TOI report on the book launch

India’s former ambassador to UNESCO, Chiranjiv Singh, termed it a “book of profound insights.”

Book excerpt on Churumuri

http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/what-your-nela-and-what-your-jala-says-about-you/

Book launch pics – Indiatimes gallery

 

http://photogallery.indiatimes.com/articlelist/2314452.cms

Book launch – Link to the Hindu report

http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/31/stories/2008033159550400.htm

Keeping Faith… My speech at the launch

 

After a long wait and a tiring process of putting the book together, like most debut authors I feel terribly exhausted to make a speech on the day of the launch. So, I won’t get into to telling you why I wrote the book, how I did it and how long I took. All that is amply clear in the fairly longish ‘introduction’ and ‘endnotes’ that I have written in the book. But I would only like to emphasise that it was personally very important for me to put this book together. The theme I have chased in this book broadly suggests my own journey from imagining myself as a provincial Kannada boy, growing up in Malleswaram as the son of a Kannada academic and activist, to reaching the fringes of the so called cosmopolitan world by the virtue of being part of the English language media. My present and this book is about the struggle to reconcile the best of the two worlds that I have experienced.

 

The theme of this book occurred as a result of a set of questions that were nagging me. Roughly reconstructed the questions were something like this: Should I read Kannada at the cost of English, as the great Kannada poet Gopalakrishna Adiga had once advised me? How much time should I devote to keep myself up to date in the Kannada world? Is it worth it at all? Will it be of any use to spend so much time when most of what I need to manage in this world is available in English? Etc. All the while, I knew there was something deeply abnormal about these questions. I soon realised that I too was caught in the dilemma that millions of my generation were facing in a globalised world and that caused enormous guilt in me.

 

I clearly knew how richly I had gained from my Kannada milieu and how deeply secure and rooted I felt sharing the Kannada identity. At the same time I was also aware of the fresh perspectives and access that the English language created. I did not want to pursue one at the cost of the other. I wanted to be a good bilingual integrating my reading and writing interests in the two languages. Since I constantly travelled between the two worlds, I knew how dubious it was to dub all that was generated by local languages and cultures as ‘provincial’ and ‘parochial.’ In the everyday sense, cosmopolitanism was narrowly defined or equated with the use of the English language and the ‘benign’ global environments it was said to ‘naturally’ create. This wasn’t true and I started wondering as to how to get the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the local and the global, the inside and the outside, the passion and the profession to coexist. How do I get the two worldviews to complement each other? To put it a little more pompously, I began the exploration of the middlepath. It was a dire necessity for me. Almost a question of survival.

 

I have even wondered that if this book is about avenging my father’s humiliations at the altar of English. Despite being so accomplished, learned and creative, I suspect that in some remote corner of his mind there was this regret that the world did not open up as much as he wanted to because of his limited access to English. Some obituarists of my father have pointed out that before his silence acquired a meditative temper, the silence of his younger days that produced the mime plays were more a result of his shocking encounter with the English-speaking cantonment world in Bangalore, when he came from small town Chikkaballapur to study at the St. Joseph’s College. Since English assumes itself to be the world, it has acquired the power to extract regrets from even the most marvelously accomplished people. Garcia Marquez in his autobiography ‘Living to Tell a Tale’ recalls a debate that took place between his parents over the school he was to join. He says: “My father would have preferred the Colegio Americano so that I would learn English, but my mother rejected it with the perverse argument that it was a den of Lutherans. Today, I have to admit, to be fair to my father, that one of the defects in my life as a writer has been not speaking English.” One does not know how to make sense of such regrets.

 

Perhaps to ensure that his son does not suffer from a similar angst, in my early teens, the only serious holiday homework I remember my father assigning me was translation of short stories or poems from Kannada to English. So even before I had picked up the nuances of the two languages, I had become a translator of sorts. That was the destiny that he was trying to carve out for me – to take my mother tongue to the world. I took the path he showed me seriously. In an altered way I continue to feel the same even today. As a journalist, I am merely a translator between two between two worlds and between peoples. In that sense, this book is so much about being my father’s son. I have dedicated this book to his memory and I only wish he was alive today to see it in print.

