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This is a commentary on the historical period in which we live: a media announced the death of Girish Karnad under the name of " Tiger Zinda Hai actor died at 81 years." Contribution of Karnad India's letters, stage, stage, and thought His role in a popular Hindi film was far superior.
And yet, Karnad would have smiled ironically at the description because he was versatile and perhaps had even taken it as a compliment, to remember his virtuosity. remember him for his roles in popular commercial films, others would remember his thought-provoking pieces, those who praised him for defending the values that made India a progressive nation and liberal, such as to protest and mourn the murdered journalist and editor, Gauri Lankesh, but others would feel it to want the Bengaluru airport to be named Tipu Sultan.
Karnad was part of the Indian Renaissance after independence, as much at ease in the exploration of clbadical Sanskrit plays the finest points of the tradition yakshagana ; the primacy of rhythm in carnatic music or the skillful footwork of Kuchipudi ; the relevance of ancient myths to understand our current situation and its exasperation with the canonization of false idols in a time devoid of heroes.
He was certainly a Renaissance man: a Rhodes scholar who was president of the Oxford Union in 1962-1963. Karnad was an esthete, a clbadic, who plunged into tradition to understand and explain modernity. In his play Yayati he explored the clash between the demands of the family and, by extension, of society, with the undisciplined character of an individual, forcing him to lead an accursed life. In Tughlaq he told the story of the impulsive king of Delhi who was very misunderstood in his day and whose grandiose ideas became an allegory of the nehruvian period. It should be remembered that he wrote these two remarkable pieces while he was in his twenties
Later he wrote Hayavadana after Thomas's novel Mann from 1940, The Transposed Heads which itself echoes a history of Kathasaritasagara . Hayavadana raised the deep question of what constitutes identity and beauty – supreme intellect or brute physical prowess, brain or soul – as if the conflict between Athens and Sparta unfolded in each of them. we. A pillar of Indian theater, Karnad has also translated what is perhaps the most beautiful existential game of modern India, Evam Indrajit of Badal Sircar, which has highlighted the pessimism and nihilism that have enveloped India a decade after independence. Karnad was a worthy recipient of the Jnanpith Award in 1998.
The controversy over the Tipu Sultan speaks volumes about the busy period of division that has characterized our age. The first film that Karnad realizes (with B.V. Karanth) is Vamsha Vriksha (1972), based on the conservative writer S.L. Bhyrappa's novel. A quarter of a century later, when Karnad wrote Tipu Sultan Kanda Kanasu (Tipu Sultan's Dreams), Bhyrappa criticized the play because he did not agree with Karnad's nuanced representation. Karnad, on his side, saw the shades of gray in each of us – his Tipu was a complex leader and very misunderstood, deliberately misinterpreted by those who embraced a narrower identity.
At the same time, even though Karnad and U.R. Ananthamurthy would generally agree on many issues. Karnad was uncomfortable with the rise of linguistic chauvinism in Karnataka, a cause fervently supported by Ananthamurthy. But it was not like Karnad was defending another language, nor defending the primacy of English. In fact, he wrote in Kannada and showed a deep understanding of his state and was fluent in many other Indian languages - he played in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu films.
Karnad was intimately related to the films of the new Indian wave. In two films of Shyam Benegal that take the feudal structure, Karnad embodies a man who sees evil around him and wants to change it. As a helpless schoolmaster, he sought justice after the abduction of his wife at from Nishant . He was an idealistic doctor who went to a village in Gujarat to help organize farmers in Manthan . In the Marathi film by Jabbar Patel, Umbartha Karnad showed the weakening of a man, a lawyer, who could only support his wife's empowerment to a certain extent. In Pattabhi's film Rama Reddy Samskara (based on Ananthamurthy's novel), Karnad played the role of Praneshacharya as he attempted to tackle the dilemmas imposed on individuals . Karnad presented in a detailed way the fact of turning in the mind of a Brahmin, whether to do what seems instinctively right to end a tragedy or to defend arbitrarily imposed customs society. Fight with one's own pbadions or avoid them? And how to deal with the inevitable guilt that follows? Kaadu, whom he wrote and directed on witchcraft and blind religion, and Ondanondu Kaladalli inspired by Akira Kurosawa's samurai films.
The characters played by Karnad are progressive and not radical; some of these characters were morally flawed and compromised. Life did not concern the absolutes; Karnad understood this as a human condition. But his commitment to integrity was absolute. He has always supported justice, equality, civil liberties and inclusive governance. Even though he was ill, he came to public demonstrations to protest the wave of deaths from lynching in recent years. And in describing his life in the theater at the Tata Literary Festival in 2012, he dismissed the protocol and criticized VS Naipaul, who received a lifetime honor at the festival, because, in Karnad's eyes, the elegance of Naipaul's prose could not hide his misanthropy and racism.
There could be no compromise on values. And to understand these values, he rediscovered wisdom from ancient Indian stories to clarify our ambiguous present. And so Karnad explained to us the meaning of what it means to be human.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
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