not about me as an individual, but as part of the collective in expressing the same sentiments or the spirit of the community, so to speak, through these narratives, through these ideas. And most of these parable-like prose-essays that he writes are often to that effect where you’re gesturing towards everyone in this community, not along caste-lines, but by recognizing the humanity of each of the participants in that community or each member of that community. And that comes through his fiction all the time.
ANUPAMA RAO: May I read a couple of questions and then we can sort of come back? So there are two of them. And I think they come from two different aspects of this question of thinking with and through community knowledge, through something that's available to the community.
[A member of the audience] asks the question: “The experiential sensibilities, which come through the metaphors that Devanoora uses in his writings, such as sin, crime, bringing Marx under the people’s tree – ‘p-e-o-p-l-e-s’ tree – are largely missing in the mainstream academia and the public. I'd like to know the possibilities to mainstream-ize this vernacular theoretical knowledge production as an approach of de-caste-ing methodologies which have remained subsumed under the canonized sort of theoretical framework.”
From the other end, a slightly more critical question dealing with that same material, is by [a member of the audience] who asks: “When Devanoora talks about the collective consciousness, what role does he see there from memory? As we all know, memory can be deceptive, or writers may choose to present a selective version of memory, ignoring certain parts. Can memory be trusted at all in constructing a collective consciousness?
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: Both interesting questions. I mean, I agree with the point on memory, but, you know, we’re all choosing to – especially in these kinds of political projects – we're not trying to be historicists or professional historians. Especially for someone like Mahadeva, he would completely reject that demand. He wouldn't accept it at all. It’s the burden of historians [to] remember everything that has happened, good and bad. But what I'd also like to recognize is the ability to see both, as he concluded in one of his interventions. Simplicity, wisdom, and cruelty. So, memory need not simply mean we choose what is flattering to us.
And one really remarkable tradition in Kannada intellectual circles – you see this in D. R. Nagaraj’s work and you see this in Mahadeva’s work, both serious, quasi-academic, intellectual work or in literary works or parable-like essays – you see this ability to simultaneously grasp beauty and cruelty. Actually my advisor, my teacher, Sheldon Pollock, when he wrote a dedicated line to D. R. Nagaraj, he mentioned that it was recognizing his extraordinary ability to see beauty and cruelty in the same thing. This is what remains at the back of our conscience, sort of informing our consciousness, collective, individual, whatever it may be. This important ability to see both cruelty and beauty, whether it comes from a historicist sense or whether it comes from a folk consciousness, it's present, [and] the presence is something that we need to recognize.
I can read out a line in every page of Mahadeva’s fiction which would exemplify that. I mean, quite often, when I'm speaking on these kinds of themes, I've been accused of being a fanboy. But it's something that we notice. I mean, how do we theorize this without paying attention to those kinds of details? This is a challenge.
With the first question, I think it's, as I was saying earlier in our social movements, quite often it may not get recognized, quite often, it may not get as much significance as it should, but it is present. The point about including this kind of wisdom, which in academic discourse might be missing, is our challenge. It is our responsibility. Mahadeva wouldn't see it as his burden. He left university life four decades ago, and he hasn't had much to do with it. So, if a university or academia wants to be part of this social movement, it's up to us who are in the universities to make that gesture.
ANUPAMA RAO: I wondered if we could come back to sort of where you ended both your own comments, Prithvi, and then what you said just now. One is the sort of challenge to historicism, and to think through then what it means to call up this tradition where the vachanakaras, Buddha, and Marx sit with each other in an imagination of equality which is generous, inviting, and open to all – that temple without the roof.
