Review of anthology The Sour Mango Tree

The Hindu

04-07-2025

It is intriguing that P. Lankesh (1935-2000), an iconoclastic modernist Kannada writer and public intellectual, showed little interest in making his works accessible to a wider audience through translation. Unlike his contemporaries U.R. Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad, who embraced global platforms and saw their works rendered into English, Lankesh, much like his kindred spirit K.P. Purnachandra Tejasvi, chose to be a local cosmopolitan.
Lankesh's life and writings, however, undeniably merit a wider reach. Thanks to Nataraj Huliyar and a group of excellent translators, the carefully selected and translated anthology, The Sour Mango Tree, makes for an ideal introduction to Lankesh's oeuvre. The collection features excerpts from his autobiography, Hulimavina Mara (The Sour Mango Tree), two plays, Giliyu Panjaradolilla (The Bird is not in the Cage) and Gunamukha (Recovery), besides select short fiction, prose, and poetry.
Lankesh was a politically committed writer who, more often than not, practised what the Greeks called parrhesia — telling truth to power structures. Apart from expressing his thoughts and worldview through works of art, Lankesh actively critiqued his era as the editor of Lankesh Patrike, a weekly tabloid, from 1980 until he died in 2000. The Patrike, a runaway success, became a platform for literary activism, fostering emerging voices such as Huliyar, Sara Aboobacker, B.T. Lalitha Naik, Vaidehi and Banu Mushtaq, among others. Its influence profoundly shaped the sensibilities of an entire generation.
Taking caste head-on
This anthology includes essays from Lankesh's acclaimed 'Teeke Tippani' (Comments and Notes) column penned for the magazine. Spanning politics, literature, sports, philosophy, and figures such as the Buddha and Ambedkar, these pieces shaped the political consciousness of readers while refashioning Kannada prose as a tool for social criticism.
Gandhi and Lohia indeed loom large in the unconscious of Lankesh's writerly life. One standout essay, 'Us and Them', translated with sensitivity by Lankesh's close associate Basavaraj Urs, offers a Gandhian perspective on the Ayodhya and Babri Masjid conflict, written two years before the mosque's demolition.
As a Lohiaite socialist, Lankesh grappled with the phenomenology of caste practices. His searing short story 'Muttisikondavaru' (The Touch) confronts untouchability, using illness as a metaphor — where physical affliction mirrors a deeper spiritual decay. Basalinga, a simpleton farmer, gets his ailing left eye operated on by Doctor Thimmappa, who is a Dalit. On learning about the doctor's caste, his mental ailments begin, tortured by the impurity of touch.
This story illustrates how caste practices deeply entrenched in Indian ethos become natural essence, overriding reason and rationality. Basalinga's troubled eye cannot see the doctor's expertise but his caste identity. Lankesh's framing of social ills as universal tales of the human condition, in which, he believed, man is inherently evil, reminds one of Saadat Hasan Manto, who transmuted the trauma of Partition into metaphysical irony and dark humour.
A female pseudonym too
The mastery of this framing is on full display in his play Gunamukha, a tour de force based on Persian emperor Nadir Shah's life in Delhi. The physical illness of the emperor becomes a lens for his mental torment, born of his hubris. When Nadir Shah summons Alavi, a hakim (healer), to treat his ailments, the healer diagnoses the root cause of his illness: the emperor's arrogance that renders him deaf to people's suffering.
The way Lankesh dramatises the exchanges between both characters, especially the last scene excerpted so well in this book, remains unmatched in modern Indian theatre. Though Gunamukha could not amass the power of performance in the national theatre, commanding stages like Delhi's Purana Qila, it is no less a classic than Karnad's Tughlaq.
Lankesh's prose further illuminates his brilliance, offering fresh perspectives on texts like Babur's Babarnama, Tejasvi's Carvalho, and writers, including Bertolt Brecht. His poetry, too, reads the world and literary classics differently. In one of three poems on Anna Karenina included here, he thus illuminates: Helen and Anna/ Karenina turned/ adultery into love/ shaped yearning into/ a basic emotion. His 'Neelu' poems, short poetic lines composed under a female pseudonym, are arguably naughty but aesthetically appealing and thoughtful.
While Lankesh's political outlook inspires us to be critical of our times, his literary corpus makes him one of the masters of Indian literature. His relevance, therefore, compels us to demand comprehensive translations of his works, particularly his autobiography, fiction and Gunamukha.
The reviewer, a NIF Translation fellow, teaches English literature at Tumkur University. His forthcoming book is a translation of D.R. Nagaraj's Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination.