The Dialectics of Cultures: Modernism and Kannada Literature

The Crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

‘How does one write the nation’s modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal?’ Homi K Bhaba asks in his Nation and Narration, which still needs an adequate answer. The question at once brings to forefront the antithetical axis upon which the cartography of modernism is drawn; first, treating it as a quotidian reality at the micro-level, and the second, considering it as an agent of transition at a macro-level. Bhaba through his question attempts to decipher the double signification of modernism in the light of its dichotomous Janus face and appears to come to a close conclusion that all acts of transition, whether social, political, or cultural demand a reconfiguration of certain existing structures and patterns thus posing an imperative for societies to accept the cosmic dynamic principle as a ruling monarch. This psychodynamics of transition poses a challenge to the negotiation of the principle of center and as all of us are aware to locate the center in the postmodernist context is to engage one’s intellect in the forever and already collapsing structure of signifiers withstanding the fact signification is more often than not, ‘a unique verbal event’. Here perhaps is the indenting of Artaud’s “implosion”, wherein the non-locus of ‘the functioning anarchy’, which India is, in the grateful and also painful act of reconfiguration, contests with the ‘alien’ ideologies that seek an entry into its space. This struggle between the native and the alien results probably in the creation of what Turner calls “liminal spaces”. This can be called the cultural dialectics. This is the dialectics that Modernism initiated in its wrestling with the native cultures when it entered the Indian culture. I wish to take up this issue in the backdrop of my own Kannada literature, which is replete with a rare understanding of the compulsions under which Modernism and its pedagogy was formalized and institutionalized. While reading the act of resistance of the native culture as an attempt to retain its cultural Identity, my paper also takes into consideration the paradox involved with that, that how while opposing the influences of a new culture, for Modernism came with its cultural package, the native cultures pose obstruction for ‘progress’ in a teleological sense of the term.

Modernism, as a literary phenomenon entered into Kannada literature in the 1960s, the period when Postmodernism was already ushered in, in the West. So, interestingly, the writers who introduced Modernism to Kannada literature were also influenced by the tenets of Postmodernism. In this sense, Modernism in Kannada literature is a rare blending of Modernism and Postmodernism of the west. Hence it becomes invariable for a writer tracing the roots of Modernism in Kannada literature to essentially mix the phrases of both the movements that otherwise may become anachronistic.

Writers such as Gopalakrishna Adiga, U.R. Ananthamurthy, P. Lankesh, Poornachandra Tejaswi, B.C. Ramachandra Sharma, Devanooru Mahadeva, Alanahalli Srikrishna, and the precursors of Modernism tried to explore in their works the nature, culture, and effects of modernism creeping into the rural fabric of India. Often referred to as Navya writers, we find in their works approaches accelerated towards deciphering the society at cross roads and its pros and cons. It was in fact Gopalakrishna Adiga who blew the conch of Modernism against the Romanticism’s dead weight upon literature and heralded the advent of a new epoch through his poetry. He waged a war against the traditionalist Romantic writers and was successful in drawing to his coterie young influential writers such as U.R. Ananthamurthy and P. Lankesh, and trained them in the literary gymkhana of Modernism. For him Modernism was the only way out to take the past fraught society to new vistas of wisdom and hence he at one became its volunteered votary. He exclaimed:

They haunt me, the secret foetuses of the past;
The stale air of the sunken old well
Rises on all fours crawling upside down
Entwining the sunbeam that sings a lullaby
and charges towards the basil bush.

Hence his overt clarions call to revolt against the tradition. He writes in The Tree of Dead Roots:

Lift up this tree of dead roots
with all the branches and twigs;
Prepare coffee with dry leaves, drink it
as sorrow chokes your throat.

He finds tradition “an age-old tree”; so the ironic question in the same poem: “for hanging oneself/ Is anything better than its branches?”

For Adiga, Modernism was a welcome panacea because he believed that it would infuse new spirit into the dead society. In fact he thought that the crisis of the present result of the staleness of the past necessitated an imperative for what Habermas later called ‘the project of Modernity’.

