Kannada, The Husband Stitch and Athshe
Learning Kannada, fun experiences with my Kannada teachers, fun facts about Kannada, a short story and a novella recommendation.
It’s really hard to write a newsletter every week, especially if I want it to be something useful, fun, or both, and not just a run-of-the-mill episode and a show of consistency—although that would feel good. To break the slump, I wrote it on my mini white paper board, and this is the first thing I did today.
Learning Kannada ( ಕನ್ನಡ ಕಲಿಕೆ )
I have been learning Kannada for three reasons(as I found myself telling my brother and cousin in Canada)
I feel embarrassed. I’ve been living in Bengaluru for more than six years and had not known a Kannada word, let alone a sentence.
I find that thinking and writing in English, ironic as it is, restricts me in ways I can’t comprehend. It shows in my constant struggle to find words to express a thought, which is much more effortless in languages which have more room, more sounds. This is the reason I started reading in Hindi again, after 10th grade. The 10th-grade me, who was relieved on the day of the Hindi board exam, that he would never have to read it again, would be aghast to know this.
I wanted to read U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (ಸಂಸ್ಕಾರ) and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (ಘಾಚರ್ ಘೋಚಾರ್) in the original language. This was the reason that got my teacher excited—that I wanted to read and write Kannada, and not just speak it, and she started teaching me on a moment’s notice.
My Kannada teacher says my Kannada handwriting is marvellous. That has become one of the reasons.
Italian and Kannada, And Why Any?
Clickbaity heading, I know. Let’s take the bait first and then move forward. A random similarity between Kannada and Italian ( and Portuguese and Spanish ) — both of them have a personal suffix of the verb which suffices to indicate who the agent is. An example in Kannada—
Avanannu Karedenu
Translating to ‘I called him’. Kare = ‘to call’, d = past tense signifier, enu = first person singular. Enu, as we can see, is suffixed in the verb itself.
Jhumpa Lahiri in her essay ‘Why Italian?’ says
Reading, writing, and living Italian, I feel like a reader, a writer, a person who is more attentive, active and curious.
I share her view as I learn Kannada.
Lalla Romano wrote with a limited eyesight when she wrote Last Diary. Jhumpa Lahiri understood from
“my near blindness = a point of view”
— translated from Last Diary, p. 16
that
It makes me understand, and appreciate, that the inability to see clearly and fully can illuminate the world in a different way.
I’m still not entirely capable of evaluating my writing in Italian; therefore, I remain partly blind to the result. And yet, blindness has made me more vigilant, more agile. Nothing came to me naturally; I had to pay my dues. I understand Romano when she writes: “In the margin one finds possibilities.”
Learning a new language forces you to build from scratch. The struggle to put together the world, feelings, the writings of people, forces the brain to learn in a different manner, a push from inside-out. An opportunity to start from scratch, to think in ways not possible before, to take risks not known or allowed. I imagine how Addie Larue must have felt, painstakingly spending years to teach herself to read, word by word, sentence by sentence, putting together again and again.
My Kannada Teachers
Mrs. Jayashree is a retired Kannada Professor. Her husband, whom I’ve come to call Sir, proudly tells of her career, ‘She started teaching all the way from 1st standard and moved up.’ Mrs. Jayashree, Sir, their daughter, and a lot of other family members—whole family really, is a family of readers and writers. Since Mrs. Jayashree hasn’t taught anybody who doesn’t speak Kannada, before, sometimes she’s not able to come up with the corresponding words in English, to teach me. Her English is really good, just not used much. Sir chimes in and helps me understand it. When he does, he sometimes tells about the short stories he has written or is writing.
When I first visited their home, Sir was on a call—an online gathering of Kannada poets on Republic day, reciting the poems they had written on a group call. ‘It’s his first time on a call over the internet,’ she said, amused and proud. After the call got over, he came over to her and said something I didn’t understand. I asked her what he said and she said, ‘he said he got utterly bored by the people and their poems.’ We smiled widely.
Last week, Mrs. Jayashree and her husband revealed their notebooks to me. ‘Poems,’ Sir said. Mrs. Jayashree added context, ‘Our 40th anniversary is coming, so we are writing 40 poems each which we are going to read together then.’ ‘These are pun, punny poems, but with something deep, ah…, meaningful talked about along with the pun,’ Sir informed. He then recited a couple of poems, and then crudely translated them in English to help me understand. I remember one of the poems. A crude translation:
A person sleeps,
and dreams,
then wakes up
to fulfil those dreams,
works for them,
gets tired,
and sleeps again.
What a funny cycle.Fun Facts about Kannada
Excerpts taken from A Manual of Modern Kannada by Robert J. Zydenbos
Kannada differs strongly from its neighbouring sister-language Tamil, in which the written normative language differs so much from commonly spoken forms that it is a classical example of what in linguistics is termed ‘‘diglossia’.
