Rama Bhima Soma, a game with no winners or losers, becomes an interesting metaphor for democracy in Srikar Raghavan’s book by the same name, which attempts to unpack the social, political and cultural histories of modern Karnataka in an original way.
Raghavan, an independent writer and researcher based out of Mysuru, explains that the game, which is known by many different names, requires only a ball and has no fixed number of players, teams, designated boundaries or premeditations. This way, “every guy gets the chance to be king (hold the ball), but it is always temporary,” he says, drawing a parallel between this game and Karnataka’s literary and political movements.
“Here too, there was this volley of power changes where every new generation is, at once, an enemy and a friend to their predecessor,” he says. Additionally, it also helped him look at writers, activists and politicians through this “web of interconnections where you are not immediately passing ethical judgments, but able to see them as they’re responding to other movements of their own time,” says Raghavan of the book, which was supported by the New India Foundation Fellowship and was published by Westland in 2024.
Rama Bhuma Soma defies genre, delving into multiple aspects of Karnataka’s cultural history, ranging from the lives and perspectives of stalwarts like Kuvempu, Shivaram Karanth, U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi to the rise and fall of multiple social movements, literary and cultural criticism and your meditations and experiences. Can you tell us more about the book’s origin, structure, sourcing and evolution?
The germ of the book goes back to when I was in the second year of my Master’s. I was searching for a subject to do my thesis on, and a friend brought up the story of Saketh Rajan, a Maoist revolutionary from Mysuru who was shot dead in 2005. I had never heard of him, but he had left behind two thick volumes of a Marxist history of Karnataka: very dense, challenging, and problematic in many ways, but, all in all, a fascinating piece of textual legacy. I took that up as my subject and began reading more about the times that had created him. It gave me a window into the intense idealism of the 70s generation and a launchpad to start exploring that effervescent moment.
I applied to the New India Foundation (NIF) immediately after my second year of MA. This was during the pandemic in 2020, so I had gone back home to Mysuru. They had extended the NIF deadline by two months, and I had time to draft a decent proposal. Initially, it was a history of social movements in late 20th-century Karnataka, and my first outlines of the proposed book were meant to be an interrogation of these diverse struggles: the farmers’ movement, trade unionism, environmentalism, the Dalit movement, and so on. I think my academic training also contributed to these initial concerns – the hope was that these investigations could throw light on our present political moment and help us understand how we arrived here. Once I got the fellowship, I started hoarding books like a maniac, procuring all sorts of Kannada books, going to libraries, and talking to people.
But I soon hit dead ends because there was little writing about these times, and what did exist was mostly in Kannada, completely inaccessible to the anglophone world. I knew I had to interview people who had lived through these times, especially activists, and the project took on a distinct character of (translated) oral histories. I think quite a large portion of my interviewees were over sixty, people who had lived through the ‘70s and ‘80s, so I was very conscious of the fact that I was documenting a fading world. I did some online interviews during COVID, but it was during the personal interviews that the most interesting revelations came out. Apart from that, these meetings gave me access to books and ideas. I would go to these interviews, come back with books to read, and try to connect them to what I knew or thought I knew.
A couple of years into this kind of research, all these conversations and readings gave me confidence that they could be arranged into an engaging narrative – I began writing chapters in earnest. Because there was so much material, I had to make some hard choices about who/what I should include. I decided to focus more on lesser-known voices from the late twentieth century while also engaging deeply with the seminal shakers and movers of the Kannada world of letters whom you brought up.
At the beginning of the book, you talk about yourself coming to Kannada a little later in life and how that feeling of being linguistically unmoored played a role in your decision to embark on this ambitious project. Can you tell us more?
Yes, I had begun to feel I knew very little about my backyard. I had never read a single Kannada novel in the original, and I felt this was particularly shameful because I am a student of literature. Because I was starting from first principles, the book carries a sense of innocence and discovery. I think this worked out well because I also wanted to introduce this world to readers encountering it for the first time.
In many ways, I was trying to expand on stuff I had already absorbed during my childhood in Mysuru. For instance, I write about the socialist leader Shantaveri Gopala Gowda. I grew up a mile away from a hospital named after him in Mysuru, so I knew there was this man called Gopala Gowda, but nothing apart from that. One of the first things I started researching for this book was Gopala Gowda’s legacy; he turned out to be such a fascinating personality. Similarly, T.P. Kailasam was a figure my grandfather and granduncle used to talk about (they’d also sing his songs), and I had encountered him in my childhood. But again, I did not know he was this radical playwright and bohemian figure who challenged so many norms of early twentieth-century Karnataka.
Another important aspect of the book was a confrontation with my own privileged upbringing, and I think the chronicles of the Dalit movement in Karnataka are perhaps some of the richest parts of the book, where I interview writers and activists like Kotiganahalli Ramaiah, Arvind Malagatti, Devanuru Mahadeva, and Du Saraswati. It was not just that I had remained aloof from the Kannada world during my childhood. I had also been sheltered from subaltern struggles for justice and dignity, whose existence and vitality I discovered only during my MA.
