Land of Lime

I have been reading Samsa again for a few months now. This Kannada playwright, who wrote six (published) plays on the history of Mysore has been a favorite of mine for long. I read KIRAM’s wonderful play, Nigikonda Samsa recently. Samsa’s nephew A. N. Subramanyam has a very insightful small book called Samsasmarane (Remembering Samsa).

Honestly, I have been obsessed with the tragic life of this extraordinary playwright and I will share my notes within the next day or so. But here is a very nice and insightful profile that Subramanyam wrote. It’s a short piece and very well written. I may be violating some copyright laws by posting thisbut this piece should be widely read and it also complements what I want to write soon on Samsa.

Samsa: A Recollection

by

A. N. Subramanyam

A tall, lean and straight figure with receding hair and wide forehead. Frequent knitting of eyebrows. In repose, a hawklike and distant expression. An occasional deaf ear to someone or something. Soft, yet matter of fact, voice, sharp in argument. A sardonic smile reserved for lesser mortals like relatives, successful scholars. Non-descript three-piece dress (dhoti, shirt and towel) of the intelligentsia of the times. that didactic thrust of the index and middle fingers of the right hand while driving home a point or reciting a poem. That essential shyness of the litterateur: After the command performance of Vigada Vikaramaraya, when requested to appear on the stage, he left the palace remarking that the play is the thing.

His circumstances were unhappy, if not sordid. They contained no ingradient of success. He was too unsophisticated to make the grade. The successful astrologer in him, who made many a famous astrologer wince about his future, was quite indifferent to his own fortunes. His ability to bear hardship and his utter unconcern to comfort made him a stoic. This and a passion to avoid personal obligations, checkmated every move to help him. Frustrated well-wishers became part of his unsettled life. All this made him a non-conformist. Instability dogged him, whether as a Pandit in a southern college or as a white collar worker in Quetta. Because of his unstable temperament, he was wont to speak of crossing over to other religions.

Out of this welter emerged, a capacity for sustained literary work and a purposeful literary career. His non-age saw Kaushala, a novel in Kannada. Followed in those phlegmatic days, a piece in English: Sherlock Holmes in Jail, a novel which ended in an Indian, a mere native, rescuing the great one. He composed Samsapadam, a style-book on prosody, on the lines of Nagavarma’s classic. He evolved and perfected the technique of historical drama, with an idiom all his own. There was a method in his madness, which meant long hours with manuscripts and inscriptions in the Oriental Library. Otherwise, how could reel off, from memory, derivations of old Kannada words from Classics, giving cross references and meanings from Kittel’s Dictionary?

A conflict between literary work and personal disillusionment tore his later years. A verse in Samsapadam describes the world as a stage for play of the wanton, half-way house for straggling souls, an inn to drink from the mirage of pleasure. With the passage of time, in his last days, this wayward thought hardened into an obsession that an alien police machine was unjustly persecuting him. Perhaps it had no basis in fact. But it did damage and brought about his tragic end. That he cared to live to write his plays was the fault, not of himself, but of his stars.