Have You Ever Listened to the Looms?

Sailen Routray

By the time of his untimely death in 1998, at the age of 44, D. R. Nagaraj was increasingly seen as stepping into the space vacated by cultural theorist and folklorist A.K. Ramanujan who was arguably the most seasoned human scientist that Karnataka had produced by that time. At the same time, Nagaraj was also seen as a Dalit-Bahujan counterpoint to Brahmanical hegemony in the fields of intellectual and cultural production.

But it is unfair to slot Nagaraj as merely a Dalit/Backward caste and/or Kanandiga intellectual. Although steeped in dalit-bahujan heritage and the literary and cultural milieu of Kannada and Karnataka, his work has universal provenance and value. After his death, for a little more than a decade, his writings remained more or less unavailable for the general public, till the cultural theorist Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi edited Nagaraj's works and made them current again. 

The book under review - 'Listening to the loom: Essays on literature, politics, and violence' - is a collection of essays by D.R. Nagaraj and forms the second volume in a series that seeks to collect his writings. The first volume of his essays edited by Chandra Shobhi and titled 'The flaming feet and other essays: The dalit movement in India' was published in 2010, and was received with gratitude and enthusiasm by scholars from across the world. These essays provided a genealogy of sorts of the dalit movement in India. A few key articles in the volume created a much needed bridge between the approaches of Gandhi and Ambedkar. 

The essays in the volume under discussion, in contrast, occupy a much larger canvas. 'Listening to the loom' has two distinct parts. The first section consisting of a set of six essays deals with the literature and culture of Karnataka. The second part has seven articles and deals with questions surrounding politics and violence with their social horizon being mostly that of India.

D. R. Nagaraj (1954-1998)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

The inaugural essay of the first section titled ‘Critical tensions in the history of Kannada literary culture’ is the longest piece in the volume running to 90 pages. It is an analytical overview of around 800 years of the history of Kannada literature, and provides plural narratives of the many traditions that go into its making, including those of heterodox ones such as the Jain and the Virashaiva ones.

This essay also complicates the picture of pre-colonial Indian literature by pointing out that the vachana literature of Karnataka need not be read as just another instant of the pan-Indian tradition of bhakti. Instead, Nagaraj argues that, the vachana corpus was in some sense a significant departure from prevalent literary practices in Kannada that tried to radically erase the extant differences between laukika (worldly) and agamika  (scriptural) literature in order to reconstitute the relationships between the body, writing, the world, and Shiva - the supreme being.

Two other essays in this section deal with the social world of Kannada literature; the pieces on the writers U. R. Ananthamruthy and Chandrashekar Kambara are especially perceptive, and provide alternative accounts of the relationship between the literary and the political in Karnataka and India.

The essays in the second section of the book deal with the relationship between politics and violence. Nagaraj advances his points (often startlingly novel and insightful) in a manner in which narrative and metaphor have a central role in the argumentation. In one of the essays in this section he argues that Gandhi’s psychologization of violence (in Nagaraj’s reading of Gandhi, the latter sees the origins of violence in the emotion of fear) leads a ways out of social scientific discussions of violence that take place around the tropes of nature and history.

As the editor of this volume suggests, this engagement with Gandhi can be seen as part of Nagaraj’s broader intellectual project that tried to go beyond the dichotomies of tradition and modernity in order to fashion alternatives futures for oppressed communities of India by finding resources of resilience and resistance in their own pasts and practices. This project needs to be taken forward, and Permanent Black and Dr Shobhi must be congratulated for the publication of this meticulously edited and produced volume.

Bibliographic Details: D. R. Nagaraj (edited by Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi). 2012. Listening to the loom: essays on literature, politics, and violence. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.  365 +xiii pages. Rs. 750 (Hardcover).

Note: A marginally different version of this review essay was earlier published with another title in the newsmagazine 'Hard News' in 2012.