Kuvempu’s first attempts at writing were, unsurprisingly, in English. He unapologetically fills his memoirs with page after page of romantic poetry written in English. He might very well have been living in late eighteenth-century England, and putting Wordsworth to shame in the quantity of saccharine verse produced. Any random dip into the book finds some ecstatic description of the natural world.
Life scatters here its richest heaven,
And pleasure floats by madness driven!
And here I linger to admire
This heavenly scene that doth inspire
A heart that least responds to beauty.
(on the Western Ghats)
Sweet poet of the forest,
So cheerful and bright,
Towards heaven thou soarest
Not with half such delight
As thou dost chant thy lays upon bowers nobly delight.
(on the Bulbul)
It was thanks to the exhortations of his well-meaning mentor—the Irish-Indian writer James Cousins—that Kuvempu would start writing in modern Kannada, and go on to become its first notable non-brahmin practitioner. Kuvempu’s high school teacher had urged the young man to meet Cousins when he was visiting Mysore University in 1924. Cousins’s wife Margaret would go on to mentor and inspire another big name from Karnataka—the freedom fighter, socialist politician and social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the first Indian woman to contest an election. She was influential enough to convince Gandhi to allow women to participate in public satyagraha. She would also be one of the first labour organisers of Mangalore, that port city perennially bustling with industry and commerce. The Cousins certainly had a knack for spotting and nurturing Indian talent.
In 1929, Kuvempu graduated with a degree in Kannada from Maharaja’s College in Mysore, and later returned there to serve as principal. In 1956, he would go on to become vice chancellor of Mysore University, where he set up the Institute of Kannada Studies. He combined his love and passion for Kannada with a vision of social equality and communal harmony. Kuvempu actively dissociated himself from organised religion, and often emphasised that he’d stopped going to temples. Instead, he underscored the need to embrace a personalised god, abhorring the monstrosities of fanaticism and religion-mongering in concert with twelfth-century poets like Basavanna and Allama Prabhu. He spoke widely of the need to abolish untouchability, advocated inter-caste marriages and kickstarted a tradition of simple marriages that shunned opulent display.
The anti-caste movement in Karnataka owes an indelible debt to Kuvempu, who rallied for it throughout his life. In his famous speech ‘Aatmashreegaagi Nirankushamatigalaagi’ (For your own good, let your mind become fetterless), he urged the youth of the country to release themselves from the bonds of sectarian beliefs, and work towards making rural Karnataka more educated, egalitarian and enlightened. Some dalit activists I spoke to remember being filled with an invigorating spirit while listening to Kuvempu. Some had imagined him to be such a mythical figure that when they actually saw Kuvempu in the flesh, delivering speeches in the 1970s, they were astonished to find that this was a living-breathing man, and not some long gone legend.
Kuvempu admonished youth for being too enamoured of orthodox institutions, urging them to find solace in the divine qualities of nature, culture and their own selves. He saw the dire need for the birth of a new literature in Kannada that could serve as brain fodder for the newly emerging generation clamouring for spiritual and moral guidance. At the same time, he would constantly bring up quotations from the Gita and other Sanskrit texts, trying to find a critique from within the very traditions he was attempting to scrutinise—a Gandhian impulse. This led to some dalit scholars of the 1970s (such as Devaiah Harave) to critique Kuvempu’s acceptance of the supernatural paradigm that characterises these texts—after all, the caste system had emerged out of the imposition of unchanging essences onto a society deemed to be ‘naturally’ and divinely hierarchical.
As one keeps digging into his memoirs, one is struck by what appears to be a child-like innocence. One must be a little patient to approach Kuvempu on his own terms. In one instance, he starts off a diary entry saying that he has been reading Will Durant’s The Lessons of History, and that this has got him thinking about whether history is the creation of great individuals or merely great forces. Nothing more on the subject is forthcoming as, in the rest of the entry, Kuvempu gets distracted by a moving ant on the book, attempts to kill it by folding the book, and is struck when it survives the attack, calling the whole event an important experience for him.
I realised the importance of this innocence, of the poetic inspiration it births, when I encountered a poem by N.K. Hanumantayya, which put into verse the moral epiphany that Kuvempu had experienced. The feeling was reinforced as videos of Israeli crosshairs training their aim on massing Palestinian refugees began showing up on my timeline, month after month:
On this ant
I put
my hefty foot
and pulled it back
after a while.
The ant is moving again.
Oh, pin-sized being,
I salute your spine
that bears
my weight.
(Translated by Kamlakar Bhat)
It is a tendency that is visible across Kuvempu’s autobiography. On another occasion, for instance, he notes that he has been reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and devotes one sentence to its description, adding that it is inspiring and that all politically inclined individuals should read it. In the very next sentence, he changes the subject, becomes overjoyed that a press in Calcutta is all set to publish his book on Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and ends the entry with the exclamatory Jai Gurudeva! Like Will Durant himself, it seems like Kuvempu too subscribed to the view that ‘the only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only emancipation is individual, and the only revolutionaries are philosophers and saints’.
Excerpted with permission from Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka by Srikar Raghavan; Context/Westland Books