I guess, both Mahadeva and D. R. Nagaraj [share] in the effort to think about Gandhi and Ambedkar together. Of course, Nagaraj makes the argument that each one is profoundly transformed by the other, especially in the aftermath of the Poona Pact compromise. This position was absolutely unexpected for those who called themselves political Ambedkarites, who had a particular reading of that moment. But then I think [it was unexpected as well] for a reformist, upper-caste group or community who felt that they could take on what Gandhi had done because he was –for them – the most radical, upper-caste activist against untouchability, but not Ambedkar. Nagaraj’s is a rare position, a fraught position to embrace. I wonder if you could say a little bit more to what it would mean to bring those two perspectives, Ambedkar and Gandhi together. And it goes to your broader point that one wants to think about cruelty and beauty as co-evil or co-constitutive. But this is a very, very difficult hole to square, peg to square, or whatever the word may be. Right. These two positions…they are really incommensurable. Or, they have become incommensurable. What do we take away from that meeting or encounter [between Ambedkar and Gandhi, in 1932 and after] that we should be thinking about again today?
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: The two of us, for the last two or three days, we've been discussing this quite a bit. This event has given an opportunity for us to re-engage with each other. One of the concerns that we share is about a recent development in Karnataka, where each caste is getting a Development Corporation of its own. It is as if the state has no conception, the government cannot think about any notion of public good and so we need a caste-specific Development Corporation. Or, you provide reservation to all groups so that you basically segregate state services along caste lines, you share public goods along caste lines. And we have been thinking about this.
I mean, is this the option that we are looking at when you return to the great challenge that Ambedkar posed: “What is our society? What is the Hindu society that we are envisaging? Caste society is the reality.” And so, where I see Mahadeva sort of breaking the discipline of Dalit movement, in a sense - I don't have much time to develop a couple of scenes that I wanted to discuss there – is to challenge certain strategic objectives, whether it is in the form of getting certain entitlements or creating a certain political space for itself, which will then enable the community to become an interest group, a political player in the game of politics.
So, one of the criticisms of young Dalit activists in the last ten or fifteen years, is that the choices made by senior Dalit activists, like Mahadeva himself, weren't appropriate. They didn't become a political party. Though they achieved certain objectives, they didn't make the kind of radical political choices where capturing political power was actually the goal; a strategic, partially Ambedkarite goal of securing a separate electorate, or partaking in state power.
But I think the question that Mahadeva is asking is perhaps a more ambitious version of the bahujan samaj question. It’s not bahujan samaj, it is the samaj question. So, what is this samaj that we are thinking about and how do we get there? And in my understanding, in the way I read him, he is constantly thinking about overcoming contradictions, overcoming what we call in Indian languages as vairodhya. You see these opposition dyads, which emerge quite often. But how do we transcend, how do we see certain possibilities even while being comfortable with the difference? And this is perhaps.. I should end on this note. In my experience, Mahadeva is the writer or the thinker that I've seen most comfortable with difference. Difference doesn't faze him. And when you have that kind of confidence about dealing with the other, you feel the strategic objectives of the Dalit movement are very limited goals. So, how do we transcend this to build a larger society or to come up with a conception of a samaj, of a society? This is the broader question, the broader objective. Here is where I see Mahadeva as quite distinctive from others, though it also lends to accusations that he is not disciplined enough, not strategic enough, or, in some ways, not being parochial enough to achieve the goals of the movement.
ANUPAMA RAO: Just a continuation of this issue, since [a member of the audience] asks, and this is coming right to the point that you were making: “In Karnataka, the Dalit movement, which was influenced by the Dalit Panthers in Maharashtra, was preceded by Dalit literature. Interestingly, the Dalit movement pulled not just the Dalits, but a significant number of progressive savarna writers, if I can say so, also toward the movement. So, you know, U. R. Ananthamurthy and others. That's on the one hand. And on the other hand, there were too many ideological conflicts, Lohia-ite socialism and Gandhian socialism. I see B. Krishnappa, the founding convener of D. S. S., as the only Ambedkarite within the movement in place. What role does that play in shaping Dalit literature and/or the movement? What role does that play in the Karnataka cultural milieu?”
