Girish Karnad (1938-2019): Playwright who engaged with history to articulate Indias modernity

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Girish Karnad, Girish Karnad death, Girish Karnad dead, Girish Karnad news, Girish Karnad plays, Girish Karnad films, Girish Karnad bollywood — For one of Indias greatest modern playwrights, modernity was not a repudiation of the past but a conversation with it. (Express archive photo)

Girish Karnad wrote his first play on a ship to England. He was 22, travelling to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and leaving behind a family acutely anxious about the departure of their son to foreign lands. In that “intense emotional turmoil”, he found himself writing in Kannada, the language of his childhood.

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He found himself writing about the legends that he had soaked up as a child in Sirsi, a small town in Karnataka that was the heart of yakshagana country. His ambition, till then, was to become an English poet in the mould of TS Eliot, but Yayati (1960), about a king who cannibalised his sons youth, “nailed him to his past.”

For one of Indias greatest modern playwrights, modernity was not a repudiation of the past but a conversation with it. Through parables mined from history, ancient myth and folklore, he found a way to articulate the anxieties of the here and now, and the muddled-ness of being an Indian. It was a project he carried into his last play Rakhsasa Tangadi, about the hubris of an old king and the destruction of the Vijayanagara empire, which he wrote last year. “He was an international figure, but he never lost his connection with Indian life,” says Kannada writer-playwright Vivek Shanbag.

His death on Monday at 81 — he passed away in his sleep at his home in Bengaluru — brings to a close a glorious chapter in modernist Indian theatre which he helped shape through his work, from the early 1960s onward. Together with Badal Sircar in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi and Mohan Rakesh in Hindi — and several other artistes in post-Independence India — Karnad asked the question: what is it to be Indian? The answer, articulated robustly in various Indian languages, affirmed a belief in equality, secularism and constitutional morality.

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A cosmopolitan erudite liberal rooted in a thriving tradition of Kannada modernism, Karnad was a true Renaissance man, ranging from theatre to cinema and television. (Two of his most-loved roles were in Turning Point, a Doordarshan show on science education, and in Malgudi Days.) To him goes the distinction also of co-writing a film (Aa Dinagalu) with a reformed underground gangster Agni Sreedhar.

Also Read | Giving voice to Girish Karnad

Karnad grew up in a Saraswat Brahman home in Dharwad, an important centre of scholarship and classical music. The city was also home to Manohar Granthamala, the publishing house which bet on him when he was an unknown writer in his 20s. It was where he met the two men who shaped his imagination, poet AK Ramanujan and critic Keertinath Kurtakoti. Till the end, he called himself “a Dharwad man”.

As an actor, he was part of the influential parallel cinema movement with stellar roles in Shyam Benegals Nishaant and Manthan. To Kannada cinema, he brought a fresh perspective through award-winning films such as Vamsa Vriksha. He
debuted as a film actor with Samskara, based on a novel by fellow Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy, for which he wrote the screenplay.

For those who pilloried him as an “anti-national” and part of a creaking, corrupt ancien regime in his last years, it is important to remember that Karnads pathbreaking Tughlaq (1964) — written at the astonishing age of 26 — captured the disenchantment with Nehruvian ideals that had set in after Independence. It became a metaphor for authoritarianism during the Emergency and the Indira Gandhi years and remains a powerful depiction of the impulse to overweening, unchecked power in Indian democracy.