“Municipalities are not city planners anymore, but vehicles of economic drain.”

From pourakarmikas to poets, protests to public policy, Srikar Raghavan’s Rama Bhima Soma is a layered portrait of the ever evolving state of Karnataka

Amoolya Rajappa 

BENGALURU, Karnataka: Researcher-writer Srikar Raghavan’s debut book, Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka explores the layered history, politics, and cultural life of Karnataka through the lens of social movements, migration, language struggles, and regional literature. Weaving together interviews, archival research, and sharp critical analysis, Raghavan captures how ideas of justice, identity, and pluralism have evolved—and have been contested—across decades. 

At a time when questions of inclusion, diversity, and belonging are once again at the forefront of public debate, Rama Bhima Soma offers both a deep historical perspective and insights urgently relevant to the present. In this interview over email, we speak to the author about the making of the book, the role of literature in shaping social consciousness, the changing face of Bengaluru, the challenges to pluralism, and much more.

An illustration from 'Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka'.

Pic credit: ramabhimasoma.ink 

This book spans a very vast intellectual and cultural canvas. How did the idea for Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka first take shape? What compelled you to take on something so wide-ranging?

I think it was a combination of youthful bravado and a strong urge to understand how we have landed up at our present political moment, which is riven by all sorts of identitarian fissures. The germ of this book emerged during my MA years, when I began reading up about contemporary Karnataka, thus improving my Kannada reading skills in the process too. Because I was discovering this world of letters afresh, it felt like there was so much to talk about, and this expanded the breadth of the book. Also, it was clear to me from the beginning that all these various literary and political movements that contributed to the creation of modern Karnataka would have to be spoken about together, through their relationships and connections with each other – I think this felt even more important because of the fragmented and polarised moral compasses of our own times.

Your book highlights ‘chaluvali’—the idea of collective struggle—as a defining cultural force, especially through the powerful wave of movements in the 1980s. How did state institutions in Karnataka respond to these uprisings at the time, and how has the nature of that response changed in the years since?

The State was flustered and shaken by the chaluvalis, and it responded to these developments with violence. For instance, there was a DSS (Dalit Sangharsh Samiti) march from Kolar to Bangalore in 1980 – a protest against rape and murder (committed by a local landlord who was in Gundu Rao’s ‘kitchen-cabinet’) – which was met by fierce lathi-charge at Vidhana Soudha. Around the same time, there emerged farmers’ protests stemming from legitimate grievances that were neglected by the government, leading to riots erupting across the state, with more than a hundred protesting farmers gunned down by police. That said, it is also true that these reprisals fuelled further anti-establishment sentiments. One activist I spoke to recalled how they used to throng prisons in huge numbers – jail-bharo andolans were once a very effective medium of protest – while also lamenting how, today, one might be condemned as an “anti-national” for even seeing the inside of a jail-cell (unless you’re Mr Moneybags or a cine-star). These movements worked as powerful pressure groups that could influence governments from the margins of power. 

It is in this sense that the landscape for social movements has changed drastically. Even in 2012, an old man named Anna Hazare could guilt-trip the regime into at least undertaking token reflections, but this sense of accountability (however meagre) looks quite eroded today. The Gandhian protests of Shaheen Bagh were met by violent suppression and derision, and the farmers of Punjab have been camping outside Delhi for a second long stretch now, awaiting meaningful engagement and dialogue, even as they are derided as ‘Khalistanis’ and ‘anti-nationals’. A well-credentialled civil society activist like Sonam Wangchuk might carry out a 21-day fast in Ladakh, but the central government does not even deem it worthy of response, even as the television media works extra-hard to paint him as some kind of a conspirator. Here in Bengaluru, demonstrations can be simply disallowed (as in the case of protests against the pulverisation of Gaza), and on a more trivial note, the singer Ed Sheeran was trounced out of Church Street by cops for starting an impromptu gig there. It is clear that the establishment has gotten used to policing and curbing any public gatherings it might find irksome, sometimes for no reason at all.  

One striking feature of your book is the way you use italics—often placing the English translation in italics while keeping the original Kannada word in regular font. What informed this stylistic decision, and what kinds of meanings or emphases were you hoping to convey through this choice?

The book’s editor at Westland pointed out that italicising Kannada words would become an act of ‘othering’, and I agreed with her. I do offer meanings or etymologies of Kannada words that I use, so that the reader is not left in the lurch. There are Kannada words that will resonate with other Indian languages too (chaluvali is chalval in Marathi, for instance), so retaining them made sense on many levels. There are some non-fiction writers who try to translate every non-English word, which may end up as a strange concoction that diminishes the reading experience. I think I mostly use italics only when there is a need for emphasis within a sentence or a para, or while naming a novel or work of art, and not for highlighting a non-English word, which a reader will be able to figure out anyway.

Author: Srikar Raghavan

In the course of your research, you have spoken to a diverse group of people—poets, authors, literary critics, activists, and artists. Was there a moment during these conversations—a story, a remark, or even a gesture—that struck a personal chord or lingered with you long after the interview was over?

So many. It would be impossible to list them all. Just for instance, I was very moved by the intimate reception offered to me by the novelist Kum Veerabhadrappa, and the poet Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy – these are friendships I will cherish. Interviews with activists who continue to believe in a politics of idealism and integrity – a nearly extinct species now – were always inspiring and induced much energy and hope in me (as well as the book.)

Your book also delves into the lives of sanitation workers and those involved in Karnataka’s waste segregation sector. What drew you to their stories, and what did you take away from those interactions?

