Kannada awaits Man Booker crown

Prof U R Ananthamurthy, an accomplished academic now shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize has focussed the spotlight on Kannada literature.

The Man Booker International Prize is an international version of the Man Booker Prize which is applicable to specific countries. While this award considers writers across the globe, it is awarded for their entire body of work which is available both in their regional language as well as translations. It is appropriate to therefore ponder over issues of translation and Indian writing in English. Ananthamurthy’s work facilitates fertile ground to explore questions, speculate and search for answers as Indian English readers, who are still steadily grounded in their regional language cannons.

Ananthamurthy’s writing pioneered the Navya, a modernist literary movement in Kannada literature. His novel ‘Samskara’ along with short stories became the hallmark of this movement. His writing goes beyond mere narration, or the prose that is poetry but the questions that his characters pose. Interestingly the plots that he crafts about these mundane characters, brings out conflictual situations not only among them, but also draws readers into dilemmas over old and new values, the search for an identity in the light of constantly changing times. For instance, his short story ‘Suryana Kudure’ available in English translations encapsulates this style that is so unique to Ananthamurthy, his characters and their fate in his fictional world.

While most of Ananthamurthy’s work is available in English translations, he otherwise writes in Kannada. He himself claims that he wishes to make a statement with his adamant rule to stick to his mother tongue as his writing language. However he agrees with Chinua Achebe, who won the same award a few years ago, that though English plays an important role as a cementing language, it is our indigenous languages that have to survive too. He strongly believes that an Indian language like Kannada, with its rich literature can survive the onslaught of English, just as some European languages like Dutch or Spanish have successfully withstood. Translation studies poses important questions of accessibility, it brings to fore the dilemma of the particular being essential in creating a universal with English.

Today Indian writing in English has blossomed with the emergence of several names. Broadly their themes are the individual, a product of his culture, society and the ideological industry that surrounds him. The first generation of writers would include V S Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie whose writings are classified under the broad titlomede of post-colonial literature. The second generation writers on the other hand, like Arundhati Roy, Chethan Bhagat, Anita Nair and many more are far from not just the post-colonial —but can also be labelled post-modernist in some of their writings.

When one reads Ananthamurthy’s prose in Kannada its phonetics and the regional slant of the language are a delight to behold. While in English the same work is intellectually capturing, but loses its lustre that Kannada as the written language offers. Arguably writers and readers of both Kannada and English would have to agree on the superiority of the original Kannada work over its English translation. Except for writers like Girish Karnad, who writes both in Kannada and English, they often self translate their writings from Kannada to English which is rare. To that extent, translations transport the work to a world in which English is as Achebe commented a cementing language.

Ananthamurthy’s nomination for the Man Booker International Prize stimulates readers, writers, theorists and intellectuals to ponder and pose questions that are so inherent to the unique space that he as a writer and theorist occupies in the cannon of Kannada and Indian literature. He is the product of that period when post-colonial India was chasing modernity. Today his work has evolved into one that collapses the post-modern into its post-colonial commentary. In the context of Indian writing in English, the first generation of authors like R K Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand began their work with post-colonial commentary which is also reflected in Ananthamurthy’s writings. Importantly, in style his writings surpass even the modern and post modern writings. Otherwise Ananthamurthy’s writings reflect the Kannada language and peep into an amalgamated India through a Sanskrit and English education, which are a delight and raises a mountain of questions.

(The writer is from the dept of English, Christ University)