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The feudal spirit

M D Riti

A still from Kannoora Heggadthi. Click for bigger pic!

It might have taken a caste-minded prime minister like Deve Gowda to get him behind the megaphone again. But any product by Girish Karnad, going by his past record, should certainly be worth viewing.

Karnad is hard at work on jointly directing a Hindi television serial and a Kannada commercial movie based on litterateur K V Puttappa's novel Kannoora Heggadthi. This unusual film also brings together what Karnad himself describes as the "old gang" of B V Karanth as music director, S Ramachandra as cameraman and Suresh Urs as editor.

"This may well be my last film ever," says Karnad quite seriously. "I find movie-making a very exhausting experience."

Karnad's last major directorial venture was all of 15 years ago: he directed Utsav based on Charudatta's Mrichchakatika. After that, he directed a short 80-minute film, Cheluvi, based on a simple folk tale about a girl who turns into a tree.

"My first love has always been theatre and playwriting, so I devoted myself to that for the past 15 years," the man who won the Jnanpith award this year told Rediff On the NeT at his home in J P Nagar at Bangalore.

"However, this novel of Kuvempu has fascinated me for a long time. I told his son that I would like to make a film on it, and would get in touch after I got hold of some funds for it. I think word must have travelled to Deve Gowda, when he was prime minister, and he directed C M Ibrahim to approach me with an offer to make it into a serial for television."

Kuvempu belonged to Deve Gowda's Vokkaliga community. This story also describes the lives of the Vokkaliga community of the Malnad region of Karnataka. The novel on which the film is based was written in 1936 and is set in the last phase of that feudal era. Karnad himself readily agrees that Deve Gowda, who is known to be very caste conscious, would have taken extra interest in this project because of the Vokkaliga connection.

"And why not?" he demands. "Kuvempu was one of our greatest poets, and this novel is one of the six greatest ever written in Karnataka." Then why did it take him 15 years to make a film?

"Films take 6, 7 months out of your life; they are also very exhausting," he says. "I didn't want to stay away from my family for long patches of time either. So I was just concentrating on writing plays. This film has been a refreshing experience for me, because the Vokkaliga society of Malnad, which is now so hospitable and civilised, was just 50 years ago a society in which wives were brutally beaten, branded and tortured!

"As luck would have it, Kuvempu was the first Jnanpith award winner, and my own Jnanpith was announced when I actually was with the Malnad Vokkaligas making this film. I think the film will be a very good record of their language, culture and lifestyle."

Click for bigger pic!

Karnad placed his proposal for the serial before Doordarshan, which quickly approved it. But before the project actually got under way, Deve Gowda was ousted from the prime minister's seat and S S Gill became the head of Doordarshan.

By this time, Karnad himself began feeling it made more sense to film the story in Kannada too since it documented several sections of Malnad history that the Kannada viewer might relate to well. So back he went to Doordarshan, with a request to be allowed to make the serial bilingual.

"In his usual offhanded manner, he [Gill] said no," says Karnad. Then, Karnad had a brainwave: would they please permit him to make a Kannada feature film on the same subject, with independent funding? The answer this time was an affirmative. Doordarshan also gave him a budget of Rs 500,000 per episode. Three fans of Kuvempu came forward to produce the film: H G Narayana, C N Narayan and I P Malle Gowda.

Karnad began work on this project about five months ago. The two main protagonists in the story are women -- Subbamma, the young wife of the aging Hegde or village leader and Seetha, his son's wife.

Kannada film actress Tara, who is usually cast as a supporting actress or a vamp in commercial movies, plays Subbamma in the film, while Bhagerathi plays that character in the serial.

"I chose Tara because I thought she looked the part exactly, someone from the village," says Karnad. "She was just perfect for my film. After this film, I think she will be recognised by the film industry as a really good actress. In commercial Kannada cinema, women rarely have parts written for them; they always have to play either the vamp, or the younger sister who was raped or the heroine who performs in three or four dances and cries in the climax."

