Living with rebels

What does it mean to grow up in a family that is liberal, outspoken, and non-conformist? Renowned filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh tells Deccan Herald the story of her creatively restless father P Lankesh, firebrand sister Gauri, and equanimous mother Indira:

Here are some excerpts:

Something changed at the turn of the 21st century. When my father P Lankesh died of a heart attack in January 2000, he was facing four court cases after two decades of running ‘Lankesh Patrike’.

The Kannada weekly ran without ads, shook governments, satirised politicians, and nurtured new writers and intellectuals. A scuffle once broke out in front of his Basavanagudi office when he wrote against legendary actor Rajkumar fans’ association.

Appa, as we called him, calmly called the protesters inside and spoke to them.

In September 2017, the year she was shot dead, my sister Gauri was facing 80 cases. She had been single, a voice against Hindu extremism, and a beacon of rationalism. Powerful people had been going all out to thwart her.

Until Gauri’s killing, I was just a bystander to politics. But I started attending farmers’ rallies and anti-Citizenship Amendment Act demonstrations to show solidarity with the causes Gauri believed in. Filmmaking was and remains my passion, and the documentary ‘Gauri’ on my sister’s contribution to journalism and human rights is my latest work.

Does the resistance run in our family? Does it all stem from my father, a Gandhian-Lohiaite who taught English, wrote poetry, plays and fiction, translated classics into Kannada, and produced and directed films? Or, is the Lankesh legacy a sum of us all?

‘Couldn’t suffer fools’

In our growing-up years, our father did not care if we had new clothes for our birthdays and festivals. He did not know which class Gauri, my brother Indrajit and I were studying in when guests asked. He signed our report cards without looking at how much we had scored.

When we became financially a little stable — we stayed for 20 years in a rented, asbestos sheet house that was unbearably hot in the summer and leaked all through the monsoon, he would happily give us blank cheques to buy books from Premier Book Shop, just off Church Street.

Sidney Sheldon, P G Wodehouse, T S Eliot, Ismat Chughtai, Khushwant Singh, U R Ananthamurthy and Poornachandra Tejaswi — we read them all. Gauri and I must have gifted Manto’s work on the Partition, ‘Mottled Dawn’, to at least 50 people in our circle.

Appa would also send me to Church Street to rent VHS cassettes of international movies. Movie outings were common but if the film was boring, he would walk out and insist we follow.

He was also a stickler for punctuality. Result? Once my mother had to gain a backdoor
entry to his play and I had to hear an earful for picking him late from a horse-racing venue.

In 1989, when the tabloid was thriving and avidly read across Karnataka, he launched Pragathiranga, a party with its moorings in socialism. It was a disaster. He wanted to be in the system to set things right but he was neither diplomatic nor canny. We have borne the brunt of his undiplomatic side, but Gauri knew better!

Lankesh wasn’t anti-social but he liked intelligent company and abhorred hogalu bhattaru (flatterers).

I remember him making a minister wait for hours while he spoke to a farmer. After Ramakrishna Hegde became the chief minister, he brought a bouquet for Appa because the tabloid had supported his campaign. My father refused to take it, and warned him, “From now on, I will be keeping an eye on you”. Once, a man spotted us in Lalbagh and said, “Sir, you are so bold and famous, shouldn’t you walk with a bodyguard?” Appa found the idea ridiculous.

When he was unwell, gangster-turned-writer Agni Shridhar wrote a cover story in his tabloid about my father and brought it to the hospital. Do you want to read what he has written, I asked after Shridhar left. “Throw it out. I don’t need to know who I am or what his opinion is,” he thundered.

For him, work was work and had to be done with honesty and self-respect. Such were his principles that he asked someone else to review my first feature film ‘Deveeri’ (1999), based on his novel ‘Akka’. Thankfully, in some other context, he had mentioned watching the film and said, “Her film would make everybody envious.” I was elated. Any praise coming from him was high praise.

