‘Bride in the Hills’: Kannada writer Kuvempu’s novel depicts life under the ruthless regime of caste

Bride in the Hills is Vanamala Viswanatha’s brilliant translation of Malegallali Madumagalu, which is considered one of the greatest novels of Kannada literature, by one of Karnataka’s best-loved writers, Kuvempu. The epic novel was written in 1967 and has been translated into English once before and published by Rashtrakavi Kuvempu Pratisthana. This evocative translation by Vanamala VIswanatha reintroduces Kuvempu to a wider English-speaking audience and will hopefully enable a larger conversation about the importance of Kuvempu in both the national and the global context.

The nature of caste

An important strand of the complex and multilayered narrative of the novel appears in the three love stories, one between Gutthi and Thimmi from the Holeya caste, another, between Aita and Pinchalu from the Tulu-speaking Billava caste, and Chinnamma and Mukundaya from the Gowda caste. These three love stories, set as they are in the breathtakingly beautiful, though deeply feudal Malnad region, dramatise the barriers love has to cross – social, feudal, psychological, patriarchal – before the couples are united.

The novel apart from evoking the breathtaking beauty of the Malenadu region also leaves etched in the mind’s eye, people who become a familiar part of your world. Everyone will have a favourite in this novel, peopled by so many unforgettable creations, but few readers will disagree that among the truly unforgettable characters is the dog, Huliya who is blinded in a fight with a leopard and is described, affectionately, as a “one-eyed devotee of his master”, Gutthi. His death is one of those moving scenes in literature when you deeply feel the fury of the torrent that sweeps him away, as well as the pain of Gutthi and you are then left with the deep sense of loss that Huliya’s departure brings.

There is a rich interior life to each of the characters and the author seamlessly moves between the evocative passages on the forest as a pulsating being to the description of the love between Aita and Pinchalu and the repartee between Gutthi and Thimmi. As the novel’s epigraph notes, “Here, no one is important; no one is unimportant; Nothing is insignificant.”

Even as you are lulled into a sense of wonderment at the beauty of the Malnad region with its thick forests and majestic mountains, the characters embark on their own interior reflections which plumb the depths of the relations between human beings, bounded as they are by caste and gender. The many nuanced registers in which caste manifests itself in this novel, offer us a novelist’s insight into the nature of caste.

The sense of being trapped in an eternal unchanging social order sanctified by religion and tradition is disrupted through the lovers who challenge the structures of feudalism, caste and patriarchy. This challenge takes the form of the love of Gutthi and Thimmi, who flout the limits imposed by feudalism and caste as well as the love of Mukundayya and Chinnamma who transgress the structures of caste and patriarchy in their community.

In the novel, caste speaks the language of authority and command. One memorable example is the description of the Master’s Mound, from where the Gowda masters shout for their Dalit serfs to come to work. To those “hereditarily bound in vassalage to the Heggade household”, the Master “standing on top of the hillock every morning commanding them to start work” is “like a natural phenomenon”, which “they had seen from their childhood.” It is almost as if there is a fusing of the natural order and the social order. However there are subversive possibilities hinted at in the scene, as while the call of the master may be like the rising of the sun, the Dalits don’t respond with urgency but rather dawdle, delay and make the master wait! The master may command, but the vassals have lives and loves of their own which cannot be totally controlled by the master.

If there is one emotion that is integral to the expression of caste it is contempt. Contempt by the Brahmins towards the Gowdas and Gowdas towards the Dalits pervades the novel. When the elder Heggade appears before them, all “the men prostrate themselves before him as custom demanded, unmindful of the thorny bushes and shrubs. The women slink away into the thick bushes lest their sight defile the old man.” When a talisman is given to a Dalit, the upper caste, “drops the talisman into Gutti’s hands from above, lest their hands touch.” In the terms in which the lower caste person is addressed, contempt is rife. The boatman’s voice drips with contempt when he denies entry to his boat to those outside the caste order, “Aye you tribal fellow, whose chicken coop is this? Where’s the space in this boat to ferry all your cocks and curs, man? Take them down now, son of a bitch.”

