![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/rama-bhima-soma-1230x692.png\")
Frustrated efforts to pin down one of India’s most diverse states
\n\n\n\nAs one of the most diverse states in India, Karnataka boasts linguistic and geographic variety, a long history of sociopolitical movements that struggle at the grassroots level and a progressive social history that birthed, to give the best-known example, the anti-caste Bhakti movement. However, within India’s present cultural and political narrative, my home state seems to hide in the wings. Save for industry news from the country’s IT capital Bengaluru (also capital of the state), and electoral drama, most recently evidenced by its overwhelming rejection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva politics in the 2023 state elections, it’s not often that news about Karnataka travels to the national level. Therefore, any book that aims to investigate Karnataka’s cultural present is of particular interest, especially because of the dearth of such works in English. However, Srikar Raghavan’s debut is far from being the ‘genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction’ it claims to be. Disappointingly clumsy, lacking nuance and depth in its arguments, it is a haphazard collection of the top dozen issues that have affected life in Karnataka during the last century.
\n\n\n\nThe title of the book comes from an eponymous boyhood game: a person with a ball in their hand hurls it at another person who tries to dodge it, and whoever ends up catching the ball then hurls it at someone else, and so on. Raghavan connects this, rather unconvincingly, to Karnataka’s sociopolitical sphere, a world of opposites and contradictions, and into this weaves an account of growing up in a privileged, upper-caste family and grappling with his political self in college. He blends literary history and reportage with interviews and personality sketches for the purpose of ‘thematic diversity rather than comprehensive detail’.
\n\n\n\nThis profusion of themes begins with a long chapter on Marga versus Desi, categories in Indian art and aesthetics that, to put it very simplistically, distinguish between classical and folk, or the canonical and the regional. Raghavan’s analyses of this debate goes from introducing the work of literary scholars like D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi to a baffling comparison of the films of Kannada language actor Dr. Rajkumar, considered a cultural icon, with those of Upendra, a contemporary actor-director whose works have been both critically acclaimed and panned for their unusual visual language. The following chapters look into the rise and fall of socialism in Karnataka, literary movements like the dalit-bandaya during the 1970s, conservation activism in the state’s Western Ghats, trade-union politics, a Marxist library in the city of Mysuru, communal issues in the town of Chikmagalur and in the novels of S.L. Bhyrappa, one of the most popular writers in the language with a rightwing political view, and the Naxal movement.
\n\n\n\nIt is no doubt an interesting set of ideas, and Raghavan has clearly accumulated a vast bibliography and many interviews. But very early on in the book it feels like his research gets in the way; instead of aiding a deeper understanding of the topic he is writing about, it all becomes either a list of who he has read, or a series of opinions he has borrowed from his interviewees rather than forming his own. While Raghavan seems somewhat more confident in chapters that foreground literature, there too his various takes lack any real personal engagement or an understanding of the Kannada language and Karnataka beyond the rarefied world of urban city centres. It becomes increasingly hard to take the author seriously when, for instance, he likens the writer Kumbara Veerabhadrappa (popularly called KumVee) to the Humvee. Or when he attends a talk by the leading playwright H.S. Shivaprakash speaking about the continued relevance of Kuvempu (who is to Kannada what Shakespeare is to English) and dismisses the former’s opinions as sentimentality brought on by old age, writing, ‘… the grand old man of Kannada theatre reminiscing about other older (and therefore grander) men’, without seeming to understand the contemporality of Kuvempu’s works. Or when he insists on calling the coastal Karnataka district ‘South Canara’ (a colonial term and regional demarcation that included parts that are now in Kerala) instead of Dakshina Kannada, the name of the present district with slightly different geographical boundaries. Such questionable choices make it impossible to root for what had the potential to be an important scholarly work. Instead this is an account of predominantly male, mostly upper-caste contributions to Kannada literature, rather than a holistic understanding of the state and the many worlds it contains.
\n\n\n\nRama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka by Srikar Raghavan, Context, Rs 899 (hardcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the Spring 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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