IN my youth, it gave me immense pleasure to go on top of the hill, ‘Kailasa Gudda’, in my village. At its top was a microwave station of the Indian Telephone department with its tall tower. The friendly station in-charge allowed us to climb on top of this tower which offered a panoramic view of the surroundings in all directions. Any visit by a friend or a relative was excuse enough for me to take off for the hill top, a pleasure I loved most because it afforded a fantastic view of waves and waves of unbroken greenery till they were lost in the misty horizons. I found an inexpressible delight in that majestic image of the ‘malenadu’ (Ghats region).

The emotional pleasure that I felt in thus looking at the endless vistas of nature’s green cover was as much personal as cultural. Because, inhabitants of the Western Ghats region owe their entire way of life to the peculiar milieu they live in. It impacts their sense of time, cycle of seasons, cuisine, sartorial preference, architecture and so on. Hence, it is no wonder that Western Ghats region has left a mark on the literature written by writers from the region. My interest in this essay is primarily to identify the patterns of representation of the Western Ghats in literary texts and to explore the transformations indicated by them.

Literary works since ancient times have given fascinating accounts of nature. We come across evidence for this in primitive artifacts in ancient epic narratives like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, in the Sanskrit heroic poetry and plays, Virgil’s eclogues, Ovid’s narrative poems, folk narratives, and right through the diverse literary traditions all over the world. Thus, the presence of ‘nature’ in literature is both ancient and cross-cultural.

Exploring representations of Western Ghats in literature is primarily interesting as a contribution towards a composite understanding of the cultural constructions of Western Ghats. Such an attempt would require to attend to diverse kinds of texts – literary, cinematic, scientific, ethnographic, sociological, legal, policy statements – in languages spoken in at least six states across which the Western Ghats are spread. Attending to a few literary works in Kannada, this essay will try to identify some of the established patterns.

My essay in fact attempts to retrieve from the many metonymic references in literary works to Western Ghats – to its forests, hills, valleys, rivers, waterfalls, animals, birds, flowers, plants, insects, etc. – a map of the ways in which man’s relationship with them is imagined. The image of Western Ghats thus constructed is based on the special place it has in human experience. The Western Ghats is not only a contiguous physical reality; it is also a place that man has tried to conquer and tame since a very long time – with both success and failure. Western Ghats have become the source of enrichment for human beings, contributing to, impacting and altering many aspects of their daily lives as well as their institutional practices like language, cuisine, rituals, economy, and so on.

 

Literary works reveal very complex responses if we attend to the details minutely. Exploitation of nature coexists with concern for it. Western Ghats are an object of aesthetic glorification or ecological concern in the cultural sphere when its summative image is taken – the abstract ‘Western Ghats’. As for its constitutive elements, very often they continue to be cast in the figure of pests – the marauding monkeys, unwanted plants, thieving rodents, among others.

There is another plane on which the Western Ghats are seen in their individualized aspects, but portrayed positively – memory. Literary works of all kinds are often structures of memory. The remembering observer – whether the narrator, lyric speaker or a character – invokes the types of trees, streams, plants, flowers, birds, or the unique behaviour of animals, insects, creepers... Thus, the individualizing of nature receives a positive colouring in nostalgic retrievals. K.V. Puttappa in his poems often turns to nostalgia for his native place in the Ghats region as an intensely desirable abode, as in his famous Hoguvenu Naanu (‘I Shall Go’) poem:

I shall go, I shall, to my lovely abode

A region of hills, of rains, of charming ways

Tired of the plains, I shall go to the vales and hills and forests

To the place of lusty greens, pleasant sun, and sweet tunes.¹

 

