A Handful of Sesame

To know that a mind as rich as Shrinivas Vaidya's has worked in Kannada - and that Kannada has created a mind such as his - is, for me, a tremendous reassurance.

K V Subbanna

With a captivating start, A Handful of Sesame plunges us into the heart of the dying years of the 1857 mutiny. But the mutiny is largely a backdrop to the novel. When Kamalanabh of Kashi is manipulated by an impoverished Brahmin of Navalgund into marrying his daughter, the novel becomes basically the story of an internal migration. This is rare, and it remains one of the strengths of the novel. We are so used to speaking of migration across the postcolonial bridge and accredited national borders that we forget that India is a country of endless internal migrations - in the past and the present.

It is to Maithreyi Karnoor's credit that she manages to execute a [linguistically] difficult endeavor, bringing across Shrinivas Vaidya's Halla Bantu Halla to the English reader - not just as an Indian or a `postcolonial' novel, not even simply as a generically Kannada novel, but as a novel from a particular location within the richly varied social and literary heritage of Kannada-speakers.

Shrinivas Vaidya was born in Navalgund of Dharwad district. He studied economics and history at Karnatak University, Dharwad and worked in Canara Bank for nearly four decades in senior positions. He took up literature as a serious activity since retiring from his job and has, since then, published seven collections of widely read and critically acclaimed short stories including Manasukharaayana Manasu, Agnikaaga, Kappe Nungida Huduga, Innondu Sante, etc. Several of his stories have been adapted into hugely successful plays. His novel Halla Bantu Halla - whose translation this is - won him the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004 and the Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008. He is also the recipient of the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award. He has been awarded honours and citations by many more cultural and literary organisations.

When I read Halla Bantu Halla for the first time several years ago, it felt so familiar and real that I had unconsciously started translating it in my mind even though translation as an occupation was not something I was considering seriously yet. It's not until early 2017, by when I had published some of my translations, did I gain enough confidence to approach Shrinivas Vaidya and propose to translate his novel.

A few people, I was told, had given up after a few pages of attempting to translate this book into English. I was not surprised. The region it is set in -the one, the author and I come from - is among the most underrepresented in Kannada literature, and more so in English. This is not because it is `subaltern' in a vertical hierarchical sense of the word. This narrative, especially, being a fictionalized memoir of a Brahmin family, certainly cannot claim powerlessness. But northern Karnataka, which was part of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency and later Bombay State before being reassigned to Karnataka, embodies a linguistic and cultural characteristic that has been `neither here nor there' in modern history owing to its geographic distance from the centres that governed it. Apart from the Marathi intonation and diction (which interestingly is heavier on the Brahmin tongue and less so among the Lingayat castes), the slang and almost Wodehousian kind of humorous undertone to our speech are misconstrued by mainstream Kannada as coarse. Not only did this linguistic region not enjoy any position of great regard by the Marathi centres of power, which were disdainful of it as laanadi', but Kannada popular culture - especially Kannada cinema - in attempting to portray it has not gone beyond caricaturing it. That's because the mainstream cannot look at this linguistic nuance without othering it, and hence, fails to understand that the essence of our language - the irreverence, the mockery - is our way of making light of the inscrutability of life. It's almost spiritual! Even the swear words that our sentences are liberally peppered with, which on the outside may seem uncouth, are a manifestation of how not taking life too seriously is a deep-rooted characteristic of our region. Calling one's own son a `whoreson' is not uncommon. There is no literality to it. So, translating a text like this needs an insider's sensibility without which a translator, however well-intentioned, has to constantly contend with the slippery slope of parody.

A vulture makes eerie gbok-gbok noises as it thumps down on tree after tree, following the injured horses of two exhausted men. With this captivating start, A Handful of Sesame plunges us into the heart of the dying years of the 1857 mutiny. The two men - brothers - are Brahmin medical practitioners from Kashi sent by Nanasaheb Peshwa, now on the run from Kanpur, to seek the support of allies in South India. They are on their way to Nargund, whose ruler has rebelled and (unknown to them) been defeated by British forces, but they are intercepted by the guards of the Desai of Navalgund, an ailing man. The Desai is a friend of the ruler of Nargund but he is more circumspect in his actions, and he tries to keep himself and the brothers away from trouble. One of the brothers escape in order to deliver his message and get the mission done, so that he can return to his own life; he is captured with papers from the deposed Peshwa and immediately executed by the British. The other brother, Kamalanabh, stays on under the patronage of the Desai of Navalgund, treating him successfully as a medical practitioner.

But the mutiny of 1857 is largely a backdrop to the novel. When Kamalanabh is manipulated by an impoverished Brahmin - one of the eleven Brahmin families in Navalgund - and the smart Dubashi, Gurunath-Panth, into marrying the Brahmin's daughter, the novel becomes basically the story of an internal migration. This is rare, and it remains one of the strengths of the novel. We are so used to speaking of migration across the postcolonial bridge and accredited national borders that we forget that India is a country of endless internal migrations - in the past and the present. What happens to the Hindi-speaking Kamalanabh in Kannada-speaking Navalgund? The intricate if concise exploration of this internal migration is further nuanced by the author's awareness of difference and variety within Kannnada-speaking regions: "Considering that most of his interactions were with Gurunath-panth's Marathi-speaking family that was of Konkanastha ancestry, any smattering of Kannada that he did pick up eventually sounded like the stretchy, nasal Kannada of the Konkanastha people from the areas of Sangli and Miraj."