Water envelops Malenadu (Hilly regions of Karnataka-Ed) in a million different ways; it pours down in sheets from the sky. It winds through plunging valleys like a snake in the grass. It thunders down towering precipices of Mesozoic rock, flecking joyous sprays of smoky foam. The dewdrops radiate a hue of lush, glimmering green from the shrubs of the shola. Malenadu is also the land of rain. This is the home of coffee and sandalwood, the wild dog and the whistling thrush; it is the nursery of Yakshagana and Hulivesha (forms of folk theatre-Ed). It is at once, the ecological nucleus of the Western Ghats, and the throbbing, resonant, heart of Kannada culture.
Water envelops Malenadu (Hilly regions of Karnataka-Ed) in a million different ways; it pours down in sheets from the sky. It winds through plunging valleys like a snake in the grass. It thunders down towering precipices of Mesozoic rock, flecking joyous sprays of smoky foam. The dewdrops radiate a hue of lush, glimmering green from the shrubs of the shola. Malenadu is also the land of rain. This is the home of coffee and sandalwood, the wild dog and the whistling thrush; it is the nursery of Yakshagana and Hulivesha (forms of folk theatre-Ed). It is at once, the ecological nucleus of the Western Ghats, and the throbbing, resonant, heart of Kannada culture.
It was here, to a tiny village called Heggodu that a young dreamer and idealist called K V Subbanna, returned home after university in distant Mysore, a few years after India’s independence. While there, the young Subbanna had embraced both socialism and literature. He was also infected with a lifelong love for theatre, cinema and their roles in society.
Those were also times of a heady euphoria across the nation. There was, of course, the trauma of partition; but there were hopes and dreams as well. And, as a newly decolonized people imagined a nation for themselves, the early visions were firmly decentralised. The notion of the village being at the centre of all development (an idea endorsed enthusiastically by Gandhi) was still very dominant.
Subbanna threw himself into managing his family’s plantation of supari palms and paan vines. But his restless exuberance led him, and a group of friends, to launch a cyclostyled newspaper, build a library and incubate a theatre group. The seeds of that experiment have grown into a unique cultural movement, receiving, and reflecting upon the art of the world – at home in a remote hamlet in a verdant valley.
Ninasam is an acronym for Neelakanteswara Nataka Samsthe. It is named after the presiding local deity in Heggodu, and was informally started in 1949. Like in so many villages across India, it was a forum where people got together to perform one play a year, mostly mythological. But Subbanna pushed the borders – slowly, but steadily. He rejected the notion that high art was only intellectually accessible to the urban elite. Among the early plays they performed, was a translation of D L Roy’s Bengali classic, Shahjahan. Then, they went on to Brecht and Shakespeare. He once attended a film appreciation course in Poona, and came back, transformed.
A film club was formed, the Ninasam Chitra Samaja. A few local volunteers trained as projectionists – and prints were borrowed from the National Film Archives. The villagers began to view Chaplin and Kurosawa, Bergman, Ray and world war documentaries. And K V Subbanna, from the sides, would speak the dialogues in Kannada, even as the film ran.
In this way, the ideas and the images, the sounds and the surprises of the wider world began to arrive in Heggodu, consumed with an infectious enthusiasm and debated vigorously by its denizens and their neighbours. An unwavering commitment throughout was a strong sense of community, where despite the many quarrels, disagreements, and differences, the organization prevailed. The political differences were many and varied, there were issues of social hierarchies, but the aim was debate, dialogue, and where possible, creative resolution. They explored the links between what they saw and heard and the everyday problems in their society. They did not leave their politics at home; instead they never gave up striving for consensus.
The village of Heggodu now has a spiffy 600-seater auditorium (Heggodu’s population is less than a thousand) named after yet another son of the Western Ghats, and an indescribably talented, and prodigious, giant of modern India – the multi-faceted Shivarama Karanth. It is part of a larger campus, a genuine multiplex, for there is Akshara Prakashana, a publishing imprint, a drama school, and Tirugaata, a travelling drama repertory company. For one week every October, the campus hosts the Samskriti Shibira, a cultural festival. The participation is truly eclectic, with a wide range of people attending; both rustic, and urbane. Last year an Iranian student of Philosophy, a lecturer in English from Mandya, a Banana vendor from Davangere and a Marxist activist from Siliguri were dorm mates. Ninasam has survived and grown for sixty years, the shibira for half that time. The sheer endurance of this rustic and doughty group of villagers is a testimonial to their viability.
