Determined to find a gentle, liberal way to be conservative, a way to be rooted without being parochial or insular.
 Keeping Faith With The Mother Tongue: The anxieties Of A Local Culture By Sugata Srinivasaraju Navakarnataka Pages: 287; Rs. 200 |
Our languages have developed a persecution complex, a sense of being stalked by history: English, malevolent world spirit, swamps everything. The cultural elite especially, healthily bilingual till now, is turning anglophone and feeling guilty about it. In all of India's fine menagerie of tongues, Kannada—the subject of this book—was perhaps fated to suffer the keenest anxiety pangs. It owns the least homogeneous territory among its kind. Besides the usual diffusion over a finely-grained dialect geography, it cohabits with a host of significant others: Konkani, Tulu, Kodava, Dakhini, their subsets, the spillage on the borders. Then there's Tamil, the looming hulk in the near distance.
The Indian linguistic state was an in vivo experiment in political theory: it set up a blunt, linear equation between language and empire. We are all victims of its success. Kannada's embattled, often hypertensive self-image—which these essays trace, indeed partake of in a reflexively aware sort of way—flows in part from this official transcribing of language as power and territory. The author navigates these swirling currents determined to find a gentle, liberal way to be conservative, a way to be rooted without being parochial or insular. He parlays his more journalistic concerns into this overarching theme to craft metaphors of loss: language as land, local culture as small farmer, actor Rajkumar as Kannada's embodied god and archangel, his arthritic senescence a creeping, dark omen in a millenary tale. Sugata Srinivasaraju is a work in progress. We wish him godspeed. He must now honour his own critique, write in Kannada, and defy translation.