The cosmopolitan Kannadiga

by Guest Sat Sep 12, 2015 8:45 am

The Kannada people are still nervous about their identity. While Bengalis, wherever they are, define themselves as Bengali, the Tamilians as Tamil people and the shop keeping Gujaratis, in England as Gujaratis, people from Karnataka are not easy with their identity as Kannadigas. Very often the language they speak at home is preserved atleast as a kitchen language and they live in urban areas.

Tulu Kannadigas from Udupi and Mangalore, after living in Mumbai for a generation or two, may still speak Tulu at home and among themselves, but may forget Kannada which is the language of the State. So is the case with Konkani Kannadigas,Tamil Kannadigas,Telugu Kannadigas, and Marathi Kannadigas.

There is a paradox in this. Some of our greatest writers may not speak Kannada at home. Masti and Pu.Ti.Na spoke Tamil, Kasturi, the great humourist spoke Malayalam, and our greatest poet, Bendre, spoke Marathi. Some of our best writers are Konkani speaking at home. I have often thought this makes Karnataka rich, as conceived by Sri Vijaya. If any state is a mini India it will surely be Karnataka. Yet, this richness and variety often lead us to confusion or in times of crisis to mass hysteria.

I feel deeply pained by the anti-Tamil agitation in Bangalore. Some five decades ago, most of the Tamils who came to Bangalore would have become Tamil Kannadigas. There are thousands among us who are Telugu Kannadigas and that is not as obvious as being a Tamil Kannadiga. I think this mass hysteria is perhaps due to our inability to keep the richness of the ambience of languages in Karnataka, and at the same time find our roots in one language of the State. Bengalis have done this.

In India there are no pressures for languages to die as there are in the United States of America. But the urban pressures in India, particularly on our school-going children and our professionals are growing so intense that we too have begun to find advantage in being monolingual. As a result, the language that triumphs is English. And we slowly lose our identity in our everyday intellectual, commercial, and official life as Kannada speaking people. Some times, in compensation when there is crisis this results in a blind outrage against another language — Tamil vs Kannada or Kannada vs Marathi...

In the contemporary literary scene, for instance, Tamil has often shrieked to be heard. Kannada has spoken quietly in the voices of great writers such as Masti, Karanth, Bendre, and Kuvempu. As a writer I was happy about the quiet strength of Kannada. Now I am worried that we are imitating the extremists of all other languages.

http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2002/10/31/stories/2002103100050100.htm

by MaxEntropy_Man Sat Sep 12, 2015 8:47 am

http://www.akkaonline.org/
http://mandaara.org/
http://www.atlantakannada.org/

The cosmopolitan Kannadiga

The cosmopolitan Kannadiga

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