I have just completed an hour-long documentary film set in Heggodu, around the activities of Ninasam. The film is a celebration of the deeply humanist strain that survives in Ninasam today, and also reflects on the place of the village in contemporary India. In a country where they have by constitutional right, the freedom of speech and expression, it has become necessary for people to ‘wrest’ a vested right, as has been the experience of the Anna Hazare campaign in recent days. My experience of Heggodu, over several filming visits over the past year, is that it is a genuine public space, committed to free speech and fearless listening. Independent of both state and corporate control, it is a truly ‘public’ space. You would witness a faithful translation of Shakespeare, without arrogantly dumbing it down for its audience and intervening with the Ramayana, a common inheritance.
Ninasam’s innumerable celebrants delight in its rooted, organic blossoming; they see its core values as intrinsic to a praxis that resists the commodification of culture, and its corporatisation. They see it as proof that art is truly universal, and that rustic audiences are capable of being proactive consumers of an ‘urbane’ artistic culture, capable of engaging in the most sophisticated of aesthetic experience. The energy, the motor that drives all this is an unshakeable belief that the Village is a viable centre of community life. To the late Subbanna and to Ninasam, the village and the Nation, Heggodu and the World, were interchangeable terms.
Ninasam has its share of critics as well; some claim that it was Subbanna’s landowning prosperity, which enabled him to bankroll a whim. This is not entirely true, for Ninasam regularly publishes its accounts.
One of its core principles is not to accept outside money for its core activities. And it has always been funded by local subscription and volunteerism. Others draw attention to his Brahmin birth and upbringing; they despair that this has limited the vigour with which Ninasam has interrogated social inequity, the vicious brutalities of caste oppression and communal disharmony. This may perhaps be partially true, but last year for instance they performed Shakespeare’s Othello and Kuvempu’s radical retelling of the Ramayana, Shoodra Tapaswi (the story of Shambhooka-Ed). While one explores racial prejudice, the other is an attack on caste prejudice.
It can be argued that a reforming Brahmanism, (or indeed a reforming capitalism that the new free market is touted as being) however progressive it may be, has its inherent limitations. The ultimate articulation of this crisis has to come from the subaltern. A truly public space will allow this articulation to flourish, and this I have seen firsthand in Heggodu. If I were to give just one example, it would be the formation and growth of Janamanadaata – or the play in the minds of the people, which is a travelling drama repertory too. It has been founded by an alumnus, and now a faculty member of the Ninasam Theatre Institute, M. Ganesh. Its members are all alumni of the Ninasam Drama School. They are independent of Ninasam, yet they have emerged from within and found their voice in a common enabling space. Their main emphasis is to articulate the voice of the underprivileged and exploited, with an emphasis on dalit assertion. Last year, they adapted for stage performance, the riveting, visceral, autobiography of the dalit poet Siddalingaiah, Ooru Keri, a text, which is characterized according to literary critic, the late D R Nagaraj, by badavara naguvina shakti, or the power in the laughter of the poor and Khadgavaagali Kavya, Let Poetry become a Sword.
My experience of filming in Heggodu and interrogating the Ninasam experience raised in my mind, fundamental questions about democracy and decentralisation. The Ninasam story helps us to seek answers to some crucial questions about the universality of art; the nature and process of its consumption; and the relationship it has with its audience. It also does much more. It opens the debate about the possibilities such a practice has for the formation and sustenance of communities, organically linked to local production economies that are not exploitative or destructive.
This is a crucial debate for contemporary India, witness as we are to the disturbing consequences that policies gone awry, governance failure, and corporate greed have wrought in large swathes of the country. In understanding Ninasam and its contemporary challenges, we develop an understanding of the parlous state of village India. At one point, in this year’s Shibira, a participant got up to remind the audience that the debate is no longer really about how we are consuming like there is no tomorrow, or even whether villagers lead a simple life because they have no choice. For him the situation is graver still, for our villages have become old age homes where no youth lives.
He was making a very important point. For, in the free market chatter that now consumes us, the future is a seductive urban paradise; it is a vision that envisages three quarters of our people living in cities. It is a very fuzzy notion of metropolitan bliss. It is this callous brand of capitalism, which treats villages only as resources, which treats nature, at the same time, as food source and a garbage dump that led to the young man’s lament. With the emptying of the villages, the questions that has returned to haunt us –what kind of a nation do we want to be?
S. Gautham is a film maker, among other things. Photographs by the author.