Vishwakarmas, Brahmins and Billavas have opposed her for allegedly using colloquial Kannada and Tulu words in her novel Gandhi Banda. DNA caught up with its author Nagaveni H to find out her take on the controversy. Here are the excerpts:
Your novel Gandhi Banda has a stirred up lot of controversies. What’s your opinion?
It was an unwanted row. There was nothing so controversial written in Gandhi Banda. It was a work of research on social customs and linguistic practices, which has been moulded into a novel that has incidentally become a text book.
I have spent many years in studying a small region between Kulai and Hosabettu near Mangalore, gathered social customs, living standards, and religious practices. This area is a researcher’s delight even today. There are upper-caste Hindus, lower-caste folk dancers, and many other sub-castes. Their social harmony is something that has to be seen to be believed. These long years of study brought me across people from Muslim community, Hindus, and people of lower castes. Gandhi Banda was never meant to be a novel on caste system; it was a study of a micro society.
All three communities were against prescribing your book to final-year BA Kannada students of Mangalore University.
There are deep-rooted insecurities among few people, and those were the ones who do not know A from B of Kannada literature. I am surprised that one of them had served as the president of the State Kannada Sahitya Parishat and has stirred up this storm in the tea cup about Gandhi Banda.
There are a few colloquial sentences used commonly in these parts of the state. They are in use even now. But only when it comes in the shape of a novel written by a woman, these people find it a problem. This did not happen when Mulk Raaj Anand’s Untouchable was prescribed for BA in Mysore University. If we as writers and novelists are not allowed to write about social themes, how can we sustain the right of expression as a fundamental right?
What made the Hindus revolt against Gandhi Banda?
Gandhi Banda is a book that narrates the social situation in 1920-39 when Mahatma Gandhi’s movement on untouchability was at peak. There is one episode that depicts a small exchange between the non-Brahmins and the Brahmins. One of the characters makes a remark in lighter vain against a certain sect of Brahmins, which has now become a bone of contention for these persons. Gandhi Banda had been a textbook for Kannada post graduates of Kuvempu University, Gulbarga University, and Mangalore University in different periods but none of the boards of those universities had problems with it. The Mangalore University also wanted the book in an abridged version prescribed for its undergraduate Kannada optional students.
Will you delete the objectionable portions, if asked by the university?
Nobody can dictate me what to write, and this was a book written 12 years back. If somebody asks me to clip or prune, I consider it equivalent to a situation where somebody has asked me to clip the body parts of my own child.
Let the opposition rage. I will face it, now that I have Jnanapith awardees on my side.
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