How K Chinnappa Gowda and B Surendra Rao translated the oral language Tulu for the world

When K Chinnappa Gowda and the late B Surendra Rao conceived of their ambitious project to translate works of literature from the Tulu language to English, their chief intention was to build an architecture for “Tulu-ness” or the “Tuluva” world for non-Tulu speakers. They went on to translate and publish seven books in translation within three years, including the first novel in the language (Sati Kamale by SU Paniyadi), one contemporary novel (Mittabail Yamunakka: A Tale of a Landlord’s Household by DK Chowta), one early modern Tulu story (Tale of Narayana The Impostor by Polali Sheenappa Hegde), and anthologies of folk tales (The Rainboy: Tulu Folk Tales), poems (Ladle in a Golden Bowl: Translation of Tulu Poems), work and dance songs (When Moonlight is Very Hot), and short stories (Heartbeats).

An urgent need

Gowda told me that it was a very conscious decision to translate representative works from each genre of literature, and that they wanted to give readers in English a flavour of the vibrancy that the Tulu literary world contained in both its written tradition of over a century and its oral history going back far longer. The reasons the scholars – Gowda is a former Vice Chancellor of Karnataka Folklore University, a prominent researcher, folklorist and retired Professor of Kannada, Mangalore University, while Dr Rao was a celebrated historian and retired Professor of History, Mangalore University – both native-Tulu speakers, felt this was an urgent need are deeply political, and contain a highly complex socio-cultural history of the language and the southwest coastal belt where it is mostly spoken.

Tulu is a Dravidian oral language that is at least 800 years old, though there are (contested) claims that references to the language have been found in Tamil Sangam literature from 300 CE. The age of an oral language is hard to date though; the earliest inscription mentioning Tulu dates to 1159 CE. According to the 2011 Census, there were 1.8 million Tulu speakers, although scholars say that the actual number is more likely to be somewhere between four and five million, ascribing the difference to a lot of dialects within Tulu and those speaking the language outside the state being counted as Kannada speakers in the Census.

West Asian countries have a sizeable number of Tulu diaspora, apart from diasporic presence elsewhere in the world, but it is in the Dakshina Kannada (DK) and Udupi districts of Karnataka and Kasaragod district in Kerala that the concentration of Tulu speakers is most seen. Parts of this belt have long been proposed as the site for the state of “Tulu Nadu,” one of the demands of a language movement that has been seeking a more prominent position for Tulu since at least the 1930s. Especially in DK and Udupi, Tulu is the lingua franca and is used extensively by people of all communities and classes even, though Kannada is the language of education and state administration.

Linguists have long held the opinion that Tulu is just as sophisticated and just as developed in its ability to convey complex ideas as the other major South Indian languages of Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Yet, scholars like Gowda and Rao believe that Tulu has not been given the recognition it deserves in Karnataka, where Kannada is seen in a hegemonic role by not just Tulu, but also Byari (spoken by Byari Muslims), Konkani, Kodava (spoken by a community in Kodagu) and several other dialects and tribal languages. Especially since the 1980s, Tuluvas have been leading a movement to change the status quo, demanding inclusion in the Eight Schedule of the Constitution. While it is certainly not an unfair demand, one of the most contentious missteps in this direction has been the perpetuation of a myth that not only was there a script for the language that was purportedly lost and must be revived, but also that the language has a rich written history going back hundreds of years.

In reality, Tulu developed as a vibrant oral language, sustained and nurtured by folklore and by ritualistic practices like Bhutaradhane or Bhuta worship (the 2022 film Kantara portrayed parts of this animistic art form, but was criticised for gentrifying Tulu culture and making it more Sanskritised than it is in real life). A popular perception that oral languages are somehow below those like Kannada with scripts of their own has led to a controversial chain of events where various people have tried to invent a script for Tulu. Prominent scholars like the late Amrutha Someshwara, BA Vivek Rai and Gowda and Rao argue rightly, one must note, that the importance of a language is not solely tied to whether it has its own script or not, and that orature is just as equal a marker of the richness of a culture. Tulu is currently written in the Kannada script.

It is beyond the scope of this article to trace the complicated twists and turns the fight for Tulu prominence in public consciousness across Karnataka and beyond state borders at a national level have taken over the decades. Suffice to say that the mammoth translation project that Gowda and Rao undertook sought to lend literary strength and support to the movement to make Tulu language and culture more familiar to those outside the coastal region.

The long road ahead

Each of the books translated by the two scholars is accompanied by long essays that explore the history of the language, comparative literature analyses, examination of its past and present situation and politics, cultural contexts in which Tulu has evolved and the challenges ahead, making this exercise not only a thorough introduction to Tulu literature, but also a repository of knowledge about the region’s cultural landscape. For instance, in When Moonlight is Very Hot, many of the fifty-three kabitas, or work songs, celebrate the mundane, prosaic lives of women farm workers. Yet they dream of more comfortable lives; one song contains a list of jewellery they would love to own, from “shining nose rings”, “neck chains that are like jasmine and beaten rice” and gold ear studs to silk sarees and an umbrella and footwear; another is explicitly sexual, comparing the virility of “tawny red bull” to the sexual prowess of a man.

Of course, one must not discard the plenty of songs and poems that speak to power, criticising the treatment of labourers under the caste system, the atrocities committed by landlords and the resilience displayed by women reeling under the twin evils of patriarchy and feudalism. Chowta’s Mittabail Yamunakka, a novel about a feudal landlord’s house and its people, includes detailed descriptions of Tulu gods, festivals, ritualistic traditions and what the translators call the unveiling of “the whole culture of agriculture” as practised in the region.

In a recent essay that Gowda wrote about this translation project in his book Karavali Kathanagalu (Coastal Narratives), he notes the impressive output of literature in Tulu in recent years, counting the hundreds of novels, short stories and plays that have been written, the large number of texts from Tulu translated into Japanese, English, several Indian languages and the many books that have been translated into Tulu. He writes of the duo’s choices of words in the source language to keep and transliterate or translate, noting how the former not only helps the English lexicon gain new words from Tulu, but also helps “translate a reader into a Tulu reader” in the process of translating the text.

This pedagogical essay goes into detail about the importance of translation, about the politics of choice and what is at stake for Tulu both at home and outside its geographical boundaries. It reiterates the motive that at the heart of their translation project was an attempt to answer questions of language itself – what its uses are, why a language thrives or fades away, why a language gets elevated to national consciousness when it becomes significant and deserving of widespread attention and so on.

Meanwhile, after Surendra Rao’s demise in 2019, Gowda has kept up their intention to “give back to Tulu” by continuing to translate Tulu literature into Kannada. As a young researcher, he had translated, along with a team from Finland, Siri Mahakavya, a Tulu epic of 16,000 lines sung by the artist Machar Gopala Naika, into English. Just last year, he published a new Kannada translation of the told, or narrated version of the same epic by the same artist along with several analytical essays to further inform the reading of the epic.