There is an influential idea called Vishwamanava - the universal human - as defined by Kuvempu (1904–1994), the Jnanpith-winning Kannada writer. If you grew up in Bangalore in the last quarter of the last century, as I did, it was almost impossible to miss. And yet, I can’t say I ever immersed myself in it directly, only dipped a finger into it.
My exposure was passive, ambient. It floated towards me as a child through speeches delivered by older people on local stages before amateur drama and other art competitions. I may even have heard people like H. Narasimhaiah, then Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore University and a noted rationalist, speak at one such event, for instance. It appeared scrawled on school notice boards, sometimes even those of the local Kannada Sahitya Koota. In movies. In fragments of poetry printed in textbooks I did not take seriously, memorising without understanding. On the radio talk shows because I used to fiddle around with a transistor. In newspapers and magazines, at barber shops and small libraries. These days, you still see Kuvempu’s images and statues around the city, but the world has other ideas to entertain and influence them.
It lingered in names. Chetan, Chethana, Aniket, echoes of poems I had heard as songs. A girl named Chethana sang one such song at morning assembly. I remember the melody more than the meaning.
On a recent visit, I noticed that the Central College campus of Bangalore University still carries the line: Aagu Nee Aniketana, be one without a fixed abode, or more generously, belong everywhere.
Kuvempu wrote extensively. I have read none of it in the original, nor in translation. And yet, I suspect I have been shaped by it, passively, like one is shaped by a climate rather than a text. It arrives indirectly, through stories, through public memory, through the afterlives of people documented in the new book I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India by Rollo Romig, some of the people in Rama Bima Soma by Srikar Raghavan, and through reflections by writers such as Ramachandra Guha in conversations on Amit Varma’s The Seen and the Unseen, about a generation whose ideas I may not remember directly, but whose echoes I seem to carry. A kind of trickle-down influence.
This may be how many of our moral compasses are formed. Not through rigorous reading or conscious alignment, but through repeated exposure to ideas that sediment over time. ‘Calibration’ may be too precise a word for something so unstable. Which is why people reach for firmer systems, religion, philosophy, mythology, ideology, communal identity, to steady what refuses to settle. Having religion agnostic parents helped.
And yet, there is something unsettling about Vishwamanava itself. The idea of becoming universal, of belonging everywhere, emerges from a very particular linguistic, cultural, and regional context. It asks you to transcend rootedness, even as it is taught to you through the most local of forms: a language, a classroom, a morning assembly. To be without a fixed abode is not the same as being free of place. If anything, it reveals how deeply a place has already worked on you.
The reason I am thinking about this now is because a friend asked me to lead a “Kerala to Dubai via Bombay” walk about Keralites in the city. Malayalam is my mother tongue, though I can neither read nor write it (even though it seasons my accent rather heavily). The thought of identifying with a language, religion, state, country, caste, or community sits uneasily with me. (I understand that’s a privilege in India.)
Perhaps that is why I remain a follower of a book or idea I have not read. Not out of total conviction, but because its ideas seem to have reached me anyway, through voices, names, places, and fragments I barely paid attention to at the time. Enough to shape something, though I still hesitate to claim it as my own.