 

So much for the personal history of this book. But however sincere my personal ambitions and thoughts were, they would not have translated to the public realm if I had not met the people I met in my professional life. I feel very grateful to Mr. K N Harikumar, my first editor, for allowing me to pursue my interests and explore Kannada and Karnataka in a different light. I feel extremely proud and lucky to be working for Mr. Vinod Mehta. Many of the essays in this book would not have happened had he not given me the courage and the confidence to write them. I am also indebted to him for the lessons in professional integrity that he has continuously imparted without once getting vocal or self-righteous about it. I was deeply moved by his call yesterday when he said he would be attending this function in spirit. I was also lucky to have had Vir Sanghvi as my editor at Hindustan Times, who sent me to Rajasthan to bring out an English daily in a wholly different and challenging provincial setting that I had till then not known. I would be failing in my duties if I do not recall the generosity of my editors at Irish Times, especially Caroline Walsh and Kieran Fagan and also Mr. Girradi Govindaraj, the past chairman of Karnataka Sahitya Academy for picking me to edit ‘Aniketana,’ the English literary journal when I was just about 26.

 

My professional and intellectual influences have been numerous and that is acknowledged and evident in the book. But I would like to particularly thank Mr. Jeremy Seabrook and Mr. K V Narayana, the two people who helped me gently negotiate the two worldviews of the local and the global. They also, most importantly, told me there need not be a conflict between the two. Mr. Narayana is not here today, but Mr. Seabrook has come all the way from London to launch this book, I know I’ll never be able to repay his kind and loving gesture. When I first met him at his Muswell Hill home in London, I spoke non-stop for a couple of hours and simply rattled off my professional, personal and intellectual anxieties before him. From that day till now, he has patiently heard me and seen me through all the difficult bends. Thank you sir for being there.

 

I am also immensely happy that people whom I admire and greatly respect are here today for the release function. I became a diehard fan of Mr. Ashokamitran’s works through the translations of my dear friend Kalyan Raman. As the compere rightly said that he is one of the living greats of Indian literature and I feel deeply honoured that he took the pains to come from Chennai for this occassion.

 

I have quietly turned to Mr. Chiranjiv Singh whenever I have been in some kind of a professional dilemma and he has always put me on the right track. His saintly demenour has also offered me personal solace at times. His erudition and the great ability to appreciate the richness of all that is regional and local has been a bonus acquisition in my many conversations with him. 

 

I have not known professor Settar personally, but I have known him through his writing. His scholarship, again, that has negotiated the local and global spaces, has been a fine model before me. When I met him the other day to invite him for the function, I told him how my father had felt very anxious when I had picked up his book ‘Pursuing Death’ to read when I was about 17. His most recent work ‘Shangam-Tamilagam mattu Kannada Nadu-Nudi’ has been an eye opener. It is a book that I personally feel will correct the distorted history of relationship between the Tamil and Kannada communities. There was a small debate on my dear friend Krishna Prasad’s blog on the guest list for this function. While appreciating the ones present on the list they had asked why there was no Kannada scholar on it? But another blogger had sharply responded by saying that you could not perhaps find a greater Kannada scholar than Prof. Settar.

 

There are many dear friends, elders and family in the audience here today. I thank you all for coming here and cheering me. I hope you will continue to cheer me on. Finally my thanks to Mr. Rajaram, for investing faith in my writing, for guiding me and publishing this book. I sincerely hope sir Navakarnataka recovers its money and publishes my next book too.

 

THANK YOU.     

 

 

Keeping Faith… Book blurbs

“In this stimulating book, Sugata Srinivasaraju explores the clash between local cultures on the one hand and the homogenizing impulses of globalisation on the other… his sweep is broad, his tone by turns empathetic and polemical. He acquaints us with the different dimensions of this conflict – economic, political, moral and aesthetic. Through his reports and analyses, Sugata makes a case for a rooted cosmopolitanism that I for one found deeply persuasive.”
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
Historian and columnist

“Spanning across centuries from the earliest extant Kannada literary work of the 850 to today’s Lankesh and Karnad and unblurred focus on the invisible and visible expressions of the cultural consciousness of the great Kannada community, the book is an exemplary discourse of an extremely well-informed, reflective, liberal and committed mind. Though the author’s reference point is Kannada, his concerns are the concerns of all languages of India.

 

The book contains some perceptive biographical pieces which are moving, original observations of those personalities. Sugata Srinivasaraju’s scholarship and his natural restraint makes the book one of the most illuminating and stimulating commentaries on contemporary Indian society.” 

ASHOKAMITRAN
Tamil writer

 

“This book deserves to be read wherever cultures are threatened; and that means everywhere… Sugata is indeed an exceptional ambassador between cultures.”
JEREMY SEABROOK

British Writer (from the Foreword)

 

 

 

 

 

My book launch

KEEPING FAITH WITH THE MOTHER TONGUE
The Anxieties of a Local Culture
By Sugata Srinivasaraju
Pages: 288
Price: Rs. 200
Publisher: Navakarnataka Publications, Bangalore