Among all the living languages of South Asia, Kannada possesses the second-oldest literature ( after Tamil ).
The predominant religion of the nobility in the Kannada-speaking part of India was Jainism, and the literature of the first few centuries of Kannada literary history is almost entirely the creation of Jaina authors. Because most medieval literature in other Indian languages is mainly the creation of brahminical Hindus, Kannada literature provides an ‘other voice’ and gives researchers glimpses of life and thought in other sections of Indian society at the time.
According to official statistics, Kannada ranks as the eighth-largest language in India according to the number of native speakers.
There is a persistent belief among many people in India that Kannada has developed out Sanskrit ( as also all the other Dravidian languages, for that matter ). This is nothing more than pious superstition. The many words of Sanskritic origin in Kannada are loanwords, and they cannot serve as proof of a genetic relationship between Sanskrit and Kannada, just as Latin and greek words in German or English do not prove that German and English are offshoots of Latin or Greek.
The language has not changed much grammatically since the 12th century ( Vīraśaiva period ) and texts from that period can be read by the readers of the language today, without any extra training needed.
Short Story Recommendations
The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado—I don’t have words to express how sharp, poignant, heart-piercing this story (and all the sub-stories are) is. A beautiful accompanying essay about the story that you might want to read either before, during or after reading the story.
Loser by Chuck Palahniuk—a story about a high college kid participating in a game show he used to love seeing as a kid. Witty, funny.
Book Recommendation
Ursula K. Le Guin was a Maestro of Craft. She created stories which shows us the mirror to the world, society, people, men, power, and ourselves. I love this quote from her acceptance speech for The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, because I’d love to live in a world where capitalism is truly social—
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.
— Source
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin ( pdf available here ) as a partial response to the Vietnam war. It is a story set on planet Athshe whose inhabitants are called Athsheans—humanoid species, close relatives to Homo Sapiens. Half in height than humans, they are covered with green or grey fur, who dream while awake, who have different sleep(dream) and body clock cycles than humans, who have no concept of violence. They use touch to convey a range of feelings and emotions, in contrast to humans, for whom, touch could only evoke threatening or sexual emotions. Terrans, or yumens as Athsheans called the human beings from earth, have colonised the planet for harvesting wood. For Athsheans the word for the world, Athshe, is the same as the word for the forest. Despite their habitat being destroyed, and yumens enslaving them under ‘Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps’ on paper, Athsheans are quietly roiling at the behest of army from the Old Earth—the Terran colonists. Until, one of them, Captain Davidson, does something that evokes violence in one of the Athsheans called Selver. The dreaming of the Athsheans is fundamentally changed by an act of violence which Selver commits. All the Athsheans across the planet follow Selver to free themselves from these perpetrators.
The book shows the power dynamics, hypocrisy, and manipulation of the colonists, both with their own kind, and in the ways they defend for their actions—the violence, captivation, forced slaved labor against the Athsheans, and destruction of a planet. Captain Davidson is the epitome of fascist right—exploitative, arrogant, rule breaker, driven madly to tame the creechies, who pins his behaviour to—it is how it is. He contradicts himself when he answers ‘I don’t know’ to if he considers Athseans to be human, and when he gets called out, ‘Would you have sexual intercourse with a female animal?’ by Mr. Or, a Cetian—a non-Terran human. There is also the story arcs of friendships both amongst the Athsheans—as they support and follow Selver, and Selver’s friendship with Captain Luybov, an exobiologist who has been cautiously warning against the cutting of trees and the possibility of Athsheans going extinct, who has been studying them, by living with them, and who saved Selver when he first attacked Captain Davidson, when Davidson killed Selver’s wife Thele.
What I liked the most about the story was how the choice of having to do violence—something that Athsheans might never have done, because,
They’re a static, stable, uniform society. They have no history. Perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive.
Mild spoiler warning
fundamentally changes the Athsheans. The Hainishman(another non-Terran human) Lepennon asks Selver,
“Will you tell me one thing, Selver. If the question doesn’t offend you. There will be no more questions after it. . . . There were the killings: at Smith Camp, then at this place, Eshsen, then finally at New Java Camp where Davidson led the rebel group. That was all. No more since then. . . Is that true? Have there been no more killings?”
to which Selver replies
“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretences. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
Lepennon laid his long hand on Selver’s hand, so quickly and gently that Selver accepted the touch as if the hand were not a stranger’s. The green-gold shadows of the ash leaves flickered over them.
“But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason,” Lepennon said, his face as anxious and sad as Lyubov’s face.
“Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.”
The book’s relevance, sadly, is more now than ever.
Until next time. 🕊️