Bhat, Kamalakar  <br/><br/>
The timeless and the temporal: Literary mappings of western ghats 

 - Seminar: Cradle of Diversity    
 - 735, Nov, 2020: p.57-60 
<br/><br/> IN my youth, it gave me immense pleasure to go on top of the hill, ‘Kailasa Gudda’, in my village. At its top was a microwave station of the Indian Telephone department with its tall tower. The friendly station in-charge allowed us to climb on top of this tower which offered a panoramic view of the surroundings in all directions. Any visit by a friend or a relative was excuse enough for me to take off for the hill top, a pleasure I loved most because it afforded a fantastic view of waves and waves of unbroken greenery till they were lost in the misty horizons. I found an inexpressible delight in that majestic image of the ‘malenadu’ (Ghats region).<br/><br/>The emotional pleasure that I felt in thus looking at the endless vistas of nature’s green cover was as much personal as cultural. Because, inhabitants of the Western Ghats region owe their entire way of life to the peculiar milieu they live in. It impacts their sense of time, cycle of seasons, cuisine, sartorial preference, architecture and so on. Hence, it is no wonder that Western Ghats region has left a mark on the literature written by writers from the region. My interest in this essay is primarily to identify the patterns of representation of the Western Ghats in literary texts and to explore the transformations indicated by them.<br/><br/>Literary works since ancient times have given fascinating accounts of nature. We come across evidence for this in primitive artifacts in ancient epic narratives like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, in the Sanskrit heroic poetry and plays, Virgil’s eclogues, Ovid’s narrative poems, folk narratives, and right through the diverse literary traditions all over the world. Thus, the presence of ‘nature’ in literature is both ancient and cross-cultural.<br/><br/>Exploring representations of Western Ghats in literature is primarily interesting as a contribution towards a composite understanding of the cultural constructions of Western Ghats. Such an attempt would require to attend to diverse kinds of texts – literary, cinematic, scientific, ethnographic, sociological, legal, policy statements – in languages spoken in at least six states across which the Western Ghats are spread. Attending to a few literary works in Kannada, this essay will try to identify some of the established patterns.<br/><br/>My essay in fact attempts to retrieve from the many metonymic references in literary works to Western Ghats – to its forests, hills, valleys, rivers, waterfalls, animals, birds, flowers, plants, insects, etc. – a map of the ways in which man’s relationship with them is imagined. The image of Western Ghats thus constructed is based on the special place it has in human experience. The Western Ghats is not only a contiguous physical reality; it is also a place that man has tried to conquer and tame since a very long time – with both success and failure. Western Ghats have become the source of enrichment for human beings, contributing to, impacting and altering many aspects of their daily lives as well as their institutional practices like language, cuisine, rituals, economy, and so on. - Reproduced