It is my belief that in these days when information is easily available through inter net, a documentary that simply gives us biographical information doesn’t add up to anything. Thus I chose this format— a personal journey with URA. There has to be some personal interventions to make sense of it all. URA has certainly influenced my generation. Many of us have grown up admiring his insights when they are found acceptable but also not hesitating to debate/quarrel with his views when they are found to be unacceptable. URA is one man with whom one can quarrel and yet remain friends without any bitter feelings. What I admired in his arguments and writings is that he is never judgemental. He always interprets an event from two positions— sadhya and shasvatha— the temporal and the eternal. He views all manifestations from a larger perspective: What are the contemporary implications and how much of it is because of historical reasons? He never sees anything as binary opposites or as bipolar identities. He tries to fuse the east and the west, traditional and modern. For him all philosophical matters are quotidian and all quotidian are philosophical. H.S. Raghavendra Rao aptly says in his interview that his prose is very poetic whereas he fills his poems with ideas.
You’ve leavened the inevitable talking-heads format with evocative visuals of Malnad, a few enactments of URA’s fiction and even an instance of playful animation. How did this format evolve?
I have made 3-4 documentaries earlier and except for the one on the painter K.K. Hebbar, I have always twisted the subject around and made a short fiction out of those commissioned films. I actually didn’t want to use whatever little of the talking heads format that I have used. Here, I had to resort to it as URA had to be constantly under medical supervision while undergoing dialysis. So I devised this format of using his poems and certain passages from his fiction as illustrations of his views. Even in the enactments, all that the characters read out/enact are the exact sentences from his original works.
You’ve got many Kannada writers and intellectuals apart from the likes of Ashis Nandy and Shiv Vishwanathan deconstructing the importance of URA. URA himself comes across as one of those rare creative minds whose self-analysis has startling clarity (despite failing health at this age of 82) minus any bogus humility. This must’ve been an advantage for you?
A friend of mine who was URA’s student told me that if one has not been a student of URA, (he was an English professor) one has missed a great experience in life. I never really understood his statement till I started attending URA’s lectures/ public speeches. He is a very engaging conversationalist and has the gift to express complex concepts in simple terms without using jargon. If this film is any good I think the credit must go to him. Prof. Manu Chakravarthy is an authority on the works of URA and was the subject consultant on this film apart from Ashis Nandy and Shiv Vishwanathan who have given some sharp insights into URA's philosophy.
URA is a self-confessed socialist and says: “Writing is a political act, not a mere contemplation”. He has boldly attempted contesting an election, participated in various agitations (illegal mining, saving river Tunga etc.) and has even been accused of being a Naxal sympathizer. In the recent past he has declared that he will quit India if Narendra Modi becomes PM and then retracted it. What is your take on it?
Let me try to contextualize URA. Like many writers and artistes in Karnataka, URA too has a socialist background. He is from Thirthahalli of Shimoga district where socialist movement was very strong. The first farmer agitation started in 1952 in which people like Lohia and others participated. URA, as a young man, too contributed in his own way by writing articles, composing and printing them at his father’s printing press and circulating the handbills etc. During that period his interactions with Gopla Gowda and other important socialist leaders of the state strengthened his belief in Socialism.