FAR away from New Delhi, where decisions about Indian culture are becoming increasingly centralised, there is a relatively unknown village called Heggoddu in the Shimoga district of Karnataka. Secluded amidst paddy fields and the area's hut plantations, this village is perhaps best known for an institution called Ninasam, which administers a theatre school, a repertory company, a film society, and a workshop unit that has spread theatre and film culture to all nineteen districts of Karnataka.

Judging from these statistics, Heggoddu would not seem to be a promising site for a theatre group to flourish, still less to inspire a cultural movement throughout Karnataka. Even K V Subbanna, the modest visionary who has been the guiding spirit of Ninasam since its inception, is surprised by the scale and momentum of the institution's activities. And yet, if one had to analyze Subbanna's supreme organizational abilities, enhanced through socialist principles of work and production, one could learn how it is still possible in India to "serve" people through our culture.

At this point, it is necessary to stress that there is no romanticization of rural life in Subbanna's vision. He simply accepts the village as a place of work, which also happens to be his birthplace. The soil, and the trees are not merely images to him; they determine his very survival as an agriculturist (his family profession). His acceptance of the village as the dominant social milieu of his life has undeniably strengthened his attitude to grassroots' activity. It has also prevented Ninasam from becoming another Santiniketan, an eternalized vision of a harmonious life, so rhapsodically envisioned by Tagore, only to corrode into the rotting bureaucracy that it has become today.

Despite the obvious idealism that has inspired Ninasam's creation, it is not a dream world, an artificial refuge self-consciously created to resist the vulgarity of our times. Its value lies in its activity, not in its aura of humanism or proximity to nature. Once again, I repeat, Ninasam is a place of work.

What kind of work? For the most part Ninasam focuses on theatre work implemented through the training of fifteen students a year at the Ninasam Theatre Institute, and concretized through the productions of Ninasam Tirugata, an itinerant repertory company that has performed in all nineteen districts of Karnataka. Before these units were created, Ninasam was an amateur theatre company. Originally named after the local deity, the Sri Nikanteshwara Natyaseva Sangha (of which Ninasam is the present acronym) was made up of a rather conservative group of actors, who did not share Subbanna's taste for realistic drama.

Even after independence, "company drama" (as popularized by the famous Gubbi Theatre) continued to be the model for most theatre people. In this respect, it is significant to note that the IPTA movement did not extend to Karnataka. Consequently, while the Bengali theatre was staging European classics in the realist tradition after the landmark success of Nabanna, Subbanna's group in the late 40s was still doing D L Roy's Shah Jahan.

Two important Kannadigas stimulated the growth of Ninasam's early activities. One was B V Karanth, who staged two children's plays, Panjarashale and Heddayana, shortly after he had graduated from the National School of Drama. The other important visitor was Ramakrishna Hegde, who had visited the high school at Heggoddu in 1971, while he was the finance minister in the Congress government. Whatever Hegde's political limitations may be, one cannot deny that he has been a warm and generous supporter of the arts.

Purely at the level of organization, Tirugata must be hailed as one of the most dynamic ventures in the contemporary Indian theatre. At a time when most urban theatre groups have yet to perform in a small town or village, when they are unable to reach different communities even within their own cities, it is encouraging to know how Tirugata has been able to reach so many people. It is hard to say what is more impressive: the fact that an average of 756 spectators watched each show in Tirugata's second season of plays or the even more unbelievable fact that there is actually a theatre organization in India that keeps records of its ongoing history. These records include a detailed breakdown of shows in each district, the number of performances, the size of the audiences, the ratio of rural to urban spectators (3:1), responses collected through questionnaires and reviews (not just by the critics, but by the spectators as well, who participated in a special "review contest" of Tirugata's productions, sponsored by a local magazine).

The organization is all the more impressive when one considers the hazards involved in staging a repertoire of lays in vastly different performance spaces. During the first tour, which provided a testing ground for conditions of theatre work, Tirugata discovered that out of 62 spaces, only three had fully equipped stages. More often than not, the actors had to work within the vagaries of community halls, open-air theatres, platforms, and small stages in schools and colleges. Very often, there was no green room, and the voltage of the spotlights would fluctuate dangerously.

At times, more people would show up for a performance than the space could accommodate, for instance, an influx of 2,500 children for a production of Neeli Kudure (an adaptation of The Blue Horse by B V Karanth).

But with all these problems, one must admire that Tirugata has continued without canceling a single show due to the illness of a performer or for any administrative problem. There are no understudies in this travelling company, and the work (both onstage and backstage) is very strenuous. Though the personal relationships of the actors is a subject that needs closer scrutiny, the group spirit of Tirugata is strong. Like a regular stock company, the actors are responsible not only for their performances but for the sets, lights, costumes, make-up, which have to be set up for each show, then packed up and transported for the next performance.

In this unfortunate scenario, where the village provides the basic material for consumption in the cities, both at home and abroad, it is positively stirring to see how Ninasam has reversed this trend. Instead of using rural resources for production in the cities, it has selected some of the finest examples of urban culture, and disseminated them to rural and mofussil audiences through the state. This dissemination would be somewhat arbitrary were it not for the fact that Ninasam adapts its material to meet local needs (for instance, by providing a running translation and commentary to foreign films, and by using an adaptation of the company theatre idiom for its productions). The purpose is not to educate the illiterate with "high culture", but to make available what has been denied to them, and in the process, question the very categorization of culture on an elitist basis.

Certainly, one can see how Ninasam may have to further politicize its work in future by dealing more specifically with local problems like caste oppression, communalism, religious superstition, without the mediation of foreign texts and films. While one welcomes its avoidance of revolutionary rhetoric, one can only hope that the idea of revolution will not be forgotten in its no coercive conscientisation of people.