THE TRAGIC FATE OF GAU-MATA in post-independence India is embodied in the lineage of Punyakoti and forms the sprawling canvas on which Dr. Bhyrappa paints a vivid and fine-grained portrait of an impossibly complex array of subjects including but not limited to the following:
The overall decline of Hindu Dharma
The inner workings of the psyche of a mentally colonized people
The impact of westernisation on the Hindu society
The state of “modern” agriculture and what is known as animal husbandry
Family and community relationships
The subterranean bond between humans and animals
Emotion and intellect
Cultural clashes
Tabbali is a contemporary classic by any yardstick.
Today, it is doubtful whether the Govina Haadu poem is prescribed in the Kannada language syllabus at the primary school level in Karnataka itself. A reasonable explanation for its absence in the school curriculum is an ideological interpretation that was floated around thirty-five years ago.
A good representative of this interpretation is by the Kannada academic, Mogalli Ganesh who argues that the Song of the Cow stands for what is pejoratively known as Brahminical supremacy, which has the cow as one of its main symbols. Accordingly, the tiger showing remorse and committing suicide is interpreted as the Brahmins depriving the food of the oppressed classes. To state it mildly, this interpretation has its roots in Karl Marx’s outdated and illogical theory positing an irreconcilable enmity between the bourgeoise and the proletariat.
When this theory is applied in the realm of literature, it clearly qualifies as ideological politicking in literature and heightens caste-based propaganda, which the Marxists have elevated to an art form. Further, when this ideology acquires actual political power, it erases poems like Govina Haadu from school books.
However, to an accomplished artist like Dr. S. L. Bhyrappa, Govina Haadu reveals itself as both a motif and an inspiration for a profound literary and philosophical exploration. The contrast between his art and propagandists like Mogalli Ganesh is clear: while Dr. Bhyrappa attunes himself to the spirit, ideologues detect nonexistent politics in a children’s song.
Tabbali is also a literary classic because it dispassionately examines the so-called cow “problem” without injuring the Hindu reverence for it or dismissing the western worldview that the cow like other animals is, simply, food. Thus, one of the central themes of Tabbali can be described as culture versus slaughter.
But this and other threads in Tabbali, powerful, thrilling and moving as they are, occur largely on the polemical plane if one wants to reduce the novel just to that.
A MAJOR PORTION of the action in Tabbali occurs in a nondescript village situated in Dr. Bhyrappa’s favourite Old Mysore Region in Karnataka. It is a miniature of Bharatavarsha’s culture and society. Indeed, few writers have displayed Dr. Bhyrappa’s unique and expert talent for projecting the macrocosm by embedding it in the microcosm. Even in an epic novel like Tantu in which the whole of India is the canvas, the action opens in a small village.
In Tabbali, the fictional village Kalenahalli is a brilliant metaphor for space and time; it also presents the extraordinary deployment of a literary technique where the imaginary and the folk merge with the real.
The Sthaḷapurāṇa (local legend) which narrates the story of the origin of Kalenahalli is none other than the aforementioned Govina Haadu. The original song does not mention the name of any village; it simply introduces the place as follows:
“In the center of the earth was flourishing the Karnata country
In which lived a cowherd named Kalinga.”
Dr. Bhyrappa’s imagination supplies the name of the village – Kalenahalli – in the Karnataka country in which this cowherd named Kalinga lived. He further tells us that the very name of the village was derived from that of its headman, Kalinga Gowda (or Kalinga Golla). Kalinga’s lineage had lived there from unknown antiquity. Dr. Bhyrappa has aptly chosen the name “Kalinga” for its inextricable link with Krishna, the Lord of cows.
Kalenahalli is a timeless, idyllic Indian village of the type that actually existed even fifty years ago throughout India. Such villages were marked by countless generations of staid and settled life, blissfully isolated from the world that existed even twenty kilometers beyond its confines.
Kalenahalli is precisely the village that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi loved so much and wanted to preserve because in his words, “real India lies in its villages.” It is self-sufficient, self-contained and content with the natural rhythms that its inhabitants are attuned to for ages. They are happy to be left alone to grow their crops, tend their cattle, celebrate their festivals, and settle disputes without stepping outside. The “Sarkar” or government is only a hazy reality in their minds; it is something to which they pay agriculture tax ungrudgingly but it is also something which they are generally afraid of.
To be continued
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