‘Teru': Sahitya Akademi-winning Kannada novel questions uncritical acceptance of religious ritualism

Scroll.in

27-04-2025

BR Ambedkar tersely stated that all civilised or uncivilised religions try to portray two essential features: historicity and provision of psychological comfort (to the banal–episodic hysteria). These are then portrayed as a philosophy of religion, though the fundamental essence of what constitutes philosophy differs from the above-foregrounded portrayal. One crucial element that embodies any religion is the category of myth.
In the words of Wendy Doniger, a myth is a story that many people believe, although they know it is untrue. The essence of a myth is veiled, and therefore, people ignore it or cannot comprehend it. Thus, myths with the additives of rituals help attain a balance between the individual and society. In a Machiavellian sense, they are enablers for an individual/group to establish their hegemony using this power of philosophy to maintain social order using the masculine idea of strength.
Symbolism, mysticism, mythicism, spirituality, ritualism, religiosity, and philosophy are the way of life for the people of India. Their agency of experiencing and following their religious philosophy is attached to practising rituals and a staunch belief in these myths without questioning the institutions that propagate them, symbols, or the proclaimed/traditional/imposed authorities. This complexity and the dialectics of various tenets of layered religion are attempted to be dissected in the unique postmodern yet nativist literary work of Raghavendra Patil in his Sahitya Akademi award-winning Kannada novel, Teru.
Locating Teru's genealogy
Teru, in English, means chariot. The image of a chariot generates a Rashomon effect if we think of it in the lexicon of religious philosophy. In the Buddhist pantheon, it symbolises the wheel of Dhamma: progress and continuity. The Hindu pantheon invokes the idea of war, evident in the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The image undergoes diffraction of qualified meanings as one moves across the period, along with mythology, pragmatic history, or the realm of mythical history.
The novel's staging happens in the Belagavi region, the northwestern part of Karnataka, bordering the state of Maharashtra. Though the novel's core spatiality is the village of Dharamanatti, the events portrayed also cover the area around the rivers of Malaprabha, Ghataprabha, and Krishna. The novel covers the period of Peshwa rule till the years beyond the Emergency. It tells the reader about two social systems: Brahmanical feudalism in pre-independence India and resuscitated feudalism in post-independent, democratic India. The main participants in this novel are the individual, family, and society.
Lastly, one can think aloud on these lines and answer how these can be rethought to arrive at the idea of a nation. In these delineated contours, Patil tells the reader the generational saga of the Killikyata family, of low-caste people who practice the profession of puppetry. It begins in the Peshwa period and follows patrilineal descent. Though the story revolves around a family, it is an alternate saga of the metamorphosis of parochiality embedded in social morality.
Peshwai feudalism and the manufacturing of the myth
The caste feudalism under the tutelage of the Peshwas and its Brahmanical agents, in the name of Vitthala of Pandharpur, initiated a chariot festival using the mask of devotion and spirituality. The ritual performance is a core arrangement to ensure the institution of Peshwai feudalism that thrives on the blood of the low caste(s). The systemic feudal–caste discourse(s) nurture economic undemocracy, as societal status decides the degree of the freedom of an individual to choose her livelihood. This Killikyata family thrives on the orthodox piety of this feudal order and is lured by the 'ought to be assigned dignity' and forthcoming 'bestowed generational holiness.'
This deal is offered for their (low-caste) son's sacrifice knavishly by this patriarchal feudal system by using the architectonics of gendered-caste in its utmost subtlety. Thus, one sees how an institutional method of madness using the cloak of philosophised-spiritualised ritualism in the name of religion is created. This then turns into a mythical saga expected to be confirmed by future generations using the communitarian force that is Leviathan and lends a death blow to the freedom, choice, and individuality of a being, succumbing her to bend to this socio-religious force.
To evoke Dr Ambedkar again, religion, with its rational-enlightened philosophy (expected), should cater to the person and not vice versa. But, in the story, the philosophy of religion manufactured to cater to certain classes of society fails the rational–humane person. The psychological percolation of this subtle hegemonic philosophical indoctrination normalises the banality of evil. Without any interrogation of the rituals that have been traditionally imposed or asked to be followed, in the force of brutal sanctified dogmas, the idea of love is lost. This happens in the democratic post-independent setup; the now contemporary Killikyata (I am deliberately using the caste name as the Brahmanic reduction of a person to her caste persists in democratic India, too) is unable to marry a Dombara caste girl against the dogmatic-set caste norms due to the primacy of religious ritualism over the person's love.
Here, essence triumphs over existence as communitarian-caste ethos thrives over a person's love. The idea of love, having lost in the tangible realm of this undemocratic, philosophical-ritualised world, the Killikyata person's individuality ultimately tries to find her liberation in the metaphysical realm in the service of excluded people, i.e., leprosy patients, with whom the defeated proponent of love may have found a resemblance to a certain degree of marginalisation.
The novel has humongous scopes in terms of literary aesthetics, the deployment of the force of regional language, the multiple narratives, the dialectical play of their reliability-unreliability, the many nations formed on the denominators of gender, religion, caste, region, etc., but one thing that we can be sure of is the melancholy a reader shall feel when they finish reading it. Rare are the instances where a profoundly religious or spiritual person laments over the triumph of religion over a mundane person who lost her love. Again, one cannot help but ponder what Dr Ambedkar said, 'A just society is that society in which an ascending sense of reverence and a descending sense of contempt are dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society.'
In this light, how do we rekindle this lost love or compassion? Can we reclaim that love and compassion again? We need to answer these questions ourselves; this is what Teru compels the readers to do.