Girish Karnad’s memoirs document the extraordinary life of an extraordinary man

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Girish Karnad’s memoirs, ‘This Life at Play’, are an English translation of the Kannada book ‘Aadaadta Aayushya’ by Srinath Perur. The work, as Karnad admits, is a documentation of half his life. Unfortunately, the second half will now never be written as he has passed on.

An extraordinary man, who lived an extraordinary life, made possible by an extraordinary vision, Karnad, a man of exceptional talent, charisma and creativity, made a lasting contribution to the world of theatre and cinema in India. His growth as an artiste parallels the trajectory of the cultural history of modern India, shaping and formulating a modern idiom.

Reading this book makes one feel dizzy as if atop a giant windmill, with each revolution revealing a different perspective. His childhood was a constant wandering back and forth across the borders of reality, seeking refuge in the unreal, the imaginative and the endless possibilities that he wished to grasp! Filled with literary and artistic curiosity, his awareness of his sexual awakening and his carefully choreographed ambition are the stuff that legends are made of. In his memoirs, there is a constant reference to the play of light and shade, a chiaroscuro of memories both dim and illuminated through interpretive interventions. In his act of writing, there is no deep freeze in the brain where memories are stored, but are juggled, readjusted and reassembled and hence made afresh.

The story of his life cannot be separated from the story of India’s search for a modern vocabulary in playwriting that could best express the aspirations of a fledging nation and the challenges before it. Traditional stereotyping and moribund ideas had to be confronted and re-examined for fresh ideas and concepts to emerge, that could grapple with the complex idea of modernity with all its manifestations. A new grammar of performance emerged that was an intersection between the real, illusionary, fiction, fact, contemporary, folk, myth, realism, that segued effortlessly.

BV Karanth, a close collaborator of Karnad, once told me that when you read a Karnad play, there is absolutely no need to edit, as Karnad being a student of mathematics builds up his plays like a theorem: precise, measured without anything extraneous, yet exploring the mystical abstraction of numbers through words. While directing his play ‘Naga Mandala’, Karanth’s words rang true. Every line, word was apt and appropriate.

It was in Dharwad, and the evenings spent in the ‘atta’ (Kannada for attic), that his love for poetry, literature and philosophy flourished and fructified.

While reading the book, the varied people who make their entries in the narrative are so delightfully vivid and full-blooded that their foibles, ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ jump out, as if from a proscenium arch. The characters after playing their role exit into the darkness of the wings, leaving traces of their impact on the life of the young Karnad.

Growing up in Sirsi and Dharwad, engaging with the local theatre activities, along with the Yakshagana, later education in Bombay and then a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, are masterly etched vignettes brimming with humour and irony, making his memoirs a fascinating read. His work as a publisher, along with his film career, fraught with uncertainties and tribulations, springs ‘alive’ through Karnad’s luminous honesty in being able to shine a torch on even a treacherously dark path.

The book is written with an intimacy that is rare. I almost had the feeling that I was sitting under a starlit night, under the shadowy trees of the Sirsi forest, with Karnad sharing his story in a manner that is personalised and direct. He tells his story as it is, warts and all, no hagiography in evidence.

The “Afterword” written by his accomplished son Raghu and daughter Radha is a befitting tribute to their father’s compelling memoirs. “He was a child of the 1940s, raised in a world without electricity, yet full of cultural transmissions. He liked to talk about power cuts at home in the Nineties, and shares it again in his memoirs; his nostalgia for the many shades of darkness after every sundown, and for the abundance of stories that emerged in those true nights. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that these two elements of his childhood, the darkness and the storytelling, evoke a theatre hall — the place he loved most through his life.”

This constant reference to darkness and light are leitmotifs in his plays, especially in ‘Naga Mandala’. A chorus of flames made up of the petromax, the diya, the lantern and the naked flame, poses this metaphysical question. What happens when you blow off the light from the diya or the lantern? Where does the light disappear?