The wonder of retrieval

On a Sunday afternoon, during one of DR Nagaraj’s visits to our home, I had held out towards him my new acquisition, a copy of Vaclav Havel’s Living in Truth. He took it from me saying, “This has an exciting essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless.’” On another occasion, it was The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Pushing back his black, square horn-rimmed glasses, he exclaimed: “Oh! I learnt the niceties of English from Waugh.” I was finishing high school during this time, the late eighties. My father, who had studied and taught English literature before joining the Karnataka civil services, and DR Nagaraj (DRN), had become close after having met through common friends.

The range of DRN’s reading was truly stunning. Primarily a Kannada literary critic, his passions moved across Indian, English, American, European and African literatures. Indeed, literature from any part of the world was up his alley. Indian and Western philosophers and political thinkers also mattered greatly to him. His recall of books, writers and literary episodes had an endearing nerd-like quality. And the delight he took in ideas and in making details tell was independent of anything else.

DRN would narrate one of the case dreams from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams to show his excitement about the great psychoanalyst’s method. His review of Mao’s biography written by his personal physician began thus: “Among the tallest revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century, Mao didn’t have the habit of brushing his teeth in the morning: he only rinsed his mouth with tea.”

True, literature could have a political side, but the power of the literary imagination soared above it. While referring to Kannada writers who he felt had “written more authentic stories” on matters of concern to Dalit and feminist movements than the latter’s ideologues, he noted: “Literature probably has its own way of ditching ideology.”

After being beholden to the socialist ideas of Marx, Lohia and others in his youth, DRN had struggled to see freshly. The great folk epics of Male Madeshwara, Manteswamy and Junjappa, the vachanas of Allama Prabhu and the poetry of Rumi, the Persian poet, offered him new angles to regard the socialist ideals, helping shake his ideological fixity to an extent. The folk epics showed the radiant literary and aesthetic creativity as well as intense critical sensibilities seen among the lower castes, a fact that appears counter-intuitive to fossilised histories of caste relations where the upper castes triumph in all instances. DRN had joked once, “Do you think a Shudra landlord would let molten lead be poured in his ears as punishment for hearing the Vedas? The Manu Smriti is an ideological fantasy of the orthodox Brahmins. It isn’t a document of how things actually were.”

Not proposing a diminished place for the power of Brahmin culture, DRN was asking instead that the cultural experiences of lower castes be properly understood. An attention to how the social worlds of castes and religions in India cross-fertilised each other all the time while institutional memory erased the history of that co-influence was needed to overcome what he termed “cultural amnesia.”

Mystical traditions which revealed hitherto hidden relationships in the world through metaphors also fascinated DRN. A sense of vismaya (wonder) and a relish for metaphors, which modern scholarship so easily dispensed with, better aided the work of overcoming cultural amnesia.

The truckloads of books that emerged in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism concentrated their energies on how European thought dominated social life in colonised countries. But what about the hundreds of ways in which small communities preserved their creativity amidst colonial rule? In this regard, the Kannada poets of the early 20th century appeared to DRN like tiny birds that had reached for twigs, feathers and leaves from anywhere to build a nest amidst a storm: “They saved Kannada poetry from the vulture that was colonialism.”

For modern minds like him, DRN confessed, history was like a mother’s saree in whose folds frightened children sought refuge at the sight of violence. Having seemed opaque at first, Rumi’s poetry (which he translated into Kannada) later proved to be like ‘a seed that waits patiently in the folds of darkness to burst through the cracks at some point and flourish as a plant.’