Red stone, red sky, red soil
Last Diwali I rued the fact that I could never be home for this mid-semester festival. I had a blast instead with friends in the Bay Area. This year, amazingly, the food took a backseat even though I was with my family, and instead of celebrating at home, we skipped the festivities and the ear-splitting, incessant firecrackers in the city and went on a trip. We went back to north Karnataka: our route this time was Saundatti-Hampi-Aihole-Pattadkal-Badami-Kudala Sangama-Almatti. Below is a spread of one photo from each location respectively. As always, click through to Flickr for larger versions, and many more annotated photos of each site.
One of my adolescent fantasies was to drive a rough and ready jeep (4×4 vehicles are often generically called jeeps in India) through the rugged landscape and bad roads from Pune to my grandpa’s in Bagalkot. In this fantasy, my superior driving skills got me through the bruising country, and I drew up at the gate of our old house in a triumphant swirl of red dust. I was of course lissom, and wearing chic dark glasses, short shorts and a skimpy top.
Well.
The house, as you know, is gone. Let’s not even go near lissom or the short shorts. And it wasn’t a jeep, it was a small compact car, but boy did the rugged landscape, the superior driving, and the bad roads part work out just like I’d imagined. We encountered some of the best (NH4) and worst (too many to list) back roads in northern Karnataka. This was my first time truly driving a car for extended periods in India, and I enjoyed it immensely. The area is now very cash-crop-intensive, with sunflowers, corn, tobacco and sugarcane nearing harvest all around us. (This increase in this cashcropping, especially corn in the past decade, warrants a separate post, really. Michael Pollan is right – corn is fucking everywhere.)
A Bay area friend was frequently on my mind, as I thought of the history of the region, and about Kannada and Kannadigas. The state (Karnataka) and the language (Kannada) are hardly unique in their diversity of dialects, religious-cultural influences and histories, especially in the subcontinent. But it is still interesting to closely watch how our family, settled outside the state, adjusts to the subtle differences of word-usage and twang from district to district, and how we modulate our speech accordingly when we visit.
When asking for directions, my father reverts to the rural Bijapur speech he spoke as a kid on the farm. My staunch Kannadiga-patriot brother-in-law insists on speaking “pure” Kannada the minute he crosses the border, his Marathi evaporating fast. Oh this red soil! he murmurs, his eyes misting over. He points out our “mistakes” and tells us how to speak the “correct” Kannada of southern Bangalore and Mysore. We roll our eyes, because we can still tell the northern Hubli strains in his accent. His sons mimic him in the hopes of getting the goodies they want to pry out of him, both cunningly bilingual in Marathi and Kannada since they learnt to speak. My sister and I freeze initially, and it takes us a while to acquire that delicious sing-song of Bijapur district-speak. We soon surprise ourselves with our fluency. My mother decides it’s not worth the effort – her Marathi is better, she taught the language for years, and her Kannada shows it. The ratio never falters with her.
The Maharashtra-Karnataka state border has been witness to serious tensions over these linguistic differences, each state wanting a piece of the meaty, tobacco-rich area. Like other census-based partitions in South Asia, it has not been a happy one, each side left feeling cheated out of the boundary arrangements. Bigots on either side proudly refuse to speak the other language, even though it is impossible not to be bilingual here. When we were kids and we would travel down the National Highway 4 (Bombay-Bangalore), sometimes during violent outbursts, my sister and I played a game – converse only in Marathi till the border town of Nipani, then only in Kannada. The one who used a word from the other language lost a point. We realised very early how porous our versions of both languages were – we kept losing points. It has remained like that, thankfully, and unlike many fools in both states, we don’t chase the vanishing horizon of excessive linguistic purity.
At the glorious ruins of Hampi, purity keeps tempting people into dangerous pasts. Local guidebooks and tourists are at pains to insist on the exclusively Kannadiga roots of the kingdom’s dynasties (even though Krishnadevaraya, its most famous king’s love for Telugu is well-known), the newly elected BJP government in Karnataka is only the latest in a long line of cheap memory-makers to cash in on Vijayanagara’s position as a Hindu bastion against Muslim intrusions into an imagined pure Indian culture. The stone carvings themselves, meanwhile, hint at more complex memories, of central Asian horse-traders, Indo-Persian and Dravidian architecture, Hindu mythology and art, animist deities, and a deliciously polyglot landscape.
History and language are, and ought to be, messy. I wish we’d focus on keeping our monuments clean and tidy, instead of the pasts and peoples they are traces of.
