On October 7th, the Kannada humour magazine ‘Aparanji’ will celebrate its 40th birthday, an extraordinary feat for any print publication in the digital age, let alone one dedicated to humour. Through the years, this little independent monthly has held its own against media giants, discovering, nurturing and platforming a gamut of unknown voices, turning them into familiar, beloved names among the Kannada reading public. Its dedicated editor, who not only contributes extensively to the magazine but has overseen every single issue since its inception save for the first eight months, is engineer-entrepreneur M Shivakumar, affectionately called ‘Aparanji Shivu’.
The Kannada humour magazine Aparanji is set to celebrate its 40th birthday on October 7. (Mint Archive)
Shivu was about the age Aparanji is now when he took over the editorship of a magazine that had, in some sense, been bequeathed to him. For Aparanji is only the newer version of an even older, much-celebrated, pioneering humour magazine called Koravanji, founded by Shivu’s father, Dr M Shivaram, who wrote under the pseudonym Raashi. Perhaps aptly, Koravanji was born in March 1942, during World War II, when there wasn’t a lot to joke about.
Raashi’s own funny bone was whetted by his friend and mentor, the great TP Kailasam, whom Kannadigas know for his unconventional plays and literary criticism. Kailasam’s work was revolutionary in its rejection of extravagant mythologicals as the only kind of Kannada theatre possible – his plays were tongue-in-cheek contemporary social commentaries that first shocked and then delighted audiences. Like many other Kannada writers, Kailasam wrote with as much felicity in English as in Kannada.
Cycling down the streets of Cantonment after work at his very busy clinic in Majestic – in his other life, Raashi was a popular and much-loved doctor – on his way home to Malleswaram, Raashi often caught up with Kailasam for long chats about this and that. One of their favourite topics of discussion was the British humour magazine, Punch. In fact, it was Punch that inspired Raashi to start a similar magazine in Kannada. In this endeavour, the young doctor found a wonderful collaborator in journalist, writer and academic, Prof Na(rayana) Kasturi, who was then teaching in Mysore.
During Koravanji’s early days, Na Kasturi contributed as many laugh-a-minute pieces – jokes, skits, social satire, limericks, and his unique Anarthakosha (anti-dictionary), which involved hilarious definitions of common words – as Raashi himself. He also brought in a young, artistically inclined student of his at Maharaja’s College, who had taken up a BA there after he had been rejected by Bombay’s JJ School of Art, to provide the occasional cartoons and illustrations. The student’s name was R K Laxman.
Over the next 25 years, Koravanji (Kannada for a female fortune-teller of Karnataka’s nomadic Korava tribe) went on to build a loyal community of readers and humour writers, including such luminaries as T Sunandamma, Sriranga (Adya Rangacharya), Kefa (AV Keshava Murthy), A Ra Se (AR Sethurama Rao), GP Rajaratnam, Dasharathi Dikshit, AK Ramanujan, and occasionally, Dr Shivarama Karanth himself. The language of the magazine was colloquial and informal, an organic mix of Kannada and English, and the satire sharp, but the humour was always ‘clean’, which gave Koravanji a very special place in the Kannada literary firmament.
In 1967, citing a lack of funds, Raashi sent Koravanji ‘back to the forest’. In 1983, as he lay ailing in bed, A Ra Se came to visit Raashi, and urged him to allow him to bring Koravanji back. Raashi assented, but requested that the magazine be renamed ‘Aparanji’ instead. Eight months later, soon after Raashi had passed, his son Shivakumar took on the editorial mantle. To this day, the iconic magazine, now also available online at aparanjimag.in, is put together in the very same house in Malleswaram that Raashi built.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a long-time love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
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