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: Yeah, this is the narrative arc that I wanted to address a little bit, but I'll try to give a two- minute version of it. You have both Dalit literature and Dalit activism being coterminous because literature itself becomes an act of assertion, of expression of a new literary and political consciousness. This was accompanied by activism all across Karnataka, from the village level to the universities, and it led to all kinds of conflicts. Actually, the Dalit movement emerges out of those conflicts. So that's one part. And, for a variety of different reasons, the movement itself splinters. Initially, you had a commitment to conduct workshops or other educational programs in the evenings in the first one decade. They were endemic then, but they slowly disappeared.
The other point that [the member of the audience] is making is about the alliance with the Bandaya movement that comes about in a slightly different context. But there are certain overlapping concerns that both Dalit writers and Bandaya writers have, which have to do with their idea of the purpose of literature itself, and then the kind of new aesthetic criteria which needs to guide the production and the evaluation of literary works The standard literary critical parameters are not seen as adequate or appropriate even. So that's the sort of complexity. I'm not so sure about the reading of other Dalit activism. That's a longer conversation. That's left for another occasion.
ANUPAMA RAO: Prithvi, we've got a few moments and we should probably bring things to a close. Difficult to think about how we can do that. But, I would like to ask if Mahadeva could have the last word and if we can ask Mahadeva about…I keep coming back to what you read from Kusumabaale.
(Anupama Rao speaking in Kannada – roughly translates to the following)
“Mahadeva, would you please speak a little bit about vachanas?”
What is the place of Vachana? You know, I'm very drawn to this imagination of the world of the vachana being with us now. In the excerpt, you permitted Prithvi to translate, there is a living presence. One might feel that Akkamahadevi is with us even today. She knocks on our door and asks for things, making a claim.”
What is the importance of the vachana?”
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA: I’m very glad to hear you speak Kannada. In ordinary terms, in other Dharmas (faiths/religions), there is a prophet, pravadi, a single prophet who leads all the followers, whether it be Muhammad, even Buddha, even Mahavira, the leader of Jainism. Whichever religion/faith it may be, a single prophet leads and all others become followers.
But, amongst the vachanakaras, there is a notion of mutual equality which makes them come together. Then, they each have an ishtadaiva, and each one’s ishtadaiva, their god, is nothing but their consciousness, prajñe. And it is their consciousness that they each have to address. […] And to god you can lie, for instance, you could say “I repent having made this mistake, please forgive me.” But to your consciousness, how can you lie?
Most religions have become associated with a faith/caste. Jainism became affiliated with the traders’ faith/caste (vaishyas), Buddhism became prominently affiliated with the faith of the Kshatriyas before – now it is becoming affiliated more and more with that of the Dalits. If the workers were to be affiliated to a faith or a caste, it would be Lingayata or [the faith of the] vachanakaras. That is why, I would call this faith the faith of the vachanakaras. You could call it Lingayata too, but that does not become a “faith,” dharma, in its true sense. If Lingayata were to be a faith, dharma, it would be the highest religion, māunnata dharma, but if it were to be a caste, jāti, it is a low caste.
At this time, I remember a saying. During the time when Ambedkar was in the US and Europe, he did not experience untouchability. This is the distinctiveness of the experience in India. There are people who say that wherever the Untouchable goes in India, it is an issue for him and an issue for those around him. This is a kind of distinctiveness that needs to be overcome.
Then you had asked about the Gandhi-Ambedkar nexus. Gandhi, [despite] being orthodox, sanātani, on the one hand was a great revolutionary, kranthikari, by attending only inter-caste marriages and not others. On the other hand, eradication of caste, eradication of chaturvarna, he lets these be as they are [i.e., he does not want to eradicate caste or the chaturvarna]. Gandhi walks through different ages. The Gandhi of this evening is different from the Gandhi of the next morning. If you were to capture Gandhi at different moments, they would all be different [and difficult to put together/comprehend]. But if you were to see Gandhi walking past the ages [i.e., if you see a dynamic/non-stationary version of Gandhi], it makes sense to trace such a version of Gandhi, to see where Gandhi walks and reaches. […] How many Gandhis are there? There are so many Gandhis. If you look at it in this way, you can see things in a different light.
