Karnath’s ‘Hettala Tayi’

Karanth’s ‘Hettala Tayi’

By V. M. INAMDAR, M.A.

Shivaram Karanth has been experimenting with a type of creative fiction in Kanada which, if not new, is at least rare in the expanding scope of contemporary Kannada prose. He needs no introduction to Kannada readers, but, for the information of the non-Kannada readers of this journal, it may be mentioned that he is the outstanding Kannada novelist of today whose work challenges comparison with the best elsewhere. His genealogical novel Marali Mannige (to the Soil), published three years ago, placed him at once in the front rank of novelists. It is a saga that records, with rare power of creative imagination, the irrepressible impact of modern conditions on the peaceful; age-old ways of rural India and pictures the consequent disintegration with compelling accuracy. Since then he has given Kannada readers two more novels (besides other things), less expansive in range but bearing marks of a deepening technical richness. Convincing as his characterisation has been in his great novel, the process appears to be enriching itself more and more, with the result that his two subsequent novels may more accurately be described as novels of character. In this type of creative fiction, greater interest centres round the portrayal of the complex workings of an imagined human personality than round the clever manipulation of a complicated network of situations. His Betteda Jeeva (A Creature of the Jungle) is one such novel and his latest Hettala Tayi (A Mother After All) is a still richer improvement over his earlier attempts in characterisation. We shall briefly analyze this his latest novel.

Probably the distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident is more technical than real. It seems a matter of emphasis. Perhaps only the creative artists can testify to whether, in their first planning of a projected piece of creative fiction, the characters come first or the incidents. No single imagined incident could have logical relevance unless it is directly related to a character or characters, and emerges from the intrinsic reactions of those characters to their surroundings. Otherwise, it will remain isolated from the main texture of the story. Incident, to be convincing, has to follow character. Similarly character, though conceivable apart from incident, has to depend primarily upon the latter which remains its medium of expression: incidental is usually the means through which character unfolds itself. Thus considered they are so vitally connected with each other that the one cannot almost exist without the other in any good fiction worth the name. That is why we said the distinction is more technical than real. But a closer examination of the question will reveal that a particular novelist may choose to restrict the field of incidents to the very necessary minimum, or remove the incidents from the physical to the mental plane and concentrate on the elucidation of character. It is a more difficult art in that the novelist deliberately casts aside the easiest means of maintaining interest. An ordinary reader is often pardonably more interested in what a character does that in why it does it. The novelist who would stress character more than incident, therefore always runs the risk of sending the reader to sleep over his work. A subtle balance has to be struck; the reader has to be seduced into interesting himself in the springs of character and the motives of action. This balance Karanth has been achieving in greater and greater degree, so that his work today is disclosing that essential artistic compromise between the demands of the unsophisticated reader and those of the exactingly finical literary cr1tic. The novel Hettala Tayi bears evidence of this.