Outside, Appa was bold and brave, outspoken, a no-nonsense man. But inside the house, he was afraid even to change a light bulb or face a dog. When we moved to Banashankari from Gandhi Bazaar, a mongoose slunk into the house. We panicked, and all my father did was throw a big fat encyclopedia at it from a safe distance!

House of inspiration

Our house was a bit of a commune for those engaged in activism, arts and culture. My father named my first cocker spaniel ‘Picasso’! His morning would start with a coffee with actor and English professor G K Govinda Rao. Intellectuals like Ki Ram Nagaraj, Dr Srinivasa Gowda, ‘Shudra’ Srinivas, Basavaraj Urs, Ramdas and others dropped by frequently.

As a kid, I would pretend-teach ‘ABCD’ to professor-writer K Marulasiddappa and ‘beat’ him. I would jokingly call actor C R Simha a tiger (because Simha means lion, and I wanted a variation!). We would visit writer Poornachandra Tejaswi’s house in Mudigere once in a while.

I grew attached to Vimala Naidu, who acted in my father’s National Award-winning film ‘Pallavi’ (1976). Actress Sudha Belawadi’s mother Bhargavi Narayan would be the first to greet my father on his birthday. I was infatuated with actor Anant Nag and would hang out on the sets when I was all of 13 and Appa was making ‘Anuroopa’, his second film. Playwright Girish Karnad would get his props readied in the tiny space opposite our house. In ‘Oedipus’, a play my father directed, Gauri and I had to hug Girish Karnad on stage and that was our acting debut! Much embarrassment followed as Dr Rajkumar, who was sitting in the audience, visited the green room after the show and we were in our petticoats!

There was no pressure to mingle with the illustrious or to match up to our father. I would browse through ‘Lankesh Patrike’ for its film articles. Indrajit would read the sports columns and Gauri liked articles on politics and rationalism. Gauri and I also loved the ‘Nimmi’ and ‘Neelu’ columns on love and life. Everybody thought they were written by a woman but, in fact, Appa ghost-wrote them!

Discussions about films pulled me and Indrajit into the world of cinema, while Gauri chose journalism. Was our father happy with the choices we made? We don’t know. He was never judgemental. He never questioned our choices.

Mom’s reality check

But idealism doesn’t pay bills, my mother Indira will tell you. Until ‘Lankesh Patrike’ took off — success stories included readers travelling 40 km from Haveri to get a copy — our financial situation was far from comfortable. Once, my mother refused to cook because we hadn’t cleared the accounts at a grocery shop for two months. That day, Appa went out and sold a gold ring to pay the bills. Gauri and I remember the hardships more, because my brother was a bit young then.

Everything paled in front of my father’s passions. He sold his father’s house in Shivamogga to fund his film ‘Pallavi’ and my mother would cook for a crew of 25 every day. When he quit as an English lecturer at Bangalore University, my mother started selling saris from an almirah in the house to pay our fees and put food on the table. The business grew and she opened a shop in Gandhi Bazaar called Mayura Silks and Sarees. Appa then borrowed money from friends and strangers to start ‘Lankesh Patrike’. He paid his writers the highest. He was one of the few editors who hired journalists with no degree or prior experience. He encouraged several ordinary women to write who went on to become reputed writers.

My father was not wise with money, and neither was Gauri. I am more practical, like my mother. I budget my films down to a tee. Yes, money is important but it shouldn’t be pursued at the cost of ideals, our parents inculcated in us. And so, before the pandemic, I rejected an offer to make a comedy film with a budget of Rs 2 crore. The jokes were poor in taste and didn’t sound funny to me at all.

My father, I was told, would send money to a woman from the Lambani community near his village in Shivamogga till his last breath. He had been a sickly child and she had looked after him long, long ago.

Amma taught us financial freedom. We were not great in academics, so she sent us to learn typing. She used to say it would fetch us some job, and we would never have to depend on a man.

Gauri my best friend

Life is painfully lonely without Gauri. We were different. She was a late-night person, I am an early riser. She barely cooked, I cooked and packed her food.

