Modern myth-maker

Chandrashekar Kambar, who chose a style that was starkly different from that of his contemporaries, wins the Jnanpith for 2010.

AT a recent felicitation function, Chandrashekar Kambar joked that he owed the Jnanpith to his miserable failure in the family's traditional trade of ironmongering. His father was frustrated as the young Kambar showed no promise in the skill of softening iron and shaping it into agricultural tools and other implements. Leave alone shaping the softened metal, I could not even keep the furnace aglow! Kambar said with his signature guffaw. My father had no alternative but to put me in school.

No one could have guessed that this accidental entry into mainstream education would one day bring the Jnanpith to Kambar the eighth to Kannada, a language which lays claim to bagging the largest number of Jnanpith awards.

Native wisdom

To the good fortune of Kannada and its literary tradition, formal education did not kill Kambar's love for the earthy flavours of his native village. Godhageri in Belgaum district, where he was born in 1937, was a vibrant place teeming with folk story tellers, singers and performers. They made an indelible impression on him, and have stayed with him through nearly 50 years of his writing career.

In his speech after receiving the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, he said that the fact of his birth in a disadvantaged community had turned into a blessing. My people, who were illiterate and the most exploited, had preserved and nurtured their experiential learning through songs and stories. Their entire system of knowledge stemmed from their sensory memory. So it was an extraordinary event when I, their son, became literate and capable of documenting these experiences in writing.

The best in Kambar's vast body of work which includes nine collections of poetry, 24 plays, five novels and five feature films abound with richly sensual imagery drawn from rural life. His characters speak a raw northern Karnataka dialect, and the techniques are strongly inspired by folk performing traditions such as Bayalata.

A singer too, he is the star of poetry reading sessions because he never recites his poems but sings them with the full-throated gusto of a village bard. Though this boisterous celebration of the folk in his works has sometimes led to Kambar being erroneously branded a folk writer, he is clearly a modern writer who chose a style that was starkly different from that of his contemporaries in Navya (modernist) writing.

His second collection of poetry, Helatena Kela, published in 1962, marked the beginning of what was to be Kambar's distinct literary path. The eponymous, long narrative poem has the musicality and rhythm of the Lavani form and uses rich earthy imagery. However, its central theme is the fragmentation of the organic community of Shivapura in its confrontation with colonial modernity. A play like Jokumaraswamy, hailed for bringing back folk forms to the urban stage and creating a new music-and-dance trend in Indian theatre, is a reflection on the decline of an oppressive feudal order.

Dealing with tradition

Kambar has described himself as a modern-day myth-maker and believes that this method alone can help the writer grapple with the complex Indian reality. Kambar has given a mythical character to the country's new economic policy too, equating liberalisation to Mohini, the enchantress who would lure men only to turn them into ashes.

Several literary critics have pointed out that while many of his contemporaries rejected the past, Kambar negotiated it in a manner all of his own. He does not betray the typical modernist alienation but remains rooted in tradition even though this rootedness is fraught with complexities. His negotiations with the fissures and contradictions of the modern world, as the poet and critic H.S. Shivaprakash puts it, are through the eye chastened by the wisdom of a rooted oral tradition.

It is crucial that tradition for him is not Brahmin orthodoxy, but a Sudra native wisdom which informs his perceptions of the tussle between tradition and modernity involving questions of identity, feudal decay, colonialism or sexuality.

There are times, though, when Kambar seems to get carried away by his zeal for celebrating the native, even to the extent of turning blind to some of its trappings. The feminist critic M.S. Ashadevi, for instance, points out that women characters in Kambar's works, with exceptions such as in the novel Siri Sampige, never go beyond their sexual identities. The role of a woman in a feudal society is not a serious question for Kambar. Women in his plays sing and dance with abandon, but do not stand beside men as equal partners, says Ashadevi.

Kambar seems to have achieved a much more complex negotiation between the traditional past and the modern in poems such as Gangamayi or Maotsetunganige, where the hankering for the native tradition is tempered by a cuttingly satirical tone. During an interaction with the press recently, he said that nostalgia over the death of oral traditions without an understanding of the context could be dangerous. We cannot, for instance, celebrate the music of Devadasis without taking into account the oppressive context in which the tradition was born, he said.

As Vice-Chancellor

Outside the realm of literature, Kambar's negotiations between tradition and the mechanisms and tools of modernity are evident in the work he did as the first Vice-Chancellor of the Kannada University at Hampi. He laid the foundation of the institution with a vision to conduct multidisciplinary research on various aspects of Karnataka to make it a centre of Kannada knowledge.

A votary of primary education in the mother tongue exclusively through state-run schools, he has often talked of the need to make all forms of knowledge available in local languages. Colonial experience, he has said, has led to a lapse of memory of a rich cultural experience and a voluntary abandonment of native creative strengths, which need to be reclaimed.

He believes that the latest technological tools can aid this process. Kambar, with the late writer Poornachandra Tejaswi, lobbied for active government role in Kannada computing. Though Kambar rarely makes comments that can be read as anti-establishment or confronting political trends or political parties, he has often spoken angrily of the Karnataka government's apathy towards Kannada computing, which has left it at least 15 years behind States such as Tamil Nadu. This was one of the issues he had raised when he was nominated to the Legislative Council in 2004 by the Congress government.

He recently said that he and Tejaswi had met Minister after Minister to plead for the cause, but to no avail. He joked that each Minister would put an arm each on both their shoulders, making them feel like bullocks in harness, but did little else.

His next work, Kambar has announced, will be a comedy on thieves. When he was asked to comment on this rather unusual choice of theme, he replied, tongue firmly in cheek: Because there are too many around us!