The Karnad who also took on canards

Girish Karnad 19382019 was known to brilliantly derive from Indian mythology history and folklore scripts that still made for the most relatablecontemporary plays His major concern though that he often articulated is that Indians show scant regard for preserving and recording their own heritageThis grouse might just as well be true for his life You figure this reading pages after pages of his obituaries And yet these accounts while generously listing his works reveal so little about the man behind them And by that I mean delicious anecdotes or untold stories from peers that make for the best form of oral history anywayIn that sense K M Chaitanyarsquos 26minute documentary on Karnad available on YouTube produced by Sahitya Akademi digging deeper into his early influences probably does better justice than anything I have readwatched lately A child prodigy of sorts studying in Karnataka College Karnad reveals in the film that he basically wished to study abroad But he wouldnrsquot gain scholarship without a firstclass degree Scoring that high was harder to do if he took up subjects that he actually enjoyed mdash history or languages EnglishKannada So he graduated in mathematics instead And in fact topped the university picked up the Rhodes scholarship sailed to England and subsequently became President of the Oxford Union worldrsquos top debating societyThat a creative multilingual polymath can be this good at math destroys at once that leftbrainrightbrain myth for all Also you have to give it to young Karnadrsquos incredible selfbeliefconfidence that he had decided to be an English poetmdashalong the lines of Eliot and Audenmdashaiming for a Nobel Prize in literature a reasonable aspiration for him at the time That he began writing a play instead was purely by accident he says It was mainly inspired by the robust literary culture of his hometown Dharwarmdashchiefly championed by the local Kannada journal Manhohar Granthmala which published his first work Irsquom not sure if Karnad pursued his initial passion as seriously thereafterBut maybe there lies the seed of his supposedly controversial statement about Rabindranath Tagore few years back when he called Gurudev a fine poet of course but a ldquosecond grade playwrightrdquo Or maybe it was simply in his nature to say it the way he feltsaw itItrsquos something he practised as a public intellectual every so oftenmdashwhether taking on Naipaul over a blindsided view of Muslim rule in India or defending student leader Kanhaiya Kumar against blind hatred being perpetrated on JNU campus His last defining image is of course the one from the street holding an antihate placard with his nostrils wrapped in an oxygen tubeKarnadrsquos contemporary Satyajit Ray considered activism as too ldquounaestheticrdquo I was once awestruck observing Karnad take on detractors among the audience at a literature festival in Lucknow Uttar Pradesh He could aggressively tackle politicalhistorical canardsHow he made time to pursue so many professions simultaneouslymdashas an actor director playwright thinker and administratormdashbeats me most No point listing his reacutesumeacute There is enough work under each individual header to rival a lifetimersquos worthA headline that went viral on the Internet upon his demise called him an actor from Tiger Zinda Hai It would have pleased him no doubt His range was simply that astounding Everyone will have their favourites from his output among so many separate compartmentsJust so mine doesnrsquot clash with othersrsquo and for no other reason at all Irsquom happy to single out his work as screenwriter of Shyam Benegalrsquos Kalyug 1981 One of the finest connoisseurs of films I know still pines to revisit Karnadrsquos Godhuli 1977 decades since he saw it first Irsquove been trying to trace a copy for a few years now without any luck so farOf course listening to online academic tutorialslectures on his works Irsquom also dying to watch Tughlaq on stagemdashthe play that made Karnad a national phenomenon at age 26 So far Irsquove only heard actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui deliver before me a crackling monologue from Tughlaq Yeah Nawaz is that same guy who said no to working on Tiger Zinda Haimdashamong his other accomplishments of courseThe best anecdote from Chaitanyarsquos shortdoc on Karnad is the bit where the artist says that his mother had decided on abortion when she was two months pregnant with him His parents decided to visit the local doctor As it turns out the doctor wasnrsquot in on that day It was then that his mother changed her mindWhen this story was revealed to Karnad at a later age he was totally in shockHe said ldquoI felt completely blankhellip For about five minutes the notion that the whole world could exist and that I could not be there in it just completely stunned merdquoThatrsquos true now His legacy of course will live on foreverMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper