July 6, 2011
 
Monappa lay inert in his deathbed. Tired of waiting for him to give up his ghost, his wife, Parvati, and her brood of five went about their chores around the house. Parvati, busy cooking in the kitchen, heard her husband coughing and rushed to his bedside. He beckoned her to come close to him. She bent down over him a he lay on a Spartan mat. He spoke in a feeble voice. "Our four children born first are fair and handsome. How come our last, Ramesh, is dark and ugly?"
 
It was a bolt from the blue for Parvati and she got dumbstruck for an answer. Using all his ebbing strength, Monappa came straight to the point. "Who fathered Ramesh? If you tell me the truth, I will forgive you and die in peace."
 
Parvati knew that these were the last moments of her husband. The promise of forgiveness for her and the prospect of peace to his soul called for a confession and she said: "Ramesh is your child but…" At this point, before she could complete the sentence, Monappa’s head jerked to the left and he stopped breathing.
 
Savitri’s unfinished confession would have said that her first four children were sired not by her husband and naming paternity for them would have been difficult in the social and geographical ambience of Tulunadu. The creation of Tulunadu is steeped in legend. Its original name is Parashurama Kshetra – Parashurama’s domain. How did this come about? Parashurama’s mother went out to bring water from the well in a mud pot. As she was returning with the pot balanced on her head, she seems to have lost concentration and the pot fell to the ground and splintered.
 
Her husband suspected that she had been lusting for another man. He ordered his minions to behead her for her sin. They defied his authority and refused to do his bidding. When his son, Parashurama (Rama of the axe) returned home, his father ordered him to behead his mother. Parashurama didn’t stop to ask why, but obeyed his father. Later he repented his act and became remorseful. Angry with himself, he threw his axe, the murder weapon, into the sea west of the Ghats. The sea didn’t want to swallow and hide the murder weapon. Instead, it receded westwards and the resulting landmass became Parashurama Kshetra, and later Tulunadu (land of Tuluvas).
 
The rural setting of Tulunadu, before land reforms, was marked by the dominance of high caste, arrogant landed gentry and low caste, docile labourers, depending on the former for their thatched hovels and farm work. The community customs dictated that no brother could marry till his eligible sisters were settled in marriage. Monappa’s sister, Suguna, might have had virtues but no looks, with squint eyes and one shorter leg. By the time she was paired to a lame groom, Monappa was past forty, more than twice the normal marriage age for men. Yet, he managed to net Parvati, a fair damsel of twenty years. She was the talk of the village and lusty landlords planned their moves to bed her. They were known for their sexual promiscuity and straying beyond their wedded wives, keeping concubines, mistresses and ensnaring young damsels for casual liaisons. Their own wives were voiceless and had to suffer silently the deviant behaviour of their errant husbands. If the couple went out together, the wife had to walk five feet behind her husband. She cannot eat unless her husband ate first, even if he returned from a cock-fight past midnight. She could not utter his name and when census people came, she would point to the pictures of the deities on the wall for the visitors to decide if it was Rama, Laxhmana or Krishna – the favourite names among high caste landlords.
 
Once a target for a sexual liaison was fixed, the landlord had his devices of consummating the deal. The most credible and safe way was to send the husband on an errand, such as bringing fertilizers, to the town five km away and involved four hours of walking. Though the husband is not   sexually virile or active, he would demand a session so that he, already exhausted from his trip to the town, can get instant sleep. That helped in getting over the paternity problems! But, apparently the stronger genes of high caste landlords prevailed in the foetus.
 
Many of these liaisons between landlords and helpless wives of labourers took place in the deserted forests and groves that mark Tulunadu’s rural landscape. But not all of these sessions went unseen by peeping toms who knew the terrain and the goings-on there. One such was Narnappa, the toddy tapper. He had to climb palmyra (palm) trees, negotiating their rounded trunks of up to 15 metres, to reach the crown where he tapped the sap (toddy) and collected in mud pots. From this height, Narnappa had a vantage aerial view of what was happening within a radius of one kilometre.
 
And sometimes Narnappa saw more than sexual liaisons between the mighty and lowly. In one instance, he saw a fight between a cobra and mongoose at the base of the palm tree he was on. After some violent struggle, the mongoose succeeded in tearing open the stomach of the cobra and ate its heart and liver. It seemed that the cobra was dead. The next move by the mongoose was to pluck some leaves from a nearby bush and apply them to the cobra’s wound. In an instant the cobra came alive and slithered away.
 
