Shivaram Karanth has been experimenting with a type
of creative fiction in Kanada which, if not new, is at least rare in the
expanding scope of contemporary Kannada prose. He needs no introduction to
Kannada readers, but, for the information of the non-Kannada readers of this
journal, it may be mentioned that he is the outstanding Kannada novelist of
today whose work challenges comparison with the best elsewhere. His
genealogical novel Marali Mannige (Back to the Soil), published three
years ago, placed him at once in the front rank of novelists. It is a saga that
records, with rare power of creative imagination, the irrepressible impact of
modern conditions on the peaceful; age-old ways of rural India and pictures the
consequent disintegration with compelling accuracy. Since then he has given
Kannada readers two more novels (besides other things), less expansive in range
but bearing marks of a deepening technical richness. Convincing as his
characterisation has been in his great novel, the process appears to be
enriching itself more and more, with the result that his two subsequent novels
may more accurately be described as novels of character. In this type of
creative fiction, greater interest centres round the portrayal of the complex
workings of an imagined human personality than round the clever manipulation of
a complicated network of situations. His Betteda Jeeva (A Creature of
the Jungle) is one such novel and his latest Hettala Tayi (A Mother
After All) is a still richer improvement over his earlier attempts in
characterisation. We shall briefly analyze this his latest novel.
Probably the distinction between the novel of
character and the novel of incident is more technical than real. It seems a
matter of emphasis. Perhaps only the creative artists can testify to whether,
in their first planning of a projected piece of creative fiction, the
characters come first or the incidents. No single imagined incident could have
logical relevance unless it is directly related to a character or characters,
and emerges from the intrinsic reactions of those characters to their
surroundings. Otherwise, it will remain isolated from the main texture of the
story. Incident, to be convincing, has to follow character. Similarly
character, though conceivable apart from incident, has to depend primarily upon
the latter which remains its medium of expression: incidental is usually the
means through which character unfolds itself. Thus considered they are so
vitally connected with each other that the one cannot almost exist without the
other in any good fiction worth the name. That is why we said the distinction
is more technical than real. But a closer examination of the question will
reveal that a particular novelist may choose to restrict the field of incidents
to the very necessary minimum, or remove the incidents from the physical to the
mental plane and concentrate on the elucidation of character. It is a more
difficult art in that the novelist deliberately casts aside the easiest means
of maintaining interest. An ordinary reader is often pardonably more interested
in what a character does that in why it does it. The novelist who would stress
character more than incident, therefore always runs the risk of sending the
reader to sleep over his work. A subtle balance has to be struck; the reader
has to be seduced into interesting himself in the springs of character and the
motives of action. This balance Karanth has been achieving in greater and
greater degree, so that his work today is disclosing that essential artistic
compromise between the demands of the unsophisticated reader and those of the
exactingly finical literary cr1tic. The novel Hettala Tayi bears
evidence of this.
Three characters dominate what little of story there
is in Hettala Tayi: Kusuma the village girl who marries the lawyer
Subbayya and is increasingly enamoured of public esteem and city life: her
husband Subbayya, who submits to her through sheer goodness and generosity of
disposition; their mutual friend Venkappa, also a lawyer, infirm of purpose and
uncertain of conduct who comes into their life as a disturbing force. The way
these three characters act and react on one another forms the simple framework
of the story which may be now summarised. The rural Girija becomes Kusuma the
lawyer’s wife and soon engages assiduously the first few years of her married
life in social activities in collaboration with the more domesticated wife of
her husband’s friend Venkappa. They found their own club and have a good time.
