Dams For A River Of ­Languages

Lunch hour at Krishna, the vegetarian restaurant at New Woodlands in Chennai, is usually a hectic affair. You’d see cars parked up outside on the spacious grounds and large families streaming in past the blast of air-conditioning at the doorway. Inside: the hustle and bustle of waiters serving large helpings of rice and various assortments of the south Indian meal that has been drawing patrons for decades.

Roughly 350 km away, at the satellite bus stand on Mysore Road in Bangalore, if you were pleased with yourself at having beaten the early morning traffic rush on a trip out of town, you’d probably still find yourself waiting for a couple of minutes at the counter of the Adyar Ananda Bhavan restaurant to order a mini-tiffin which, of course, is ‘self-served’.

Krishna and Adyar Ananda Bhavan—pla­ces which would buzz with order calls of “idli, dosa” or a ‘full meal’—suddenly found themselves in the thick of issues far more emotive last week. To wit, the rightful share of river water, on the surface, and a kind of ethnic unease within which that age-old rivalry over resources is framed. The two eateries, both cross-transplants situated on the other’s geographical turf, happened to get picked out as easy targets in a quick burst of events that shut down Bangalore for two days. And that refrain—of how this propensity for ethnic rage does not behove a global, cosmopolitan city like Bangalore—was rolling off tongues once again. The ref­rain gets to be heard oftener these days, as an incipient xenophobic element is pic­ked out across sundry incidents of violence. And this was to do with Cauvery. Or was it?

For, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, as modern linguistic states, have played host to a kind of sibling feud as rival Dravidian identities; a subterranean war almost, expressed through subtle means most times, but occasionally turning combustible when it finds a vent or flashpoint like Cauvery. Bangalore, of course, is a special subcategory by itself within Karnataka. And many also feel that last week’s trouble-makers who upturned cars and torched buses don’t speak for or represent the larger population, as is the case with most skirmishes. But how deep do sentiments run in these situations?

“Somewhere, it does transcend the water issue. I wonder whether we need to think about this with more nuance,” says Carnatic singer T.M. Krishna, for whom Woodlands is “as Tamil as it can get”. That’s because the hotel started by Krishna Rao, who, in the words of writer S. Muthiah, “brought the gospel of Udipi cuisine to Madras,” dates back to 1938. What Krishna is wondering aloud is whether we are thinking deeply enough of the outsider-insider issue in terms of community itself. For that matter, how much does Bangalore’s multi-cultural population figure in all this, and as many still ask—is the city really cosmopolitan or have those old faultlines persisted? Like the oft-heard witticism that you don’t need to know or speak Kannada to live in Bangalore. “It’s a joke but it’s not a joke,” says Krishna. “At some level, I think there is resentment.”

Despite the tensions last week in Bangalore—a fleet of buses set on fire in a depot and selective vandalism elsewhere—the conflict did not reach the level of interpersonal violence it touched in 1991, feels economist and academic Narendar Pani. But he reckons you could trace some of the undercurrents to the old cultural divisions in Bangalore that were alive till recent decades before they ostensibly melted away when the Kannada-speaking old-city areas and the British-built cantonment area, where Tamil, apart from English, was largely spoken, began to mingle. As many feel, much of that old cultural history and its dynamics still haven’t got the careful aca­demic attention they deserve. For INS­tance, how, even in the old-city areas of Bangalore, local traders were not nat­ive speakers of Kannada but the language on the streets was always Kannada.

The breaking down of these div­ides, in a manner of speaking, coin­cided, in the mid-eighties, with the Gokak agitation—the public outcry protesting the state government’s move to make Sanskrit a compulsory language in schools—which many reckon was a milestone or sorts in the assertion of Kannada identity across the state. If one were to look at the history of Kannada activism, says one obs­erver, it is likely that the rising Tamil ideologism—though primarily targeted at the imposition of Hindi in the years following Independence—may have also contributed in some manner, ostensibly because a certain identity was being ass­erted in parts of Bangalore where newer entrants began to settle the city.

“Kannada writers have touched on this matter for several decades now. Kannada speakers, in their view, ought to learn the language of the state they migrate to and non-Kannada speakers needed to do similarly when they moved to Karnataka,” wrote sociology professor Chandan Gowda in a recent opinion piece on the broader topic of languages and linguistic duties. “There is an imagination of linguistic fairness here. There is an imagination of sacrifice here as well, since Indians have to commit to making the effort of learning the language of the region they have chosen to settle in, both as a gesture of respect for that language as well as a regard for its continued well-being.”

