When Girish Karnad started writing, the Navya Sahitya movement in Kannada literature was at its peak. It was a very rich time for all expressions of creativity in Kannada: poetry, music and prose.
There were towering writers like P. Lankesh and Ananthamurthy (URA) and poets like Adiga and Kambar. Girish joined the movement late, but he filled the playwright gap very successfully.
Of course, Karnataka’s theatre movement got its impetus in the 70s with B.V. Karanth, but Shriranga was the only significant playwright of the time. Into this gap Girish came like a breath of fresh air with his new kind of writing structure and modern thoughts.
If you look at Tughlaq, the structure is so well-knit and so tight that you cannot edit one line. He worked on it continuously; every edition has something changed. Dramatic structure is Girish’s greatest contribution to Indian theatre.
URA’s strength was his intellectual ability; he could convert thought into experience. He was truly a literary person. And he was into active politics. So he was also that kind of political writer.
Girish’s other contemporary, Kambar, has a strong folklore background. He knows the inner life of folk tales and language is his strength. In comparison, Girish did not have his own language. His mother tongue was Konkani. He had to acquire a language, and he adopted the Kannada of Dharwad. When he wrote Yayati at 22, literary critic Kirtinath Kurtakoti edited it entirely. And Girish would later say, “He is the one who showed me the way.”
Girish worked with mythologies, and he brought in both the politics of URA and the folklore of Kambar. Hayavadana was possibly the first modern play to use a folk art form. Kambar introduced the folk form to Karnataka, but Girish took it and made it national.
Girish was passionate about cinema, but he was clear that he acted only for the money. “Theatre is my life,” he would say.
Not many people know that he has written some wonderful non-fiction essays in Kannada. In fact, I consider his essay on a Kannada play called Kakana Kote a masterpiece of analysis. It shows his passion, his involvement with the craft of theatre. Being one of the rare playwrights who also acted, he was able to visualise the power of his words when spoken on stage; to see how a set would transform on stage.
When Girish was posted as the director of the Nehru Centre, I too had just taken up a job in London. I landed in the city two months after he did. And I found that he had already seen 60 plays. He had seen one play every day! That was the level of his love for the medium.
(As told to Vaishna Roy)
