Girish Karnad was on time for the literary meet for tolerance at the Senate Hall of the erstwhile Central College, the site where some of the most powerful debates in Karnataka had originated for decades. He was carrying the now ubiquitous ‘lifesaver’ (oxygen) but insisted on listening to Ganesh Devy, Ramachandra Guha, and M.S. Satyu before making his brief but effective speech in his usual no-nonsense terse style. When a reference was made to his being on the ‘hit list’ of the extreme right-wing groups, he quipped that he was trying his best to get his name removed from it.
Karnad was one among the many intellectuals and writers in their seventies and eighties, ravaged by ill health, and tired, but trudging out to raise a voice of protest against the irrationality of the times. It was a small but courageous act against the backdrop of shrill and vulgar trolling, threats on life, vilification in the media and the distinct possibility of imprisonment.
Come to think of it, to our generation who came of age during the Emergency, Karnad had not been the quintessential public intellectual. For young rebels like me in Dharwad, he had just every qualification to be the opposite of a public intellectual. A Rhodes scholarship, a cushy semi-foreign job at OUP, becoming an international celebrity, successful in the film world. He was not visible at the many protests that happened on a daily basis at the Karnataka Vidyavardhak Sangha or Kadapa Maidan in Dharwad. We were told that he was an individualist who did not want to harm his career in any way. It took us years to understand that in his own quiet, unostentatious way he had always said what he had believed in.
One wonders if the playwright learnt from his plays. From the low-mimetic ironical Hayavadana he went on to write Tale Danda, Agni Mattu Male, and Tipu Sultanana Kanasugalu. Though he retained his profound sense of irony and the paradox of history, these plays “took a stand” on the caste system, on a spiritually dead ritualistic Brahminism and on the erasure of our own histories by the discourses of imperialism. Perhaps the increasing polarisation of even an essentially pluralistic society like Karnataka forced Karnad to come out in the open and speak. He soon got embroiled in the anti-right wing, secular struggles in Karnataka. On his way to Bababudangiri, near Chikkamagaluru, to participate in the communal harmony movement, he along with some senior writer-activists was stopped at Hassan. But he came out loud and clear in his public denunciation of the rise of the communal discourses against Karnataka’s secular traditions. He always spoke in a register of constitutional rights, freedom of speech and more importantly of a community’s responsibility to maintain a free public sphere where rational views could be shared and irrational behaviour could be curbed. He opened out to public debates and interventions, bringing with him the enormous authority he carried as a great playwright who had made Kannada theatre Indian theatre.
What was ignored by many in the Kannada circles was that it was through a committed exploration and scholarship that he had realised how the truth of history had been communalised. Speaking of his plays on Tipu and Basava, he had said that he was willing to allow a hundred weaknesses in his plays, but not in his understanding of history.
However, one wonders if Karnad was prepared for the beastly attack on him for saying that Tipu was probably a greater figure in Karnataka’s history and that the Bengaluru airport could have been named after him. The tragedy was that many intellectuals like Karnad, who had unquestioningly accepted liberalism and the norms of public debate, could not imagine the huge tide of irrationality with “the worst in passionate intensity”. The argumentative Indian had been replaced by the foul-mouthed abusive troller. But Karnad did not withdraw.
At the national protest meet on the first anniversary of Gauri Lankesh’s killing, we saw him wearing the placard ‘I am an urban naxal too’, prompting right wingers to file an FIR against him for admitting he was an anti-State treasonous naxal. There were many who doubted his sincerity because they had not seen him walking in the heat and dust of popular movements. But there are many ways to record one’s resistance. In the present triumphalism of the right across the globe, the sane, unpretentious voices, like that of Karnad also have a serious political role to play.
(The writer is a literary critic and director of Manasa Centre for Cultural Studies in Shivamogga. He is former professor of English in Kuvempu University.)