All in all, Rama Bhima Soma was a project of uncovering and recovering histories that not many might know about. I wanted it to be a narrative history of ideas that could engage anybody in the country who was interested in the subject. I found that Karnataka is a microcosm of so many debates we’re having – whether regarding economy, politics, society or language.
Do you have any thoughts about the language divide we constantly encounter in Karnataka today, especially considering this region has a long history of being a highly pluralistic society?
What we know as Karnataka today has historically been a multilingual, plural, multicultural society. It has been a crossroads for migrants from all across the subcontinent in diverse ways. For instance, the famous gardens of Lalbagh in Bangalore (commissioned by Haider Ali) were created by a Tamil-speaking community of horticulturists called Tigalas, who brought with them the elaborate 11-day Karaga festival that still happens in Bangalore every year.
In the Deccan, encounters with Islam created wonderfully syncretic traditions that survive to this day – Hindus and Muslims celebrate Muharram together in villages across North Karnataka. Around the fifteenth century, there lived a mystic named Kodekallu Basava, who was worshipped as a reincarnation of the Prophet. Not many know that Guru Nanak once visited Bidar in 1512 and that it is an important pilgrimage site for Sikhs.
Linguistically, the region has been very porous, and there are histories of migrations from Tamil and Telugu countries across centuries. There are so many languages spoken in Karnataka outside of Kannada – Tulu, Konkani, Beary, Coorgi, Dakhni, and so on. Of course, we must not construct for ourselves an imagined utopia because history is also full of bloodshed and contestation. Yet, these histories of pluralism stand out, awaiting fuller recognition.
The 9th-century Kannada text Kavirajamarga, written by the poet Srivijaya, was the first attempt to unify Karnataka as a geographical region. It asserted that Karnataka is the land that lies between the Godavari and the Kaveri. This too was a utopian presentation. In my book, I bring up a quote by U.R. Ananthamurthy, who once said that Srivijaya’s great dream of unifying Kannada was only realised when the actor Dr. Rajkumar spoke in Kannada in the 20th century. So, it is cinema that really unified this language and gave it a cohesive identity that somehow transcended all these diverse histories.
What we have now are modern ideas of identity. The notion of Karnataka statehood itself was a product of the Indian freedom struggle, an anti-colonial response, which, too, projected the image of a great, long-lost Karnataka. Kuvempu, for instance, described it as sarvajanangada shantiya tota – a peaceful haven for all peoples. But there were other writers – like the famous novelist A.N Krishna Rao – who rallied for a more militant linguistic consciousness. The immense popularity of Tamil films in 1960s Bangalore was seen as a serious challenge to Kannada cultural sovereignty by many, and theatres were also attacked. There is a complicated history of riots (both linguistic and religious), too.
In the wake of globalisation, these anxieties surfaced again and there was a new kind of alpha-male energy re-animating militant Kannada pride. In the early 2000s, I remember seeing a lot of English boards in Mysuru blacked out by paint. Personally, I find that there are much better ways to channel this energy and anxiety – by investing in literary and cultural ventures that recognise the state’s plural pasts and celebrate its heterogeneity or by reinstating public universities and Kannada departments.
None of this needs to come at the cost of Kannada pride – it could, in fact, be in service of it. For instance, M.M. Kalburgi (before he was assassinated in 2015) was heading an ambitious project to translate 16th-century Adil Shahi poetry (from Persian, Arabic, and Urdu) into Kannada, which was successfully completed a few years ago.
You use the word pluralism, but there don’t seem to be too many spaces for pluralism today, with both left and right discourse often being rather exclusionary. Your book, on the other hand, attempts to inject nuance and complexity into all the personalities and histories you capture. Your thoughts?
Yes, and it doesn’t help that there are spaces like Twitter that basically thrive on polarisation. One of the motivations (or consolations?) of writing a big book is that you can break out of these binaries and present people and histories as complex entities. I try to engage with all corners of the ideological spectrum critically. For instance, I interviewed Srikant Shetty, a Sangh leader in South Canara, with whom I had a reasonably tempered conversation. Only when he said something outrageous or ahistorical did I feel the need to explain why these simplistic assumptions are so flawed. I also shored up these conversations with references to historical scholarship that would lead readers to their own enquiries and maybe improve upon my own suggestions.
The further we go back into history, the muddier it becomes. We know so little about the past, and I was amazed by the bravado of those who pontificate on it without adequate scepticism. I also challenge the Left’s poor understanding of cultural and religious pasts and the confidence with which it embarked on sweeping historical judgements. Saketh Rajan’s historiography, for instance, was the product of a highly romanticised, mechanically Marxist interpretation – his ambitious project might have shaped up differently had he actively sought out criticism and contestation.
Of course, I do celebrate excellent scholarship that prizes curiosity (and a love for pluralism) over ideological agendas. I often quote Wendy Doniger, for instance, or D.R. Nagaraj, or the anthropologist David Graeber, whose work I greatly admire. A reader trying to navigate these political binaries will find some interesting resources in my footnotes and comments. They might find my own conclusions and suggestions erroneous but still find enough foothold to formulate their own opinions – which is what pluralism is ultimately all about.