In July 2022, there was a major four-day strike by the sanitation workers, or pourakarmikas, across Karnataka, and I was amazed by the complete lack of coverage in mainstream media and popular consciousness. It reflected a larger public ignorance of labour movements and workers’ rights, which is one of the most damaging side-effects of neoliberal triumphalism. I was around a couple of years into this book project then, and I learnt that these struggles for dignity had actually been decades in-the-making, going back to the 1970s, when the politician IPD Salappa set out a scrupulous critique of state policy and recommended numerous measures to uplift the pourakarmikas. Needless to say, these recommendations still remain relevant. I interviewed activists, journalists, and workers in Bengaluru who helped me understand this history better. I had a wonderful conversation with the poet, activist, and playwright Du Saraswati, who has been working with the pourakarmikas for decades. Apart from the recognised pourakarmikas on the city’s official roster, I learnt that there also existed a vast class of migrant waste-pickers (predominantly Bengali-speaking Muslims) operating on the city’s fringes, segregating waste by hand, without minimum wages, without any kind of security. I heard numerous stories of their struggles to find gainful employment and decent accommodation, and I took away from these interactions a sense of compounded grief, a feeling of being violently uprooted from their homes (thanks to agrarian distress, climate change) without the solace of having found a new one. 

Bengaluru has had a long history of in-migration, layered with multiple identities, cultures, ethnicities and languages. Do you think its reputation as a tolerant, assimilative city still holds today or has that image begun to shift?

A spate of recent fisticuff events in the city might have been sensationalised by social media in this regard, but I was glad to see the CM Siddaramaiah put out a tweet recently that highlighted the pluralism that has historically characterised the region. The city itself has serious challenges to confront on a practical, logistical level – it cannot keep expanding and assimilating as though there exist endless resources to support its mushrooming population. These Malthusian factors are more likely to accelerate implosions rather than ethnic or linguistic reasons, I think.

The IT sector, often romanticized as Bengaluru’s crown jewel, exists right next to informal economies that sustain the city. Why do you think there remains a disconnect when it comes to supporting the people who make the city liveable for everyone else?

I was recently reading a new study of Bengaluru titled Chronicles of a Global City, which investigates the impact that this new paradigm of finance-governance and ‘public-private partnerships’ has wrought on its citizens. It also shows how it is the working class – domestic workers, hawkers, the informal service economy – that really takes care of the city, while also dulling the spectre of serial unemployment. In an increasingly financialised world, the political establishment has been rendered inseparable from the real-estate mafia, whose primary goal is the conversion of land into rent-producing entities. Municipalities are not city planners anymore, but mere vehicles of economic drain, and structures of local governance have been crippled by rampant corruption. Local governance structures have been monopolised – the BBMP has not seen elections in five years. The tech world lives in a virtual bubble, away from the problems of the majority. We have also seen IT employees protesting against exploitative work-hours (and taskmasters like Narayana Murthy) recently, and so, that sector is also in an internal churn. The rise of AI is poised to disrupt this even further.  A broader movement for workers’ rights, a broader recognition of the invidious origins of money and monopoly – these would be some hopeful futures.

There’s a deep reservoir of Kannada literature that wrestles with themes of justice, identity, and modernity. In what ways does this body of regional literature help us better understand Karnataka’s social landscape and the nature of contemporary dilemmas it faces today?

It is quite indispensable, and should rightfully be of interest to the country at large. Reading DR Nagaraj’s reflections on colonialism and cultural amnesia will come as a refreshing breather after you’ve tasted some of the inanity that is being peddled today in the name of de-colonisation. For so many Kannada writers and artists of the twentieth century, the vachanas from the twelfth century Sharana movement became a deep source of pluralism and egalitarianism – the critique of organised religion, patriarchy, hierarchy – which are ideas that we often tend to fuse with the European Enlightenment. The killings of (vachana sahitya scholar) MM Kalburgi in 2015  and (journalist and activist) Gauri Lankesh in 2017 are  nothing less than a barbaric negation of this extraordinary legacy of humanism that has exercised such outsize influence on the Kannada tradition. 

Incidents like the recent tensions in Belagavi show how language politics and border disputes continue to surface in Karnataka. In your view, how can we build a collective consciousness that acknowledges such fissures without being consumed or overwhelmed by them? 

I had the recent pleasure of meeting the linguist Peggy Mohan, and when we were talking about the future of Indian languages, she told me that she believes that there could be a new linguistic churn shaping up, a kind of reorganization of desi tongues, which could potentially be spurred on by new technologies of translation – the Internet is actually accessible to a fair number of Indian languages now. It would seem to me that this ecosystem could help create spaces that surpass linguistic anxieties, if harnessed wisely.

With regards to communal and caste battlelines, it is only cultural spaces that can block out the insularity of hatred and hierarchy. If artists, writers, and intellectuals are unable to create spaces where these identities are transcended, it is inevitable that orthodox society will be much further behind. The assault of disinformation and crass media vultures has also diluted the integrity of our cultural discourse – everything is a flood of incoherent images and emotions.

In today’s socio-cultural climate, marked by the politics of inclusion and exclusion, do you believe pluralism is under threat? If so, how do you see it being challenged? How have past political regimes dealt with these challenges, and what can we learn from their efforts today?

The democratic spirit of the Indian freedom struggle would certainly be our closest source of moral vitality and clarity, and there is much to be learnt from their efforts at inculcating a political culture that values pluralism, cosmopolitanism, democracy, and moral independence on the world stage. This project is present under serious siege. The challenge for the fragmented Left (I mean it very broadly) is to find ways to merge political audiences, to fuse environmentalism with labour struggles, or make feminism prevail over caste-politics, or something like that. To seriously impact our political trajectory, these new intellectual resources will have to be formulated into coherent narratives, communicated to voters, and debated in public. It is a long-term project, and I think we have our task cut out – ‘struggle’ is really the keyword here.