Three characters dominate what little of story there is in Hettala Tayi: Kusuma the village girl who marries the lawyer Subbayya and is increasingly enamoured of public esteem and city life: her husband Subbayya, who submits to her through sheer goodness and generosity of disposition; their mutual friend Venkappa, also a lawyer, infirm of purpose and uncertain of conduct who comes into their life as a disturbing force. The way these three characters act and react on one another forms the simple framework of the story which may be now summarised. The rural Girija becomes Kusuma the lawyer’s wife and soon engages assiduously the first few years of her married life in social activities in collaboration with the more domesticated wife of her husband’s friend Venkappa. They found their own club and have a good time. All goes on well for a time with the growing affluence of Subbayya, until the urge for motherhood grows upon Kusuma slowly but irrepressibly. A village astrologer predicts that she is destined to have children but that her husband is not so favoured! Unfortunately, as if to confirm the prediction, her first two children die still born and Kusuma gets embittered. She blames her husbands stars for her misfortune in losing the children born to her. In the meantime Venkappa’s wife dies suddenly leaving behind a houseful of young ones and himself in a pathetically helpless situation. Not quite willing to marry a second time, lest his children should suffer at the hands of a step-mother, he wavers in life. Subtle suggestion is conveyed that Kusuma in her urge for successful motherhood develops an illicit contact with Vekappa during the period. A son is born to her and survives. Kusuma goes on helping Venkappa under cover, as his good friend Subbayya does openly, until Venkappa marries again with Vimala who not unexpectedly develops into a veritable shrew. The two families drift apart for a time and Venkappa’s affairs, both domestic and professional, deteriorate and make life for himself and his children miserable. The generous Subbaya offers once again a helping hand and rescues his friend from ignominy and impecuniosity. Venkappa’s second wife stays away at her parents and would not return to live with the children under the same roof. Subbayya supports his friend’s eldest son through his legal studies, who returns successful to give his younger brothers a happy home and his much harassed younger sister a loving husband. All these developments bring Kusuma and Venkappa together again and a second child is in the coming even when in the interval Subbayya has survived a serious illness and is convalescing. The revelation of Kusuma’s condition is a terrible shock to Subbayya who takes things quietly. But the agony of flouted tolerance and goodness is too shattering to let him live happily. A daughter is born and the relations between the husband and the wife become more and more strained. Subbayya lives as much away from home as possible under cover of his illness, which has become more of the mind than of the body, and returns home only to die with the last words of profoundly moving forgiveness for his wife, now full of remorse and sorrow. Venkappa leaves his children to the care of his flourishing son and goes after his second wife to settle down at her place and to his ways.

That is all the story we have and the narration moves on straight and direct with an unhurried grace. The subtle manner in which the illicit relations are hinted at throughout is a major triumph of literary reticence and artistic restraint. The graphic pictures we have of the two households of the way the rivalries developed between the womenfolk, of the slow deterioration of Venkappa’s fortunes, of his happy home under the management of the self forgetful first wife and its steady transformation with the advent of the jealous and selfish second wife, of the children’s suffering and their rescue, are major graces of the creative imagination which provide a convincing ground for the principal developments of the novel. Despite the fact that there is very little dialogue in the novel; despite the fact that the story covers quite a length of years of which the reader is quite unconscious except perhaps in critical retrospect, his interest in the narrative never flags. This is all the more remarkable because of the conspicuous absence of even a single arresting incident all through the novel or of vigorous movement that may hasten the reader from page to page. It is, on the other hand, a slow motion picture of life, a life observed with a seeing eye and feeling heart and recorded with a selective judgment that speaks volumes for the author’s insight into the value of imagined experience m the unfoldment of the characters or the story that proceeds from them. It would sound like a truism but it is an arrestingly significant fact that, if either Kusuma or her husband or their friend had been but slightly different from what they are, there would have been no novel at all. They hold the reader’s mind. They direct the course of the story. Or, they just live their life in their own ways and the story is born. There can be no greater compliment to the authenticity and the individuality of the characters.

The question whether a woman of the type portrayed in Kusuma is possible in life does not arise at all. The author has taken care to delineate in sufficient detail her rural antecedents which, with their unending denials of opportunity have firmly implanted in her nature the will to succeed and succeed at all costs. She is the frustrated villager vainly seeking fulfillment in the false values of urban existence. Coupled with this basic strain is a nature that is egoistic ‘in the extreme. It is a kind of egoism, moreover, which no defeating circumstances can baffle or quench but which will circumvent opposition by means fair or foul. This gives to Kusuma’s character a determined forthrightness which entirely subdues the soft Subbayya but makes of Venkappa probably a victim in spite of what little better sense he must have had. We have no evidence in the novel, except perhaps as an indication in the general improvidence of Venkappa’s nature, to show that he was a willing and deliberate accomplice of Kusuma. She knew well how to achieve the success of her wishes. A nature such as hers is exceedingly sensitive to its surroundings which it aspires completely to master. Thus when she felt that the local high-brow club did not accord her the respect she felt was due to her, she sets about not only doing everything she could to denounce that club but founds a rival one of her own. She would not let her donation be smaller than those of any other; she would not be dwarfed by any other in any respect. She would be unequal to none she comes across. Her urge for motherhood was in a sense, aggravated by the awareness that others were getting conscious that she had no children. So the complex begins to work and the urge develops into a passion until, at last, it leads to questionable intimacy with her husband’s friend; a fact which indicates not so much a depravity of nature but a determination to have what she wants irrespective of the consequences involved.