Accompanying contempt as a marker of caste is indifference, which is masterfully portrayed by Kuvempu. When the lower caste Aita, in a state of shock, goes to report to the Gowda landlords the murder by her husband Chinkra of the pregnant Deyi, Kuvempu comments: “Aita pours out everything he has imagined, heard, seen and known. What has taken place in Chinkras hut in the night is so horrifying and so important for him that he assumes others would also be as shocked out of their wits. Is the death of Deyi, someone he had known ever since he was a child a trivial matter?” But in striking contrast to Aita’s heartfelt response, “neither Aigalu nor Mukundayya is shocked. They mouth the words of sympathy anyone would in such circumstances, The response of the landlords is so underwhelming that Aita, who thinks he has brought earth-shattering news of great pain and suffering, feels ashamed of his hyper excitement.” Gowda concludes the conversation by saying ‘Give them whatever they need for the last rites’ after which he yawns and “takes out his snuff-box from his waist for a sniff.”

Caste as social convention

The evil of caste is that it warps the development of a universal human consciousness, based on the idea that the other person is a human being deserving of equal treatment. Over a period of time caste society socialises a person into grading fellow human beings in hierarchical categories. However the young are still not fully socialised and hence face a conflict of values, between what caste society is telling them they should do and what their conscience is telling them is the right thing to do. There is a subtle invocation of this conflict of values, in Thimmu who during a wedding enjoys listening to the Dalit Baira playing the pipe. However, when Thimmu thinks of his enjoyment, he feels “humiliated”, that he admires the pipe playing of Baira who is “a lowly Holeya, a mere cowherd, a farmhand who lifts manure for his landlords’ fields and farms, and does his bidding as a beef-eating vassal.” Under the grip of his shame, he snaps, “Come, let’s go…why listen to the music of these carcass eaters?”

What is also hinted at here is the fact that caste is a social convention, which is learned and can also be unlearned. The characters at various points in the novel, involuntarily drop the façade of caste and the limitations it imposes and that allows the action to move forward. If the injunctions of untouchability had not been set aside, Chinnamma could not have been married to her lover Mukundaya, relying heavily, as they both did on the committed help provided by the lower caste character Pinchalu. Kuvempu captures how under the grip of extreme emotion or dire necessity, the characters are enabled to set aside the socially imposed restrictions of caste and interact more freely.

The theme of desire erasing the lines of caste recurs at various points in the novel. In one memorable scene, when Mukundaya, Pinchalu and Aita, companions, albeit across lines of caste, class and gender, go crab hunting, Kuvempu describes Mukundayya (who is a Gowda) gazing intently upon the newly married couple Aita and Pinchalu. To him, they appear no more “lower caste serfs who work for him, but rather embodiments of Rathi and Manmatha.”

The beauty of Pinchalu quite overwhelms Mukundayya. When he sends Aita back to get a gun to hunt a boar, Mukundaya is left alone with Pinchalu. In Kuvempu’s description, from the point of view of Pinchalu, even if something of a sexual nature had occurred, she would not have seen it as a betrayal of a marriage but rather the extension of a friendship. Mukundayya’s arresting perception of Pinchalu as Rathi indicates the direction his mind traverses. However, the moment passes and what could have easily happened between them does not happen. Yet the invocation of an uncovenanted possibility is rich with the potential of a transgressive future where desire erases the lines of caste.

Throughout the novel, there is the lurking possibility of violence as a crucial armature of caste power. In one bantering conversation between Gutthi and Thimmi, this subtext of violence is hinted at. When Thimmi ribs Gutthi, telling him that she can’t forget that he almost got her crushed by the gaur. Gutthi’s riposte is: “What do you expect, that you’d be taken on horseback like a bride?” To which, Thimmi gloomily concludes: “But if we ride on horseback, our master will sever our legs along with the horse’s. They have forbidden our community from using horses.”

This hidden subtext of lawless violence, which is ever present in Thimmi’s subconscious, emerges to the surface in the chilling incident of the lynching of Sanna Bira for the offence of his sister, Thimmi eloping with Gutthi, against the will of the master.

