Land of Lime

What is an act of remembering?

Memory is tricky business. It doesn’t have an autonomous existence of its own, outside of us, the people who choose to remember. So memory is not a passive thing, but an active construct and it requires us to act. Our act of remembering is a subjective act and does not have objective, scientific parameters guiding that act. Let us be clear: memory is a political and ethical act.

Public memory is trickier. When we expect institutions - City Corporations, Governments and Private Corporations – to act, they are always prodded by individuals, groups and organizations. A circle is named after A Ramanna because of an initiative by someone. Churumuri’s campaign too is a similar initiative. Someone necessarily will have to prod others into being part of this act of remembering. Then, who do we, the people, choose to remember, how and why?

I get more visitors to the Land of Lime, looking for details on the Dhoni-Sania Mirza romance (on which I once wrote a short sentence) than those seeking to read on Pampa, Kumaravyasa, Raghavanka, Kuvempu and Rajkumar (until last week) combined. In Vontikoppal and Yadavagiri, I suspect kids (and elders too) talk more about Dhoni (it would have been Ganguly last year) than on the two illustrious residents of these localities, Kuvempu and R K Narayan. Before we begin to question the worth of uneducated people, what on earth do these educated people of these two neighborhood remember?

Indeed, KP made a persuasive case for the campaign yesterday and I have no substantial problems with that. Sure, we want our cities and communties to remember our writers, artists, architects, athletes and such achievers. But what ought to be the form of that memory, both in the physical space that the city is and in spaces that aren’t visible, within us? I live next door to Robie house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous prairie house and every day thousands of visitors show up to see this landmark and also visit the museum. A museum, with all the memorabilia serves the purpose of those ‘who enter the city and pass through’.

Still, this is a limited act of remembering and I suspect just doesn’t offer the paradigm shift KP demands. KP’s own suggestion keeps the focus on creating a tourist attraction; we can conveniently place the responsibility of this act of memory on Governments, and Private Corporations, to whom we can appeal to create something substantial. And then feel good about it.

Look, earlier, my own focus was on asking how (and what) we, the Mysoreans, ought to remember about this man. A museum would be a wonderful idea. But what do we want the artifacts in that museum - his writing material, table and chairs - convey to us? The fact that he placed Mysore on the map! Let us say something more and not leave it to English professors!

That’s my first complaint about our approach in this discussion. Why do we want to appreciate him? Let us make that case too. That was the point of my ‘appreciation‘. To repeat myself, do we realize how huge it was for a young student in Maharaja’s college in the 1920s, to dream of being an English writer? Or the fact that he lived in Mysore as a ‘freelance writer’ all his life? How do we ‘remember’ that and inculcate that possibility in the mind of a kid in Yadavagiri, whose parents may believe that a productive and prosperous life can only be had as a computer programmer in some Silicon valley? How do you make that kid and all the other kids who are born in Mysore remember the audacity of ambition, imagination and creativity of a Narayan? How do you make the artifcts in that museum convey that message? How do you make the educated Yadavagiri remember the civility and meaningfulness of the ordinary life that Narayan cultivated in his everyday life and brought out splendidly in his fiction, when he wrote on the sweet vendors and printers of Malgudi? In today’s Mysore that rushes to deposit all its future in software, isn’t Narayan the chronicler of the dignity of sweet vendors and printers of Mysore?

What I am trying to address here is the mode of our ’speaking up’. What are we, the people, prepared to do? There is so much we can do. Short documentaries. Write ups. Audio archives consisting of interviews of people who knew Narayan intimately. We have enough ’specialists’ amongst us and our own personal resources/equipment we own are plenty to do all this. Doesn’t the Museum also need such material?

Also beyond the physical space of his house or Mysore, why can we not think of creating a digital archive for R K Narayan? We don’t need Infosys patronage or even English professors to assist us!

Indeed, this is my second complaint.

As I said earlier, acts of memory require some people to speak up and make the case. But I don’t see any such concrete alternative suggestion coming forth in this discussion. I don’t see a single suggestion that makes the act of remembering our own agentive action, and not someone else’s responsibility. KP alerted us but then where are voices seeking to set up a WIKI? It is not KP’s responsibility to offer to set up a WIKI and digitize photographs, copyleft articles, commission essays on his life and writings in Kannada and English, which can be made publicly available. But after he has raised that issue, why cannot we work on this as a collective project, spend a few hours every week and create something worthwhile within six months? I can get some institution to provide server space and maintain it. Along the same lines, why can we not work on creating more robust and detailed entries on all matters R K Narayan in Wikipedia, in both Kannada and English? Sunaad would do a much better job of recreating Narayan’s Malgudi than any English professor I know of. None of the activities I propose here require much (or any) money. Only time and effort. Do we care enough to start a NARAYAN-WIKI project?

Indeed, why do we frame our campaigns and demands in such a way that the burden is put on someone else?

Aside: For those who are interested here is a link to my favorite online resource Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has a wonderful entry on Memory.