S. Settar’s seminal work “Halagannada” went through 11 drafts before going into print. The multiple revisions, the well-known historian says, were efforts at not just making his arguments academically sharper but also making them more accessible to non-academic readers.
“There is a perception that academic works are boring. But they also have to be read and discussed by people who are not scholars,” says Prof. Settar. His 2007 publication on Dravidian languages and communities, “Shangam Tamilagam Mattu Kannada Nadu Nudi”, has gone into nine prints so far, besides winning awards.
“Halagannada” is the latest addition to over 20 works on history in Kannada and English authored by Prof. Settar, who has been researching on archaeology, art-history, history of religions and classical literature for four decades. Running into over 500 pages, the work examines more than 2,000 ancient Kannada edicts and constructs a history of Kannada “script, scribes and cultivation of letters” in the first millennium.
Prof. Settar describes it as an effort at constructing an “alternative picture of history” by drawing from Dravidian sources in lower Deccan, especially in what is today known as Karnataka. He says in the introduction to the work that the significance of this region in the early history of native writing traditions is beyond dispute.
The book, rich with illustrations of ancient texts and written in a lucid style, questions many of the received notions about language and knowledge production, including the nature of interaction between Sanskrit, Prakrit and Kannada.
Through this, he also constructs a nuanced picture of history that underlines the role of the non-Brahmin caste groups in knowledge production and evolution of script. Prof. Settar says the process of “Sanskritisation”, as opposed to dominant arguments of sociologists and linguists, is not uni-dimensional. “It is rarely acknowledged that desi (native) languages also influenced Sanskrit,” he says.
