Kannada poetry: A brief and incomplete history
In the 12th century, even as Kannada poetry was shifting away from champu style towards new and exciting metres, a new group of poets, drawn from a different spiritual tradition, began to take centrestage
On February 1, a 32-year-old British-Indian woman called Ananya Prasad made history by becoming the first woman of colour to row across the Atlantic Ocean – solo! – as part of a competition known as the World’s Toughest Row. Aided by neither motor nor sails, she had relied entirely on her oars, and her own strength, to cross the 3,000 miles of ocean, a journey she completed — notwithstanding choppy waters, extreme isolation, and a broken rudder — in 52 days, 5 hours and 44 minutes.
While Ananya’s achievement is awe-inspiring in itself, Bangaloreans have special reason to preen — not only are Ananya’s parents Bangaloreans, but her paternal grandfather was GS Shivarudrappa (GSS), one of only three Kannada poets, and the most recent, after Kuvempu and Govinda Pai, to be honoured with the prestigious title of Rashtrakavi.
The first Kannadiga to be hailed as a poet was the 10th century wordmeister, Pampa, seldom mentioned without the added honorific, Adikavi (first poet). In his two celebrated works – Adipurana, a life of the first Jain tirthankara, Rishabhanatha (father of Bharata and Bahubali); and Vikramarjuna Vijaya, a secular Kannada version of Vyasa’s Mahabharata, in which Arjuna, not Yudishtira, is crowned king (with Subhadra, not Draupadi, as his queen) following the Kurukshetra war – Pampa pioneered the part-prose, part-verse champu style of literature in Kannada.
With the three great Jaina poets of the 10th century – Adikavi Pampa, “Kavichakravarti” Ponna, and “Kaviratna” Ranna – composing their masterpieces in the new style, champu became the de rigueur form of classical Kannada literature for two centuries thereafter.
In the 12th century, even as Kannada poetry was shifting away from champu style towards new and exciting metres like the tripadi (three-line verse), saptapadi (seven-line verse) and the ashtaka (eight-line verse), a new group of poets, drawn from a different spiritual tradition, began to take centrestage. Known as the vachanakaras, the Lingayat poets, followers of the philosopher-saint-social reformer Basavanna, opted, like him, to use free verse, and simple, direct language, to express themselves, whether they were writing about mystical experiences or unmasking societal hypocrisy.
The next watershed moment in Kannada poetry arrived in the 16th century, with the poet-balladeer-saint Purandaradasa, considered the father of Carnatic music, ushering in an age of devotional Vaishnava poetry called Dasa Sahitya under the patronage of the great Krishna Deva Raya of Vijayanagara. Among the best-known exponents of this kind of poetry were the royal sage of the Vijayanagara empire, Vyasatirtha, and his disciple Kanakadasa.
The 20th century renaissance in Kannada poetry kicked off with the Navodaya (new dawn) movement, inspired by the form and content of English romantic poetry, and dominated by poets like BM Sri, Kuvempu and Da Ra Bendre. Around the time of independence rose a new, contrary literary movement called Navya, led by progressives like Gopalakrishna Adiga and VK Gokak, who veered away from the rose-tinted lenses of the Romantics and chose to highlight social realities like caste discrimination and poverty that the new Republic was grappling with, drilling deep into themselves to find a different language and poetic form to express themselves.
Ananya’s grandfather, GSS, was part of the Navya movement. Born in 1926, he had been greatly influenced by the Romantics, and was considered Kuvempu’s protégé, but coming to adulthood in 1947 made him, equally, a student of the Navya tradition. He balanced the philosophies of the two schools admirably in his writing, and was loved equally by poets on both sides of the divide.
It was for this bridging of the worlds, apart from his own extensive and beautiful poetry, which lent itself so well to song, that GSS was anointed Rashtrakavi in 2006, seven years before he passed in 2013.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)