For ages, stories told, written, shared in Kannada were parables, folktales and myths meant to convey moral lessons. But with the turn of the 21st century bringing a wave of Western influence on thought and education, the Kannada literary world saw a landmark transformation – the emergence of the Navodaya literary movement, united by a style that considered one’s immediate surroundings and contexts. “The content changed as our Indian Kannada writers started writing in ways inspired by English stories, addressing social concerns and contexts,” explains Sahitya Akademi Award-winning translator Susheela Punitha, whose recently-released translated collection of short stories, A Teashop in Kamalapura (Harper Collins, `399), seeks to make stories from this crucial period of Kannada literary history accessible to English readers. “Together, we tried to bring alive the concerns and social norms of the last decade of the 19th century and the first three to four decades of the 20th century,” explains Mini Krishnan, the editor of the collection.
A major focus for Punitha and Krishnan was ensuring the representation of key Navodaya writers from diverse social contexts, including women and Muslim writers that are often sidelined. “It is my hope that this collection will lift the curtain of opacity about early fiction from a time when all the journals were run by men and nearly all the writers were also men. Today, the balance is shifting rapidly. Ownership and management might still be largely men, but there is a cohort of writers and translators who will never again be behind a wall of silence or invisibility,” says Krishnan.
Works included in the book are stories published within 1900 to 1985, like Panje Magesharaya’s 'At a Teashop in Kamalapura' to Masti Venkatesha Iyengar’s 'The Story of Jogi Anjappa’s Hen', and 'Between Rules and Regulations' by Sara Aboobacker. Punitha notes that while Kannada readers may be familiar with the names of these writers and older readers with some of the stories, most stories will be unfamiliar to younger readers. For Punitha, the process of compiling these stories was almost archival. “Almost all these stories were published only in local magazines of those days like Suchitra Bharathi and Madhura Vani, and I was only able to get these from archives. In translation, this will be the very first time that people would be reading many of these stories, maybe even all these stories,” she says. It is not the fame of the writer or the story that binds these tales together but, as Punitha says, the question of whether they have literary relevance today. “I was looking for stories that would have a modern impact and be relevant almost a whole century later – it’s not just like we’re reading them as museum pieces,” she says.
With an increasing number of young people in Karnataka, particularly a lot in Bengaluru, not being fluent enough in Kannada to easily peruse its literature, Punitha and Krishnan hope that this book serves as a gateway. “When I’m thinking of English readers, I’m not just thinking of non-Kannada speakers; I’m also thinking of my own grandchildren who can speak in Kannada but not read or write in it. This present generation hardly knows about their own literary heritage,” says Punitha, adding, “I hope that they take away with them an understanding of the rich heritage that we have in Kannada writing and read beyond this collection – reading the Pragathisheela, Navya, and Dalit movements as well.”