DISCUSSION

Community, Language and Music in Colonial Karnataka

Vijayakumar M Boratti

Focusing on the relations between vachanas, Lingayats and Hindustani music in the early 20th century north Karnataka, as compared to the question of Kannada and music in south Karnataka, this comment is a response to Tejaswini Niranjanas Music in the Balance: Language, Modernity and Hindustani Sangeet in Dharwad (EPW, 12 January 2013).

Vijayakumar M Boratti (borattivijay29@gmail. com) teaches at the University Evening College, University of Mysore, Karnataka.

ejaswini Niranjanas Music in the Balance: Language, Modernity and Hindustani Sangeet in Dharwad (EPW, 12 January 2013) addresses a series of questions. Caught between Kannada nationalism and dominance of Marathi, what was the role of Hindustani music in negotiating linguistic tension in this region? How did Hindustani music contribute in dening the identity of the Kannadigas? Did it dene this identity conclusively? Was it inconsistent with the identity of the Karnataka unication movement? To address these questions, she maintains, the dichotomy of the language-music conjuncture that the cultural landscape of the Dharwad region presents. This needs to be probed into and is crucial for understanding the social choices and the aspirational horizon of the singers and advocates of Hindustani music. Tracing the history of Hindustani music in the region, she argues that the growth of this national music in the region was unlike that in Maharashtra, which was dominated by the brahmins. Besides brahmins, Lingayats too competed for a place in the music world of Dharwad-Hubli. Here, she very briey touches upon the social composition of the singers and practitioners but does not continue the line of thought. The overt social and linguistic aspect of the Kannadigas, she thinks, becomes displaced onto the music form and music question. This, she concludes, led to the work of suturing, of smoothing out contradictions in creating a coherent cultural identity via Kannada literature and Hindustani music. I would like to begin by noting that Niranjanas contention that music is related to the structure of social aspiration and issues of social mobility (2013: 43), cannot be conned merely to the language-music conjuncture. Secondly, her observation that social and linguistic aspects became displaced onto the music
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form will be problematic in the light of multiple linguistic and musical experiments in the region. The question of community and its relation with Hindustani music will illuminate what I am trying to argue here. The nationalist discourse tried to accommodate and resolve not only the question of region and language, but also the communitys primordial social and cultural bearings. In such circumstances, whether it is Hindustani or Carnatic music, the question of language, howsoever it tried to evade community bearings, inevitably found its way through it. This inevitability leads us to understand Hindustani music at two levels: (a) as a process of fashioning itself by negotiating with multilayered social, linguistic and cultural spaces of communities, and (b) as a secular site for restructuring social relations and equations. Let me elucidate this point with a focus on the relations between vachanas, Lingayats and Hindustani music in the early 20th century north Karnataka. Lingayats and Hindustani Sangeet Any community, being a conglomeration of castes and sub-castes, not only tries to imagine a coherent or homogeneous identity, but also devises strategies aimed at joining the wider regional dominant class (Upadhyay 1997: 181) by channelising the available cultural resources in its sphere in our case here, music or language. The Lingayats, as an emerging non-brahmin community in the early 20th century, were trying to come to terms with colonial modernity by refashioning their history and cultural heritage. Priding themselves to be the largest community in north Karnataka ghting to safeguard the interest of Kannada against the dominance of Marathi, the Lingayats, unlike the anti-nationalist non-brahmin movement under Periyar Ramasamy in Madras Presidency, employed their culture and history for joining and reinforcing nationalism in the mainstream public sphere. The discovery and publication of vachanas complemented this process. Vachanas are Kannada prose-poetic compositions of the 12th century Shiva Sharanas (Shiva devotees). Though they are now part of the popular consciousness in Karnataka, the Lingayats pride themselves to be the sole
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DISCUSSION