Thimmi’s elopement is punished by the Gowda masters, with a savage lynching, referred to as the “Honnali Hodeta” Honnali thrashing.) Sanna Bira is tied up by Ijira Sabi. In Kuvempu’s gut-wrenching description, “As soon as Ijara Sabi gestures grimly, a quivering Sanna Bira obeys him, his tongue dead in his mouth, like a mute animal, like an ox that is used to following the cartman’s orders when he calls out, obediently lowering his neck for the yoke to be placed…” He is then whipped with tamarind birches, and “Sanna Bira’s back swells up with the first round of lashing…”

This eruption of bloody violence represents the concentrated force of the contempt, hatred and indifference of a caste society, which can no longer be contained within the register of contempt and indifference. It expresses itself in the outward forms of a caste law, which is deployed to take forward an inner register of hatred and contempt.

This particular portrayal of a brutal lynching evokes what is a continuing reality in many parts of the country. Part of the way Brahmanism has enabled caste to thrive is by invisibilising violence against Dalits. Before the advent of Dalit literature, which decisively broke the silence on caste as violence, we have the important writings of Kuvempu in Bride in the Hills as well as Karanth in Choma’s drum.

‘The power of poor people’s laughter’

Are there clues or hints in the novel as to how the caste order can be resisted? The novel takes seriously what DR Nagaraj calls the “power of poor people’s laughter”. Each incident which affirms caste supremacy at the same time contributes to, in ways big and small, the undermining of the caste order with the “weapons of the weak”. The weak in this case use all the tools at their disposal right from flattery to slowing down of work in order to subvert the caste order from within. In times when people are under the sway of extreme emotion and in times of precarity, the rules which govern touch are silently flouted. Similarly, there are intimations that love renders the rules of caste vulnerable to challenge. At points, the caste order comes across as seemingly permeable. However, none of the above stratagems is in a position to challenge the order of caste as graded inequality. However, any challenge to the order of caste will have to take seriously the subjectivity of those at the receiving end of oppression. That subjectivity is portrayed with nuance and sensitivity by Kuvempu.

One possibility of a challenge to the caste order emerges through the advent of modernity. In a famous episode when for the first time the villages view a cycle, in their eager curiosity to see this new-fangled invention, the villagers fall over each other ignoring the rules of caste. The novel ends with the establishment of the first school in the area, bringing with it the promise of modern education. However, modernity is not presented here as an unmixed blessing given a continuing authorial critique of religious conversion.

As against this received critique, there is an embrace of the idea of a challenge to the caste order from within, especially in the reference to Vivekananda who stands in for a rethinking of Hinduism itself. Gaddayaa, the mendicant who speaks to Mukundayya and Devayya expounds on the Vedanta as a way through which Hinduism can “escape from the grip of Brahmin priests” and return to Upanishadic thinking which is free of caste bias. Interestingly, one of the main characters in the novel, Gutthi embodies this spirit of Vedanta. When all seems lost and Gutthi is feeling helpless, he takes to prayer to a formless God and as Kuvempu puts it, “the heartfelt prayer of the Holeya”, will surely ascend to the lotus feet of God.

Kuvempu is committed to a reinterpretation of Hinduism within the framework of Vedanta which based as it is on the idea that everyone has a spark of the divine, renders caste philosophically untenable. In an essay titled, “A clarion call for a cultural revolution”, Kuvempu engages in a debate with the Dravida Kazagam movement, where he states that, “he accepts and understands their movement”, but does not agree with the “burning of the ancient epics”. To him old epics are like old ornaments, you may not like the design etc, so what you do is smelt it and make something new out of it, not just throw it away.

Kuvempu, even while he wrote beautifully about nature was extremely alive to both the nuances of the oppression of caste, its brutality as well as ways the caste order could be undermined. The novel imaginatively reconstructs, what it means to live, resist and love under the law of caste and for this reason, deserves to be read and reread.

Bride in the Hills, Kuvempu, translated from the Kannada by Vanamala Viswanatha, Penguin India.