The first ladies of the Kannada Kadambari
Born in 1917 in Mysore, Kannada’s first woman humourist T Sunandamma’s delightful writings were first published in the legendary Kannada humour monthly, Koravanji, in 1942
On September 1 this year, an Instagram post by Anusha Kumar, a second-generation Indian American who had just received a PhD in clinical psychology on her late grandmother’s birthday, went viral on social media. Neither she nor her mother had ever known the grandmother, wrote Anusha, for she had passed away in 1963, at the age of 34, just nine days after childbirth. The post went viral because the grandmother she was referencing was the cult Kannada novelist Triveni, many of whose books, written in the 1950s, are a deep dive into the impact of family pressures, and sexual and financial exploitation in and outside marriage, on the mental health of women, long before such a thing was ever acknowledged, let alone discussed in public.
Triveni was born Anasuya Shankar on September 1, 1928, into a highly literary family. Her paternal uncle, the great BM Sri(kantaiah), was a pioneering writer and academic who set the course for the renaissance of Kannada literature in a modern, secular, accessible avatar in the early decades of the 20th century. Her aunt, MN Subbamma (pen-name Vani), was also a Kannada writer who would come into full flower around the same time as her niece.
Triveni’s first collection of short stories ‘Eradu Manassu’ (Two Minds) was published in 1950, when she was only 22. Over the next 12 years of her short life, while she herself struggled through successive miscarriages and resulting depression, ‘Kannada’s Jane Austen’ would write 21 hugely popular novels (among them were Belli Moda, Hannele Chiguridaaga, Hoovu Hannu, and Sharapanjara, which were posthumously made into blockbuster Kannada films by celebrated director Puttanna Kanagal), bringing women’s inner lives to the forefront of Kannada literature.
Well before Triveni’s searing stories, however, were the tongue-in-cheek, slice-of-life writings of Kannada’s first woman humourist. Born in 1917 into a wealthy family of Mysore, T Sunandamma’s delightful writings were first published in the legendary Kannada humour monthly, Koravanji, in 1942. The magazine ran for 25 years, and Sunandamma, who shared space with such greats as G P Rajarathnam and Na Kasturi, ruled the pages as the sole female voice for most of those years, garnering legions of fans, both male and female, in the process.
MK Indira, best known as the writer of the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Phaniyamma, the heart-wrenching true story of a child widow in an unrelentingly orthodox Karnataka village at the turn of the 20th century, was born in the same year as Sunandamma, but would not have her first novel published until 1963, the year of Triveni’s death. Indira was 45 that year; it was a chance meeting with Triveni, who had urged her to try her hand at a novel, that had led to Indira’s debut. Indira would go on to write over 50 novels, and become one of Karnataka’s most acclaimed novelists.
Of a later vintage, but equally popular as novelists, were Nalini Murthy (b 1937) and Usha Navaratnaram (b 1939). Both died relatively young – Nalini at 55, Usha at 61 – but otherwise had very different lives. An electrical engineer, Nalini got herself a Masters degree in Manchester and a PhD at Canada’s Nova Scotia Technical College, becoming the first female engineer to register with the Engineers Nova Scotia, before settling there with her family. She still found the time not only to write books demystifying science and maths for children but also heartwarming novels. Usha, fluent in French, worked as a teacher for over 30 years and was married to popular Kannada humorist Navaratnaram. Her romance novels, over 40 of them, were all the rage with women readers in the 70s and 80s, before television made passive couch potatoes of us all.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)