‘Karnataka has historically been a multilingual, plural, multicultural society’ Premium

“Here too, there was this volley of power changes where every new generation is, at once, an enemy and a friend to their predecessor,” he says. Additionally, it also helped him look at writers, activists and politicians through this “web of interconnections where you are not immediately passing ethical judgments, but able to see them as they’re responding to other movements of their own time,” says Raghavan of the book, which was supported by the New India Foundation Fellowship and was published by Westland in 2024.

Rama Bhima Soma, a game with no winners or losers, becomes an interesting metaphor for democracy in Srikar Raghavan’s book by the same name, which attempts to unpack the social, political and cultural histories of modern Karnataka in an original way.

Raghavan, an independent writer and researcher based out of Mysuru, explains that the game, which is known by many different names, requires only a ball and has no fixed number of players, teams, designated boundaries or premeditations. This way, “every guy gets the chance to be king (hold the ball), but it is always temporary,” he says, drawing a parallel between this game and Karnataka’s literary and political movements.

“Here too, there was this volley of power changes where every new generation is, at once, an enemy and a friend to their predecessor,” he says. Additionally, it also helped him look at writers, activists and politicians through this “web of interconnections where you are not immediately passing ethical judgments, but able to see them as they’re responding to other movements of their own time,” says Raghavan of the book, which was supported by the New India Foundation Fellowship and was published by Westland in 2024.