Curtains down, but rehearsals will go on

First published: BBC News (abridged version) | 10 June 2019
Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48580607

‘Girish Karnad has passed away at the age of 81,’ read an impassive message on my phone from an old acquaintance. His passing away had been announced like a palace sentry in one of his many historical plays would casually inform the arrival or departure of somebody to the audience. But, let’s be sure, this is no ordinary announcement for Indian public life or the world of arts. It signals the departure of a colossus who straddled many creative realms, and quaffed gently from various cups of public life, leaving a deep impression for over five decades and across generations.

Karnad was foremost a playwright, but he was also an actor, a filmmaker, a translator, an administrator, and a daring public intellectual. This multi-tasking that he tirelessly subjected himself to made him one of the most prominent voices among those who built a robust liberal tradition for India, since Independence in 1947. When India’s plural history, diverse traditions are being severely challenged now, mourning his demise acquires a different meaning. A frame of reference seems to have vanished, a pillar to lean on appears to have collapsed, yet, his works, and his life promise to inspire and instruct how we need to stand steadfastly, and do what we need to do, that is, fight a good fight.

It was quite accidental for Karnad to make an entry into the materially uncertain world of arts. Raised in quaint Dharwad town in colonial India’s Mumbai presidency, now in Karnataka, one expected him to make it big in the academic world, and seek a more certain and firmer foundation to life. He was born into a middle class Chitrapur Saraswat brahmin family, and his mother, who worked as a nurse, had remarried as a widow, which was a revolutionary act then. She was the second wife of a doctor. His autobiography in Kannada ‘Aadatha Aayushya’ (roughly translated would mean, ‘A Life Spent Playfully’) has a precious chapter on his mother’s life, and the enormous social pressures she had to confront in shriveling silence.

In such circumstances, the young man Karnad won the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to study mathematics at Oxford. He thrived there and also became the president of the Oxford Students’ Union. He could have settled down in any part of the world, but made a ‘mad choice’ to get into the arts and write not in English, but in Kannada, a language which was only his acquired mother tongue. He is a native Konkani speaker. This conflict between Konkani, Kannada and English, remained in him till the very end. It also found expression in a play that he wrote in 2006, titled ‘Odakalu Bimba’ (Heap of Broken Images).

This play was not just about choice of language for writers, but also about the worldview they nourish: local or global? More specifically, for Karnad, to swim contently inside the Kannada world, or develop a pan-Indian appeal, or cater to a global audience. Karnad, I think, chose the pan-Indian ideal, this often made him look a little distant to other Kannada writers who employed a very specific native idiom. The debate of how much he was a Kannada writer never ended till the very end. In fact, when he won the prestigious Jnanpith award, for lifetime achievement, his compatriot genius, P Lankesh (father of Gauri Lankesh), wrote an editorial raising these doubts. But they were such good friends, they probably settled their arguments over a drink.

This play, ‘Broken Images,’ was also significant for the reason that for the first time in his writing career, Karnad had addressed another charge that the literary critics had made against him for a longtime. Until then, he had only made voyages in the past, or in mythological worlds, to conceive characters, scenes, and dialogues for his eponymous plays like ‘Tuglaq’, ‘Dreams of Sultan Tipu’, ‘Taledanda’ (on the life of 12^th century saint-social reformer Basaveshwara), ‘Yayati’ (his first play), Hayavadana (inspired by Thomas Mann’s ‘Transposed Heads’), Anju Mallige or Nagamandala. In these plays, Karnad had had the cushion of time, and a complete view of the mutation of meaning that these characters and tales had undergone over centuries. But, with ‘Broken Images’ he had finally arrived on the shores of the present. In this play, set in a television studio, he also looks at the impact of technology on modern living and thinking. He subverts the classic technique of mirror speaking as the alter ego and gets the television image of the protagonist to have a dialogue with her. After this, he wrote more plays like ‘Marriage Album’ and ‘Boiled Beans on Toast,’ which were situated in the present.

When I spoke to Karnad in 2006, about this transition from history and mythology to social plays, he had explained it this way: “It was a conscious decision to write historical plays, because all historical plays we had until then were costume dramas. I was quite cerebral and it suited my way. Also, my contemporaries like Vijay Tendulkar were doing a great job with social plays, so I didn’t want to dabble with it.” On being accused of having a pan-Indian, rather than a native approach he had said: “I always need a bigger canvas to write.” But interestingly, in 2000, when I had met Karnad in his South Audley Street office, when he was Director at London’s Nehru Centre, he had told me that he would perhaps never write a social play. The same year his ‘Dreams of Tipu Sultan’ was published, and in 2002, he wrote a paly ‘Bali’ (Sacrifice) for the Leicester Haymarket Theatre on a tenth century theme.

However, Karnad perhaps will be known for his historical plays, and if one is pushed to pick one among the many he has written, it would be ‘Tuglaq.’ This play, published in 1964 (the year Nehru died), based on the life of 14^th century Sultan of Delhi, was translated and produced in all major Indian languages, and it permanently altered the Indian amateur theatre scene. This play was so powerful, that a person who played the lead role in its over hundred Kannada productions, C R Simha, not only built a flourishing career for himself, but spoke and walked all his life like he was asked to in the play, with a certain self-consuming imperiousness. He struggled to escape the mould, perhaps the way Ben Kingsley struggled to outplay the Gandhi he had become for Richard Attenborough.

In the very last play that Karnad wrote, ‘Rakshasa Tangadi,’ in 2018, he returned home to his favourite historical theme. It deals with the battle between the Bahmani Sultans and the last of the Vijayanagar kings. This poignant work that he explained passionately on camera to the portal I edited, for over two hours, holds lessons for today’s India, when centuries of Hindu-Muslim relationship has been conveniently typecast for political gains.

Karnad’s film career will make for a separate appraisal. Likewise, his public interventions. He never ceased to speak for communal harmony and India’s rich diversity. The way he had taken on Nobel laureate V S Naipaul at a literary fest, in Mumbai, in 2012, on his mis-characterizations of Indian history, politics and Muslims, were deeply felt. The image of Karnad with his oxygen tubes holding a placard in the middle of Bangalore’s streets when Gauri Lankesh was assassinated, can never escape one’s mind. There are several such images and words. Curtains may be down, but the rehearsals will go on. His words and images will stay.