But for the later writers modernism did not come with so good a package that Adiga had envisioned. By then they had already started realizing the aftermath polemics that Modern culture had created with the native Kannada culture and its ramifications in the socio-political and also cultural life of its people. They realized that Modernism is unfortunately is not a lateral crossing, but hierarchic in nature. However writers such as Ananthamurthy sided with the new wave because somehow they knew that in spite of the havoc it creates, Modernism is a sure remedy for the uplift of the illiterate and the downtrodden. Or, rather they used Modernism as a tool to reach out such a socialist and humanist goal. They were convinced that a society such as India, rotten with social blemishes such as Casteism, needs to be cured of, whatever the price may be. Accordingly, each of them took up some aspects of the Movement and used them to represent the Modernist culture. For Ananthamurthy, Modernism comes in the guise of Modern education. In Bharathipura we find Jagannatha propagating the need for Modern education to root out the social taboos that have prevented certain downtrodden sections of society to access to certain social and religious institutions such as hotels and temples. Jagannatha, the ideologue of the novel knows only too well that unless people become more secular and democratic-the values he associates with modern education, society would perish to its nadir. Hence his consistent efforts to disjuncture the existing privileged positionalities of certain communities over the rest of the society. He does it by attempting to dismantle the religious fabric of the society-for he considers religion as a hegemonic institution that harbours oppression and injustice in the name of God. In the novel he makes a Sudra-an ‘untouchable’ touch the Saligrama – a highly sacred and sacrosanct icon of God, which sends cultural shock waves to both the societies; the society of the Upper caste and also the society of the Downcast. While the privileged sections gape at his unpalatable blasphemy before reacting, the lower sections look at him with eyes of suspicion and spy some malevolent intentions with his so called democratic values. Through this act both the sub-cultures of the society are deterritorialized because the borders are blurred. For Jagannatha, and even for Ananthamurthy, these borders are not merely cultural or religious borders, but are borders between fellow human beings. Hence Ananthamurthy considers it imperative to wipe them out using the modernist movement as a tool. The literary movement becomes in the hands of a socially committed writer a weapon to fight for the higher causes of equality and humanity. Perhaps we can locate theory of syncretism as proposed by Wilson Harris and Bill Ashcroft.

Syncretism believes in the possibility of psychic regeneration through cultural catastrophe. Even culture wars, by their own energies savagely deconstruct themselves and seek to erode the cultural prejudices and dismantle their binary base. This syncretistic questions our notions of cultural identity itself in its attempt to create ‘hybrid culture’. Thus Ananthamurthy uses Modernism as an imperative for the subcultures of the ‘margins’-margin in the postcolonial sense, to come together under a single banner only to strengthen their base upon humanitarian grounds. Although Ananthamurthy knows that Modernism comes along with the notion of fragmentation in cultural, linguistic, and political deterritorialization, he is convinced of its efficacy to create a unity among the subcultures of the margins, which in turn will be jointly able to face the modern problems. This is a unique strategy of drawing strength from an alien Movement such as Modernism, only to strengthen and unify the native roots and counter it to face its hegemonic onslaught. The writer believes that the unification of distinct cultural codes within the society will essentially broaden the cultural base of India.

Another poet who uses Modern education as a tool to empower the downtrodden is Govindaiah. Hailing from such an outcaste background, he has a first hand experience of finding an access to the mainstream of the society through the modern education. His poems such as Alphabets and Me reveal the empowerment of the margin within the margin.

Devanooru Mahadeva another major Kannada writer who also has his roots in the oppressed sections of the society adopts a similar strategy; In his much acclaimed short story Tar Arrives, he uses the tar road as a spatially grounded metaphor of Modernism and problematizes the feudal social hierarchy by bringing the very foundation under subtle scrutiny. While the older generation represented by the village Gowda and Patel plan to build a temple from the money saved in the government contract for making a tar road to their village, the youngsters belonging to Dalit-untouchable community question the very ethics of such an action thus posing an implicit challenge to the existing hierarchy. At once the entire issue boils down to a conflict between religious and secular values as in the previous novel of Ananthamurthy. Thus in either case modernism comes handy for writers to introduce their socialistic values.

But Alanahalli Krishna looks at the issue of modernism from an altogether a different point of view. His novel Gendethimma provides a direct site for contestation between modernism and the native culture. Hailing from a rural background, he is an eyewitness to record the percolation of modernism in his village. In the novel Maranki, more than a symbol becomes a metaphor of modernity. She and her husband Gendethimma who is a peripatetic merchant become chief proponents of modernism in the rural community. By introducing a new market force backed by it’s alluring and decontextualized commodities, such as bra, skirt, scented oil, perfumes and other such fashionable things she becomes a harbinger of a radical change – change not merely in the individual and economic aspects but in the human relationships and in the very consciousness of village itself. The Scope of these commodities, which are in true Marxian sense carriers of bourgeois culture, poses formidable problems in a different culture specific society. Introduction of this ‘new culture’ in the novel opens up a new space in which people find themselves startled to operate in the absence of cultural stabilizers. The trial incident of Gendethimma in the novel is an outcome of such bewilderment and also outrage of the people. The younger folk of the village who are allured by these fascinating things when start spending money over these ‘inauspicious’ things the elders at home cannot digest this dandy nature of their sons and daughters-in-law. When they oppose, the sons who had not even dared to look straight into their elders, start asserting for their share in the property. This social quid pro quo initiated by him and his wife has created a tumult in the harmonious relationship that pervaded the whole village. And understandably the ‘old heads’ of the village call him for a trial and there accuse him of ‘polluting the minds of younger folks at home’. Kendagannappa – a respected villager roars:

Because of these inauspicious things (bra, skirt, vests and briefs) we have been having wrangles, squabbles, and bickering at home… things have come to such a pass that my son has claimed his share of property. A cad like this (Gendethimma) has wrecked our homes.

Another old woman of the village, Motamma, also lets out her grievance. She narrates the story of fall-out in her house hold: her two sons Shivalinga and Gurubasava go mad at the wanton and excited merriments of their wives, and ‘dancing to their tunes’ provide them with all the luxuries that Gendethimma had introduced, paying no heed to the request of their mother. When she forcibly takes the affairs into her control they leave her and go.
Thus there is a sudden volte-face in the rural fabric. In the novel changes do not merely rest with the dress style. They alter the whole value system, human relationships, beliefs, habits, customs, and practices, and as a result there is a drastic and unwanted reconfiguration in the cultural co-ordinates of the village. There is an apparent loss of the native, ethnic identity that the village fostered over the centuries; whether it be the joint family system, or its austere dress style, or reverence for elders as a paramount value. With the change in the dress style, there is a dramatic change in the relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The net concomitant result is the break up of life style and value systems. The joint family system, which was hitherto a desirable and the only way of living, is broken to pieces; the society which was content with its simple way of living gets shattered with the introduction of these fashionable and luxurious commodities which in turn commodify the organic society of the village. Thus the author brilliantly works out the dialectics of cultures; the dialectics between the native, rural culture and the metonymically represented modern, urban culture.

Any kind of resistance to change is bipolar in nature, which at once highlights the in-built paradoxical component. On the one hand, any act of resistance to the engulfing influences of new culture, can be construed as a successful event of maintaining the native/local identity. It is a desirable value in itself. On the other hand, such an act would also become a subversive or a suicidal event for the new hopes and progress, if it were carried to its extremities. Probably the modern Kannada writers are caught in this dilemma; the dilemma that places them in the Hamletian contemplative mood making them incapable of tilting to either of the sides. This is well balanced in Krishna’s novel Gendethimma. In the novel, Bediyamma, Gendethimma’s mother stands for such a subversive force. She refuses to keep her household cleanly because ‘a new entrant’- Maranki, her daughter-in-law, who stands as a representative of modern culture, suggests it to her. Bediyamma rather prefers allowing her hens and dogs dirty the house, to listen to the tidiness proposed by Maranki, which only results in the collision between them. Subsequently the collision transgresses the domestic walls and results in the break up of the family. Thus the novelist ingeniously weaves strategic incidents to extend the culture clash paradigm from micro-level to macro-level by maintaining the artistic distance. This helps look at things from a non-biased and mere nativistc perspective.

The problematic boundaries of modernism are in fact enacted in such ambivalent positionalities. With these we arrive at the Frostian matrix of choice: Hybridity and liminal spaces on one side and on the other, exclusionist and nativistic stand. One can either apt for the formation of culturally aseptic zones or culturally hybrid zones. But most of the Kannada writers know that change is a must, and it is a law of time and nature. They believe in the dynamics of society, and hence their assent with Achebe’s dictum that ‘life just has to go on, and if you refuse to accept changes, then tragic though it may be, you are swept aside.

Notes:

Antonio Gramsci quoted in Mark Poster, “Postmodernity and the politics of multiculturalism”, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol.38, No.3, Autumn 1992.

Homi K Bhaba, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990

Gopalakrishna Adiga, “Past”, ed&tr-Sumatindra Nadig, 20th Century Kannada Poetry (Selections), first World Kannada Conference, Kannada and Culture Division, Govt. of Karnataka.

Gopalakrishna Adiga, “Past”, ed & tr -Sumatindra Nadig

Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity, an Incomplete Project”, The Anti Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Poster, Port Townsend, Bay Publications, 1983.

Srikrishna Alanahalli, Gendethimma, tr. P.P.Giridhar, McMillan India Ltd, 1999.

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