BENGALURU: A huge coffee table book, Anurakti, put together by a Kannada professor from the city hopes to endear poet laureate Kuvempu’s works to the younger generation of Kannadigas.
The book, yet to be launched, is a project by K C Shiva Reddy, working at Kuvempu Kannada Study Centre, an extension of the Kannada University in Kuppalli, Kuvempu’s birthplace.
“When I set eyes on the natural beauty that inspired his poetry, I had the urge to capture these sights with my lens,” says the academician who was passing through the city last week. He began working in Kuppalli in 2003.
A couple of years ago, when he spoke to fellow shutterbugs S Anand Kumar and Gopi Peenya, he realised that they had enough to produce a coffee table book with a collection of Kuvempu’s poems.
The visuals act as a reinterpretation of the text, the editor says, and can even act as a ‘field guide’. “For those venturing into Kuvempu’s world for the first time, the photographs could even aid imagination,” he says.
Landscapes, birds, the moon and several vibrant sunrises and sunsets taken by the three photographers over 10 years have found their way into the tome, each accompanying one of the several poems in the compilation.
Reddy, however, refuses to view these pieces as separate entities. “Every poem of Kuvempu’s is related to another and to every epic and novel he ever wrote,” he declares.
He goes a step further to say that he should be perceived as a poet of Karnataka, alongside literary figures like Da Ra Bendre and Gopalakrishna Adiga. “And if you examine it closely, his body of work cannot really be separated from Tagore, Shakespeare or Dante even,” Reddy says. “After all, these are writers he would have read and been influenced by.”
He feels there a need to reimagine and reinterpret literary figures from other times who still remain relevant today. “And not merely by scratching the surface and making blanket statements as seems the trend today, but by really delving deep and understanding their works,” he says.
He and the production team that has been working on the project for the last year and a half has been waiting for Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to give them a date for the launch. “Ideally, it should have been sometime around (Kannada) Rajyotsava, but he has been busy. However, copies can be reserved,” he adds.
The book is the second project, aimed at getting the youth of today to take pride in their cultural heritage. A few weeks ago a music video featuring Kuvempu’s poetry, Baarisu Kannada Dimdimava, took YouTube by storm.
Anurakti, a 340-odd page book, is priced at Rs 2,750. For details, call 94489 00999