ANUPAMA RAO: Thank you. Phenomenal. Prithvi, just for an ending, just a few main points, if you can, since we're recording it for people who are with us and…
DEVANOORA MAHADEVA: (Mahadeva speaking in Kannada – roughly translates to the following)
Another point, sorry, about [the conflict between] Krishnappa, Ambedkarites, Lohia-ites, Communists. This is all true. We used to fight ideologically, but in small, ordinary, and straightforward ways. We still do too. We used to fight simply by invoking the names of Lohia or Communism. But, you know the wound that is within us? That wound makes us all one, brings us all together – it is that [shared] wound that makes us all speak.
PRITHVI DATTA CHANDRA SHOBHI: So a quick summary, three points. [In] his response to the [question on the] vachana tradition, Mahadeva talked about how in other traditions you have one teacher, one enlightened one, whether it is Jesus Christ or Muhammad or Mahavira, and then others are followers. But he see vachanakaras, the vachana community, or the vachana tradition as one in which you have equals. That's his reading of the vachana tradition. [In the vachana tradition,] all of them have the conception of a personal god with whom they struggle. And that personal god is a form of Shiva in one way, but it is also the embodiment of their consciousness. So, it is their consciousness that they are constantly engaging. You see their struggles, their fights to realize this god, and to their own consciousness they cannot lie. That was what he wanted to say in relation to vachanakaras.
He continued to talk about Gandhi and Ambedkar, and his point primarily was about the many Gandhis who exist and Gandhi's radical changes within Gandhi’s own beliefs. [From] a Gandhi who has a stronger conviction or stronger commitment to maintaining caste order to somebody who moves towards a radical position of endorsing and attending only inter-caste marriages and so on.
Those are the two major points. And finally, about the Dalit movement itself, he recognized the ideological differences which existed between fellow travelers like B. Krishnappa and so on, but what united them was this wound that they all shared, which brought them together to launch collective struggles.
ANUPAMA RAO: Thank you, Prithvi, thank you, Devanoora Mahadeva, thank you to Janni. I think this has been an extraordinary conversation. And I think given that, you know, the previous session was about the Dalit Panthers, it's very interesting to think about the relationship between one aspect of that conversation regarding the relationship of Ambedkar and Marx as this was discussed in the 1970s. And here, I think, as many of the questions have opened up around the unresolved conversation between Gandhi and Ambedkar, which also keeps coming up, whether it's with Nagaraj’s work, or in what Mahadeva was saying, that you don't just fix Gandhi at a particular moment. There are so many Gandhis. And what one wants to see is where does Gandhi go? Where does he walk in the context of a life? This opens up important questions.
What we get from the engagement with Mahadeva today – rare and we're just so grateful for it – is to see him engage as a poet-philosopher, in every bit of his writing. This makes it difficult because what you're getting is a poetic kernel that might shock you. You have to stay with it and really think through how it asks you to transform yourself.
We are waiting for language— language is skin and—we are together under this open sky, the temple without shelter. This is a remarkable world that Mahadeva opens up in his writing. And Prithvi, you are such an important guide in this journey. Thank you all very much again.
H. Janardhan, popularly known as Janni, former Director of Rangayana Mysuru, is a graduate of the National School of Drama (NSD), and the recipient of Karnataka’s Rajyotsava Award (2024) and the Karnataka Nataka Academy award among many other honors. Janardhan came of age as a talented singer who took part in protest theatre in Karnataka in the 1970s. He played an active role, together with B. V. Karanth, in setting up Rangayana. A passionate practitioner of the use of street theatre in the literacy campaign, he has been the Karnataka state convener of the literacy movement. He founded Janamana Samskrutika Sangathane, a Mysore-based cultural organization that has been engaged in taking theatre, music, and theatre workshops to the people for over three decades.
