The original Kannada novel Karya was published in 1988, and is inspired by true events.
After the death of Bangaravva, a virtuous woman, a solemn procession consisting of over a 100 people is performing her third-day karya (rite or ritual). As they walk resolutely towards the graveyard, a draft of wind hits the fire of the kullaggi (the sacred ritual fire made of cowdung cakes), due to which it falls to the ground. This is considered inauspicious, as according to custom, the fire should be carried by hand and never be placed on the ground. As a result, the ceremony is disrupted. A series of events ensue, leading to chaos and confusion. As the panchayat struggles to pronounce justice, the division between castes and communities comes to the fore.
In this powerful novella, Aravind Malagatti—a prominent Kannada poet and writer—unfurls the politics and power embedded within a Dalit community. Calling for urgent change in our casteist society, the poignant tale critiques religious customs and rituals. The book is also sprinkled with a number of superstitions, such as: the bereaved should not light the fire for three days after the burial; if one has a growth on the right side, his or her wealth will never dry out; and an ascetic is born after a thousand monkeys die.
The original Kannada novel Karya was published in 1988, and is inspired by true events. During the funeral of Malagatti’s grandmother in 1985, the kullaggi embers flared up into a blaze, and the person carrying it was forced to drop it. “The questions which started from there, in addition to the previous incidents and experiences, took the form of a candid realistic novel,” he writes in the Author’s Note. Since being published, Karya has been a textbook for some academic courses, and there have also been some critical writings on it.
Malagatti, who has published more than fifty books, including poetry, fiction and literary criticism, is a recipient of the prestigious Ambedkar Fellowship Award from the government of Karnataka. His autobiography, Government Brahmana, the first Dalit autobiography in Kannada, won the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award.
The book’s celebrated translator Susheela Punitha received the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award for English in 2015 for U R Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura. In the Translator’s Note, she explains that it was intimidating for her to tackle the regional variety of north Karnataka Kannada, with its mixture of expressions and sayings from Marathi and Urdu. “It was quite a challenge to transfer the flavour of the colloquial style to create the right ambience,” she writes.
Further, given the highly symbolic nature of the story, she had to use interpolations as scaffolding to interpret culture-specific rituals that point towards the deeper significance. It is heartening to see that in the rendition, she manages to capture the spirit of the original work without any gaps, while bringing indigenous words and the native dialogue structure to life in English.
