The Indian Express
No play, says Bajrang Dal in Shivamogga
G N Devy writes: Bajrang Dal's disruption of the performance of a play in Shivamogga cuts short the journey of a story — transcending a span of a millennium, a distance of several continents
GN
Devy writes: The drama unfolding before the people of India has an
indulgent state and the RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal as its eager actors.
(Express Photo)The world is, indeed, a small place. Otherwise why would the recently devastated Ukrainian Poltava create a familiar echo in Karnataka’s Shivamogga? There is apparently no connection between Poltava city along the Vorskla river and Shivamogga along the Tunga and Bhadra. Why would a 12th century story of insanity and love from a distant island come to visit Karnataka of the 21st century, transcending a span of a millennium and a distance of several continents?
The story involves three daughters and their doting, old father. It was reported first by the 12th century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. It was then reproduced by Raphael Holinshed during the 16th century. A century later, William Shakespeare employed it as the plot for his tragedy, King Lear. Shakespeare’s Lear has never ceased to inspire many writers in all continents since then.
One of them was a 19th century genius from Poltava in central Ukraine. Born in 1859, Solomon Naumovich belonged to the minority of the Ashkenazim. When he started writing during his teens, he took the pen-name Sholem Aleichem. The Shakespeare story of Lear and his three daughters appealed to him as he himself had an engagement with three languages — Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish. Of these three, he gave up on the first two and passionately kept up with Yiddish. Though, deeply influenced by Germanic languages, Yiddish had kept alive its links with Hebrew and Arabic.
Solomon’s pen-name, Sholem Aleichem, reminiscent of the Arabic “salaam alequm”, takes one more easily back to the ancient Hebrew “sholem”, closely linked in its linguistic genesis with what Sanskrit inherited as “shanti”, both having roots in the ancient Indo-Iranian. Sholem Aleichem’s rendering of the story had the king turned into an amusing milk-man called Tevey. Given that he was witnessing the rise of a bitter anti-Semitic social ethos in Eastern Europe, his fiction got suffused with the pain and anxiety predicting the coming Holocaust. Like many other Jews of his days, he chose to migrate to the US when the First World War began. It was his fiction that inspired Joseph Stein for producing his musical Fiddler on the Roof, also made into a film by the same title.
The songs of Stein’s superlative musical thrilled the rest of the world and the depiction of religious discrimination made him a hero in the fight against anti-Semitism. It would have been a surprise had not Stein’s movie attracted Jayantha Kaikini, one of the finest lyricists of India in our time. Kaikini, son of a major Kannada fiction writer Gourish Kaikini, grew up in a progressive atmosphere and after a spell in Bombay’s industrial ethos, took to writing. He has produced outstanding fiction, poetry and plays, has won many literary awards and is held today as a leading Indian writer and lyricist in Kannada.
Jayantha Kaikini’s “Jathegiruvanu Chandira (The Moon Will Be With Us)” is not a recent play. It was published as part of a collection of his plays a decade and a half ago. It has been performed in Bangalore and elsewhere and has received laurels for its control of language and dramatic intensity. It was performed in Shivamogga earlier this year by theatre group Rangabelaku led by Kotrappa S Hiremagadi. When a performance was staged on Sunday, July 3, it was disrupted by Bajrang Dal members. Their argument was that the place where it was being performed was a Veershaiva Hall and to perform a play with a Muslim character in it would be sacrilege. Little do they know that the Ukrainian author who created the modern story of the kind milkman and his three daughters, Sholem Aleichem, had a name which literally means “Peace be on you’, which in its Sanskrit form is “shanti, shanti, shanti”, the ultimate benediction for every Upanishad.
One wonders if the Bajrang Dal members know that the founding text of the Veershaiva sect, the Shri Siddhanta Shikhamani, states, “Bhaavo Yasy sthiro nityam manovaakkyaayakarmabhi… shaanto daantstapashishilah satyavaak samadarshan.” It means, “Do hold the ‘Shiv bhava’ — the mentality inspired by the divine — as the primary duty; do learn the ‘shant’ (peace), generosity, study, truthful speech, for they are manifestation of the divine.” The truth is the vandals who disrupted the performance do not care for the teachings of the Veershaiva path of life, nor do they know the long trajectory of the story that Kaikini’s play brought to the Shivamogga performance. Vandalism and cultural suppression are tragically short of memory. They may act in the name of tradition, but they have barely any knowledge of what it is that they are defending. The finest theatre academy in the country created by Subanna is located at Heggodu in Shimoga district. Another first-rate playwright and director, Prasanna, is a resident in the same district. The people in the district have seen some of the greatest theatre productions over the last half century. It is difficult to imagine that theatre would be brought under attack there.
In today’s India, the Hindutva forces have little time to understand what Hindu philosophies and metaphysics have advocated. Sholem, being an Ashkenazim, understood how the hatred for Jews in Europe during the late 19th century was affecting the creative sources of Russia, Germany and France. The Dreyfus imprisonment and trial is still not forgotten. Defenders of human dignity such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Georges Clemenceau and Emile Zola, are still not pushed into amnesia. The hatred for Jews in Russia, France and in Hitler’s Germany is remembered as a shameful episode in history.
In recent years, several important writers in Karnataka such as UR Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Devanoor Mahadeva and Rahmat Tarikere have spoken against the rising atmosphere of hatred. Some like MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh had to face bullets. Initially it was an apprehension, a view of a horizon turning dark with clouds. Then followed physical assaults from close quarters. During the last few months, the state has actively ignited and encouraged an anti-minorities sentiment.
Now, the hatred project is on auto-pilot. It no longer requires state patronage or concealment of its intentions through subterfuge. The drama unfolding before the people of India has an indulgent state and the RSS, VHP and BD as its eager actors. The theatre of hatred has made spectacular progress. It has declared that even an imaginary character in a play can pollute the purity of a religious place. The world has always been a small place; in India, it is becoming much smaller than the space that our rapidly disappearing Constitution had imagined for it.
The writer is a cultural activist.
