ರುಜುವಾತು

Let me use a traditional Indian home, my own home which I knew as a child, as a metaphor for Indian literature. My father and his friends frequented the front-yard which had a raised earthen platform under the country tiled roof. Caste was no bar here. It was a village, and the non-brahmin friends of my father who came to consult him for auspicious days for weddings, and other ceremonies, and, more frequently, to sort out land related litigations sat around him on colored mats on this raised platform. The very poor belonging to the same castes sat a step below under the platform, on a matless, but cowdung treated and well swept space. Father offered everyone pan and betelnuts and even tobacco to chew. This space in the frontyard, framed impressively by massive well-carved pillars was a place of authority, and cheerful and full of new tidings of the temporal world outside, as well as of the spiritual world beyond. On auspicious occasions, Puranic stories too were recited here by invited traditional story-tellers.