Another pattern pertains to a common form of description wherein man is dwarfed in front of the immensity of Western Ghats. K.V. Puttappa, Shivaram Karanth, Poornachandra Tejaswi, and many others would refer to the largeness of trees, of rocks, of mountains, or the density of forests, and the force of the river’s water. For example, K.V. Puttappa in an autobiographical essay describes his birth place thus: ‘The Kuppalli house sits on the laps of mountain ranges adorned with the forests of malenadu. The house has wrested its backyard through a battle with the hills. To the east of the house, within ten metres, the forest engulfs the hills. In another direction, mammoth mountain ranges hold up the sky.’²

The kinds of descriptions and responses found in literary works can be arranged into at least three frameworks – idealistic, demonic and integrative. The first sees Western Ghats in a romantic light, generally praising its beauty. The second sees Western Ghats as a destructive force or conversely, man as the cause of destruction of the Western Ghats. The third sees Western Ghats and human beings both as undergoing similar plight of maladjustment to the large-scale transformations thrust upon them.

The idealistic framework portrays Western Ghats by venerating and glorifying it. Beauty is attributed to aspects of Western Ghats; the descriptions glorify elements of nature and see even the inanimate world of nature as a lively spirit. This perception of nature may have experiential basis for the narrator, the speaker or the character. Gathering together such a portrayal, the work then tends to discover spiritual or cultural significance in them. K.V. Puttappa’s famous line, ‘nature worship is the ultimate worship’ attests to this. The following poem by him reveals this entire process quite clearly:

This pile of white sand, the breeze from the tree leaves

the dancing, flowing blue-tinged water

The sky like a blue, vacant soothsayer

all to my eyes are filled with a soul.

Emotions! Not inert; nor lifeless objects.

Not sense-less corpse of dead nature

Sublime limbs of a divine body;

The waves in the oceanic mind of Brahma.³

 

Literary works reveal how Western Ghats are seen as an image of nature, even nation, and are then invested with political, religious, spiritual, cultural, ethical and aesthetic values. For example the famous song ‘Nityotsava’, by K.S. Nisar Ahmed, mentions in its first stanza many elements of Western Ghats – Jog, Tunga, Sahyadri, evergreen forests, teak and sandalwood and asserts that their glory is a form of worship rendered to the ‘mother’ land. Similarly, K.V. Puttappa in his autobiographical essays gives a similar emotionally charged account of ‘malenadu’: ‘As if Indra’s nandanavana is brought down to earth, mocking the celestial world, malenadu shines forth. Like Switzerland and Kashmir, it has won the hearts of people around the world. It is the Kashmir of Karnataka, nature’s leafy abode. A pleasurable land of forests.’⁴

Descriptions of Western Ghats also receive a very different portrayal by alluding to the wonder and awe it inspires. Western Ghats are often a source of mystery, the unknown, the wondrous, the cruel, the beautiful and the sublime. Writers in their descriptions, plot structures, themes, or symbolism, cast Western Ghats in various roles – the divine, the beautiful, the objective materiality, the field for human creative endeavours, and the unsympathetic cruel locale frustrating human efforts. This introduces the second matrix that I want to discuss – representation of Western Ghats in a demonic framework.

 

In Shivaram Karanth’s novels like Marali Mannige, Kudiyara Koosu, Chomana Dudi, the Ghats, like nature in general, are mysterious, and possess characteristics opposed to that of civilization. Karanth often uses the contrasting framework to delineate man as struggling against the unsympathetic Ghats (nature). For example in Bettada Jeeva, the conflict between human beings and nature is a measure of man’s capabilities. ‘When we climb a mountain peak... wouldn’t the mind be filled with contentment? We feel who would equal my height? It feels as if one has stood above hundreds of small individuals.’⁵ Here, the mountains stand metaphorically for superior achievements, and the person who climbs the mountain is valued more than the mountains. In other words, it denotes human potential for mastering nature. The character Gopalayya, in this novel, seems to draw his power from nature, while Shivaramayya holds nature to be aloof from him.

