There are no protagonists without minor characters. It’s only against the shifting backdrop of minor characters that a protagonist attains prominent individuality. Too flat a treatment of minor characters risks flattening the protagonist as well, while too nuanced a portrait of minor characters takes up narrative space that the protagonist should claim.

Alex Wolloch’s study of this ancient tension lets me characterise Chandan Gowda’s Another India: Events, Memories, People as an exploration of the open set of minor characters that make up cultural identities in modern Karnataka, displacing the protagonist that is India.

This book comprises essays that complement this open-endedness. True to the origins of the genre among early modern Europeans whose encounters with the New World led Montaigne to realise how European identities were only as accidental and provincial as those of the foreigners they encountered, these essays are tentative in spirit, openly dependent on the author’s personal encounters with books, authors, actors, farmers, and films, and free of the dogmatic closure of any one ideological commitment. As with Montaigne, the profundity of some of their arguments never compromises the clarity of their prose.

“People without a stereotype,” says the opening essay, reflecting on the absence of a national stereotype about a cultural identity for Karnataka. It reads this ambivalently as summoning “unease and a sense of failure”, conveying a lack of power for those who wish to mark their presence in India’s repertoire of sub-regional languages,” but also as “a delicious freedom”. The rest of the book exploits this freedom to foreground what are mostly Kannada-language writers, film directors, actors, and even barbers as minor characters whose complexity has enabled a protagonist we glimpse in the background: an Indian federation owing its cultural pluralism to regional traditions of non-atheist socialism.

This, then, is the ethical stake that implicitly or explicitly threads the essays together: a commitment to taking religion seriously as a site of collective moral imagination, of inter-generationally produced images of virtue that, on the interpretation of the intellectuals, saints and artists Gowda focuses on, may orient and nuance distributive justice.

In contrast to the Marxist Sanskritist D.D. Kosambi (1907-66), who tried to shoehorn the Carvakas, ancient Indian materialist philosophers, into his conception of them as proto-Marxist materialists, the villagers, artists, and authors in Gowda’s essays effortlessly come across as indigenous socialists, whether or not they claim this label.

A selective conspectus of Gowda’s themes should bring out its thematic variety and argumentative richness: we read of the recent waning of “animals as moral actors” in Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada cinema, “an impoverishment of worldview;” of the Kannada film star Rajkumar as “a custodian of Kannada morality” who “moves smoothly across both modernity and tradition” in his films set in the present; of how the great Kannada poet Kuvempu’s humanist critique of community identities as limiting led him to propose a new model of low-cost marriage that crossed caste and religious lines, avoiding dowry, bride-price and horoscopes; of Karnataka’s women Sufi saints and their dargahs that are open to all; of the 19th century Kannadiga Sufi Shishunala Sharif’s trans-communitarian piety; the debate in the early 2000s Kannada press over Kuvempu’s alleged exclusion of Madhvacharya, the 13th century dualist Vedantin philosopher from Karnataka, from his hymn to Karnataka because Madhvacharya deemed Shudras and women unworthy or incapable of spiritual liberation; of the folklorist and Dalit leader Siddalingaiah’s initial disapproval of and eventual affection for the eccentric intimacy between villagers and their village deities; of Jayaprakash Narayan’s innovative socialist ideal of a non-violent and multi-part “total revolution;” of the trans-communitarian lyricism of the Kannada poet Nissar Ahmed; of the farmer Narayana Reddy’s successful adoption of the Japanese natural farmer Fukuoka’s methods from the latter’s One Straw Revolution...

To resume my opening metaphor, Karnataka thus comes across as a large realist novel made up wholly of morally particular minor characters, ranging in their moods from scholarly sobriety to folkloric hilarity and lyricism; and commanding genres that include political theory, poetry, folklore, theatre, journalism, cinema, and farming philosophy. That this cast of minor characters includes North Indian socialists like J.P. Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia signals the openness to socialism that has distinguished the history of the old Mysore State from the Marxism that was prominent in Andhra Pradesh and the Ambedkarism prominent in Maharashtra. But Gail Omvedt who made this observation in 1994 also wrote: “Lohiaism, then, did not come to Karnataka as an ideology of full-scale Dalit liberation but rather as a reformist trend which was in some ways compatible with the liberal co-optation patterns that had been established in the ‘Ram-raj’ atmosphere of the state."

Omvedt might have critiqued Gowda’s book by arguing that the absence of a stereotyped Karnataka identity and the region’s openness to plural moral-religious visions are mutually complementary aspects of the same assimilationist and reformist rather than radical political culture. But let me conclude by proposing another frame of reference.

Philosophical discussion of ethics has distinguished between deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. Whereas deontological ethics prescribes rules for moral behaviour and consequentialism assesses actions by their moral consequences, virtue ethics concerns itself with moral states of being as ends in themselves.

Gowda’s book is a contribution to virtue ethics and, as such, an implicit response to Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. MacIntyre argues that the abandonment of Aristotelian ethics during the European Enlightenment was the abandonment of teleological ethics, of a collective consensus on where and how we want to end up by the practice of virtue. He opposed the individualist or subjective ethics that arose in its place by calling for a return to Aristotle’s model of community ethics oriented towards collective happiness. The many overlapping moral visions in Gowda’s essays present small-scale and internally heterogeneous socialism as a collective ethical goal.

These essays’ explorations of virtue ethics are distinguished by their recognition that virtue is more effectively taught and learned by stories about human individuals than by prescription (deontological ethics) or means-end reasoning (consequentialist ethics). Hence, the salience of personalities in these essays: Raj Kumar, Puneeth Rajkumar, Kuvempu, Siddalingiah, Ela Bhatt, Sara Aboobacker, and others. Each embodies her or his virtues because of their narrative frames: the films they act in, the novels or stories or plays they write and Gowda’s own anecdotes about them. Virtue ethics that depend on narrative for its illocutionary force also depends on people who recognise its language (here Kannada, English, Hindi) and poetic conventions (here vacanas, a Sanskrit encyclopedia, folklore, theatre, Puranas, cinema...) – in other words, an interpretive community. Karnataka is here an open set of interpretive communities, each purveyed to us by its morally eccentric minor character.

The value of this emphasis on narrative modes for virtue ethics is that it avoids oppressive, top-down, state-led projects that characterise deontological ethics (Plato’s Republic, Manu’s Manusmṛiti, the Shar‘ia), leaving emulation up to the reader or listener and keeping space open for small-scale experimentation, relativism and humane openness to error. Whence the importance of humour to the Dalit intellectuals Siddalingiah and to Gowda’s essays on them, humour that expresses, not the failure of reformist projects, but the impossibility of such an all-encompassing ethical project in the first place; and the necessity for ethical pluralism.

In India, as elsewhere, the political ascendancy of fascist nationalism has been catastrophic for everyday ethics. This book offers reprieve to those of us not hypnotised by spectacles of nationalism, letting us turn from its glare towards the gentler lights of Karnataka’s many small-scale forays into socialist virtue ethics.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

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