Gummalapuranevu Parasangagalu by K.S. Madhusudana, Rs.100
At a time when humour is in a way vulgarised by aimless, unprovoked conscious laughter in public parks and absurd programmes named ‘Hasyotsavas’ and also at a time when scoffing is considered rich humour, K.S. Madhusudana’s Gummalapuranevu Parasangagalu offers a whiff of fresh air and discovers a new path in the art of writing humour in Kannada. The narrator does not tread the well-established paths of Goruru, Raashi, Kefa, H.L. Keshava Murthy, Sunandamma, Dasharathi Dixit and others. He is different from them in many ways.
The locale of the narrative is a hamlet called Gummalapura which is situated on the borders of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, though the multicultural village is officially a small part of Tamil Nadu, the villagers speak three languages, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. More interestingly, it is a predominantly Kannada speaking place. There are nine chapters in this book, each one of them could be read in isolation, and each narrates a series of incidents related to a particular person or a set of personalities. In the process many of them get mythified. Each chapter has an invocation to a particular village God or Goddess. The invocations are made with mock seriousness. Except one, all the Gods/Goddesses in the village are local ones – each one is to be saluted for procuring a specific boon. Thus local Gods in the village are highly specialized ones. The people in GummaLapura consist of money lenders, illiterates, barbers (who are refined nadaswaram players too), thieves, teachers, small-scale merchants, priests, agriculturists, trouble makers and some lazy ones who do nothing other than eating and sleeping. Like Oliver Goldsmith who romanticizes the village idiocy, Madusudana deals with his village peers with warmth, empathy and concern.
Though nostalgia is the strong motivation of this narrative, there are many spontaneous thematic and linguistic deviations which make the narrative not only humorous but also very significant for the socio-economic-cultural understanding of a ‘non’-modernized Indian village. Madusudana goes back to his village of the early fifties of the last century with his own insights and experiences of the 21st century. Thus, the perceptions of the past are either underplayed or overplayed according to the attitude of the narrator. Take for instance, the narrator belongs to the revered orthodox Brahmin community of the village, but there is hardly any description of any Brahmin in the narrative. On the contrary, there are lengthy picturesque descriptions of non-brahmin personalities and their sensibilities. Ti.Ta.VareNya, the money lender, whose weakness for a woman (not his wife) being looked at with admiration, ‘Simple’ Shankarappa’s pragmatic approach to life, the delicacy of the nadaswaram played by Goyindu and his friends and the ‘special’ problems involved while playing nadaswaram, Konda’s ethical and moral commitment to the art of thieving, his professional preparation for it and his failure in stealing in the narrator’s house, Chikkathamma’s marriage, Veterinary doctor who also manages to handle human beings, the lone allopath in the village, Dr. Shekar who saves the author’s life, Eeraadi Era who gets silk dhoti from the narrator’s father and his sympathy for the son of the author (who is an American known to be using tissues rather than water in toilets), Tailor Bachiga’s escapades with women of the village, the faff about of the SaptamunijanangaL (Munnelaga, Munnaga, Munenentiga, Muneswara, T.Muniya, Jade Muniya, Muni Hanuma) – are all narrated with wonder and excitement. The places in and around Gommalapura, the forest where small temples for local gods are built, the hair dressing saloon, the school, the public toilet, Ammanni Otel (Veerasaivara Coffee Club), the dense trees and the pond in the village, the first visit of ‘autovriksha’ to the village, the all-time overcrowded bus, social functions like marriage, processions, mass feeding and dances, the animal world consisting of the village bull (Burre Basava), the buffalo (buddemme), the mane dog (Julu Nayi), the kitten, and the jackal – all these contribute to the dense narrative of Gummalapura. The names of some of the well established Kannada writers like Pampa, Shivarama Karanth, Tejeswi, Kiram and contemporary writers like Devanooru, Dr.C.P.Nagaraj, CPK and others are brought in the narrative to make its reading more light-hearted and enjoyable.
The uniqueness of the book lies in the highly stylized Kannada used. On many occasions, the narrator tends to make use of direct address forms like “Vachaka MahajanamgaLe” and engage the readers in old Kannada to create a mock serious tone to explain the trivialities around. Apart from this, the narrative is replete with a lot of code mixing both at the level of lexis and syntax. Though this particular technique is already used by many in the past, Madusudana seems to be ingenious in this. Many sentences/words start with Kannada and continue either in English or Tamil or Telugu and end up in one of the Kannada forms. Morphological features of many English/Telugu/Tamil words are drastically changed quite often to suit Kannada syntax.
Indeed Madhusudana has handled the narrative quite effectively. But there are a few episodes which seem to have already been told by someone else in some other context. The time-table episode is one like that. Though the representation of characters and episodes are well structured, many of them deserve more incisive exploration. The open-endedness of the book offers the author yet another opportunity to create some more credible characters and events in conformity with what has already been narrated.
