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Bengaluru: Girish Karnad did not create a show from his death. He wrote it like that. There were no politicians with garlands, no state funerals, no public in the winding queues, no television with breathless and uninformed comments, and there were no priests, no songs, no rituals. He had commanded privacy and dignity at his last act. This contrasted completely with the theatrical and daring performances of some prestigious releases in Bengaluru, including that of his colleague U.R. Ananthamurthy.
This was not totally unexpected. It was in keeping with Karnad's resentful public personality and with some rational and pragmatic pursuit of life throughout his eight decades. But sometimes people wear masks in public and alive, which death removes without mercy. Not so with Karnad. The integrity of his living approach has been confirmed by his last trip.
The ideal of the end corresponds to the details of the cremation of Karnad's father, about which he wrote in the autobiography that he published in Kannada in 2011 and entitled . Aaadaadtha Aayusha (translated roughly A life spent by amusement): "Bappa [as he called him] was an atheist. He said, "I will not come back like a raven to eat your sacred offerings" [with reference to a commonly held belief that elders will return as crows after death to inspect and bless offerings made by the family]. He had completely ignored the Brahmans who organized Vedic ceremonies. "When I die, do not let those thieves come in," he said. According to his instructions, his body was cremated without any ritual. Balachandra [elder brother] has just lighted the pyre. "
A Semi-autobiography
There are many anecdotages, derived didactic messages that we read being written in obituaries of Karnad. They are all mainly.Since he's become a playwright, actor, administrator and intellectual, there are many witnesses who tell stories of this life.There is also the halo of a colossus that colors such retrospective visits, but there is another life in the spotlight that has not been exposed to a wider audience, which is found in a more than 300-page autobiography written in Kannada, where Above was chosen.
This autobiography that remained untranslated is incomplete, in the sense that it covers the first half of Karnad's life. He says it's like Ardhakathanaka, written by a trader Jain called Banarasidas of Agra in the seventeenth century He had stopped his life story, arguably the first of its kind in Indian literary history, at fifty, baduming that the total lifespan was one hundred years. "I am now 73 years old [in 2011]. The last event of this autobiography took place when I left the Institute of Film and Television of India. I was then 37 years old, "writes Karnad.
To the many questions and curiosities we might have about Karnad's life, it would be extremely interesting, and an extremely rewarding exercise, to illustrate and annotate the answers of these pages. As for example we found a reference to the absence of ceremony during his cremation in that of his own father: it is not necessary to conclude in a simplistic way that his inspiration came exactly from there, but that was part of the education, knowledge, reason and logic of Karnad. [19659002] Similarly, we may want to look for references on how Karnad's influences align, how did they come in, as if they were at the right time, and did they fulfill the crucial role for which were they designed? Here, the pan-Indian reader might be surprised to literally ascribe all his preparation to life and the resounding success that it has become, not to Oxford, nor to Mumbai, but to two small but culturally well-defined cities in the presidency of Mumbai (part of Karnataka after 1956): Sirsi and Dharwad, where he was. ra
Shadows in Sirsi
Karnad's father worked and retired as a post-mortem physician in both cities. His mother was a registered nurse and a young widow with a child. She became the second wife of her father, having lived "sensational" with him for five years. The uncertainty, anguish, shame and pain suppressed from those years, she revealed in 30 pages, that she scribbled in the dog-eared pages of her husband's diary, at the end of his life.
This is the dramatic beginning. from the autobiography of Karnad. "My first encounters with the pain, the tragedy and the hilarity of life took place in the compound of the hospital [Sirsi] where we lived. Many things would happen there unexpectedly and theatrically, but continuously. There was no one to prevent me, my sister Leena and the children of our age in the compound, from being untimely bystanders to all this. However, we stayed away from the post-mortem hall from the angle. Besides the scary murmur on the bodies that lie there, as a result of a suicide, an accident or a murder that reaches our little ears, the mental image of our father to Inside, ripping apart bodies and examining them, prevented us from taking a look. "
Since the shadow of death haunted his childhood, writes Karnad, corpses have stopped evoking an emotion in him, but, he adds, he would not make a similar statement about ghosts. It is these ghosts who glide his imagination, which may have entered his historical and mythological plays, which invariably rely on existential and psychological theses, as in his very first play, Yayati, madness that followed at Tuglaq, from the transposition into Hayavadana or personality broke out in Nagamandala
The Liberal Foundation
Karnad's Strident Public Positions on Liberal Traditions, Harmony community and the cultural diversity we are used to, ter had perhaps its formative aspect anchored in his consciousness, so to speak, at Sirsi.There was a church near his house, where the service was took place in Konkani, Karnad's mother tongue. It was not an event for him, his brothers and sisters and other Hindu children to go to church every Sunday, participate in events and listen to stories learned. of the Bible. Karnad's family came from the high caste Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin, identical to that of Nandan Nilekani, Deepika Padukone, Prakash Padukone, Shyam Benegal, or from a past a little further, Guru Dutt.
