MANGALURU/KASARGOD: “I am a farmer first, then a teacher and finally a poet and a writer ... I got all my inspirations to write my poetry and other books from being a farmer and a teacher.” These were the last few lines of the speech made by centenarian poet Kayyara Kinhanna Rai at a function organised on the day he turned 100 on June 8 this year.
His epitaph will read long. Freedom fighter, poet, political activist, teacher, researcher, translator, peacenik, journalist, farmer. And in all the fields, Rai, who died in Kasargod on Sunday, shone.
Pradeep Kumar Kalkura, president of the Dakshina Kannada District Kannada Sahitya Parishat and one of Rai’s close associates remembers him as a scholar of not just Kannada but also of Sanskrit, English and Tulu. “He had once told me Sanskrit must be India’s national language... In several of his works, including Aikya Gaana and Benki Biddide Manege, he has shown his true nationalist spirit. He even lived the nationalist spirit by following the Gandhian way of life till the end.”
Born on June 8, 1915, to Duggappa and Deyyakka Rai, Kinhanna Rai had an intense carving for knowledge as a boy. He mastered Kannada and Sanskrit and later at the age of 20, he sat with Class IV children to learn English. Rai started his ‘official’ career by helping open a government school in a remote village of Perdala in Badiadka panchayat, on the border of Karnataka and Kerala and taught Kannada there for 33 years.
Between 1938 and 1944, he worked as a journalist for Swadeshabhimani and Prabhath. He was arrested during the Quit India Movement, but was let off as he was a journalist. His important works include Malayala Sahitya Charithre, a translation of P K Parameshwaran Nair’s History of Malayalam Literature. He has also translated Kumaranasan’s Chandalabhishuki, Karuna, and Chinthavishtaya Seetha into Kannada.