Book Review | Analysing Kuvempu’s Critique of Karnataka’s Feudal Society

K.V. Puttappa, an iconic figure and one of Karnataka’s best-loved writers, integrated his critique of sectarian and superstitious practices with an abiding belief in the spiritual values embodied in the Upanishads. Influenced in equal parts by the Vedantic philosophy of Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, the praxis of Gandhiji, and the poetry of Tagore, Kuvempu, as he was known, reposed faith in rationality and empirical science. His literary works celebrate the energy and small joys of his often humble, hard-working Shudra and Dalit characters even as they draw attention to the oppression, the ignorance, and the crushing cruelties of social structures. Not surprisingly, contemporary Dalit writing in Kannada, which is dismissive of both Navodaya (romantic) and Navya (modernist) literary movements, salutes Kuvempu as the first writer of a Shudra novel.

Born to Vokkaliga parents during the early years of the last century in a tiny village in the Malnad region of Karnataka, Kuvempu was sent as a young boy to the newly begun Anglo-vernacular mission school open to children of all castes in the nearby town of Thirthahalli. The Ramakrishna Mission in Mysuru where he completed his education had a lifelong impact on his thinking. These influences are clearly discerned in his epic novel Malegalalli Madumagalu (1967), which portrays the entrancingly beautiful Malnad region together with its feudal society that poses implacable barriers to individuals daring to challenge the rigid caste hierarchy.

Evocative translation

A historical novel set in the last decade of the 19th century, Malegalalli Madumagalu presents the lives of a small circle of agricultural families knit together by way of marriage alliances, landholdings, and the bonded labour affiliated to these. Kuvempu locates the larger national and global events taking place at a distance, content only to note their delayed and unhurried impact on the events of his imagined world. Considered one of the greatest novels of Kannada literature, the novel is now available to wider audiences in the wonderfully evocative English translation by Vanamala Viswanatha titled Bride in the Hills.

Rain is the leitmotif of Bride in the Hills.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement

The reader is swept, right from the opening scene, into the intricate web of events and relations in this richly peopled and complexly narrated novel, and led through the rain-soaked dense greenery of Kuvempu’s forested world. The bountiful cornucopia of nature that steeps the lifeworld of Kuvempu’s Shudra agricultural communities cannot but hit the contemporary reader. Rain is the leitmotif of this novel: Thundering sheets of water lashing down on Gutthi and his beloved dog, Huliya, as they make their way through the forest; a relentless heavy rain that does not let up for days, muffling the din of Chinnamma’s aborted marriage rituals; short downpours in which Aita and Pinchalu work in the fields; gentle drizzles that film Nagakka’s sight as she espies her friends in the green distance of the paddy fields. By making the rainy forests of the Malnad region the wellspring of his novel, Kuvempu demonstrates the utter beauty and unpredictable power of nature and the interdependence between the human and the natural. The narrative presents lived ways of being in recent history that appear to have slipped irremediably out of grasp.

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No central character dominates this novel: the comparison that is often made with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace works to the extent that this is true of both novels, as is the multilayered and complex narration of the mesh of relations amongst the large cast of characters. Three love stories illumine and act as the catalyst for corresponding action from those who oppose such ties, even when these are between partners within the same caste.

Gutthi loves his cousin Thimmi, who has been promised to another by the landowning Gowda, who “owns” her Dalit family in vassalage; Aita and Pinchalu from a tribal caste below the Ghats are happily married and deeply in love even as their neighbour Chinkra sows seeds of suspicion; and finally, Munkundaya and Chinnamma, who both belong to the landowning Gowda caste but face impediments to their union. Tenderness and care form the bedrock of these stories; the authorial compassion is clearly at work to see that these young lovers are united. Yet their union, it must be admitted, does not pose a challenge to the social order of caste.

Exposing social hypocrisy

While Kuvempu presents tragic endings to the dreams of several characters in the many subplots of the novel—Nagakka, who is duped into a relationship with a crass relative old enough to be her father, or Kaveri, whose happy anticipation of being in a permanent extra-marital arrangement with young Devayya Gowda ends in her rape and death—none of these dreams interrogate social structures. In the feudal world of his novel, Kuvempu can only expose social hypocrisy that condones sexual relations between castes as long as these do not challenge the institution of marriage, which must perforce follow caste rules.

Caste norms dictate every aspect of this society, much as in contemporary rural India: any person from the Dalit castes who violates rules faces brutal reprisal. Thimmi’s brother Sanna Bira is tied to a post and administered the well-known Honnali thrashing by Ijira Sabi on Gowda’s command that leaves him half-dead. But in Kuvempu’s refreshing portrayal of hegemony, some degree of sly resistance is seen from those trampled upon. Sanna manages to inflict injuries on Ijira later at an opportune moment. The unlovely and uncouth bully Thimmappa Gowda is kept waiting when he arrives on the “master’s mound” to summon to work the Dalit vassals bound to the family.

Kuvempu presents the nuances of domination with insightful accuracy: the tragedies that befall the Dalit community hold little import for the Gowdas. Even the more empathetic Mukundayya and Aigalu respond with perfunctory words on hearing Aita’s anguished description of Chinkra’s murder of his pregnant wife. The young too are shown to have internalised the scorn for the “lowly”: one of the young Gowda boys contemptuously dismisses the Dalit Baira’s music, snapping: “Come let’s go… why listen to the music of these carcass eaters?”

A few strands of the novel may jar the reader today. The deployment of the paranormal as deus ex machina strains credulity but may be explained by a sympathetic reader as Kuvempu’s creative fashioning of the realistic novel. However, the presentation of Muslim characters as a mercenary gang divested of any other aspect is problematic as is the largely negative portrayal of the Christian priest. Viswanatha bravely retains the caste term “Holeya” (to refer to Dalit castes). A translator must choose fidelity over correctness, yet the recall of this nomenclature in today’s context cannot but cause unease.

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Kuvempu offers an interiorised emotional landscape for all his characters: children, women, Shudra, and Dalit, true to the epigraph with which the novel opens: “Here, no one is important; No one is unimportant; Nothing is insignificant!” To read this rich and thickly evoked narrative, unsparingly candid and rife with scatological descriptions, is to participate in the pulsating energy, the joy, and the endemic heartbreaks of humanity. Mikhail Bakhtin comes readily to mind: the inherent polyphony, elements of the carnivalesque and grotesque that imbue the novel, even if Kuvempu engages with the Vedantic, eschewing the folk. Much on this has been written in Kannada literary criticism and will preoccupy the more serious reader. Vanamala Viswanatha has given the non-Kannada reader a wonderful gift. Her translation of this expansive, illuminating, and hugely enriching novel should not be missed!

Rohini Mokashi-Punekar teaches literature at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Her latest book is titled The Third Eye and Other Works: Mahatma Phule’s Writings on Education (2023).