|
|
Essay
To be a frog in the well
In the age of globalisation and rightwing politics, we need to recover
what has been lost — cultures that mirror our quest for oneness and
diversity
UR Ananthamurthy
 Let
me start with an unusual metaphor, that of the Koopamandooka or
the frog in the well which thinks that is the universe. We use this metaphor
to decry a very limited person who has no real conception of the world.
But a great Kannada poet, Gopalakrishna Adiga, has written a poem called
Koopamandooka. The hero in the poem flies all over the globe, he
is a dreamer and an idealist who tries to embrace the whole universe and
ends up as a mere bag of words – forever repeating all the great clichés
about humanity and losing his creativity. In the end he decides to be a
frog in the well and stay within its confines, literally in the mud of the
well. Why?
It is believed that when the skin of a frog dries up it has to go back to
the mud to recapture its golden sheen. Probably, for all the attractions
that globalisation offers there is a compelling need to return as a frog
in the well in the sense that you then try to recover what you have lost
in the desire to expand beyond your limits.
Why do I say this? I have a reason. In the South and North Canara districts
of Karnataka, there are two styles of Yakshagana hardly a few miles from
each other – Badagu and Tenku Tittu. In Rajasthan, within an area
of ten miles you will find a variety of musical drums and different ways
of playing them. Then again, take languages. India has so many of them.
When I was President of the Sahitya Akademi, there was pressure one me to
recognise tribal languages since injustice had been done to them. I said,
we are not here to recognise languages but literatures. A great work in
any tribal language should receive the same honour as one in a recognised
Indian language. I hope this practice, which started then, continues. As
a writer I realised that a tribal language may have a Homer in it. In the
past it is tribal languages, which had a Homer. Most languages then were
tribal, perhaps some only dialects. When a dialect has an army and a national
poet it becomes a language. Most developments in the old world of arts were
of this kind.
 Globalisation
does not respect time and space. The multitude of varieties that India produced,
were at a time when we had no World Bank money, no Bush overseeing our development
as he does now. We had variety even as we searched for oneness. The two
great quests of the human mind are, paradoxical as it may seem, for centralisation
and decentralisation, which represent oneness and plurality/diversity. In
India you have Advaita, which tries to fuse all theories into one great
principle. At the same time you have numerous gods who satisfy local needs.
There is a Kshetradevata, a Grihadevata and also an Ishtadevata
for the individual. But there is also a Brahman common to all. I think both
these movements — to centralise and to decentralise — are essential
needs of the human soul. One of my close friends KV Subbanna, has founded
a globalised cultural centre, Neenasam, in a village in Karnataka. This
centre attracts people from all over India. Subbanna says India has two
languages, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Europeans come
to know Homer when they read him for the first time. But no Indian reads
the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They just ‘know’
these epics. AK Ramanujan used to tell me a story, which I often narrate.
Ramanujan had collected more than a thousand versions of the Ramayana
in Kannada. In one oral version, Rama and Sita are illiterate. They converse
about going to the forest. Rama tells Sita: “You can’t come,
you are a princess, you are not used to hardship, so don’t come”.
Sita says: “I have to come, I am your Ardhaangi”. Rama
persists and Sita counters...by saying: “In every Ramayana she goes
to the forest, how can you deny it to me”? This illiterate Sita knows
the Valmiki Ramayana. There is a certain richness in this blend
of centralisation and decentralisation, of having one concept and several
ways of describing it.
That is why when the phrase ‘unity in diversity’ is used in
India — it has become a cliché — any response is that
if you overstress unity and claim there is only one India, then we all become
conscious of diversity. Each of us will claim to be Tamils, Kannadigas,
Assamese, Bengalis and so on. If, on the contrary you insist on diversity
and say “we are Kannadigas and have nothing to do with others,”
that will provoke a different reaction. We shall say “No, there is
something common to all the great sages, who created our Upanishads, Ramayana
and Mahabharata, we are a united country.” This is the reason
why neither unity nor diversity can be exclusively emphasised. That is why
I hope the BJP will fail in this country in their attempt to find a common
principle among all of us.
There is a suppleness in the Indian mind, in Indian culture. It has been
there for thousands of years because of which a small Gujarati like Gandhi
could become an all-India figure. He spoke Gujarati, wrote in Gujarati,
he had all the characteristics of a Vaishya. One could recognise
him in terms of his caste, language, place of origin and yet see him as
a national and global figure. I wrote a poem and addressed it to Mr. Advani
when he was setting out on his rathyatra. I said that if someone asked me
who I was I would say Indian if I were in London. I would want to make myself
distinct from a Pakistani since we look alike. In Delhi I would say that
I was from Karnataka, in Bangalore I would say Shimoga and in the latter
I would mention Melige. But in Melige I need say nothing. Everyone knows
my caste, sub-caste and even my gotra. All these identities are
continuous, not contradictory. However, Indian politics wishes to make them
discrete and conflictual. When that is done we lose something valuable.
How can one be a Kannadiga and also an Indian, a Tamilian and also patriotic?
These contradictions emerge from modern politics suggesting that there is
a higher reality than being an Indian or a speaker of a particular language
or a member of a specific caste. And this is integral to globalisation as
well.
Under the spell of globalisation we shall be nowhere. We shall have lost
our culture — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada —but will not acquire any
other, not even American culture in the true sense of the term. That state
of mind is dangerous — it represents the tiredness of the human soul.
That is the final message of Adiga’s poem: “I am tired, I would
like to be a frog in the well,” says the poet so that the sheen is
regained. Perhaps we will all feel this way after Bush’s globalisation
goes a little too far.
(Excerpted from a lecture in memory of Dr Malcolm Adiseshiah at the
Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai)
|
December
25, 2004
|
| |
|
|
