Unpacking Rama Bhima Soma: Srikar Raghavan’s Radical Reading of Karnataka’s Cultural-Political Tapestry

The striking attribute of Srikar Raghavan’s Rama Bhima Soma is the sheer individuality of the characters he covers. “They were all marked by profound journeys of self-discovery,” he says as he examines their roles against a greater cultural canvas. In this book, Raghavan spotlights the complexities that mark modern Karnataka culture: Kuvempu’s slant towards Wordsworthian English poetry but lifelong elation at J.H. Patel speaking in Kannada in the Lok Sabha, or Shivaram Karanth’s lament that “our art, music and architecture have lost the power to move us because of excessive aestheticism”.

Karanth would also bemoan the urge to gentrify Yakshagana, something Ashok Raj as the creator of Pilivesha (Tiger Dance) sees happening to his gymnastic folk-art form. Similarly, the book highlights the now-near redundancy of the fascinating tradition of oral recitation of people’s lineages by the helavas, founded by Karnataka’s greatest thinker, Basavanna.

Jahnavi Phalkey spoke of a “Kannada Modern” in response to Another India written by Chandan Gowda (who is conspicuously missing in Raghavan’s book.) Rama Bhima Soma offers that “Modern” on a platter. It romances a Karnataka beyond Bengaluru, a scholarship beyond English, a pluralist culture beyond religion, and a society beyond the self-centred individual. The book reminds readers of the police shooting dead over 130 protesters during the farmers’ protests of July 1980.

This brutality galvanised the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) into a political force that endured, though unable to align with the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS)—an alliance that could have turned Karnataka’s sociopolitical blueprint on its head. The DSS itself, the book records, emerged from Kolar district, where the town of Aadima hosted over 200 monthly gatherings around songs and theatre called “Hunnime Haadu” (Full Moon Songs). Culture and politics go hand in hand when it comes to the Dalit chaluvali (movement).

The revolutionary spirit of Karnataka

The revolutionary spirit of Karnataka is captured on just one page. Sample the list of speakers at the inaugural “rebel” Bandaya Sahitya Sammelana in 1979: Devanuru Mahadeva, D.R. Nagaraj, Niranjana, Chandrashekhar Patil, Besagarahalli Ramanna, and (a drunk) Sri Sri, who publicly confessed to being “a prostitute” for writing for commercial films. A similarly stellar line-up is on offer at a Chikmagalur prison when scholars and activists from across the State join a communal harmony function to coincide with the Sangh Parivar’s Datta Jayanti and are rounded up by the police.

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On the Parivar, the book quotes Rahamath Tarikere’s pointed observation that the Sangh had “failed to attract Kannada literati to its ideology”, with the exception of S.L. Bhyrappa, Chidananda Murthy, and Sumateendra Nadig. Raghavan cites U.R. Ananthamurthy to consider the legendary actor Dr Rajkumar as the single most influential unifier of Kannada as a spoken language across Karnataka. This fulfilled, in some ways, Dinakar Desai’s ambition of having a Kannada that was both rich and popular.

The book shifts into a different gear when dwelling on the naxal movement in Karnataka and the “rhyming relationship” the extreme right enjoys with the extreme left. Muzaffar Assadi is quoted as saying: “Naxalite adventurism helps the Hindutva lobby to consolidate and expand its bases rather than social movements and liberal space.” Saketh Rajan, a musician scholar who became a naxalite, went on to author Making History—over a thousand pages of a “total history” of Karnataka—while he was underground. Rajan reminds one of Agni Shridhar, a “retired” gangster who is an author, journalist, and critic (and is missing in the book).

Interestingly, Rajan looked up to A.R. Ramalingam, who founded the Marxist Library, which “sent ripples of revolution across a landscape clamouring for education”. Of the same “pure” leftist crop is the trade unionist Ananth Subbarao of Arkalgud, who leant towards the “militant energy” of communism over socialism and was inspired by Shantaveri Gopala Gowda (the “Edmund Burke of Karnataka”). In communism—like in the game “Rama, Bhima, Soma” (known in the Bangalore Cantonment as “holly kolly”)—the whole was always intended to be bigger than the sum of its parts.

The sub-chapter on Shankar Mokashi Punekar is a revelation. In the book Harijan Contribution to Medieval Thought, Punekar disrupts the notion that the literary oeuvre of Karnataka belonged only to Brahmin writers. He is contrarian in writing about the heterogeneity of Brahminism and the intra-caste exclusions that are not often written about. Here, Raghavan stops short of locating the relevance of such ritual-based classification in a modern milieu, where caste has assumed politically supremacist notions.

The book also throws light on the reformist efforts of Muslim leaders such as B.A. Mohideen, who worked towards having schools set up by the Beary community that would cater to Hindus and Christians, and the author Sara Aboobacker, who wrote against the practice of triple talaq. In this context, the fact that Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp translated by Deepa Bhasthi has made it to the International Booker Prize longlist for 2025 is a delightful vindication of Muslim women authors from Karnataka.

This is a pluralist land where Shishunala Sharifa, who like his guru Govinda Bhatta, was ostracised by the orthodox religious fold for propagating Hindu classical texts alongside the works of Allama Prabhu and Sufi thinkers. The book transcends genres and disciplines. It delightfully links personalities and philosophies across chapters and combines intensive research with streams of consciousness. Through the book, Raghavan sets a precedent for other subcultures to rediscover themselves.

Rama Bhima Soma offers enjoyable trivia: the first known Kannada novel, Indirabai, was written in 1899 by Gulvadi Venkata Rao; the Basel Mission Press in Mangalore was the first printing press to publish Kannada works; Gopalakrishna Adiga’s cross-disciplinary magazine Sakshi had one edition devoted entirely to Polish literature; and bits about the precocious literary stars of the 1930s Pejavara Sadashiva Rao and Kodagina Gowramma, who both died young. One also learns of Kumbara Veerabhadrappa (“Kum Vee”), who produced his Karnataka Sahitya Academy award–winning debut novel Kappu in eight days when a friend bet against him being able to write a novel at all!

A special mention is made of the IAS officer Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta’s yeoman efforts in crowdsourcing over a million books for close to 4,000 libraries for rural children across the State. The chapter “Cultures of Insecurity” profiles the delightful work of Du Saraswati that brings theatre sessions to garment workers and transgender groups, and considers pourakarmikas (sanitation workers) the “real environmentalists”.

Two quibbles

Two quibbles. One, the length of interviews extracted in the text takes away slightly from the effortless writing. Two, cultural bastions of Karnataka such as the gurdwara at Bidar, the Tibetan settlement at Bylakuppe, the Anglo-Indians of Kolar Gold Fields, and the Ranga Shankara theatre deserved mention. Some coverage of Partition migrants (whose story Chiranjiv Singh has recounted admirably) and the Kannadiga diaspora would have added flavour as well. The book cries out for a translation into Kannada.

The premise of the book remains the apparent conflict between the desi (vernacular) and marga (Vedic) paradigms, which the author takes head-on in his interviews with the poet-journalist Pratibha Nandakumar. Through examples such as Chamundi historically being “a tantric goddess” (later partially converted to the Vedic dimension) and the progressive feminism of Somadeva’s 11th century epic Kathasaritasagara, Raghavan concludes: “Cultural activism in Karnataka…. has in fact tried to show that nothing new need be created at all, and that there are numerous oral traditions that carry centuries of hallowed desi culture within their wombs.” In many ways, this is the epitaph for the tour de force that is this book.

Aditya Sondhi is a senior advocate based in Delhi.