There were no politicians with wreaths, no state funeral, no public in winding queues, no television crews with breathless, uninformed commentary, and there were no priests, no chants, no rituals. He had commanded privacy and dignity to his last act. This was in complete contrast to staged, tinselly performances in some recent high-profile exits in Bengaluru, including that of his fellow writer U.
This was not totally unexpected. But, sometimes people wear masks in public and while living, which death mercilessly strips. Not so with Karnad.
The integrity of his living approach was endorsed by his final journey. He had complete disregard for Brahmins who performed vedic ceremonies. As per his instructions his body was cremated without any rituals. Balachandra [elder brother] just lit the pyre. There is a lot of anecdotage, derived didactic messaging that we read being written in obituaries for Karnad.
But they are all mostly from a time that he stepped into the public eye. After he became a playwright, actor, administrator, and public intellectual. There are, and were, multiple witnesses to tell tales from that life. There is also the halo of a colossus that colours such retrospective visitations. But there is another life before the spotlight came that lies unexposed to a larger audience.
This can be found in an autobiography of over pages he wrote in Kannada, from where the passage above was picked. He says it is like Ardhakathanaka, written by a Jain trader called Banarasidas of Agra in the 17th century.
This precocious trader had stopped his life story, arguably first of its kind in Indian literary history, at fifty, assuming that the full lifespan is one hundred years. The last event in this autobiography is when I walked out of the Film and Television Institute of India. I was 37 then," Karnad writes. Bhargavi P Rao. The movie won several national and international awards. Before this, Karnad acted in a movie called Samskara, based on a novel by U.
Ananthamurthy and directed by Pattabhirama Reddy. Later, Karnad directed several movies in Kannada and Hindi. His Hindi movies include Utsav, Godhuliand the recent Pukar. A recently acclaimed movie by Karnad is Kanooru Heggaditi, based on a novel by Kannada writer Kuvempu. Karnad has also acted in several other movies and received critical acclaim. He has been criticised by the eminent Kannada novelist S. Bhairappa for being untrue to history. Other Notable Works He has played the role of Karadi, the sootradhar narrator , for several stories in the popular audiobook series for kids, Karadi Tales.
Death Girish Karnad passed away on June 10th He was 81, and was suffering from illness for the past few days. Popular Web Series. TV Network : Starz. Premiere Date : Jan 25 Genre : Drama.
The document on which the play is based has so far only partially been translated from the Persian original. Here, Karnad switches from English to Kannada, addressing multilingual reality in India.
For Karnad, who was English educated and living in England at the time, it was a surprise when his first play evolved in Kannada his mother-tongue was actually Konkani. Since then, even when commissioned to write a play for the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, his creative language has always been Kannada, followed by re-workings of the originals into English.
Many of his plays have also been translated into other Indian languages, and have been performed in them as well as in English. Karnad has received numerous prizes and awards for his plays. Apart from being one of the most important Indian playwrights today, Girish Karnad is also a film-maker whose films have received much acclaim. But it has been his work in television, as actor and host of a science programme, which has made him a household name in India.
But Girish Karnad's career does not stop even here. He would eventually achieve the international fame he had dreamed of, but not for his English poetry. Instead, Karnad would earn his reputation through decades of consistent literary output on his native soil. His first play, Yahati , was written neither in English nor in his mother tongue Konkani. Instead, it was composed in his adopted language Kannada.
The play, which chronicled the adventures of mythical characters from the Mahabharata , was an instant success and was immediately translated and staged in several other Indian languages.
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