All goes on well for a time with the growing affluence of Subbayya, until the
urge for motherhood grows upon Kusuma slowly but irrepressibly. A village
astrologer predicts that she is destined to have children but that her husband
is not so favoured! Unfortunately, as if to confirm the prediction, her first
two children die still born and Kusuma gets embittered. She blames her husbands
stars for her misfortune in losing the children born to her. In the meantime
Venkappa’s wife dies suddenly leaving behind a houseful of young ones and
himself in a pathetically helpless situation. Not quite willing to marry a
second time, lest his children should suffer at the hands of a step-mother, he
wavers in life. Subtle suggestion is conveyed that Kusuma in her urge for
successful motherhood develops an illicit contact with Vekappa during the
period. A son is born to her and survives. Kusuma goes on helping Venkappa
under cover, as his good friend Subbayya does openly, until Venkappa marries
again with Vimala who not unexpectedly develops into a veritable shrew. The two
families drift apart for a time and Venkappa’s affairs, both domestic and
professional, deteriorate and make life for himself and his children miserable.
The generous Subbaya offers once again a helping hand and rescues his friend
from ignominy and impecuniosity. Venkappa’s second wife stays away at her
parents and would not return to live with the children under the same roof.
Subbayya supports his friend’s eldest son through his legal studies, who returns
successful to give his younger brothers a happy home and his much harassed
younger sister a loving husband. All these developments bring Kusuma and
Venkappa together again and a second child is in the coming even when in the
interval Subbayya has survived a serious illness and is convalescing. The
revelation of Kusuma’s condition is a terrible shock to Subbayya who takes
things quietly. But the agony of flouted tolerance and goodness is too
shattering to let him live happily. A daughter is born and the relations
between the husband and the wife become more and more strained. Subbayya lives
as much away from home as possible under cover of his illness, which has become
more of the mind than of the body, and returns home only to die with the last
words of profoundly moving forgiveness for his wife, now full of remorse and
sorrow. Venkappa leaves his children to the care of his flourishing son and
goes after his second wife to settle down at her place and to his ways.
That is all the story we have and the narration
moves on straight and direct with an unhurried grace. The subtle manner in
which the illicit relations are hinted at throughout is a major triumph of
literary reticence and artistic restraint. The graphic pictures we have of the
two households of the way the rivalries developed between the womenfolk, of the
slow deterioration of Venkappa’s fortunes, of his happy home under the
management of the self forgetful first wife and its steady transformation with
the advent of the jealous and selfish second wife, of the children’s suffering
and their rescue, are major graces of the creative imagination which provide a
convincing background for the principal developments of the novel. Despite the
fact that there is very little dialogue in the novel; despite the fact that the
story covers quite a length of years of which the reader is quite unconscious
except perhaps in critical retrospect, his interest in the narrative never
flags. This is all the more remarkable because of the conspicuous absence of
even a single arresting incident all through the novel or of vigorous movement
that may hasten the reader from page to page. It is, on the other hand, a slow
motion picture of life, a life observed with a seeing eye and feeling heart and
recorded with a selective judgment that speaks volumes for the author’s insight
into the value of imagined experience m the unfoldment of the characters or the
story that proceeds from them. It would sound like a truism but it is an
arrestingly significant fact that, if either Kusuma or her husband or their
friend had been but slightly different from what they are, there would have
been no novel at all. They hold the reader’s mind. They direct the course of
the story. Or, they just live their life in their own ways and the story is born.
There can be no greater compliment to the authenticity and the individuality of
the characters.
The question whether a woman of the type portrayed
in Kusuma is possible in life does not arise at all. The author has taken care
to delineate in sufficient detail her rural antecedents which, with their
unending denials of opportunity have firmly implanted in her nature the will to
succeed and succeed at all costs. She is the frustrated villager vainly seeking
fulfillment in the false values of urban existence. Coupled with this basic
strain is a nature that is egoistic ‘in the extreme. It is a kind of egoism,
moreover, which no defeating circumstances can baffle or quench but which will
circumvent opposition by means fair or foul. This gives to Kusuma’s character a
determined forthrightness which entirely subdues the soft Subbayya but makes of
Venkappa probably a victim in spite of what little better sense he must have
had. We have no evidence in the novel, except perhaps as an indication in the
general improvidence of Venkappa’s nature, to show that he was a willing and
deliberate accomplice of Kusuma. She knew well how to achieve the success of
her wishes. A nature such as hers is exceedingly sensitive to its surroundings
which it aspires completely to master. Thus when she felt that the local
high-brow club did not accord her the respect she felt was due to her, she sets
about not only doing everything she could to denounce that club but founds a
rival one of her own. She would not let her donation be smaller than those of
any other; she would not be dwarfed by any other in any respect. She would be
unequal to none she comes across. Her urge for motherhood was in a sense,
aggravated by the awareness that others were getting conscious that she had no
children. So the complex begins to work and the urge develops into a passion
until, at last, it leads to questionable intimacy with her husband’s friend; a
fact which indicates not so much a depravity of nature but a determination to
have what she wants irrespective of the consequences involved.
