The three-day festival that celebrated the city's literary landscape, Lekhana, came to a close here on Sunday with a reading by Girish Karnad of his recently-published autobiography, “Adaadata Ayushya”, that kept the audience riveted.
The first chapter of the autobiography, which incorporates segments of his mother's unpublished memoire in Konkani, explores the family's best kept secret — the nature of the pre-marital relationship between his parents — in all its nuances.
The richly-detailed chapter speaks of his mother, who was bold in her actions but was unable to own up to her own boldness because of the conservative circumstances she lived in. A young widow who aspired to be a doctor and became a nurse against all odds, she was a person “not unhappy, but discontented”, says Karnad.
The segment read out by Karnad explores how the secrecy that surrounded his mother's remarriage and the incidents leading up to it impacted the family. In doing so, Karnad also talks of a society that does not allow a person to be an individual but always judges him or her in “relational terms”, especially when the person in question is a woman.
On a lighter note, Karnad read out the dedication to the book to doctor Madhumalathi Gune, who did not turn up on the day his mother had gone for an abortion. Karnad was already a recognised film personality and a playwright by the time he came to know that he owes his birth to such a chance. And yet, he was shocked to learn that the world could have gone on without him, he said, sending the audience into peels of laughter.
Earlier, at a panel discussion on “Body and Biography”, Tamil writer Kutti Revathi said that knowing the body — with all its physical, political and social ramifications — is central to her writing. In writing about a woman's body and its sexuality, one is also writing about the political history of the human body, she said.
Kannada writer Mamatha Sagara spoke about the need to bend a patriarchal language and its metaphors to yield new and fresh meanings.
English poet Joshua Muyiwa said that the notion of “going beyond the body” makes little sense as “we are bound and defined by it”. The session was chaired by Ammu Joseph.
The weekend event was organised by Toto Funds the Arts, Sangam House, Deshakaala and Reading Hour along with the National Gallery of Modern Art.
