You may know him as Swami’s father in the beloved Doordarshan adaptation of Malgudi Days, the leading man in cult classic film Manthan, as the playwright behind seminal plays like Nagamandala and Hayavadana that continue to draw full houses decades after they premiered, or perhaps as the director behind Kannada films like Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane or Shankar Nag-starrer Ondanondu Kaladalli. However, one may have known him or his oeuvre, 81-year-old Girish Karnad’s passing on this day in 2019 after suffering from multiple organ failure, was felt deeply by the collaborators, friends and family, and fans, he left behind. A literary giant, a prolific actor-director, and outspoken activist who never shied away from taking a stand – this is how he is known as a public personality, but who was he behind it all? Girish Karnad’s son, Raghu Karnad, a Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning writer, gives us a glimpse of the man behind the scenes.
It is probably just a fuzzy sensory snapshot, but there is one memory that’s been on my mind recently. It’s from some time in my teenage years. My father caught me at the top of the stairs in our home in JP Nagar, gave me a copy of the Mahabharata and said I should read it. This was unusual because he wasn’t one for giving presents or offering advice. Of course, I didn’t take his advice at the time but now, at a different stage of my life. I’m coming to realise what he wanted me to learn and understand – as an Indian, about that book and the cultural fountainhead that it is for us.
In the last year of his life, when he was quite ill and OUP (Oxford University Press) was publishing his final play, Rakshasa Tangadi or Crossing to Talikota, he had to decide whom to dedicate it to. Last chance, right? I always think it’s funny and brilliant that he chose to dedicate the play to two scholars – one of them an American, Richard Eaton of the University of Arizona, whom Appa had never met. He had just admired Eaton’s work on the Deccan for a long time. Part of me was thinking, ‘Appa, I can definitely think of other people you might want to dedicate this play to’, but there it is. He had such a great admiration for real scholarship, for people who did the work and really earned their knowledge and authentic cultural insight.
In some ways, this connects back to the memory of him giving me a copy of the Mahabharata and telling me to read it, not just to be satisfied with the vague sense that I knew the story. It moves me deeply because I’ve inherited some of that from him.
My sister and I grew up in Bengaluru from the age we started school, and the literary, theatre, and activist world there was a big part of the atmosphere. Of course, at that age, it is mostly atmospheric – and once you’re a teenager, you’re actively tuning out most of what your parents are talking about to each other or to their friends. I was busy, I was listening to Pearl Jam.
This retrospective project was a way of connecting all the floating points in my head: dozens, maybe hundreds of them, names and references that I had absorbed while I wasn’t paying attention. Snatches of music he used to sing or hum, who was ‘Karanth’, really, or ‘Kirthi’, or ‘Shanta’, or ‘Dubey’, or ‘Shankar’ or ‘Aurora’ or ‘Naim’ beyond being names, or mental cutouts of people I’d met, and how did they all fit together in the scheme of his life and the scheme of India’s cultural modernity? Piecing back together the conversations in the house, from fragments I recalled, was a way of piecing together this intellectual, creative, political network of this formative generation for modern culture. At the same time, I know I’m doing something more prosaic, maybe universal. It’s the personal archaeology of finding out who a parent really is or was – it tends to feel more urgent once they’re gone.
Here is an edited excerpt from the Tell It Again newsletter. The Mahabharata delves into Girish Karnad’s longstanding fascination with the epic
The only book he had ever insisted that we read – putting copies in our hands – was the Mahabharata.” – Raghu and Radha Karnad, Afterword, This Life At Play.
In 1959, when Girish Karnad was about to leave for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he felt compelled to read the epics and the Puranas before his departure. He had grown up watching these stories performed by lamplight, by Yakshagana and Company Natak troupes. Now he reached for C Rajagopalachari’s concise but complete versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This is the decision that would eventually lead him to write his first play, Yayati.
Every aspect of this play took him by surprise, as Aparna Dharwadker notes, “That it was a play and not a cluster of angst-ridden poems, that it was written in Kannada instead of English, and that it used an episode from the Mahabharata as its narrative basis.”
This choice “nailed me to my past,” Karnad said. It set him on a path of drawing narratives from myth, history and folklore, which dominated his playwriting for the next four decades.
In the myth of Yayati, a king is cursed with decrepit old age, and Puru, his youngest son, agrees to bear the curse on his behalf. In This Life At Play, Karnad recalls, “I was excited by the story of Yayati, where a son exchanges his youth with his father’s old age. The situation was both dramatic and tragic. But the question that bothered me even as I was finishing the story was: If the son had been married, what would the wife do? Would she have accepted this unnatural arrangement?”
This imaginary character’s response became the seed of his first play, written at the age of 22: “This was the first scene that formed in front of my eyes: the confrontation between Yayati and Chitralekha. ... As I thought about it, the rest of the play began to take shape around this climax. I did not feel as if I was writing a play… It was as if a spirit had entered me.”
At the time, Karnad was a young man facing his own burdensome questions: Would he return to India when he was done at Oxford? What were his responsibilities, as a young man, to his own father, his family, or his country?
When Karnad wrote the play, he could relate to the son, Puru, and the weight of obligation he feels in the story. When he read the play again, much later in his own life, he found himself identifying with the desperation of the father.