At the heart of the Cauvery dispute itself is the feeling that Karnataka has been wronged in that it has not been allowed to extract its equitable share of the river water versus the idea of protecting the interests of people downstream, who have used the water for irrigation for very long. “So, different rights come into conflict, which is why you can generate huge emotions on both sides, and both can get self-righteous about the issue,” says Pani. Just under a decade ago, film star Rajnikanth was asked to apologise for commenting on a water project. Last week, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman of Biocon, wrote an open letter titled ‘Proud to be a Kannadiga’ after her tweets on the bandh that had been called to protest the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu drew caustic responses. Shaw, who grew up in Bangalore, explained that her view that a bandh was counter-productive, from an economy point of view, didn’t mean she wasn’t sympathetic to Karnataka’s cause in the water dispute.

“That these emotions can be stoked means there have been few conversations amongst us as a society,” says Krishna, and this could be true of Kannadigas versus Tamils—or Malayalis versus Tamils—each time, say, a Mullaperiyar issue crops up. Krishna points to how, even in the Carnatic music world, some sore points have existed for decades. For instance, the feeling among musicians in Bangalore and Karnataka, that they are given less prominence vis-a-vis musicians from Tamil Nadu. “That has not gone away. It is a legitimate point, I must say. There is higher value given to musicians from Tamil Nadu and there is res­entment in the Carnatic community in Karnataka that somehow they are always given second-grade treatment and in all the big festivals, you always get artistes from Tamil Nadu,” he says. Some would recall privately that the early days of the Kannada film industry in the studios in Madras evoked similar memories—a bit of that apparently manifests even now in the form of little quibbles now and again.

Many commentators point to the ­impact local television channels in both states could have had in the situation last week, besides the social media posts flying around, as the Bangalore police tried to get the situation under control. While Mandya, the agricultural district which the Cauvery irrigates, is emotionally the closest to the dispute, Bangalore is a big part of it, not just as a capital city or as an agglomeration with such unique linguistic dynamics, but because it has, over the last couple of decades, come to depend on the river for its drinking water. It’s also where calls by Kannada groups have resonated. For instance, it was about a year ago that Vatal Nagaraj, probably the best known activist in Karnataka, complained that people from the coastal Dakshina Kannada district didn’t support a bandh call given last year over a separate issue (of course, he tendered an apology for his comments some months ago).

Over the past two decades since the Cauvery dispute flared up, Bangalore has changed unrecognisably into an IT-driven boomtown, bringing in many more cultures into its expanding perimeter and newer dynamics. Many observers reckon that the old resentments probably have weakened and that newer ones had emerged, especially for those who feel the Kannada identity of Bangalore is under threat. Earlier this year, yet ano­ther witticism—about how the city-dweller always spoke to the new entrant in the latter’s language—made its way into a social media meme. That assertion of how accommodating the city was had come in a different context—when an African student faced the ire of mobs for a road accident she wasn’t involved in—an incident that made headlines globally. All this still leaves the question—just how cosmopolitan is Bangalore?

Sociologist Chandan Gowda thinks any mention of the city being cosmopolitan is probably misreading a deep issue. He feels the tradition of tolerance of Bangalore needs to be carefully understood. “I think this cosmopolitan image is being bandied about in the most superficial way without getting into granularities of community-level interactions or class interactions and all of that, which are very important.” Is it time, then, that we took a deeper look at those interactions and had those conversations?

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Language Of Protest

1937 First wave: The first anti-Hindi agitation against the imp­osition of Hindi in Tamil Nadu (then Madras Presidency).

1965 Tamil Nadu: On January 25, a riot broke out in Madurai between students agitating against imposition of Hindi and Congress workers. The violence, which continued for two months, left 70 people dead.

1961 An Act of Pride: The Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act directed that sign boards of all establishments be in Kannada. Any other language on the board was to come below Kannada.

1982 Gokak agitation: Kannada superstar Rajkumar led the campaign, which was for the first language status of Kannada language in Karnataka.

2006 Anti-Hindi Day: The Karnataka Rakshana Vedike decided to observe September 14 as ‘anti­-Hindi day.’

2005 Rechristening: The Karnataka government accepted Jnaanpeeth awardee and author U.R. Ananthamurthy’s proposal to rename Bangalore as Bengaluru. The NDA government finally made the change, stuck till then, in 2014.