With his discovery, Narnappa went home with fistful of leaves from the bush and called out his wife. Before she could gather her wits, Narnappa cut her into two with an axe. Then he applied the leaves to the cut wounds and instantly his wife came alive.
 
Excited by the discovery and the power it would give him, Narnappa told his wife to cut him with the axe. As an obedient wife she did as she was bid and was shocked to see her bleeding husband dying. Narnappa had forgotten to tell his wife about the healing leaves and her role in reviving him after the deed. In retrospect, not only Narnappa died, but humanity lost forever the undiscovered miraculous healing leaves.
 
Into this village came Hector Johnson from his district town to set up his farm house where he planned to settle down after his retirement from the Army. An Anglo-Indian, Hector was a Roman Catholic and a bachelor. He looked forward to peaceful fading away in a village setting and working for the uplift of the villagers. Studying their situation he realized that what dragged them down was their uncontrolled breeding, not knowing the multiple men syndrome behind it. He often repeated to himself a modified two-liner of an American economist:

Indians have dirty habits,
They breed like fertile rabbits.
 
On retirement as a Colonel, Hector sold his town house and went to live in his farm house full time. His heart was set on controlling the reckless breeding. He had a handicap to deliver on his mission. There was a communication hurdle between him and his target group. He did not know the local Kannada and Tulu whereas the villagers did not know English. So, with the help of a translator, Hector argued that with more mouths to feed they would become poorer and undernourished. The way out, he said, is to practice abstinence and keep away from sex. There was a chorus of protest at this suggestion. They countered that each mouth to feed comes with two hands to toil and earn its bread. They argued that sex was part and parcel of life and bonded men and women as also perpetuated mankind.
 
Making no headway with the villagers, Hector went back to his parish priest in town for guidance. As a devout Roman Catholic, condoms, pills and abortion were taboo for him. But, the priest said, natural method of family planning was acceptable for Catholics. Hector got made a stock of rosaries of 30 red and green beads (15 each) and distributed them among the village women. The green sector was for the safe period when sex could be had without the risk of conception and the red sector represented the fertile period when sex should be avoided to prevent the risk of conception.
 
This time around, Hector had no translator to help him and he directly explained the significance of the two colours with reference to the monthly cycle. He had learnt that it was kempu for red and hasuru for green in the local language. In the meetings he held in the village he confused the two terms and noted hasuru for the unsafe period and kempu for the safe period. In the months ahead, there were unprecedented number of unexpected pregnancies in the village. Hector realized his linguistic misadventure. Afraid of facing the wrath of the villagers and unable to stand their taunts, Hector liquidated his farm house in a hurry and headed back to the town to lick his wounds.
 
Sitting in his town house, Hector ruminated on his wholly forgettable village misadventure. Then he recalled a similar story of linguistic misadventure often related in the Officers’ Mess - also involving military men. In the later half of 18th century, the British had many military engagements with Mysore’s Muslim rulers, Hyder Ali and his son, Tippu Sultan. The British recruited Christians from Tulunadu as mercenaries. The British officer who had to train and command them did not know Konkani (language of Tulunadu Catholics) and the recruits did not know English. To solve the problem, the British selected a better educated person from the Christian brigade and evolved a system wherein the selected person would instantly translate the commands into Konkani.
 
The day of the confrontation between the two armies (British and Tippu’s) arrived. While the opposing armies faced each other, the British officer shouted his command: "Cast your swords and charge" and looked at his translater for the Konkani rendition, which turned out to be: " Tumchi kasti sodn davya " (Shed your langot – kasti - and run). They promptly turned round and ran, to the consternation of the British officer and amusement and relief of Tippu’s army. Whether it was a genuine misunderstanding of English, deliberate mischief, or cowardice about confronting the enemy army has since been hotly debated in military mess bars.
 
What mischief language can land us in is well reflected in the following lines from Tempest by William Shakespeare, English dramatist and poet (1564-1616):

You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
 

John B Monteiro, author and journalist, is editor of his website www.welcometoreson.com (Interactive Cerebral Challenger) - provisioned for instant response.

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