Offering hope
Offering hope
An interesting read in Kannada…
Ondu Photoda Negative by Sridhara Balagara
Ankita Pustaka, Rs.120.
If you had begun to feel disillusioned that fiction today was hopelessly caught between historical or ideologically-driven agendas and its very opposite extreme — character sketches that believe in the universality of the human spirit — Balagara’s “Ondu Photoda Negative” is the perfect cure that would render you back into that ever-elusive zone called hope.
Balagara’s 13 short stories are each so unique, so brave, true-to-life and filled with themes captured to perfection, that they ask for a redefinition of not just what it is to write, but also of that higher aim of literature — what it is to live. Every story weaves such a magical spell through brevity of language and the introduction of multiple plot-prototypes that we would want to expand the notion of believability as a criterion in art. Balagara is the very epitome of the thumb-rule of literary writing: ‘show, not tell’. He presents the everydayness of life in all its physical details, such that life appears at least three-dimensional in Balagara’s writing.
In “Mukhyaprana”, Jayakka’s artiste husband finds his muse in another woman. The play of circumstances and characters is such a rigmarole here, that it evokes in us the bare and unbearable exasperation of a “Why? Why is life such?” Balagara renders understandable a Timmakka’s disbelief in the imported Jersey cow as sacred (in “Timmakkana Darshanagalu”), the hopelessness a bus-driver feels upon waking to find the bus ‘gone off’ (in “Samlagna”) or Tungakka’s humiliation at having been coerced into an inappropriate relationship by her brother-in-law (in “Iruvudella Bittu”).
What Balagara must be celebrated for, however, is for articulating what has largely gone unarticulated about traditional-rural cultures. In “Galakke Bilada Kolada Chandra”, the snake-charmer Shesha is sought for his knowledge of medicinal leaves by a French film-maker and a local mediator, both persistent and profit-seeking. Shesha eludes both, feigns madness and makes them pay him instead. He tells us: “The name of the medicine cannot be told, money should not be taken, giving up the sastra incurs god’s curse. It would amount to cheating the vamsa…and the medicine won’t cure.” What Balagara is telling us here is that it is only the modernist understanding that sees traditions as superstitious and misses its reasoning and ethicality. Similarly, the gods in Balagara’s stories are what the Indian gods indeed are: repositories receptive to human suffering based in pacts and contracts.
In “Samlagna”, as Bellajja relates his jaati’s migratory history, we see an India that is not necessarily power-ridden or hierarchical, but one in which bargains and agreements entered into, came to be a jaati’s custom and tradition. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Balagara is a writer that the critics are yet to fully figure out, both for the brilliance of his insights and the experimental nature of his writing.
SUSHUMNAA KANNAN
The Hindu, Friday Review, Bangalore. July 24th 2009.
An interesting read in Kannada…
Ondu Photoda Negative by Sridhara Balagara
Ankita Pustaka, Rs.120.
If you had begun to feel disillusioned that fiction today was hopelessly caught between historical or ideologically-driven agendas and its very opposite extreme — character sketches that believe in the universality of the human spirit — Balagara’s “Ondu Photoda Negative” is the perfect cure that would render you back into that ever-elusive zone called hope.
Balagara’s 13 short stories are each so unique, so brave, true-to-life and filled with themes captured to perfection, that they ask for a redefinition of not just what it is to write, but also of that higher aim of literature — what it is to live. Every story weaves such a magical spell through brevity of language and the introduction of multiple plot-prototypes that we would want to expand the notion of believability as a criterion in art. Balagara is the very epitome of the thumb-rule of literary writing: ‘show, not tell’. He presents the everydayness of life in all its physical details, such that life appears at least three-dimensional in Balagara’s writing.
In “Mukhyaprana”, Jayakka’s artiste husband finds his muse in another woman. The play of circumstances and characters is such a rigmarole here, that it evokes in us the bare and unbearable exasperation of a “Why? Why is life such?” Balagara renders understandable a Timmakka’s disbelief in the imported Jersey cow as sacred (in “Timmakkana Darshanagalu”), the hopelessness a bus-driver feels upon waking to find the bus ‘gone off’ (in “Samlagna”) or Tungakka’s humiliation at having been coerced into an inappropriate relationship by her brother-in-law (in “Iruvudella Bittu”).
What Balagara must be celebrated for, however, is for articulating what has largely gone unarticulated about traditional-rural cultures. In “Galakke Bilada Kolada Chandra”, the snake-charmer Shesha is sought for his knowledge of medicinal leaves by a French film-maker and a local mediator, both persistent and profit-seeking. Shesha eludes both, feigns madness and makes them pay him instead. He tells us: “The name of the medicine cannot be told, money should not be taken, giving up the sastra incurs god’s curse. It would amount to cheating the vamsa…and the medicine won’t cure.” What Balagara is telling us here is that it is only the modernist understanding that sees traditions as superstitious and misses its reasoning and ethicality. Similarly, the gods in Balagara’s stories are what the Indian gods indeed are: repositories receptive to human suffering based in pacts and contracts.
In “Samlagna”, as Bellajja relates his jaati’s migratory history, we see an India that is not necessarily power-ridden or hierarchical, but one in which bargains and agreements entered into, came to be a jaati’s custom and tradition. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Balagara is a writer that the critics are yet to fully figure out, both for the brilliance of his insights and the experimental nature of his writing.
SUSHUMNAA KANNAN
The Hindu, Friday Review, Bangalore. July 24th 2009.
Comments