By a curious irony the two persons with whom she
comes in direct contact in her life offer unchecked opportunities for her
nature to develop towards the inevitable end. She has no serious opposition,
which, if equally determined, might have embittered her enough to make her a
very genius of evil. But she has an easy time all along. She exploits her
husband’s generously submissive nature and his friend’s feeble moral fibre. She
bargains for self-importance with the sin of her life and pays heavily in
remorse when the appalling gravity of her mistake confronts her in the slow
death of her husband. She was a victim of her own nature, of the dangerous
possibilities of which she was blissfully unaware until the curtain rose suddenly
on the tragic consequences. The better parts of her nature are also amply
illustrated in her relations with the other characters in the novel,
particularly her quick understanding and sympathy, Her helpfulness and devoted
affection to the suffering children of Venkappa’s household stand out in
painful contrast to the selfishness and the overbearing nature of Vimala.
Altogether Kusuma is an interesting study in character, the more interesting
for its subtle combination of the good and the evil that works its own ruin.
If Kusuma was the victim of her own folly, Subbayya
was the victim of his own generosity. A rare friend, an affectionate husband,
an ideal father and a to conscientious worker in his profession, the least
suspected infidelity of his wife literally kills him. He was too good of nature
to suspect evil motives and intentions in those that were near and dear to him
and whose happiness he regarded as his own. When we consider that it was his
own wife to whom he had given his all, and his own friend who had received help
in a hundred ways that deceived him, we feel that in the midst of human
perversity goodness sometimes earns strangely ironical rewards. The way he
yields to every whim and fancy and wish of his wife lest she should feel
unhappy in his home; the way he helped Venkappa, often going out of his way and
even when, latterly, Venkappa’s affairs could hardly be remedied by outside
help; the way he helped Venkappa’s children and gave them a home–these are
eloquent proof of the innate altruism of his heart. A nature so kind and
feeling is the cream of cultured humanity. Venkappa was incapable of
understanding him, even if he ever cared to understand him. At every step
Subbayya was his guardian angel whose very beneficence should have taught him
improve his ways instead of abusing a friend’s confidence. But the basic
improvidence of his nature preventing him from thinking at all, he lets himself
adrift dangerously into the life of his friend, and wrecks that friend’s
happiness as well as his own. Not wise even after the event, he represents many
that go through life without thought of the past or of the future, impervious
to the manner they affect the life around. As such the two characters, Subbayya
and Venkappa, through two types of passivity of afford to Kusuma’s jealous
egoism a fertile field on which it throws its beautiful but tainted flowers.
The three characters portrayed in minute detail thus evolve a story that is
rich in its critical significance.
Readers of Karanth’s works may miss here the almost
volcanic power of his Chomana Dudi, the trenchant social criticism of
his Sooleya Samsara; they may not find here the grandeur and the mighty
sleep of Marali Mannige or the concentrated artistic unity of Bettada Jeeva.
But they will surely find here three different types of character minutely
studied and posed in a vital conflict. More need not be said about the final
significance of the novel than that the last words of Subbayya, so kind and yet
so severe and sublime, constitute the deadliest indictment of the values
represented by Kusuma and Venkappa. Thus the novel may even be regarded as a
study of three different attitudes towards life. But this apart, can those who
have read his earlier works fail to see here delineated yet another aspect of
the devastating impact of modern ways of life upon the ancient patterns of
simple rural living? Probably, that is the central theme of Karanth’s creative
fiction.