For B V Karanth, greatness didn't mean taking credit

September 19 was Karanth's 91st birth anniversary

Those who go around saying that people who read novels will come to a bad end will find both corroboration and great consolation in the story I am about to tell.

I came across the word orgiastic for the first time while reading about a man drumming while his sons and daughter danced. Since I did not know what the word meant, looking it up led to more interesting discoveries than were suitable for a 12-year-old.

And yet, the journalist U R Kalkur’s translation of Shivarama Karanth’s 'Chomana Dudi' left me in what I can only describe as a depression headache that lasted for weeks because, to the boy I was, Choma seemed imprisoned more by the will of the author than by anything else.

When Doordarshan announced the film on one of their Sunday afternoon awardee film programmes a year or so later, I switched the TV on in a state of dread, fearing that the fortnight of funk would return. I couldn’t avoid the film because there was nothing else to do.

The film began as five flashes of light on a dark canvas and then the flashes moved diagonally across the screen and revealed themselves to be swinging torches in a procession led by a big man.

This silent tableau was soon overpowered by a compelling, insistent rhythm, and a song that went 'avala gandana mane Gunjur-al allave/avala mindana mane Manglur-al allave/le-le-la-le-la-le-le- la-le-la. (Isn’t her husband’s house in Gunjur?/And isn’t her sweetheart’s house in Mangalore?).

I never found out who this cheeky young woman in the song was. I asked people and found out why anybody would swing a flaming torch while walking in the dark.

As I saw the actors dancing, I saw also that the translator’s prose didn’t hold even a match-stick to this coming together of sight and sound.

After those two bits of mischief with staging and song, I forgot my fears and spent the rest of the film fascinated by many such moments.

I had met, for the first time, a film that spoke of more stories than the book it had come from.

I have returned time and again to how this film captures the structures of everyday oppression that gird the lives of those who are Dalit.

It took me much longer to see the imaginative feat at the heart of this film — its refusal to steep Dalit characters in abjection, expressed in the rich textures of its soundscapes, in its skilful opening of a flat scene into a world through the sounds of people living lives offscreen while singing their work-songs, in the stories that the songs tell in parallel, by its expert melding of Tulu, Konkani, and unknown dialects in an unseen background, even as a Kannada of more colour and poetic verve than I have ever heard on screen issues forth from the actors.

I still hold that this film contextualises caste in a way that was strange and new in Indian cinema.

At that time, however, it did not occur to me to think of finding out who had made all this happen.

I learnt his name in inauspicious circumstances. While I was finishing school, I learned from the newspapers that someone from Bangalore was accused of trying to murder an artiste named Vibha Mishra, and followed this story first in prurient fascination, and then out of other feelings as it became clear that a public burning was being orchestrated, in much the same way that government and police closer home were trying to lock up and silence Bangalore University’s Prof Nagari Babaiah.

It was a somewhat tragicomic place to be in, this experience of finding that you have been in somebody’s work without recognising them — some part like living in a house nosily, and noisily, only to find out that the person tiptoeing silently out of sight is your host, and some part like Moliere’s bourgeois upstart finding out that he has been talking in prose all this time.

B V Karanth was there in every one of the Kannada films I remember discovering via Doordarshan. His music transforms Ghatashraddha via its understated commentary.

In M S Sathyu’s 'Kanneshwara Rama', a folk ballad accompanies the sombre procession trailing a captured bandit and the memories it compresses stand in ironic relationship with the tone in which the film unfolds.

And in Prema Karanth’s 'Phaniyamma', it is his themes that amplify our sense of the slowness that is imposed upon a child-widow.

When he directed, he seemed always to co-direct. Films like 'Vamsa Vriksha' and 'Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane' seem thus to owe their existence to Karanth’s capacity to step aside for Karnad to do one kind of lifting while he focused on investing layers and textures into the project.

'Chomana Dudi', where Kasaravalli stepped in as associate director, is this capacity at its peak.

When a fairer history of the new Indian cinema is written, it will perhaps make more room for this man who did much to give it its gravitas by calling into action an inspired sense of sound, and an anthropologist’s rigour in recovering the past through language, gesture and staging.

The Karanth we know through cinema is the inobtrusive figure who seems to go missing at the click in the group photograph.

In contrast with the incandescent, larger-than-life presence he seems to have been in theatre, at Benaka, at NSD, at Bharat Bhavan and at Rangayana.

Ferdinand de Saussure talks of language as a formal entity, or langue, and as spoken word, or parole.

It is this parole, this sense of culture as something living, unofficial and fragile that he seems to have chased and found regularly during his long innings in theatre.

Today, to remember him is to remember a golden time when those who loved theatre and cinema across India, looked at Karnataka with envy.

We may also learn again, in that act of remembering, of the mischief and the verve he brought to living as an artist.

Two little things illustrate this. The acting credits for Chomana Dudi include a dog named Baadu.

In Baba, P N Ramachandra’s excellent documentary about Karanth, one of his many associates recalls his not being fazed at all by having his purse snatched.

Because he was more intent on studying the thief’s movements as he ran away.