Heggodu is a village in Sagara taluk of Shivamogga district, tucked into the areca and paddy country where the Malnad hills begin to soften. For most of the twentieth century it held a few hundred residents, no theatre tradition worth the name, and no obvious reason to be known outside its own taluk. Today students from across India and abroad travel to it to study drama, and its name appears in serious accounts of modern Indian theatre. That change has one author: Kuntagodu Vibhuti Subbanna, born on 20 February 1932, who spent his entire adult life in the village and built inside it one of the most unusual cultural institutions the country has produced.

The Boy Who Came Back

Subbanna was born into a Havyaka Brahmin family of modest landholding. He went to Mysore for his education and took an honours degree in Kannada literature at the University of Mysore, where the poet Kuvempu was among his teachers and U. R. Ananthamurthy, later a Jnanpith laureate, was a contemporary. Mysore in those years was the intellectual centre of Kannada letters, and a young man with Subbanna's gifts had every reason to stay there or move on to Bengaluru. He did neither. He returned to Heggodu and stayed, and the whole of his life's work follows from that single decision. His argument, restated in many forms over the decades, was that culture is not something a metropolis produces and a village consumes. A rural community, he insisted, has the same right to Shakespeare and Kurosawa as any city audience, and the same capacity to make serious art of its own.

Ninasam

The beginning was almost accidental. In 1949, a group of young men in Heggodu who had taken to meeting in the evenings to argue about politics and the newly independent country decided to put on a play. They named their group Ninasam, from Nilakanteshwara Natyaseva Sangha, after the local deity. The early productions were what village troupes everywhere performed: episodes drawn from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, staged for local audiences on improvised platforms.

Subbanna refused to let it stay there. Over the following decades he steadily widened what a village drama society could attempt. Ninasam began mounting Kannada renderings of Shakespeare, Moliere and Brecht alongside new work by contemporary Kannada playwrights, children's plays, and reworkings of classical Indian drama. He raised money and built a proper auditorium in Heggodu, with a real stage and a lighting rig — an ambitious thing to construct in a village at the time, and a statement of intent. Ninasam was constituted as a cooperative rather than as one man's project, which is part of why it outlived him.

An Institute, a Touring Troupe and a Press

Three further ventures turned Ninasam from a good amateur company into an institution. The first was Akshara Prakashana, the publishing house Subbanna started in 1957, which over the years has issued several hundred titles in Kannada on literature, theatre, cinema and philosophy, including translations that had no other route into the language. The second was the Ninasam Theatre Institute, opened in 1980, which admits a small intake each year — roughly fifteen students — for an intensive residential diploma. Visitors have described it as a theatre ashram: students cook, clean and rehearse in a deliberately plain setting, and leading directors and designers come to Heggodu to teach them. The third was Tirugata, founded in 1985, a touring repertory that takes each year's productions on the road to small towns and villages across Karnataka, carrying the work outward rather than waiting for audiences to arrive.

Alongside these ran Ninasam Chitrasamaja, the film wing, which held appreciation courses and screenings introducing rural audiences to Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and the wider canon of world cinema. For a period Ninasam also ran an outreach programme called Janaspandana, supported by external funding, which extended film screenings and appreciation courses across the state and reached audiences numbering in the lakhs. Then there is the annual Culture Course, a week-long gathering in Heggodu where writers, scholars, film-makers and students argue about literature, politics and society — an event that has become a fixture of the Kannada intellectual calendar.

Recognition, and What Was Left Behind

In 1991 Subbanna received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, the citation recognising his work in bringing the finest cinema and living theatre to rural Karnataka. It remains the honour most closely associated with his name, and a considerably weightier one than the Padma Shri that followed in 2004. In between came the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1994 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2003, the latter for his own writing — he was an essayist and critic of substance, not merely an organiser. He died at Heggodu on 16 July 2005.

Ninasam continued after him, under the direction of his son K. V. Akshara, himself a playwright and scholar. The institute still takes its annual intake, Tirugata still tours, the Culture Course still fills the village every autumn. Subbanna's proposition — that a village of a few hundred people can be a centre rather than a periphery, if someone is prepared to spend a lifetime making it one — is not a theory in Heggodu. It is simply what happened there.