KV Nayaka

This Grant was amicably cancelled based on reasons mutually agreed upon by the Grantee and IFA due to unavoidable circumstances.

KV Nayaka is an activist based in Vaichakoorahalli, Gauribidanur, Chikkaballapura district. He has experience working in Kotiganahalli Ramaiah’s organisation Aadima, for three years. In 2010 he started his own organisation Amasa Samskritika Kendra in his village Vaichakoorahalli. He is engaging the local community in creative art workshops to enable them to develop critical thinking. As a writer he has published articles and songs in Kannada.

Vidurashwatha, a village near Gauribidanur, carved a niche in the annals of national struggle for independence inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. On April 25, 1938 a shocking incident, similar to the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, took place here, killing thirty two people and injuring many in the indiscriminate firing resorted to by the police. The village thus came to be known as the Jallianwala Bagh of Karnataka. This tragic incident strengthened the struggle for independence in the princely state of Mysore.

Another incident happened in the same area years after in 1984. A village named Nagasandra, five kilometers away from Vidurashwatha, was completely under the control of a handful of landlords who owned about six hundred acres of land and the irrigation wells. According to the official records, surplus lands were distributed among dalits. But in reality these lands too were occupied by the landlords and dalits became their bonded labourers. There were 120 bonded labourers in the village. A drive for land rights helped these labourers to build Shambuka Nagara, a colony of their own in Nagasandra.

Nayaka’s project Putta Paadagala Nade – Nela Samskritiyede (Small Steps Towards Land and Culture) frames these two historical incidents as two different ways by which people establish their struggle for freedom. He will engage the ninth grade students at the High School section of the SSEA Government Pre-University College, in Gauribidanur in a variety of art activities such as singing, acting, drawing, writing, clay modelling, collage making and painting on the themes of the two struggles. Priority will be given to songs to explore their relationships with land and express them creatively in the Burrakatha - an oral storytelling form from Andhra Pradesh. His project also attempts to locate and involve people associated with the two historical events to interact with the students and teachers of the school. The project has a participatory approach which enables both the factual and fictional to help us understand history and communicate important societal issues. It allows individuals to express themselves in their own unique way.

As artist-facilitator, Nayaka will work with the students once or twice every week through the grant period. A public performance and publication from the students will be the outcome of the project. The deliverables from this project to IFA will be a copy of the publication, photographs and video documentation of the entire project.

This grant is made possible with support from Citi India.