G H Nayak: An outspoken critic with a vision of social realities

The passing away of the illustrious Kannada critic G H Nayak marks the end of an important phase in the history of Kannada criticism. G H Nayak was a person whose opinions were very much respected in all sections of the Kanada literary circle.

G H Nayak belonged to the Navya or the modernist phase of Kannada literary culture, and Kannada literary criticism, which believed in the function of criticism as exegesis of a literary text. G H Nayak, like his contemporary Navya critics in Kannada, developed a highly sophisticated way of reading literary texts, both belonging to the tradition and to contemporary writing in Kannada. His reading of the two epics written by the first important major poet in the Kannada tradition, Pampa, made G H Nayak a very familiar figure in literary culture.

G H Nayak taught us the seriousness and the responsibility of literary criticism. He played an important role in the big shift that happened in literary criticism in Kannada, from an emotional, appreciative, enthusiastic or unquestioning response to a literary text to the responsible evaluative reading and assessment of texts.

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This is a very difficult accomplishment because when one is an outspoken critic, with very definite opinions about literary texts and the literary tradition, like G H Nayak, it's quite possible that the response that you get to your writing may not be all the time admiring or appreciative, but he managed it mainly because of the extraordinary credibility that he enjoyed as a reader of texts, and as somebody who would make an evaluation based on certain principles which you could agree with or disagree with.

His long essay on Poornachandra Tejaswi was among the first very serious assessments of the writings of Tejaswi, and in the essay, Nayak prepares the framework which helps us to understand the philosophy of Tejaswi especially in relation to nature, environment and human society. The result of such scholarly insightful readings by G H Nayak was that a whole generation was educated in the very difficult skills of reading a literary text first as a literary text. This could be said about the long review or essays that he wrote both on the short story in Kannada and also on the tradition of modern Kannada poetry, including both Navodaya poetry and Navya poetry. These two long essays provide the reader and the fellow critic with a very clearly defined framework which helps them in order to understand what the poets and the short story writers were trying to do.

Nayak's assessment is that the Navya literary modernist tradition in Kannada cannot be pigeonholed into a form of writing, which only took a very dissident or rebellious view of tradition. Within the broad framework of modernity, there were writers who had distinctive individual approaches to the question of social values and also inherited traditional values.

G H Nayak naturally believed that literary criticism expects the critic, in the words of F R Leavis, to keep his prejudices away and his own probably ideological leanings away in reading the literary texts. Therefore, one very important dimension of G H Nayak's active involvement and his personality was not really given the recognition it deserved. In his autobiography and other discursive writings, G H Nayak expresses a very powerful vision of the social realities and also all of the many conflicts in Kannada society. Some of his essays, which were collected separately in a volume, deal with the Dalit question and the Dalit phase in Kannada politics and Kannada literature.

His writings reveal the socially and politically aware aspect of Nayak's sensibility, which may not be so easily visible in the literary criticism that he wrote.

He used the word ‘Vinaya’ and he also used another very important ‘Nirapeksha’, where he was indicating the two values which he believed were important for literary criticism. Nirapeksha can be translated as impersonality, objectivity, which literary criticism should be grounded in. Vinaya is the way in which the literary critic has to locate himself vis a vis the literary cultural tradition. And he believed that the function of the literary critic is to, in a way, minimise his presence, but at the same time, through the reading of texts, and through the commentary on the cultural context establish a very clear point of view, so that the reader has this opportunity to disagree with the critic without being dismissive of the position that he takes. This is what made G H Nayak so very important to Kannada, literary criticism.

He practised the pedagogy of criticism because he not only wrote critical essays which will be read and reread many times in the future but also educated the other critics, the younger critics, especially, about the way in which one has to train once the sensibility in reading the literary texts.

(Rajendra Chenni is a literary critic based in Shivamogga)