Rise of the vernacular

When Kannada singer C Ashwath played a concert at ground where 40,000 people turned up for Deep Purple, 100,000 came.

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, universally known as RK Narayan and creator of ‘Malgudi’, was among India’s best known authors writing in English, widely translated, with a devoted following in many countries. His father was a school headmaster. Narayan, though born in Tamil-speaking Chennai in 1906 (then Madras), had to move to Kannada-speaking Mysore as a teenager when his father was transferred to the Maharaja’s Collegiate High School. His famous younger brother, RK Laxman, India’s most loved cartoonist, was born in Mysore in 1921.

The schoolteacher’s children were encouraged to converse in English and frequent the elegant school library. Narayan struggled to finish his degree and tried to work as a schoolteacher before he gave up everything else to become a novelist, writing solely in English. He became successful and built his own house in Yadavgiri, Mysore in 1953. He lived there until 1990, when he fell ill and had to move to Madras to stay with his daughter’s family. He died in 2001. When his legal heirs sought to demolish the Mysore home, fans and admirers of the writer urged the government to recognise his birth centenary and preserve the home as a heritage site. The Karnataka state government and local authorities at Mysore agreed and promised to buy the property from the heirs last September.

Incredibly, some eminent Kannada language writers are now protesting against the state’s gesture. They have many grouses against the late novelist, but almost all are related to his choice of the written language. In a joint press release and several media interviews, the protesting Kannada writers have mentioned grounds for denying the author the honour: RK Narayan is not a Kannadiga. He has not translated any Kannada work into English. He gave his manuscripts to an American university and received cash for it. He did not speak Kannada fluently. Therefore, RK Narayan is not entitled to a memorial in Mysore, which is in the linguistic state of Karnataka and the administration should desist from spending the taxpayers’ money on it.

The protesting clique, which has also shown hints of religious intolerance in other instances in the past, has been opposed by liberal intellectuals. To be fair, the state government itself, managed by a political establishment that is eminently capable of posturing for populist appeal, appears to be taken aback in this instance. This is more than a coalition of narrow minds. The outrageous logic of the protest barely hides a siege mentality founded on envy and fear about linguistic ‘others’, especially of English in urban spaces, which is in ignorance or denial of cultural realities. Among the 30 most-spoken languages in the world, 11 are Indian.

Bangalore, the capital city of Karnataka, which has been India’s fastest growing city for two decades, is an obvious arena of such conflicts. It is a city preferred by India’s young to earn well and move up. They come here from everywhere, but don’t really organise themselves into linguistic communities for political or cultural advantage. Bangalore continues to be expressed culturally, for the most part, in Kannada. For instance, it is a major centre of rock music and many big international groups give their first Indian performance here at the Palace Grounds. Deep Purple was surprised to find 40,000 screaming fans when it performed there for the first time in 2001. Other musical acts too — Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Bryan Adams or Metallica — had their fans, but the numbers are in the range of 20,000 to 40,000. But on April 23, 2005, when the late C Ashwath, a composer and singer of light music, tentatively planned a performance at the same venue, the timid organisers made arrangements for 10,000 people. This was indeed ambitious for a Kannada singer, they believed, but 100,000 fans turned up. Still, Kannada activists sulked because English-language media ignored the event. But the point is that the English-language media here is small and often marginal to the context. The most read Kannada language daily, Vijaya Karnataka, has a readership that is more than double of all the English language dailies combined in the state. Only one English language daily figures in India’s top 10, the rest of the list comprising Hindi and regional language papers. Hindi and regional language channels take most of television, with English news struggling to reach even one per cent of the 150 million TV homes of the country. India can have English and it can have all the other languages too. If India can own its own Mahatma Gandhi Road, it could easily and proudly own RK Narayan, too.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2012.