IN MANY WAYS, Gauri remained the same over the years: warm, stubborn, angry, fun. People who knew her best when she was younger described her as a party girl, a typical English-language journalist with no knowledge of and little interest in Kannada, concerned about injustice but not particularly political. Those who knew her best in her final years described her as almost ascetic and consumed with politics. She still hosted parties, but usually only when an out-of-state activist was visiting and she wanted to give friends and colleagues an opportunity to meet them. As Shivasundar likes to put it, she made a conscious choice to move ‘from comfort zone to conflict zone.’
There’s a two-part anecdote that several people recounted to me as emblematic of how much Gauri had changed. In 2003, she was travelling with a group of activists, and when they stopped for the night, she insisted on having her own private room, and she wouldn’t even let anyone else use her toilet. She had always valued her privacy and was fastidious about hygiene, but her travel companions were baffled by her fussiness.
In 2016, she was on another trip with activists, and this time she invited anyone who needed it to share her space and use her toilet. Accompanying the group were a number of tribal women; unaccustomed to Western-style toilets, they made a huge mess. Gauri was completely unfazed and cleaned the toilet herself. ‘You may have the right ideology, but you need to learn physically to share things, to share inconvenience, to travel in very ordinary transport,’ Sreedhara told me. ‘Sleepless nights. No restrooms. These things temper you. And that is exactly what tempered Gauri.’
One distinct change that many old friends noted in Gauri was a pronounced Kannada chauvinism. She’d taken to the language and its culture with the passion of a convert, and her career in Kannada writing happened to coincide with a surging Kannada pride movement. There’s a certain paradox about Kannada: it’s an indisputably important language that has long suffered an inferiority complex. Kannada has ten times as many native speakers as Norwegian and a rich literary tradition stretching back a thousand years; lines by Kannada poets have infiltrated everyday expressions so fully that Kannadigas spend their days reciting timeless verse without being consciously aware of it. Yet Bangaloreans have twice been indoctrinated with the absurd idea that English, not Kannada, is the language of important ideas: first by the British, then by the tech industry. Kannada speakers are now a minority in Karnataka’s capital city.
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The moments when Gauri established her papers happened to be high points of passionate Kannada nationalism—both fuelled by the zealous fans of the most beloved of all Kannadigas, ‘emperor of actors,’ the movie megastar known as Rajkumar.
In July 2000, just months after Gauri took over her father’s paper, came the most dramatic news imaginable: Rajkumar, aged seventy-one, had been kidnapped by the most notorious criminal in South India. The kidnapper was Veerappan, an itinerant sandalwood and ivory poacher with an unforgettably elaborate moustache who’d been eluding police for decades and killing anyone who might aid in his capture. Veerappan had a sideline in kidnapping celebrities for ransom and other demands—often related to Tamil nationalism. His abductee, Rajkumar, was the very personification of a rival Kannada nationalism: he had acted in nearly a quarter of all the Kannada-language films ever made, vowing never to act in a film in another language, and he had led the movement to make Kannada the compulsory language of primary education in Karnataka. There had long been tensions between Tamil speakers and Kannada speakers in Karnataka, over resources, languages, and much else. Veerappan’s kidnapping of Rajkumar distilled this conflict into one climactic battle between two superheroes and fuelled Kannada nationalism as no incident ever had.
The news brought Bangalore to a halt. Rajkumar’s fans insisted on a total citywide strike in recognition of the gravity of the moment and attacked the non-compliant. The Kannada film industry swore not to shoot or project a single frame until he was released, which finally happened after a hundred and eight days. This whole saga unfolded during the first year that Gauri edited her father’s newspaper. Then, in 2006—a year after she launched her own paper—Rajkumar died, again shutting down Bangalore for days and inspiring another resurgence of Kannada nationalism. That same year, the name of the city was officially changed to Bengaluru, its Kannada name. Kannada activists vandalised signs that didn’t include their language.
The Kannada-language tabloid newspapers, Gauri’s included, often stoked this activism. (In 2004, Gauri’s rival editor Agni Sreedhar, the exgangster, even founded a Kannada chauvinist organisation called Karunada Sene, which demanded that Kannada be spoken in public places, that only Kannada movies be screened in Karnataka theatres, and that Kannada-speaking job seekers be given hiring preference; he seems to have mellowed on these demands in the years since.) ‘Language,’ Gauri wrote in one editorial, ‘is life itself, because in it lies our identity, our history, our traditions, our culture, our very soul.’ She offered a smart example: Karnataka schoolchildren who are taught in English all learn the nursery rhyme ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, little Johnny wants to play’—a sentiment tailored to English weather conditions. But children taught in Kannada sing, ‘Huyyo, huyyo, maleraya, baale totakke neerilla,’ which Gauri translated as ‘Rain, please pour and pound the earth, there is no water in our banana plantation’—a rhyme, she noted, that ‘tells us that ours is an agrarian society, that we depend on rains and that banana is grown here.’
To write in an Indian regional language is to immerse yourself in the ground realities of the place you’re writing in. If you write in English, you can imagine that your audience is anyone who’s been educated in a particular way, regardless of where they’re from. It’s an amorphous, vague, rootless audience. If you write in a regional language, you know exactly whom you’re writing for and whom you’re not writing for. The activist Yogendra Yadav notes that both Gauri and her father invoked a secularism that was culturally rooted in Karnataka and articulated in idiomatic Kannada. ‘The Sangh Parivar fears this most,’ he wrote, ‘as this form of secularism cannot be brushed aside as deracinated, westernised intellectualism.’
This excerpt from Rollo Romig’s ‘I Am on the Hit List’ has been published with permission from Westland Books.