In an unusually talkative preface to S Manjunath’s collection of poems, K V Subbanna had reflected on what he described as the ‘flow’, the ‘low ebb’ of Kannada literature in the last two decades.

(Preface 2005). Admitting that the ebb had its own beauty and charm, Subbanna had wondered whether the younger poets had no ambition and were happy to ‘sport in the small space of the experience of their choice’.

Jayanth Kaikini whose sensitive and enthusiastic reading of the younger writers as editor of Bhavana created a cultural space for the new writing, also voiced his reservations about their unwillingness to explore the larger connections between the small routine realities they catch so well in the poems and short stories (Shabda Teera 2005).

Before we address the issues raised by the metaphors used by Subbanna and Jayanth, we need to acknowledge two things. One, contrary to the pessimistic, regretful refrain on there being no major writers now, or of Kannada literature going through a crisis of creativity, there is a very impressive body of writing by young writers which is complex and variegated in experience, fresh and heterogeneous in its styles and possess the genuine strength to surprise us with entirely new and hitherto unknown range of emotional responses.

Kannada criticism, still in the hangover of the navya (modernist) phase and its nostalgic reconstruction of the great creative phase of sixties and seventies, is yet to acknowledge the presence of strong, mature and individual voices of the younger writers.

All said and done, Kannada literature is the product of a small and a fairly well-knit literary community and the possibilities of creativity have always been conditioned by the pressures of this community.

Guru syndrome

The navya literary community despite its open rebellion against the near feudal hegemony of the older generation, itself got caught in the guru syndrome, with a handful of major writers lording it over their own literary monasteries.

I am still shocked by the abject mental slavery of highly talented younger writers venerating these gurus. Perhaps the truth was that the younger writers knew the absolute power these gurus had in doling out publishers, awards and even jobs.

It is a matter for celebration that the navya gurus are now dead or at least brain-dead. Young writers now have to risk it out on their own, footloose and drifting but with the promise of the frenzy, the autonomy and self reliance which road journeys without a route map provide.

The other fact, once again so reluctantly being recognised is that life has changed at a pace and in ways still incomprehensible even to those in their fifties. The Emergency generation which came of age in the late seventies was a generation to which socialist ideals,  anti-caste struggles, a new sexuality were not only literary themes but determined lifestyles.

There was also a partly idealistic faith that literature and culture were serious things, perhaps more significant than politics.

There was faith that the social movements, which were so vibrant in those decades, would usher in real social changes. The young writers today, born to a world of dead social movements, cynical politics and a new worship of individualism, may legitimately feel that this was the world of the last romantics.

The middle class, the mother and nourisher of literature has experienced major dislocations. Secure childhood worlds, rooted in small ancestral villages and home towns have vanished. (As Jayanth says elsewhere the generation next will return to these homes as razakars – holiday making, temporary marauders).

Idiom of rebellion

Urban nuclear families with their anonymity and migrant features don’t provide the intimate, suffocating, closely-lived and passionately rebelled space which used to turn many adolescents to writing. The tell-all, see-all technology and the safe, distant but totally accessible cyber sex as well as the liberal sexual mores have made sexuality almost a non-issue.

Lets not forget that sexuality provided the metaphors and the very idiom in which the rebellion against middle class morality, existential angst and an escape from the cerebral (in short, practically the entire thematics of the navya literature) could be expressed.

Gender relations have not changed in a fundamental way and patriarchy is discovering new forms of cruelty. But the ‘she’ of Kannada poems and short stories now is a modern woman, urban working person, empowered and troubled by a new zone of freedom.

Globalisation has emptied middle class homes of young boys and girls who have left behind the regional Kannada dialects and ways of life to their pensioned parents, to join the melting pot of Bangalore in which the more universal English language transports them to equally anonymous cosmopolises of the West.

Not that all this has turned them into rootless, foot loose zombies with no language to articulate their experiences of belonging to a dislocated, fragmented world. Many of the younger short story writers in Kannada are toying sensitively to create fictional idioms to express this world.

If Francois Lyotard had not patented the phrase for a description of post modernity, the apt description of the experiential world of the young writers would be a world which had witnessed the death of all mega narratives.

What made the navya writing ambitious was the presence of these narratives which provided a metaphysical intensity and a metaphysical richness to the individual experiences which the writers were exploring.

The mega narratives which in my view are the real, palpable and tragic consequence today are globalisation and communalism. Unfortunately these have been appropriated by journalism and discursive forms of writing, while creative writing in Kannada doesn’t yet seem to have found ways of articulating them.

It is this fragmented, small world which the new writers are exploring with very genuine voices.
H S Shivaprakash, still the most significant poet has published Mathe Mathe (2005) and Male Mantapa (2006). His is the most ambitious poetic effort to integrate myth, history and folk traditions and to retrieve all of them for the contemporary world.

Jayanth Kaikini continues to write his delicate, masterly tales in which the trivia of ordinary life are elevated and networked into a compassionate humane vision of life (Bannada Kalu 2006 and Toofan Mail 2005).

The prolific writer Mogalli Ganesh is untiringly innovating fictional forms, including magical realism to articulate Dalit experience.

Pratibha Nandakumar writes about the complex turmoils of the new woman in an urban poetic register (Avaru Puraavegalannu Keluttare 2006), thereby quietly demolishing the stereotypes which even women’s writing had yielded to. Raghavendra Patil’s Theru (2003) is the best work on the feudal world which he has so consistently explored.

The generation next has produced extraordinary short story writers like Sridhar Balagara, Sunanda Kadame, Vasudendra, Sumangala, though of course the two major writers are Abdul Rashid and Nagaveni.

While S Manjunath is the most accomplished poet writing today, along with Savitha Nagabhushan, there are many authentic poetic voices like Vibha (who passed away so young), M D Yakkunda, Kanaka Raju, H R Ramesh, Jyothi Guruprasad.

Even a mere listing of the names would need a space larger than given to this article. Whether any or all of them would succeed in writing brilliant poems or great poetry, a krithi that Subbanna hoped for, only time will tell.