Devanoora Mahadeva is a giant in the world of Kannada literature, best known perhaps for the literary landmark Kusumabaale,which was published in 1988 and which has since been translated into English.He has authored Dyavanooru (1973), and the novella Odalaala, published in 1981, and a collection of critical essays, Edge Bidda Akshara , which was published in 2012. He is known for his signal contribution to the literary representation of Dalit life and interiority, but he is also the keeper of our social conscience who seeks to right a world that is dangerously askew and lacking moral compass. He's the recipient of many awards, including the Sahitya Academy Award, the Padma Shri, the Allama and the Bodhisattva Awards, a DLit from the University of Mysore, and the Nadoja Award from Kannada University in Hampi. He was also among the first to return the Sahitya Academy Award and the Padma Shri in 2015 to protest the ongoing assault on critical thought and reason by Hindutva forces. Mahadeva has a website called Namma Banavasi where all his work is archived.
Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi teaches at Krea University. He is a literary historian and translator himself, and among the most innovative and engaged of our time. His rereading and translation of the vachana tradition reveals the luminosity and the sheer insurgence of the vachana as form, but also because Prithvi is fundamentally rewriting the ways in which we have apprehended that tradition in toto. I think many of you will recall his marvelous introduction to D. R. Nagaraj’s celebrated work, TheFlamingFeet, which was put together and republished with a collection of other essays after Nagaraj had passed.
Anupama Rao is Professor of History (Barnard) and MESAAS (Columbia). She is Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia, and spent over 9 years as Senior Editor of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, between 2012-2019. She is completing a monograph entitled Ambedkar in America; a forthcoming volume (coedited with Shailaja Paik), the Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar; and has recently introduced and edited Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More (2019). She has edited the 2018 reader Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality (2018), a sequel of sorts to the 2006 Gender and Caste. In addition to numerous essays, she is also the author of The Caste Question, a work of social and intellectual history, which has received critical acclaim for transforming the field’s understanding of the relationship between caste and democracy, and for its contributions to political thought and history more broadly. She directs the Ambedkar Initiative, whose vision includes: situating Ambedkar as a global thinker, and among the twentieth century’s most important voices in the radical democratic tradition; engaged pedagogy; and public outreach. Most of all, it aims to resuscitate the links, both implicit the explicit, between the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracies.
Notes
[1] Devanoora Mahadeva, “Nanna Devaru,” [“My God”] in Edege Bidda Akshara. Bengaluru: Lakshmi Publishing House, 2013: 5- 6.
[2] Devanoora Mahadeva, “Untouchability is the Great Grandfather of Apartheid,” at the conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance,” at National Law School of India University, organized in association with the National Human Rights Commission, August 3, 2001, Bengaluru. Featured Speaker Presentation.
[3] Devanoora Mahadeva, Odalaala, Chapter Four. Bengaluru: Rangasampada Prakashana, 1986: 19-21.
[4] Mahadeva, Devanoora. “Aa vyaladalli mumbaro kichchu,” [“The Spark that Emerged in that Moment”] Kusumabale. Bengaluru: Department of Kannada and Culture, 2011: 40-41.
[5] S. Bageshree, “Being Dalit after Gandhi and Ambedkar- Insights from Devanoora Mahadeva,” in Reasoning Indian Politics: Philosopher Politicians to Politicians Seeking Philosophy. Eds Narendra Pani and Anshuman Behera. Delhi: Routledge India, 2017: 245-246.
[6] Ibid., p 243.
[7] Devanoora Mahadeva, “Munchada Katha Aalisuttidda aa Jeevathmanu,” [That One Who Witnessed the Turning of the Tale] Kusumabale. Bengaluru: Department of Kannada and Culture, 2011: 19- 20.
[8] Ibid.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Akshara Santoshkumar