Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

About the BookCULTURAL ENQUIRY AND LITERARY EXPLORATION, A HISTORY OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENTSTHIS IS A COMPLEX, NUANCED AND OPEN-MINDED INVESTIGATION INTO MODERN KARNATAKA.Karnataka is one of Indias most diverse states, as rich in literary and cultural traditions as it is in democratic struggles and political churns. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of a modern Kannada renaissance, accompanied by the emergence of a powerful social conscience. One young mans desire to explore this vibrant historical backyard, born out of a feeling of being linguistically unmoored, compounded by worries over an increasingly opaque political direction, leads to an ambitiousno, audaciousattempt to unpack the regions social and cultural histories.Rama Bhima Soma is an enterprise of translation and rediscovery, packed with stories and conversations. The life and times of legends like Kuvempu and Shivaram Karanth; the fall of Socialism and the rise of the Hindu Right; the intellectual ruminations of U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi; the wildly popular television serials of T.N. Seetharam and the community-centred one-woman theatre shows of Du Saraswathi; a brief history of Naxalism in Karnataka and glimpses of other complicated legacies of the 1970s Leftthe book explores a dizzyingly wide sweep of Karnatakas contemporary history, seeking, above all, to forge new connections and begin fresh conversations.Marshalling a diverse range of literary and scholarly resources, framed through biographical sketches and immersive reportage, Srikar Raghavans genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction reanimates some pivotal moments in the making of modern Karnataka. The result is a sizzling dish of ideas rescued from the deep freeze of historical amnesia. About the AuthorBorn in Bangalore and brought up in Mysore, Srikar wrote this book while living in a small village named Parkala in South Canara. Something of that inward trajectory has permeated these pages, he believes. An inveterate bookworm, Srikar fancies himself more of a reader than a writer. He also loves to trek, travel and fiddle around on a guitar.