"There is only hero worship in Kannada cinema," says Tara ruefully. "Apart from Girish Kasaravalli's Thayil Saheb, which won the national award last year, there have been no films with strong female characters. We actresses never have an opportunity to prove our potential. This film is an exception and I am very lucky that Karnad chose me. He is such a wonderful teacher and very warm person; acting under his direction was a wonderful experience."

The experience was quite novel for Tara, who was used to the altogether different approach of commercial cinema. "Shooting is very fast, as people don't like to waste time or money on lengthy schedules," she says.

Click for bigger pic!

"You don't get the chance to understand your character or even read your dialogues properly. The crew usually says, 'Don't worry, madam, you just do your bit quickly and we'll introduce whatever nuances we require into the part on the editing table.' Besides, you are expected to emote in an exaggerated and unnatural manner.

"Here, we had to underplay our roles all the time and act in a very suppressed manner. We had a month's time to get under the skin of the character and the scope to interpret it as we wished. Karnad is an excellent teacher because he is such a good actor himself."

Mallika Prasad, a National School of Drama graduate, plays Seetha in both versions, while Karnad himself plays Subbamma's husband, Chandriah Gowda. "I'd have preferred not to act this time, as it very stressful and tiring to direct and act simultaneously," he says. "But the budget was tight, and we could not have afforded two more major actors for the two versions, so I had to step in myself."

"Although I was new to the medium of cinema, Karnad gave me the opportunity to explore the character of Seetha myself and determine how I wanted to play it," says Mallika. "It is a fascinating role and has a definite graph that grows through the film. It is the part of a girl who is in love with her childhood playmate, and goes almost mad when she cannot marry him. The work was intense, but I have really enjoyed the journey to find the woman called Seetha."

The entire film is shot on location in Malnad, which Karnad describes as the back of the Western Ghats. It talks of a whole era as it changed over the years.

"Originally, Shankar Nag had planned to do the film, but he died almost a decade ago when it was still on the anvil," says Karnad. "This bilingual project cannot be the same, because a serial is 13 episodes, which means you must film for almost six hours, whereas a film is concentrated into about two hours and 20 minutes.

"Occasionally, some scenes and locations are common, and so when we are on location, we shoot consecutively for both versions. The two scripts are entirely different. The larger roles are different, but many of the small characters are common. The whole cast was on location with me for a month. It's not been like a regular commercial film, where actors come and go."

The Kannada version has two songs based on Kuvempu's poems, but Karnad decided against trying to translate the songs into Hindi for the serial.

Click for bigger pic!

Karnad says he also chose this particular story because it brings alive a particular culture that is now almost dead. "I wanted to capture before all traces of it vanished completely," he says. "The story it tells is also very dramatic. It alternates between the two young women, Seetha who was married off forcibly to the son, and Subbamma, who is the actual Heggadthi.

"Subbamma is a completely rural woman while Seetha is the carefully brought up daughter of caring parents. Interestingly, all the scenes involving the women take place inside those houses. That made me realise what claustrophobic lives the women led, confined to bedrooms and kitchens.

"We were shooting in all the houses -- where they get married, get thrown out of, other houses they go to... The men are all outdoors, drinking and enjoying life in general."

What next?

"I'm hoping to write another play next, probably about the life of my own mother, who was born in 1902 and died two years ago," he says ruminatively. "She traversed the whole century. She was widowed in her childhood, remarried and I was born from that second marriage. The problems she faced are typical of the issues that women in middle class society had to face at that time. There were several fascinating situations that she faced."

Meanwhile, he continues to act in commercial Kannada movies for his daily living.

"I do the usual politician and heroine's father kind of roles," he says. "Acting in films is so lucrative. You get so much money for very little work. This gives me the freedom to write the kind of plays that I would like to. You simply cannot survive purely as a playwright in India. Nor can you live on theatre here.

"It has been beneficial that we don't have a very active theatre in Karnataka, because otherwise I'm sure I would have been under great pressure to write the kind of plays in demand, instead of what I myself like."