Karanth’s Bettada Jeeva is the story of the battle waged by man with nature for his ‘daily bread’. Gopalayya, the protagonist, is engaged in standing up to the hill in trying to make it cultivable. He takes care of the hill and the hill takes care of him, thus making them interdependent. Gopalayya lives in greater intimacy with the hills than with people, so much so that the two may be seen as a single being.

As opposed to Gopalayya of Bettada Jeeva, the novel Kudiyara Koosu presents characters who, comparatively less touched by civilization than Gopalayya, have a different kind of relationship with nature. For them forest represents their deity. They offer their prayers to it. So here, we have the view of the forests as divine, the giver of the gift of life, of resources of life. For the Kudiya community who live in harmony with nature, in an organic unity with it, their world is a whole, complete in itself. The forest shows them the way to find a livelihood. That is why when the forests start to become properties of the rich, where commercial crops begin to be grown, this community begins to feel the heat. There is a rupture in their existence.

The exploitative approach leads of course to severe repercussions, terrible in its effect on human lives and property. This particular dimension of the terrifying beauty of the Western Ghats, that unleashes a reign of terror upon being ravished by human greed is the chief theme of a number of works of Na D’Souza, like Mulugade. His works explore the human plight amid natural disasters that have their roots in the devastation of the Western Ghats region by human greed.

 

My discussion so far has taken into account, two distinct modes of representing Western Ghats – idealistic and demonic, with some variations. A third matrix – integrative – may be found in the works of Poornachandra Tejaswi, who rather than deifying nature, reflects on the impressions created by the environment of the Western Ghats region upon the mind and portrays such reflections in his writings – both in his fictional and non-fictional prose writings.

Both K.V. Puttappa and Poornachandra Tejaswi bring the Ghats region alive in their novels and auto-biographical prose through very dense details of the ecologically diverse place – the many types of insects, birds, animals, plants, flowers, trees, fruits, hills, streams, ravines, lifestyles, rain, fields, plantations all are recorded. Yet, very often these very descriptions also become a source of serious philosophical reflection. In their writings, Ghats region is not merely the forest, the valleys, the hills, the animals, but also the many human beings – especially the ones who have an organic unity with their environs such as Gutti, Aita, Peenchalu (Puttappa’s Malegalalli Madumagalu), Engta, Mandanna, Gare Seenappa, Linga (Tejaswi’s Karvalo).

 

In Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novel Karvalo, educated immigrants like Karvalo, the narrator, and Prabhakar find the Western Ghats to be a source of mystery. But for natives such as Mandanna or Engta, it is an integral part of their existence, not separate from them. This distinction between the alienated and organic relationship between Western Ghats and human beings comes across in the works of many writers.

Tejaswi takes as much interest in social environment as with natural environment, as he views both to have an inalienable role in the life of human beings: ‘As civilization progressed, Engta’s inherited trade and tricks were becoming useless. After export of snakeskin was banned by government, his snakeskin business fetched little money. The roots, herbs, and seeds had no buyers as ‘English medicine’ gained ground. The Forest Department didn’t allow hunting rabbits, partridges and otters... Engta was aware of how he was becoming an outsider, a loner.’⁶

 

In ‘Kiragoorina Gayyaligalu’ Tejaswi’s view of nature in Western Ghats as a force in itself is expressed clearly. For example, his narration casts storm as the driving force behind the chain of actions reported in the story. The narrator says, ‘At the root of everything that happened is the storm that brewed in Kiragooru ceaselessly for three days and three nights.’⁷

Thus, Tejaswi brings in an integrative approach to the representation of the role Western Ghats play in the lives of human beings. Combining dense details, scientific data, sociological insights, and concrete experiences, he attempts to bring a complex and complicating perspective to the cultural construction of Western Ghats. However, underlying all these perspectives is a human-centric mode of understanding, which civilization has hardly learnt to avoid in its knowledge production about itself or its others.

