48 | GLIMPSE | JULY 2019H
e liked to call himself an
urban naxal who stood
for every liberal cause.
His rich body of work
cuts across language, religious &
geographical barriers and strikes a
chord with everyone in his audience. His
writings and his plays are microcosms
in themselves & they all have a magical
understanding of the human nature.
The plays penned by Karnad around 40
years back ring in true in the modern
millennial world we live in and are
whimsical flights of fancy which deal
with deep human desires, along the
lines of Shakespeare and other western
playwrights. Karnad was a Rhodes
Scholar who was also the president of
the Oxford union from 1962-63.Besides
the Padma Bhushan & Padma Shri, he
was also a recipient of the Jnanpith
award in 1998, which is the nation’s
highest literary honor.A childhood spent amidst stories
Karnad attributes most of his life’s
teachings and successes to small
but culturally rich towns like Sirsi &
Dharwad where he was raised. It was
in these two towns that Karnads fatherworked & retired as a doctor (specialized
in post-mortems). His mother was a
trained nurse and a young widow with a
child. She was his father’s second wife.
It was later in Dharwad that Karnad
achieved academic strides. This is the
place where he got passionate about
literature, philosophy and Mathematics.
Karnad always wanted to be a poet but
ended up being a playwright in which
his graduation in Mathematics came
helpful. It was in this town that Karnad
decided to go to London to study in
the Oxford University but came back
with a new found love for his roots &
it was in Dharwad that he brought twobungalows to remain connected to his
roots.
Dharwad is also important in
Karnad’s life because he found his first
ever publisher and mentor, Manohara
Granthamala here; interestingly
he was also his last publisher who
published his Kannada autobiography
as well. Manohara chiseled Karnads
extraordinary talent and gave him wings
to fly.
Karnad had talked fondly about
his student years in Dharwad in an
interview done a few years back; he
had said “As a student of mathematics,
I was not very loyal to the subject. It
was to score high marks that I took it up
because I wanted to get a scholarship to
travel & study abroad. But when I got
immersed in it, I began to understand
its rhythm, pitch, progression and
crecendo. A character in an Aldous
Huxley novel weeps at the beauty of
a theorem. I realized the impact &
importance of mathematics when I
started writing Tughlaq, while in Oxford.
I solved structural issues just like I solved
theorems. Maths helped me figure out
the internal network & the different
aspects of a relationship the characters“TIGER ZINDA HAI”
India’s modern playwright, actor, director, filmmaker, rights
activist and intellectual Girish Karnad passed away in June.
He was 81 when he breathed his last at his residence in
Bengaluru. We celebrate the career of a man who delved into
tradition to understand modernity. He portrayed characters
& penned stories which rediscovered the country’s ancient
wisdom to bring in some clarity in the ambiguous times that
we are living in.70 mm TalkiesText: Disney BrarACTOR
BEYOND THE