Attributing Macaulayism (the policy of the imperial power to influence people’s thought and eliminate indigenous culture by substituting alien culture through education system) as the reason for the end of oral culture, president of the 84th Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana Chandrashekar Kambar on Sunday said, “School education was introduced by Macaulay to kill the native culture, which is embedded in oral culture”.
He said, “I wrote the poem Helathena Kela as a protest against colonial influence.”
Dr. Kambar, who faced some inconvenient questions during an interaction with select writers, gave cryptic replies to avoid controversies. To a query on whether he followed the “right” ideology or the “left” ideology in his thinking and writing process, the writer said, “I am both right and left”.
When asked about his silence over the killing of his friend and Kannada scholar M.M. Kalburgi and journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, Dr. Kambar said he was pained more than anybody as Kalburgi was his close friend and because he had seen the growth of Gauri from her childhood owing to his association with her father and writer, P. Lankesh. “I did my best when both were brutally killed,” he said.
On the burning issue of intolerance and attempt of the Sangh Parivar to build Ram temple at Ayodhya, Dr. Kambar cited the presence of hundreds of versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and said, “It is difficult to find a country that can match India in terms of identity. Rama in Ayodhya is history. Rama in our hearts is a myth for me.”
