Assessment: Bride within the Hills | A Kuvempu magnum opus for the English reader

Celebrated Kannada author Okay.V. Puttappa (1904-94), identified by his pen title Kuvempu, continues to stay a fantastic literary determine akin to Rabindranath Tagore within the Kannada cultural creativeness. His monumental novel Malegalalli Madumagalu (1967) re-enters the world by way of the palms of veteran translator Vanamala Viswanatha as Bride within the Hills. It was preceded by an earlier try as Bride within the Wet Mountains (2020) by Okay.M. Srinivasa Gowda and G.Okay. Srikanta Murthy.

Within the Afterword to this new translation, distinguished Kannada author Devanoora Mahadeva hails it because the novel of the century. Mahadeva’s statement not solely testifies this work’s affect on his sensibilities as a author but additionally its achievement as a literary basic. Like a gradual masterpiece, this work with frequent reprints goes on incomes extra readership. It has been profitable as a play on stage and has been made right into a TV sequence, in addition to readers revisiting it as pilgrimage.

Earlier than finishing the novel in 1967, Kuvempu’s prolific output throughout genres — together with one other nice novel Kanuru Heggadati (1936), later translated into English by B.C. Ramachandra Sharma and Padma Sharma as The Home of Kanooru (2000), and the epic Shri Ramayana Darshanam (1949) — should have sharpened his literary ambitions.

Struggles of younger folks

Set within the late Nineteenth-century Western Ghats, a area of dense forests teeming with animals, birds, and various communities, Bride within the Hills explores the lives of bizarre of us “distant from the grand mainstream of the historic stream of civilisation”. Nevertheless, colonial modernity later enters this lifeworld with a bicycle, Christian missionaries and faculties.

Gutthi, an untouchable bonded servant, units forth to carry his lady-love, Thimmi, who was speculated to marry the person her zamindar ordered. Refusing to be mere pawns within the palms of social energy constructions, Gutthi and Thimmi elope. The story, very similar to a stream on the Sahyadri, is joined by completely different lives brimming with wishes and despairs.

Whereas the orthodox mindset refuses to see Gutthi and Thimmi as human beings, not to mention take into account their love, the Vokkaliga younger man, Mukundayya, too should swim towards a special set of social currents to wed Chinnamma, whose marriage is organized with an ailing Heggade, a lot towards her will. In fact, there aren’t any qualms a few zamindar getting on with a concubine, as occurs within the case of Devayya and Kaveri, however the courtship of younger folks is a wrestle.

Translator Vanamala Viswanatha

Within the spirit of the unique

This novel with out a hero is an exemplary work of social realism. The narrator not solely supplies a stable description of objects, folks and their customs with an anthropologist’s eye for element but additionally feedback on social practices. The novel’s skill to immerse readers in its cultural world, greater than its exploration of a society’s ethical cloth, makes it a novel murals. The extraordinary literary expertise of Kuvempu turns documentary realism into rasanubhava, an aesthetic expertise. The tempo of the narrative transfers the Joycean motion of most characters, particularly Gutthi’s rhythmic errands along with his canine Huliya, to readers.

Of all of the portraits within the novel, it’s the subaltern characters — Gutthi, Aita, Pinchalu, Akkani and Pijina — who win our hearts in tune with the novel’s epigraph: ‘Nobody is unimportant/ Nothing is insignificant’. The title of the novel, which opens a perspective for eco-feminist readings, connotes the complicated play of ardour and need in a man-woman relationship, explored towards the backdrop of jungle life greater than the social perform of a bride. Learn in a selected manner, even a widow occupies the topic place of a bride, thus making it ‘brides within the hills’.

Whereas a big a part of Kuvempu’s works awaits translation, early English renderings of his two novels — The Home of Kanooru and Bride within the Wet Mountains — don’t appear to have made him attain a wider viewers. One has to attend and see how Vanamala Viswanatha’s deservingly glorious translation fares within the literary sphere.

Most of all, Viswanatha must be congratulated on this colossal work, formed by her artistic selections in transferring the Kannada ethos to English readers. Certainly, it’s tough to do full justice to a piece that breathes the spirit of regional nuances. Although classics invite a number of translations, Viswanatha’s confidence in selecting an already translated work shouldn’t be underestimated.

The reviewer teaches English literature at Tumkur College. His translation of D.R. Nagaraj’s Allamaprabhu and the Shaiva Creativeness will quickly be printed.

Bride within the Hills

Kuvempu, trs Vanamala Viswanatha

Penguin

₹799

Revealed – August 01, 2025 07:01 am IST