In the Mysore province it was Tipu who was the last and most glorious image of the fight against the colonial rulers, With the defeat of this Muslim king who ruled a predominantly Hindu subject the British played a cunning game. They did not take over the administration directly but instead returned the earlier Hindu rulers to the throne. They returned the throne to the Wodeyars, thereby giving back the Hindu subjects their proud symbol. It was literally just a symbol, but it worked all the same. People very soon forgot Tipu and the glorious fight they had led with him against the British. By introducing a buffer between themselves and the people the British successfully deflated a great deal of the people's militancy against colonial rule. Amongst the intelligentsia this resulted in a not wholly negative situation. Old Mysore produced some exceptionally refined minds, who managed to get the best of both worlds : Masti Venkatesha lyengar, D.V. Gundappa, K.V. Put-tappa, M. Vishweshwarayya, to name just a few. Their expression was not one that called for radical change, but it was an expression which had sophistication and deep insight. Bangalore in those days had a cantonment area which was kept as an exclusively non-Kannada domain. Apart from the army and British personnel the entire civilian population there was brought from Madras. This cantonment became a symbol of 'the other world' for some of these writers. Kailasam, the forefather of Kannada drama, used to go to the cantonment every day on his evening walks, and spend hours sitting in well laid-out parks, talking to young drama enthusiasts he had picked up on the way. English language and literature opened a whole new world for them and these intellectuals did not suffer as much guilt as their counterparts in the rest of the country at receiving new ideas in the oppressor's language. Despite this fascination for the west, they did manage to create very original literature. Masti has translated a great deal of Shakespeare and other western classics, but when it comes to his own creative writing he is a different person altogether. His Kakana Kote is a semi-historical play. It deals with a historical situation but looks at it with a contemporary perspective. It is about a tribe gradually getting merged with the civilized world. The civilized world is represented by the maharaja of Mysore and his administrators and the tribe is led by an intelligent tribal named Kacha. This tribal leader is not wholly uninitiated to the civilized world; he had once spent some time at Mysore as the mahout of the royal elephant and had even saved the life of the king when the elephant had gone berserk. Masti had initially written it as a long narrative poem about the legendary forest god. After completion of the poem it struck him that it could be made into a play. He has retained the narrative poem in the play, and even the narrative structure. This was the period when playwrights all over were either writing wholesale naturalist social satires or totally unreal fantasies. Masti achieves realism which, while retaining the narrative structure, also manages to capture the spoken word with absolute precision in the 'dialogues'. Only the drama of Ibsen and Chekhov had achieved such realism till then. Mastfs avowed Journal of Arts & Ideas 119