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Desi stories

With the passage of time, even the most memorable persons and events are forgotten. People live and die, and not many historians bother to record their triumphs and tribulations unless they are famous. Narasimha Murthy’s “Malla Prapancha”, a sequel to his earlier book, “Pailwanara Jagattinalli”, is chiefly a compilation of everything about desi wrestlers he could lay his hands on.

As many as 191 pages of the 330-page book contain short notes on more or less forgotten wrestlers of the last fifty to sixty years in Karnataka, and a short section on famous visiting wrestlers such as Dara Singh and King Kong. The author has travelled all over the state for two years to meet octogenarian wrestlers, garadis (gymnasiums) and patrons who have promoted the martial art, to collect material – facts, anecdotes, folk songs, and much-yellowed handbills and photographs – for the book. Since there is hardly any archival material on the subject (there are only two or three clippings from Mysore newspapers like “Vrittanta Patrike” and “Star of Mysore”), Narasimha Murthy’s book is a valuable contribution to the preservation of cultural memory.

But Narasimha Murthy makes no attempt to put his work in a socio-economic perspective. He refers to patronage from maharajas, feudal lords and philanthropists for the desi sport until Independence and even a little later, but delves no further into the reasons for its decline in the recent decades. In particular, he makes no effort to understand why the sport, which was a craze among the people of small towns and villages even in the fifties and sixties – most of the handbills he has collected are from the fifties – lost its patronage later and aspiring wrestlers were left high and dry. This was also the time cinema and cricket became popular.

Since the book is a collection of facts and not a historical narrative, one cannot read it from end to end and can only leaf through it. But whatever you choose to read could be interesting. There is for instance a quote from renowned medical scientist S.J. Nagalolimath about how a body builder prompted him and his friends when they were young to not only abstain from drinking tea (which had just then been introduced by British companies in India) but also set fire to tea stalls at night as an act of “patriotism”. Narasimha Murthy narrates a Tenali Rama tale in which the legendary jester accepts a challenge from a mountainous wrestler and beats him technically through sheer wit. One can find numerous such titbits throughout the book.

The book contains a few delightful folk songs about wrestling, particularly the ethics of wrestling. It also has a section on sculptures of wrestlers in the temples in Hampi. It is a pity that most of the sculptures have either been ruined or vandalised, prompting the author to resort to line drawing instead of photographing them.

M. Ramesh

Mapping linguistic hierarchies

Jana Bhashe Mattu Prabhutva Bhashegala Sangharsha by Dr. Ranganath Kanatanakunte,
Muddushree Granthamale, Rs. 250

The Kannada language, with a well-documented literary heritage stretching back to at least 2,000 years, has become a focus for political mobilisation and identity formation during the 20th century. The putative unity suggested by the name “Kannada” notwithstanding, there is no monolithic presence which reigns so assiduously that it transforms the language over time into an object of adulation, reverence, and allegiance. The book tries to question the vacuity of passionate attachment of the Kannada, and suggests that these “debates” (sangharsha) over language cannot be contained within a singular meta-narrative of linguistic nationalism as it has often been made out to be in the public arena. Instead, the study proposes a new analytic around language politics and it location is the socio-economic and political conditions.

Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, the goal of the study is plainly stated in the introductory chapter; to raise the language question once again, but to answer it and write it differently for a folk (non-elite), post-colonial and globalising context. Its premises are that an enquiry into language as a dynamic process, as against being stable and unitary, should be located in the ‘field’ of the folk (low) practices rather than the normative understanding of prevalence in the classical/literary/textual/sanskritised (high) literary culture, where most studies of linguistics and/or colonialism focus. The emphasis thus is on how, there cannot be a study of Kannada language(s)/literature(s) without studying the ‘materiality’, (economic and political power) of the cultures and oral traditions from which it draws its plots, styles and metaphors.

Divided into seven substantive chapters, the book interrogates a complex of issues relating to the language and its obvious importance for the political culture of the emergent nation-state and its policies. It takes on the some of the significant debates in/of/for Kannada that are brought together to form a pattern, while not claiming it to be an exhaustive one at that. The first chapter is devoted to tracing the trajectory of engagement with Kannada language politics (B.M. Shri to Tarikere) The second chapter records the trajectory of on the relationship between the Indian state and the emergence of language politics. The next chapter claims to depart from a normative understanding of ‘language’ over to politics of language hierarchies that is necessarily mediated by the market force.

In the ensuing three chapters, which form the core of the book, contrary to a general assumption of scholars studying Kannada linguistics, Ranganath too like a few, does not think that languages have singular and stable identities notwithstanding the efforts to standardise languages and fix universal models. Instead, as languages are subjected to the passions of all those interested in empowering them, they attract multiple, even contrary, imaginings. It is with such an understanding that he locates the struggle against the Sanskrit in pre-independence and against Hindi and later English in the post-independence time. Further, the study traces how the ultimate goals of colonial ideology and their cognitive technologies of measurement and classification were aimed at refashioning the “vernaculars”. In all, the book is ambitious in intent and scope and attempts to offer much promise, but largely remains instrumentalist in its motives.

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