inheritors, custodians and promoters of vachanas. Fa Gu Halakatti1 was the rst to collate and publish vachanas in 1922 with new and modern interpretations. His incessant efforts for popularising the vachanas as a valuable contribution of the Lingayat community to national/world literature were initial steps towards entering into all public spheres in which Hindustani sangeet (music) occupied a very signicant cultural status. Was not invoking community antithetical to larger questions of region and nation? How was the contradiction of community, region and nation resolved? Or was it resolved at all? The answers to these questions lie in the strategy of harmonising all the three spheres by nationalists like Halakatti. Around the 1930s, there were several attempts to compose vachanas according to the nuances of Hindustani ragas. Halakatti encouraged these attempts in order to not only disseminate the ideas of the vachanas, but to establish the fact that vachanas are a great contribution to Kannada tradition and music. He strikes several chords at once. Being a champion of the Karnataka unication movement, he introduces vachanas as the harbinger of Kannada culture; being a Lingayat, he presents and promotes them as the Lingayats contribution to world literature; and being amidst the culture of music, he highlights the musical qualities of vachanas that are amenable to the Hindustani music style. Potential conict between these different cultural practices was, thus, sought to be avoided by such synthesis. It would not have been possible if Halakatti had not tried to secularise vachanas with an ethical and moral base. A cursory look at the vachanas chosen for singing in Hindustani style indicates a careful and vigilant choice, which advocated themes like reformation of the self, true devotion, broad-mindedness, tolerance, seless life, rationality, liberalism, etc. These attributes, in turn, reinforced the central preoccupations of cultural formation of region and nation. There was a historical requirement and signicance for Halakatti to promote vachanas into the musical reservoir. As Niranjana has adequately shown, Hindustani music had already occupied the cultural imaginary of the emerging middle class. Simultaneously, it fostered an identity of social and cultural
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ascendancy for practitioners and singers, besides the linguistic pride associated with it. This was more conspicuous among the Lingayats who entered into Hindustani music with Kannada vachanas. As a step further in this direction, Halakatti championed the recitation and singing of vachanas by appointing a music teacher, Parappa Virappa Patil, to convert them into Hindustani ragas (Langoti 2000). Patil (1938, 1940) writes a series of articles in Shivanubhava2 on how to sing vachanas of several Shiva Sharanas, such as Shanmukha Swamy, Akkamahadevi, Basavanna, Urilingapeddi and Chennabasavanna. He, along with another musician D C Boramani of Solapur, composed musical notes for vachanas in different Hindustani ragas such as Mishra Pahadi, Deshkar, Tilak Kamoda and Nanda. Such an attempt was not conned to Bijapur. It spread across other regions too. Another Hindustani music singer and composer, Sangameshwar Devaru of Shivayogashrama, a Lingayat religious centre in Shikaripur, converted vachanas of Basavanna exclusively into Multani and Yaman ragas (Devaru 1938). Needless to say, most of the early singers of vachanas were Lingayats themselves. Overall, these music compositions were guides for the upcoming Hindustani singers and musicians. Kannada in South Karnataka The question of Kannada and music in south Karnataka, especially in the princely state of Mysore, was akin to that in north Karnataka, but differed in many ways. Similarities can be drawn in terms of the social role played by Carnatic music. However, differences lie in the intensity of enforcing Kannada in the eld of music. Shashikanths article (2005) in this direction corroborates my point. He substantially delineates that linguistic questions arose in the princely state of Mysore with regard to Carnatic music and Kannada identity. Some of the incidents, such as the Mysore Maharajas request to the musicians to compose in Kannada and the entreaty to the maharaja from an anonymous member of Gayana Samaj of Bangalore to treat Kannada musicians on par with Tamil and Telugu musicians, were not only tied up with the question of Kannada nationalism, but were also a discrete continuation of a call
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of Mysore for Mysoreans, the advocacy of which was largely a brahmin affair. This was spearheaded by the Kannada brahmin elites of Mysore against the dominance of brahmins from Tamil Nadu in Mysore administration and bureaucracy. These very questions formed the idiom in which Kannada nationalism expressed itself later, posing Kannada identity vis--vis Tamil identity, as large-scale migration of Tamilians from Madras Presidency in the 1940s aggravated the reaction of Kannadigas. While the efforts of Halakatti and others in north Karnataka were stray and individualistic, and without any state sponsorship, the Mysore case illustrates state sponsorship championing the cause of Kannada and the social composition of Carnatic music. In both cases, Kannada identity, by posing non-Kannada languages as its other (Marathi in north Karnataka and Tamil in the Mysore princely region), tried to produce what Janaki Nair (1996: 2809) has shown as a solidarity between all Kannada speakers effacing the specicities of caste and class. Thus, music became a site for the contradictory acts of foregrounding community aspirations, forging Kannada identity, as well as effacing overt communal elements.
Notes
1 2 A Lingayat nationalist and Kannada enthusiast who belonged to a caste called Nekara, a weaving community. It is a Kannada journal started by Halakatti in 1926 with the aim of promoting Lingayat literature and history. Patils articles were published in it between 1938 and 1940.

References
Devaru, Sangameshwar (1938): Sangitadalli Shri Basavannanavara Vachanagalu (Shri Basavannas Vachanas in Music), Shivanubhava, 12(10): 647-49. Langoti, Siddappa (2000): Dr FaGu Halakattiyavaru (Dr Fa Gu Halakatti) (Belagaum: Basaweshwara Anubhava Peetha). Nair, Janaki (1996): Memories of Underdevelopment: Language and Its Identities in Contemporary Karnataka, Economic & Political Weekly, 31(41/42): 2809-16. Niranjana, Tejaswini (2013): Music in the Balance: Language, Modernity and Hindustani Sangeet in Dharwad, Economic & Political Weekly, (48)2: 41-48. Patil, P V (1938): Sangitadalli Shiva Sharanara Vachanagalu (Vachanas of Shiva Sharanas in Music), Shivanubhava, 12(2): 98-102. (1940): Sangita Vachanagalu (Musical Vachanas), Shivanubhava, 14(11): 525-28. Shashikanth, K (2005): Carnatic Music, Kannada and Kannadigas: Certain Moments from Princely Mysore, Journal of Karnataka Studies, 2(1): 53-95. Upadhyay, Carol (1997): Social and Cultural Strategies of Class Formation in Coastal Andhra Pradesh, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 31(2): 169-93.

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