Anything but a rambling fool: Remembering DVG

Vijayadashami on October 2nd coincides with the 50th anniversary of DVG's death, a renowned Kannada author and social reformer, celebrated for his legacy.

This year, Vijayadashami, which commemorates the victory of the Goddess after nine relentless nights of fighting the demon Mahishashura, falls on October 2nd, a date that every Indian schoolchild associates with Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. Very few children, or adults, know that in another day in the same week, October 7th, marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of an extraordinary individual who most Kannadigas would agree fits Shakespeare’s description of Julius Caesar – Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about. That man was author, poet, journalist, philosopher, social reformer, freedom fighter, mentor, relentless and insightful chronicler of his times, political commentator, and public intellectual Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa, known to his ardent fans simply as DVG.

Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa, known to his ardent fans simply as DVG. (Wikimedia commons)

Born in 1887 in Kolar’s Mulbagal, DVG was a most unlikely litterateur, having abandoned formal education after he flunked out of science, mathematics, and yes, even Kannada, in his matriculation exams. But you would never guess that if you scanned his prodigious literary oeuvre - 10 collections of poetry, 5 plays (one of them a translation of Macbeth), 7 biographies, among them the hugely popular one on his political and philosophical mentor Gopalakrishna Gokhale, in whose honour DVG founded the Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs in the city, collections of essays on spirituality, two books for children, and several treatises on ethical and inclusive politics and administration, both in English and Kannada (in which he famously opined that power without the fear of inquiry was like pickles without salt — the jar would soon turn into a can of worms).

Returning to Mulbagal six months later, he taught briefly at the local school, where he so impressed bureaucrat KP Puttanna Chetty (who was elected the first President of the Bangalore municipality in 1913), that he was immediately offered a job with the government.

DVG refused on principle; despite all the privations that his future entrepreneurial misadventures would inflict on him, he never took up a government job, believing it would cost him his independent voice as a citizen.

In 1907, DVG moved to Bangalore, where he earned a measure of admiration and notoriety in association with a Kannada newspaper, Suryodaya Prakashika. The newspaper was in dire straits; an editorial denouncing the diwan of Mysore, VP Madhava Rao, had attracted the ire of the chief secretary. DVG, who had been recently recruited, shot off a well-argued riposte to the secretary’s letter, which the newspaper carried.

With that was launched the 20-year-old’s prolific journalistic career. In 1913, he published the first issue of his own English newspaper, “The Karnataka”. DVG would go on to publish a dozen more highly respected newspapers and journals through his life, including the famous “Public Affairs”, all of which he used to disseminate Gokhale’s message of the importance of “spirituality in public life”.

In 1974, a year before his death, DVG received the Padma Bhushan. He never received the Jnanpith, which his fans believe he richly deserved. Unfortunately, he is also virtually unknown outside Karnataka, which is inexplicable for someone who wrote a great deal more in English than in Kannada. But DVG would not have cared, for he had left the world a luminous legacy — a collection of 945 pithy, hauntingly beautiful, heartbreakingly wise reflections on life and living called Mankuthimmana Kagga (The Fool’s Ramblings), which Kannadigas venerate and love to this day as the equivalent of the Kannada Bhagavad Gita.

(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)