How literary festivals are exposing anxiety gripping Kannada cultural landscape

Alternate literary festival

Scholar Purushottama Bilimale had proposed an alternate literary festival in Bengaluru on social media and it seems to have gained some steam.

“We wanted to do something at least symbolically. We are planning to hold it on the final day of the Haveri literary meet,” he said.

Even though the Kannada Sahitya Parishat is an independent non-profit, it is often seen as a representative of the Kannada language.

The Karnataka government also funds the Parishat as well as its activities, including the literary meet. In 2022, the government released ₹20 crore for the three-day literary meet alone.

So it is revolting that a body funded by the taxpayers of Karnataka is excluding an entire community in line with the ideology of the ruling party.

This is not the first time this year that a literary festival has found itself in the middle of controversy.

Also read: Bilimale and others on Bhoota Kola, sacred art seen in Kantara

Ballari Sangam poetry met

Sangam International Poetry Festival held in Ballari (Amulya B)

 On the very first day of the Sangam International Poetry Festival (21–23 October 2022), as Kannada poet Wilson Kateel began reading his poem ‘Aa Sarvaadhikaari Preetiyannadaroo Maadabekittu’ (The Dictator Should’ve Fallen in Love), a man in the audience started heckling him.

“Why don’t you name the dictator!” he shouted. When the heckler refused to calm down, he was escorted out. He could be heard shouting “Modi Zindabad”. The audience responded with “Poetry Zindabad”.

A man (in yellow) heckles when Wilson Kateel’s poem “The dictator should have fallen in love” is being read. Ruckus ensues. Audience follows up with “Poetry Zindabad”#SangamBallari pic.twitter.com/bojtSjBjdF

— Amulya | ಅಮೂಲ್ಯ 🌈 | amuuliia@masthead.social (@Ay_Luma) October 21, 2022

For Kateel, the audience’s sloganeering was indicative of the success of poetry in general and the Sangam festival in particular. But for many, this was just performative.

US poet Afaa Weaver reading his poems at Sangam, Ballari (Amulya B)

“We have nothing against the intention of the programme itself,” insists Basavaraj Sulibhavi, founder of progressive publishing house Ladai Prakashana based in Gadag. “Literary festivals like this should happen across languages and across regions. We have only raised our voices against how this was organised.”

He was one of the two people (the other being Suresh Kanjarpane) who publicly called out the festival on social media, which a Ballari-based non-profit Arivu Trust organised.

The festival charged ₹1,800 as entry fee, which covered the stay and meals for all three days. Criticising what he called the “transactional nature” of the festival that “builds walls and excludes people”, Sulibhavi also condemned the organisers for inviting BJP politicians to the programme.

This essentially split the Kannada literary community and beyond, into two groups.

For those who participated in the festival as delegates and panellists, the honouring of minister B Sriramulu and local MLA Somashekhar Reddy was part of the protocol. But for Sulibhavi, this protocol could have been rejected as the organisers were not government functionaries.

Karnataka Transport Minister B Sriramulu being felicitated at the meet (Amulya B)

Both Kateel and Sulibhavi seem to recognise the threat of saffronisation of Karnataka, which goes to polls in mid-2023. But they differ in their response to it. Kateel says that Sangam was one of the only festivals to have placed no restrictions on what kind of poetry to recite.

“It’s not like we sang the praises of the ruling party, no?” asks Kateel. “Suresh Kanjarpane and Basoo did not have to portray this as the tragedy of the literary world.”

But Basoo believes in ideological purity and criticised the organisers for asking the participants to pay a fee.

“It is a dangerous trend to gatekeep people by this pay-and-participate model. In the history of Kannada literary tradition, there have been instances of self-motivated participation. That needs to happen.”

Cultural anxiety around saffronisation in Karnataka

The response to the Haveri literary meet seems to be one such self-motivated participation where Kannadigas across the nation and beyond are planning an alternative meet.

Poster for the alternative literary meet set to take place in Bengaluru on 8 January (Naveen Soorinje/Facebook)

For many progressives, even though the Ballari meet saw instances of resistance, it is essentially the “corporatisation of literature”, not different from the Jaipur or Bengaluru Literary Festival that try to portray themselves as “apolitical”.

For people like Bilimale, private, corporate-funded literary festivals cannot be the answer to saffronisation of public festivals.

The discourse around the Sangam poetry festival signals a larger anxiety that is gripping Karnataka: The saffron brigade’s success in making inroads into the larger cultural landscape which has tried to keep the right-wing forces at bay.

For a long time, SL Bhyrappa was the only authoritative voice from the right and he was in the minority.

Today, by making people like Addanda C Cariappa, Mahesh Joshi, and Chakravarthy Sulibele lead cultural and educational bodies like Rangayana, Kannada Sahitya Parishat, and Kannada Pusthaka Pradhikaara respectively, the right is in control of the narrative.

The result is in front of us: Textbook revisions with no forethought, production of a propaganda play like Tippu Nija Kanasugalu, and exclusion of Muslim and Dalit writers from the upcoming 86th Kannada Sahitya Sammelana in Haveri.

But how feasible is it to create alternative spaces every time government institutions endorse exclusionary policies? Right now, however, this seems to be the only act of resistance that different progressive groups seem to agree on.

Also read: Sita’s Kitchen is now Seetheya Aduge Mane in Kannada

(Amulya is a multimedia journalist, translator and writer based in Bengaluru who works in both Kannada and English languages. She is the winner of the National Laadli Media award in 2022. These are the personal views of the author)