Poet at the identity crossroads

K S Nissar Ahmed, the Kannada poet who died on Sunday, was a household name across Karnataka. His first book of poems, Manasu Gandhi Bajaaru, appeared in 1960. He was active for six decades and produced a huge body of work. Born on February 5, 1936, in Devanahalli, he studied in a Kannada school in Bengaluru. Living in Dodda Mavalli in the central part of the city, he grew up in a milieu that appreciated poetry and encouraged writing. He later studied geology, and taught the subject to undergraduate students in Shimoga and Chitradurga. Nissar Ahmed’s oeuvre includes 14 poetry collections, four translations, five books for children, and eight works of criticism and non-fiction. He was the recipient of several awards, including the Padma Shri, and an honorary doctorate.

Nissar Ahmed straddled two literary movements, the romantic Navodaya and the modernist Navya, and lived in an era dominated by many literary giants, winning the appreciation of Jnanpith laureates Kuvempu and Bendre, and had to contend with a host of brilliant contemporaries. He wrote poetry in both modes, romantic and modernist, and stood out with poems that drew on his Muslim experience. With subtlety and gentle irony, he described the everyday difficulties posed by his religious identity. ‘Dancing within the circle you draw/That’s difficult,’ he said, in his famous poem Nimmodaniddoo Nimmantaagade (Being with you, yet not becoming one of you). That was just one aspect of his poetry. He was largely a poet of optimism, and celebrated the many aspects of Hindu life that he saw around him. In the poem Rangavalli Mattu Maga, he is fascinated by the rangoli patterns drawn in front of his neighbours’ houses, and as a little boy, attempts to draw one himself, only to be scolded by his mother that he was turning into a kafir. In later years, his Iyengar neighbour Vedavalli and his son want to know why Muslims don’t draw rangoli patterns, and he is lost for an answer. The question becomes a haunting metaphor.

In the popular imagination, Nissar Ahmed is the poet of Nityotsava, an audio recording of his songs with music by the late Mysore Ananthaswamy. Released in 1978, it was the first bhavageete cassette in Kannada. The title song is a fervent evocation of Karnataka’s glories, an anthem comparable in beauty and appeal to Vande Mataram. Its sensational success inspired the production of hundreds of albums in a genre that came to be called sugama sangeeta. Nissar Ahmed’s unique place in Kannada literature will be remembered and discussed for a long time.