By a curious irony the two persons with whom she comes in direct contact in her life offer unchecked opportunities for her nature to develop towards the inevitable end. She has no serious opposition, which, if equally determined, might have embittered her enough to make her a very genius of evil. But she has an easy time all along. She exploits her husband’s generously submissive nature and his friend’s feeble moral fibre. She bargains for self-importance with the sin of her life and pays heavily in remorse when the appalling gravity of her mistake confronts her in the slow death of her husband. She was a victim of her own nature, of the dangerous possibilities of which she was blissfully unaware until the curtain rose suddenly on the tragic consequences. The better parts of her nature are also amply illustrated in her relations with the other characters in the novel, particularly her quick understanding and sympathy, Her helpfulness and devoted affection to the suffering children of Venkappa’s household stand out in painful contrast to the selfishness and the overbearing nature of Vimala. Altogether Kusuma is an interesting study in character, the more interesting for its subtle combination of the good and the evil that works its own ruin.

If Kusuma was the victim of her own folly, Subbayya was the victim of his own generosity. A rare friend, an affectionate husband, an ideal father and a to conscientious worker in his profession, the least suspected infidelity of his wife literally kills him. He was too good of nature to suspect evil motives and intentions in those that were near and dear to him and whose happiness he regarded as his own. When we consider that it was his own wife to whom he had given his all, and his own friend who had received help in a hundred ways that deceived him, we feel that in the midst of human perversity goodness sometimes earns strangely ironical rewards. The way he yields to every whim and fancy and wish of his wife lest she should feel unhappy in his home; the way he helped Venkappa, often going out of his way and even when, latterly, Venkappa’s affairs could hardly be remedied by outside help; the way he helped Venkappa’s children and gave them a home–these are eloquent proof of the innate altruism of his heart. A nature so kind and feeling is the cream of cultured humanity. Venkappa was incapable of understanding him, even if he ever cared to understand him. At every step Subbayya was his guardian angel whose very beneficence should have taught him improve his ways instead of abusing a friend’s confidence. But the basic improvidence of his nature preventing him from thinking at all, he lets himself adrift dangerously into the life of his friend, and wrecks that friend’s happiness as well as his own. Not wise even after the event, he represents many that go through life without thought of the past or of the future, impervious to the manner they affect the life around. As such the two characters, Subbayya and Venkappa, through two types of passivity of afford to Kusuma’s jealous egoism a fertile field on which it throws its beautiful but tainted flowers. The three characters portrayed in minute detail thus evolve a story that is rich in its critical significance.

Readers of Karanth’s works may miss here the almost volcanic power of his Chomana Dudi, the trenchant social criticism of his Sooleya Samsara; they may not find here the grandeur and the mighty sleep of Marali Mannige or the concentrated artistic unity of Bettada Jeeva. But they will surely find here three different types of character minutely studied and posed in a vital conflict. More need not be said about the final significance of the novel than that the last words of Subbayya, so kind and yet so severe and sublime, constitute the deadliest indictment of the values represented by Kusuma and Venkappa. Thus the novel may even be regarded as a study of three different attitudes towards life. But this apart, can those who have read his earlier works fail to see here delineated yet another aspect of the devastating impact of modern ways of life upon the ancient patterns of simple rural living? Probably, that is the central theme of Karanth’s creative fiction.