Literary works locate the human drama against the backdrop of Western Ghats whose presence is shown to impact the lives of the characters. They attend to natural and man-made disasters, migration into and away from the Ghats region. Western Ghats often symbolize the answers to the problems portrayed in the works, or sometimes they symbolize the problem itself.

Reflecting on Kannada literature of the last hundred years offers insights into both the changing and the unchanging aspects of man’s responses to Western Ghats. Writers of many hues gravitate towards a related set of feelings – awe, mystery, beauty – in response to the Western Ghats. For example Jayant Kaikini in his ‘Kodaikanal Padyagalu’ and Tejaswi in his ‘Parisarada Kategalu’ express a structure of response not very different from that of K.V. Puttappa from an earlier generation, though their responses to other aspects of life are markedly different.

 

But beyond this continuity, we do detect a definite shift in the tone and tenor of responses to the Western Ghats. Shivaram Karanth in his novels alludes to the immensity of Western Ghats, its density and impenetrability. K.V. Puttappa too in several of his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, impresses upon the readers’ mind the sheer grandeur of the forest in Western Ghats region. Whether it is the pouring rains, the rushing river waters or the day-light defying density of the forests, writers representing the Western Ghats region of the pre-independence period, foreground the wild and the remote. Changes have been so drastic that by 1980s Shivaram Karanth is anxiously campaigning for and furiously writing about saving the Western Ghats.

My childhood in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka had given me the impression that within a few kilometres of one’s home is a ‘kadu’ (forest), as common as the community lake. Today, an entire taluka may not boast of a decent ‘kadu’, which is an index of the extent of changes there have been in the status of Western Ghats. Within a generation, writers can no more record the awe inspired by Western Ghats, without in the same breath, expressing their anxieties about the ravages human greed has left on it. While K.V. Puttappa in his novels like Malegalalli Madumagalu and autobiographical prose like Malenadina Chitragalu described in detail the dense and diverse life forms in the forests of Western Ghats, his son Tejaswi’s works repeatedly express utter shock at the ruinous transformation, hurting both man and nature.

Writings, literary as well as non-literary, after the 1990s all express the same sense of disbelief at the destruction of forests and anxiety at the extinction of species in Western Ghats region. Today, one can hardly write about Western Ghats without also touching upon the crisis of ecology. Mourning has replaced celebration.

 

As children, we used to go to a nearby forest to fetch something or the other for our farms. Though these sojourns were frequent, yet each was accompanied by a little dread, a thousand stories about the jungle playing tricks on our sight, smell and hearing. A common experience evidently, as reports, narratives, travelogues and even scientific descriptions all tend to be touched by an unsettling sense of the unfamiliar. One of the most memorable account of this mystery and estrangement is found in Tejaswi’s Nighooda Manushyaru, a novel with realistic details evoking a spooky feeling. This sense of the strange I think has much to do with the irreducible diversity of this place. It is also perhaps the reason why it has such a magnetic hold on the imagination of so many writers.

The Western Ghats are little pockets of the timeless, among the rarest, where several time scales coexist. Let us hope that our desperation for tomorrow doesn’t reduce these multiple timelines into a mere today.

 

Footnotes:

1. K.V. Puttappa, Kuvempu Samagra Kaavya Samphuta, p. 667. All translations of all quotations from Kannada is mine.

2. K.V. Puttappa in D. Jaware Gouda (ed.), Rashtrakavi Kuvempu. p. 18.

3. ‘Tunge’, in K.V. Puttappa, Kuvempu Samagra Kaavya Samphuta, p. 253.

4. K.V. Puttappa, op. cit., fn. 2, p. 2.

5. Shivaram Karanth, Bettada Jeeva. Varsha Prakatanalaya, Puttur, 1970, p. 55.

6. Poornachandra Tejaswi, Parisarada Kathe. Pustaka Prakashana, Bangalore, 1991, p. 52.

7. Poornachandra Tejaswi, Kirugurina Gayyaligalu. Pustaka Prakashana, Bangalore, 1991, p. 1.