A talented playwright, a painter with talent, the perfect amateur dancer. Different people who knew the legendary Girish Karnad describe different facets. However, they all agree on one thing, that he continued to remain relevant through the decades. Off stage and screen, he turned into a vocal activist for the values he stood for. Karnad passed away in his sleep on Monday morning in Bengaluru. President Ram Nath Kovind led the tributes, “...Our cultural world is poorer today.”
Not many people may remember the split characters of his seminal play Hayavadana — Devdutt and Kapila. But to describe Girish Karnad, the iconic playwright from Karnataka who breathed his last in his home in Bengaluru on Monday morning, one would have to invoke the law of contrasts, within a frame of creative harmony. A man of many parts, he also represented a whole. In a way that is becoming increasingly rare in today’s fragmented public life.
Theatre was his vocation, and he was a pioneering figure there, but he left an indelible impress on cinema, straddling all strands -- the unique ‘parallel’ wave of the 1970s-80s as well as ‘middle’ and mainstream cinema, having even paired as an actor with stars like Hema Malini in that zone. Equally, he was a man of convictions who, in his later years, never shied away from the burdens that a public intellectual has to bear in inimical times.
Karnad, a native Konkani whose best thoughts were expressed in public in Kannada and English, naturally inhabited several worlds and made them his own. From fashioning the old art of playwriting, to delineating contradictions in the sensibilities of modern-day society in his films, to using his public persona to address the problematics of a post-modern, post-truth India. Never wavering once in holding up a mirror unto the society and nation he was born into.
A polymath who made mathematics his base subject to pursue higher education abroad and brought a kind of precise structure to his plays, Girish has left a legacy that present-day India and Karnataka -- conflicted between ‘national’ and ‘provincial’ -- might find hard to fathom.
He was from a generation that was deeply rooted in his region -- the culture, language, stories and villages of Dharwad -- but which could find in the regional enough resources to access the universal.
The creative fields — from thought-provoking theatre to charming or mundane roles in a Hindi film -- were just one aspect. Girish was also part of the generation that built institutions — he left his imprint on such influential bodies as the Film and Television Institute of India and the Sangeet Natak Akademi, while heading both.
However, posterity will probably remember him for the manner in which he enriched the Kannada language and the way he wrote his plays. And rightly so. For this is where his real genius shone through. One of the best playwrights India produced in the last 50 years, Girish was in the forefront of the “Navya” or modern tradition in Kannada literature, one that was very vocal about modern ideas, equality and freedom. Aesthetics, here, already went along with social responsibility.
What really set him apart? To those unfamiliar with this bit of cultural history, what distinguishes him from other Kannada and Indian language playwrights is his sense of structure, and how that melded with his thematic concerns. He was very, very good in structuring his plays. For example, Tughlaq is so well-structured that it works on many levels. It works like a company nataka and as a very sophisticated, modernist play. This is what actually made him what he was.
In the end, Girish did not remain very popular because of the steadfastness of his views. He held on to his modernist bent very firmly even when the entire world was tilting towards faith and intolerance. Even those who opposed his views, however, would admit this was really commendable. I am sure his sense of how India, and the world, should be...that will again have its hour once this phase of intolerance runs its course, as it inevitably must.
Though there’s no chance of this being under-reported, Girish was also an actor. In fact, he started his career as an actor. As an actor, with a handsome but uniquely sensitive persona, he worked more in cinema and television, not theatre. (A news website, in fact, described him as the actor in Salman-starrer ‘Tiger Zinda Hai’.)
His strength, however, was his background. He had both the worlds in him. He had an Oxford-trained modern mind but he was also a man who belonged to a small town, at that time called Dharwad, where there were very rooted people. While being rooted, they were looking to take on the whole world. He got both the worlds. He made the best use of that.
His literary friends from Dharwad, who were in some sense his mentors, Kirtinath Kurtakoti and B V Joshi, shaped his writings in some sense. He was a young man then, who had just come back from England and got a job in one of the publishing houses in Chennai.
In some senses, he was always an outsider. And again, that sense of being an outsider, he used it well for creative purposes. A Konkani-speaking man with an Anglophone polish in a Kannada (and polyglottic Indian) world, he used his natural internal variety well. Eventually, when he developed a language for his plays, it was a very well-balanced language -- neither very desi nor very videsi. It had a certain balance, which worked very well.
He became quite famous with Tughlaq, so much so that it took him some time to get out of the Tughlaq mode. Eventually, when he did come out of that mode, the results were amazing: he wrote Taledanda. It was literally an inversion of Tughlaq -- that had a king invested with all the grandeur of a Delhi sultan, whereas Bijjala was a desi king who spoke Dharwad Kannada! His roots were intact and robust, so all these social specialities of Bijjala, he could bring out very well. The result was brilliant. Taledanda was his hallmark in many senses. For example, it was that play which tried to get to the socio-economic roots for the growth of the Vachana movement and Kannada Bhakti movement.
The other play that fascinates me is Fire and Rain (Agni Mattu Male). He takes another bold step with that. He paints old-world romance against a very contemporary, modernist love here. I did the national premier for the National School of Drama (NSD) repertory company. By then, we were in the early 1980s. I was fascinated by this attempt by a modernist writer to take on the old world.
Girish had a very large canvas as a writer and a playwright. It was almost natural that he became very vocal on social and political issues in last two decades of his life. He took very firm views on certain issues. He took a stand against the intolerant mood that was engulfing India, especially religious intolerance. His dogged refusal to toe the line was amazing! Although his play Tughlaq was about the decline of the Nehruvian era, I would look at Girish as a very, very Nehruvian character. He had all those ideals and dreams that the Nehruvian era had.
For example, his understanding of Tipu Sultan when he wrote that play Dreams of Tipu Sultan. He wanted to give credit to those it was needed to be given. That was a very good attitude to give credit to the community which many perceived as “enemy community”. You are making them see good things. That sense of tolerance was very strong in Girish. Unfortunately, people did not really like it much because the whole mood of the nation has become very intolerant. I am sure history will take a correct view of that.
On certain issues, Girish was misunderstood. For example, his remark on (Rabindranath) Tagore. What Girish, I think, meant was Tagore was not a very well structured playwright. In newspapers, it came out as Girish saying Tagore was not a good playwright. That caused a lot of controversy. In a sense Girish is right. Tagore was not very strong on structure of the play, but he was so strong on the metaphor he constructed through a play.
Girish is no more. He was a very interesting personality. A handsome man with a strongly built physique. Yet in last two years of his life what gave up was his breath. He realized it. He was carrying his own machine and he knew he didn’t have much time.
He was on extended time and he took it very boldly. He continued to express his views and continued to write. I admire all these qualities in Girish.
(Prasanna is a well-known theatre director and playwright)