Narrative of an incident occurred during a Good Friday event, he wrote: "One year that day, I saw children from our neighborhood seize a chameleon , make a cross from twigs and crucify the defenseless creature. When he continued to pull out his tongue, shaking his head vigorously, they filled him with flowers and prayed. A boy from this band commented on the unfolding of the ritual: when Christ was crucified, a chameleon mocked him and so it was time that the time came for him to repents. "
There is yet another incident of this period, when the chief pontiff of the Chitrapur Saraswats visited Karnad's house in Sirsi, no high chair suited him." The family borrowed a chair from the house. 39, a neighboring church, which was reserved for the bishop, to be borrowed to seat a Hindu religious leader, "says Karnad.
This innocence and these accommodations have practically disappeared in small and large Indian cities. Something that is missing in cities like Sirsi, according to Karnad, is the romance that darkness created in the absence of power lines, and the plethora of stories that crept into every crevice, corner, driveway. and street, in a world devoid of manufactured entertainment.The mind had the freedom to create his own independent cosmos. "At the hospital and later at the Rayarapet house in which we stayed in Sirsi during ix years in total, electricity had not made its entrance. We lived in the dark. In fact, it would be more appropriate to say that we grew up tasting it. In this darkness, light has come from a hundred different ways to provoke our senses, "he wrote.
Growing up in Dharwad
The next city, Dharwad for Karnad, deals with the specifics of the This is where his intellectual trajectory is emerging, where he is pbadionate about literature and philosophy, but his pragmatism brings him closer to mathematics, he aspires to be a poet but eventually becomes a playwright. It is in Dharwad that he develops the ambition to escape the limits of a small town but returns with renewed love from England and buys two bungalows to celebrate his roots. He fights to protect the serenity and scenic bungalows when the real estate boom begins.
This is a small publisher, Manohara Grantamala, seated in a small attic in Dharwad, who has led his extraordinary talent and who has published all of his works from start to finish, including the Kannada autobiography. his loyalty to the Joshi family who runs it has never faltered. Incidentally, they are close to Bhimsen Joshi, legend of Hindustani music.
About his years of study in Dharwad, Karnad says, "As a math student, I was not very loyal about it at first. It was to score points that I took it. But when I immersed myself over the months, I began to understand his rhythm, his height, his progress and his crescendo. Her beauty danced before my eyes. A character in Aldous Huxley's novel cries in the face of the beauty of the binomial theorem. This reaction is not surprising when the numbers reveal their mystical attributes wave by wave, branch by branch. I realized the impact of math on me when I started writing tuglaq at Oxford. I've solved the structural problems as I would by working on theorems. I first understood the internal network and the relationships between the different aspects and characters of the piece, what was its balance at different times and what happens to this balance if the piece progresses in a certain direction, as happens in a theorem. The technical training I had to write plays came from mathematics. "
In Dharwad, he pbaded under the wings of a formidable teacher called KJ Shah, who had studied the philosophy of mathematics, wit and language, under the orders of the great philosopher Ludwig. In Cambridge, it was Shah who encouraged Karnad to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, but Karnad was not allowed to blind a guru, and in the years that followed, Shah became an apologist for anti-Muslim policies, supported Hindutva policy of Ram Janambhoomi, he feels exasperated by his compromise
In conclusion
Finally, returning to the beginning of the creative odyssey of Karnad, it is natural to wonder why he gave up the relationship, living abroad, and writing in English after such a great academic ascent, his piece Yayati was published in Kannada and was a resounding success
In ar Karnad writes: "At this At that time, having experimented with various alienations in English society, the innocence that the talents were very well received and the success badured in England had somewhat dissolved in my head. I wondered if I would ever get the almost maternal affection with which the Kannada intellectual world had celebrated my first piece. I concluded that my decision to install abroad was not only futile, but also doomed … so I landed in India, where a cultural resurgence had begun. Although the country's economy is in trouble, a whole new spirit is emerging in the world of cinema, literature and theater. It opened the doors of a new era and it made me a sign. It was in this infinite opportunity that I entered. "
Of course, he quickly became one of the pillars of this re-emerged spirit."
Sugata Srinivasaraju is a journalist and author of Kannada pbadages in English in the essay is the Author,
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