But we were also similar in some ways. Gauri was three years older but people often confused us one for the other. Recently, a group of transgender women recalled how Gauri would run to the police station even in the middle of the night when they were harassed. You remind us of Gauri amma, they said. I broke down. This has happened many times over the years.

Like my father, Gauri always championed equality and social justice. Once a domestic worker received her salary from my mother with humbly cupped hands and Gauri objected, saying, “We are not giving you bhikshe (alms). You have worked hard for this money. Take it proudly.”

Gauri brokered peace when fights broke out in the family but she could also be a rebel. When she opted out of a career in medicine, my mother thought she should at least marry a doctor and invited a potential groom home. Gauri got wind of it and cut her long hair to a crop, thinking he would reject her. He still liked her and Gauri had to tell him she was in love with someone else. Of course, I was privy to all her plans.

Gauri rarely disagreed with our father. She idolised him and adored him. But one day, when he fought with our mother, Gauri asked him to move out of the house. They did not speak for a while.

Being a liberal family, we learnt to speak our minds but also to respect our differences. Being older or younger did not matter. Gauri and my daughter Esha had started a family WhatsApp group called ‘The Feathers of Mayuri’. It was fine for a while as we shared jokes and photos but when Gauri started putting up serious political posts, we objected saying there was no need for children to be involved in all this. Everybody exited the group except for Gauri and Esha. In hindsight, I realise young children should be politically aware as that makes them grow up to be thinking, secular citizens.

While narrating fairy tales to Esha, Gauri would reimagine Cinderella as an independent girl — a photographer one day, a writer the next. She would also read to her the life story of activist Irom Sharmila, and books on wildlife.

I think 2000 was the year Gauri was reborn. She left the grind of daily news in Delhi and returned to Bengaluru to take charge of the tabloid after Appa’s passing. She later launched her own ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’, immersing in grassroots journalism and people’s movements.

This strong-willed woman, just over five feet in height, once escaped the police eye and hitched a lorry ride to a protest in Chikkamagaluru. That was how her activism began, with a rally for communal harmony at Bababudan Giri. The obsessively clean woman had no problem cleaning toilets while campaigning in rural areas. She was educated in English, but polished her Kannada and became the firebrand our father was. Because she spoke out against injustice, inequality and corruption, she was hated by those in authority, but loved by the people whose causes she espoused.

So when the police asked me to call only close family for Gauri’s burial, I looked behind, saw a sea of her supporters and could not choose. From Teesta Setalvad to Jignesh Mevani and Shivasundar, I don’t know how similar or different their family struggles are from ours but they are united in the belief that they can fight against all odds, and we draw strength from that.

Tolerance: Then and now

We knew outspokenness was an exception, not a norm in families. So we knew when to speak up and when to keep quiet in the outside world. Even within our family, we were different. ‘You have the right to your opinion. But that is yours, not mine’ — that was my father’s maxim to deal with squabbles within the family.

Appa would stand outside the temple as my mother visited temples, more for its serenity and architecture, I suspect, than for anything else. Though we are not a religious family, we respect all religions. We would celebrate Christmas at my place, and
Ganesh Chaturthi at Indrajit’s house. Gauri would invite family and friends over for Ramzan.

During my father’s time, we never feared for our lives or asked him to tone down. Our political ideologies weren’t radicalised on the lines of caste or religion back then. But I just wasn’t able to tweet for a whole year after Gauri’s killing. The sounds of a dog barking or bike zipping by would terrify us after her brutal assassination.

Mental fatigue has set in, but Gauri used to wake up, pinning her hopes on Esha and her generation. And I see Esha heading that way. She is interested in sociology and has already written articles on manual scavenging, transgender people and her aunt Gauri. The Lankesh legacy is as much hers as every citizen’s.

At the end of it all, I believe cacophony is better than silence. At Gauri’s samadhi, we have inscribed an epithet: ‘She is planted, not buried, here’. That is a thought that gives us hope and inspiration.

(As told to DH)