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Just before reaching
Kabbinale from Hebri in Udupi’s Karkala taluk, a mud road branches off. It
climbs the foothills of Karnataka’s Western Ghats. Fallen trees and weeds cover
the road. All that is visible is a narrow pathway in the jungle that appears
like a divider on a well combed head. The ill-maintained road ends before a
small temple at Durga.
A family of Shivalli
brahmins own the temple. About two centuries ago one of the forefathers of the
Bayar brahmins of Durga, called Yogeshwara, left Barkur which was their original
home and made it to what is now called Yogeshwara Hill, just above Durga. He
fetched an idol of the family deity, Durga, from Barkur. Yogeshwara has about
200 descendent families today. Many live in distant Bangalore. Some stay in
America as doctors and software engineers. Now there are just two of their
households that remain in the forests.
One manages the
temple and the other lives at Sugethi in a homestead settlement just three
kilometres off Durga. Both brahmin households have paddy fields and arecanut and
coconut gardens. Semi-bonded labourers cultivate these lands for them today. The
Sugethi family has about twenty acres of land including six acres at not too
distant Nuji and the priest of Durga possesses ten.
Before the Bayars of
Barkur came to Durga, Sugethi and Nuji, these forests were peopled by Male
Kudiya adivasis and Billava shudra families.
Four kilometres
deeper into the forest and higher upon the hills from Durga is Mundane. Like so
many other adivasi settlements, Mundane has no road. In the midst of terraced
paddy fields stands a lone thatched mud house inhabited by the Male Kudiya
family of Bhoja Gowda. It has thirty six members, eighteen of whom are children
born off six couples. The eldest of the married men is Bhoja Gowda and the rest
of those married are his younger brothers.
Unlike the Bayar
brahmins of Durga, history unravels itself through living memory of the Mundane
Male Kudiyas and remnant oral lore. Bhoja Gowda’s grandfather was a tenant for
most of his life. He cultivated all the six acres at Nuji and remained landless
till he died. Male Kudiyas feel gut-deep that lands owned by the Bayars of
Barkur were former settlements of republican adivasis.
Bhoja Gowda’s grand
dad grew tired of cultivating the Nuji estate. Four decades ago he repaid his
loans and quit serving the brahmins for good.
The Bayars fetched
the Billava family of Ramappa Poojar from Bachchapu in the foot hills as their
new tenant. In 1975 anti-tenancy legislation was passed by the Karnataka
government and soon after that Ramappa became the new owner of the Nuji
settlement. But before long he died. As the Kannada proverb ran, the morsel in
his hands did not reach his mouth. His grieving widow preferred to return to
Bachchapu to live with her mother. And Nuji was left fallow without a happy
cultivator.
The joint family at
Mundane continued to swell. As Bhoja Gowda’s brothers were married there were
more and more mouths to feed. The paddy fields around the Mundane homestead were
simply too meagre. Bhoja Gowda thought of his grand father’s labours and that of
his predecessors. As the grand son of a former tenant, he eyed the fallow lands
of Nuji with the maximum desire a tenant could surmount.
He approached
Ramappa’s widow in order to buy Nuji in annual instalments and become the proud
owner of the settlement.
But the Bayars beat
the Male Kudiyas in the race. Before Bhoja Gowda could meet the Billava widow,
Keshava Bayar had purchased the six acres at Nuji for twenty thousand rupees
from her. Thus the brahmin descendants of Yogeshwara Bayar regained what they
had lost and they asserted from their tile-roofed villa in Sugethi that they
were landlords of Nuji as well.
But goddess Durga did
not bless Keshava Bayar well, or else the malevolent Bhootas of adivasi and
shudra lineage that live in her backyard had neutralised her spell. For more
than a decade Keshava Bayar has left Nuji fallow. His children are educated and
away. Nuji is a long trudge for his creaking bones and lone supervision. And
tenants are detested because they may deceive him any moment and stake their
claim. The untended coconut and arecanut trees planted by generations of Male
Kudiyas and Billavas shed their fruit each year. They rattle their fronds as the
winds blow, peering into the sky for a new future with their roots in a woeful
welter of weeds.
The Durga temple is
presided over by the goddess. As money and contributions have come, the priest
has extended the goddesses courtyard. It has a Brahmasthana with a Naga and also
shows off a Yaksha and a Yakshi. The Bayar descendants of Yogeshwara visit Durga
each year or they send their earthly offerings to the family deity from as far
away as the USA. The temple shows off new granite walls, a square enclosure and
tiles on the ground to aid the transcendence of the barefooted believers
ambulating round the sanctorum.
There is nothing
special about Durga and the daily and annual ritual that attends her in the
courtyard. It is the archetype of any divine brahmin spiritual abode.
But it is the
backyard of Durga Devi’s residence that really counts.
The backyard of the
temple has grass grown wild. At an edge and nearly merging with the mysterious
forest where the Male Kudiyas reside, are three mud huts for the Bhoothas.
Kallukuntige resides in one. Varthakallukuntige, the composite brother and elder
sister, stay in the second. And the third, like the crowded Mundane household,
has six Bhoothas: Maheshantaya,Duggalayya, Spatikanthaya, Panjurli, Domavathi
and Kuppanjurli.
Bhoothas are spirits
of peasant rebels of the middle-ages who were slain by brahmin and other upper
caste feudal lords. Each year their spirits are appeased after their
resurrection by individuals drawn basically from Billava, Male Kudiya and Dalit
families. Bhootha culture is essentially a shudra peasant tradition with little
room in it for brahmins.
More than fifty
adivasi families, and close to a hundred Billava families and other shudra caste
families come with sacrificial chicken to the annual fair at Durga. While the
brahmins try to steal the show as a Durga festival even by ignoring the blood in
the backyard, the shudras and adivasis see it as the grand occasion to
propitiate their Bhoothas.
In the backyard world
of the spirits which predates the courtyard world of the goddess, chicken are
sacrificed and Bhoothas are resurrected by kola dancers as late-comer
brahmins watch from the fringe. Some brahmins are so disturbed by the
malevolence of the adivasi-shudra spirits that they succumb to their power and
even sponsor plebeians to sacrifice chicken to appease the devils in their name.
It is only after the
worship, blood rites and kola dance of the resurrected rebel Bhoothas
that the focus of the festivities shifts to the respectable courtyard and the
brahmin priest sprinkles purificatory water and begins his ritual incantation.
Durga has an
enigmatic characteristic. Does it belong to the brahmin landlords who rule in
the courtyard or does it belong to the neglected backyard teeming with the
rebellious spirit of toiler shudras and adivasis who seek their stake in the
social order of things?
Alongside the worlds
of the tenants and landlords and beside the worlds of the Male Kudiyas and
Bayars is a divine courtyard for the respectable gods washed and worshipped each
day and a crowded backyard for the wild insurgent spirits that spring to vibrant
life each year one day.
As the kola
dance begins this year round, the chande beat will carry a Naxal cadence.
Will age-old tenants revive rebellion and tend the unattended gardens and fields
of Nuji and save society from further decay?
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