Nestled in the quiet bylanes of one of Bengaluru’s oldest neighbourhoods is Chandrashekhara Kambara’s home, ‘Siri Sampige’, named after the play for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1991. In the two-storey house with a verandah shaded by plants and trees, students and young writers still drop by bringing their books to him. He reads them all with a stack of them placed carefully within easy reach in the living room. Just last week, on January 2 — on his 89th birthday — he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 3rd edition of the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman by The New Indian Express. The honour came with a cash prize of `2 lakh, a citation and a trophy. The official citation hailed him as, ‘a Kannada writer, thinker, playwright, folklorist and theatre activist whose life’s work has profoundly shaped the nation’s cultural imagination.'
For Kambara, his love for Karnataka’s folk literature or ‘janapada sahitya’ was an inevitable result of growing up steeped in the stories that filled every moment in Ghodageri, the village in Belgaum (now Belagavi) where he grew up. “In the 3,000 people in my village, there would’ve been 15 or 20 who were educated. At the time, people only had janapada, not schools. We used to herd the cattle; it was a strange existence. Janapada is a culmination of what the people are, what they say, believe and follow. Nobody knew how to read or write, but they used to sing.”
Growing up through the 1940s and coming of age in the 1950s, Kambara is part of a shrinking tribe of people who lived through the freedom movement. He comments on how the zeal and uncertainty of it all reached the folk arts too, saying, “When we started seeing words like ‘swatantra’, ‘horata’ and ‘strike’ come up in the newspaper (the single one we would get for the whole village), the villagers were shocked. They would make conversation with questions like ‘Have any other problems started with independence?’, ‘Have the British done something now?’ This was when these words and political topics began to enter ‘bayalatas’ (open-air folk theatre) and ‘natakas’.”
He began writing simply because he had learnt how to, he says, adding, “We didn’t have any scripts but plays were born there. But there’s a difference between telling the story and writing it. When you write a story down, you rewrite, make corrections and look for rhymes. It takes work.” He would go on to write more than 34 plays, including the popular Jokumaraswamy. He also directed film adaptations of some of his plays —Kaadu Kudure received a National Film Award and Sangeeta (adapted from the play Naayi Kathe), went on to win a State award.
A story the litterateur often shares is of his high school teacher and Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award-winning writer Krishnamoorthy Puranik, encouraging him to write and read out his plays in class. Even though his work drew from folk traditions as Navodaya writers looked to Western romanticism, he credits many of them for their mentorship. “There were writers like Krishnamurthy Puranik, Kuvempu, Bendre — they were our seniors and we had them as support. Puranik was a great critic, writer and my teacher in high school — I saw him as all that at once and learnt from him,” he says. Another is AK Ramanujan, the pioneer who took Kannada folk tales to the world through his translations and scholarship. He was Kambara’s mentor at Lingaraj College, Belagavi, and later at Chicago University, encouraging him to follow his folk style. “A secret to writing is to always try writing, observe writers, ask questions and learn their works," says the former Kendra Sahitya Akademi president.
For decades, the writer, poet, director and scholar has worked tirelessly, writing 13 poetry collections, six novels, numerous research papers, garnering widespread acclaim for them — from the Padma Bhushan (2021) and Padma Shri (2001) to the Jnanpith Award (2010) and prestigious fellowships. But the last few years have taken a toll, with his wife Satyabhama Kambara’s passing and his health declining. “There comes a situation when you don’t feel the urge to write,” he says, adding, "I write when I find myself wanting to narrate a moment to somebody, but I haven’t found that lately.”