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.

As a child I got to know of the affairs of the world in the men dominated frontyard of the house. My father, a self-taught man, literate in English, Sanskrit and Kannada, and therefore, an unusual and frequently sought out scholar in the hilly villages around, spoke enthusiastically of the freedom struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi to the villagers. And they gossiped about the new officers and told the same stories again and again of officers of Government whom they admired for efficiency and generosity. On auspicious days I remember some elder or the other who came as a guest to our house describing the glories of the Dussera festival in Mysore, or reading Mahabharata, sonorously, choosing an interesting episode from it.

There were only men in the frontyard, and if women came at all, they were taken inside, a cool dark hall, which was the center of the house and hence called 'nadumane'. If the women were brahmin, they went further inside the house, which was the place for family dining. If the nadumane had colored bamboo mats spread on its cow-dung swept smooth floor, the family dining space, more private, had wooden planks to sit on. Adjoining this was the most private place of all, the kitchen, which had a niche for the household gods where an oil lamp burned day and night. Only my mother had entry into this space; even my father could go there only when he had removed his every day shirt, and had bathed. Next to the dining hall was a big bath room and a work place, to which servants could come. After that was the backyard, the most magical space for me. Had I not frequented it and eavesdropped on the gossips there, I would never have become a writer.

Into the backyard came women, women of the villages either to draw water from the well, or just to talk to my mother, or get a gift of the left-over of some special food which my mother would give them unasked. These used to be gracious moments of kindness and friendship and exchange of courtesies between women. The woman would say politely "no", but my mother would talk her out and say, "not for you but your child". And much more took place in the backyard, after such civilized courtesies. I should add here a significant detail: my mother was ritually more orthodox than my father, who drank coffee in hotels in the town.

The caste barriers were forgotten among women and they would exchange secrets of their sexual life, the everyday sorrows of complicated relationships between men and women, and bodily aches and pains that never got cured and never could be shared with the men folk.

The world of frontyard and the world of backyard were such different worlds. Not only was the backyard the secret world of women. Mother cooked deliciously smelling foods from herbs and leaves that grew under the uncared for bushes in the backyard. Only my mother knew them by their names; and every small thing that grew had a name which has never entered the learned dictionaries in my language. My grandfather also often ventured into the backyard and collected roots and leaves of plants as medicine for the sick in the village. It was taboo to reveal their names; they were effective only if they were kept a secret. He used to assure me as a child that he would pass on the secret knowledge to me when I grew up. But alas, I grew up to be a different kind of person because the influence of my father's frontyard ultimately made me modern and I finished my education which began in the frontyard of my traditional home, but continued into the great frontyard of our modern civilization, England and America.

The Indian literatures in our bhashas too have a frontyard and a backyard. Let me digress a little on why I use the word 'Bhasha'. It is usual to call the Indian languages vernaculars. I find it insulting to use the word 'vernacular'. The word has all the features of another insulting word, 'ethnic'. Such words are used by imperialists in a condescending manner. Nor am I happy with the word, 'regional language'. Aren't all languages of the world regional, in the first instance, and they grow to be 'international' because of imperialist political expansion? Even the word 'dialect', is of doubtful usability, for if a dialect has an army and a 'national poet', it becomes a language.

Which is the frontyard of our bhashas? Let me take the example of my own language, Kannada. The first great poet in my language, Pampa, had for his model, literature in Sanskrit. As he was a great poet, he did not imitate the model but improvised on it a great deal. I would say that Sanskrit literature of pan Indian fame and importance was Pampa's frontyard but he was aware of a secret backyard, fragrant and fertile and unused. These were the innumerable indigenous oral folk traditions in the language. This is what we may call the 'Desi'. The classics in Sanskrit constitute the 'Marga', the royal highway.

I am using Pampa's own words, Desi and Marga. His genius lay in the sensitive and telling combinations he made of Marga and Desi- not just for aesthetic structuring; it had implications for the treatment of his themes as well. The universal truths celebrated in Sanskrit literature were not only given a "local habitation and a name", but they became pulsatingly alive in Kannada, cohabiting with the folk imagination. The two worlds of the front and the back have ever since been meeting creatively in our literary works. The back-yard is inexhaustible. As literacy spreads and more and more people emerge into the frontyard of our civilization they bring their own richness, as memories, and desire to integrate with the mainstream of world literature.

The backyard which still is the world of women, shudras, the secret therapeutic herbs, and roots and tendrils for new tastes keeps literature in the bhashas continuously supplied with new themes and treatments. Sanskrit, as a language has no backyard of its own; it has had to yield place to the bhashas in the backyards for the continuity of its spiritual substance. English in England has always had its backyard: in Ireland, or in Africa, or West Indies, or India-- and at one time it was America. Now in our bhashas we have a frontyard of our own classical literature, the literature in Sanskrit, which the late Ramanujan was fond of calling father-tongue. What dominate the goings on in the frontyard of our lives are not just these two only. There is the presence of the powerful language, English- the language of our modernity. But none of these have any power by themselves; as a matter of fact, they are impotent if they fail to cohabit with the world of the backyard.

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Literature in the bhashas have also constituted themselves as literary traditions and when they do so they are in search of their own specific royal high way. The royal high way is meant for meta-narratives, which can vie with the classical Sanskrit tradition. One can imagine what happens to its own backyard then. The linguistic sub-cultures are sought to be undermined then in a hegemonic relation to the accepted and honored royal path. Yet they can only be undermined but not destroyed. When the royal path becomes pompous and loud and artificially rhetorical and, therefore, a voice of public emotion only it loses the flexibility and truthfulness and earthiness of the common speech. It is at such moments of cultural crisis that the traditions in the backyard make a come-back and revitalize the language. This is what Wordsworth, Blake and Hopkins have done to the English language in their own country, and in our country the saint poets like Tukaram, Basava, Nanak and Kabir have done it with much greater consequence for our culture. The Shudras and women were empowered by the great saint poets of India. No one can talk about literature in the Indian bhashas without recognizing its intimate relationship with larger political and cultural questions.

I hesitate to write any further on this for I will have to launch on the disastrous consequences to our cultural heritage of a lively dialectical tension between Marga and Desi, if the senselessly greedy globalization were to succeed. Without a living civilizations of pluralities of languages, cultures,civilizations and religions, and even of food and dress habits we will cease to be authentically local, and meaningfully universal. Do our languages, which transacted with a vibrant creativity our rootedness in a tradition with the widening branches of the outside world, have a chance to continue to mould our children's lives vitally and usefully, as in the past? Could any country truly globalize without wiping out the inconvenient pluralities?
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This is a question we ask ourselves with a profound sense of anxiety. The elitist Brahmins and neo-brahmins are being tempted by the Corporate World of Globalisation, and people, who are supposed to be born into the Kula of Shri Krishna have begun to rule us as rude barbarians. And the so-called 'Sons of the soil' are only too eager to sign MOUs which threaten to deplete our fertile backyard.

And there is no place either for a leisurely frontyard, or for a dark and fertile backyard in the concrete jungles which we inhabit today.

U.R.ANANTHA MURTHY