Footnotes on Poochante

Poochante

Kannada literature is crazy about classifying its writers into categories, creating well-defined pigeonholes for every nook and corner of the language. I don't know where we got this culture from, but as a result we have more than a handful of literary movements which make no sense to the amateur reader, who just wants to have a good read. Gladly,  K P Poorna Chandra Tejaswi, or Poochante,  went off the beaten path and rejected all such pigeonholing. He professed that he would not be bound to any one method, and in his own words "started writing whatever came to his mind" (Quote from Annana Nenapu). And just for the record, this is not a scholar's critic, but an amateur's random notes.

The most striking thing in Poochante's Kannada is its style - the man was blessed with a writing style rarely seen in print. His writings are simple, fluid and effective beyond any other contemporary Kannada writer - and I am including people like  S L Bhairappa, U R Ananthamurthy etc in this list.  Add to this the honesty and simplicity of his writing - you won't see Poochante muddling his writings with half-baked convictions. The simple awesomeness of simplicity is that it makes more people understand, and so like, your writing. Truly. After reading and comparing the three authors mentioned above, I have a question: While it may be great to write social treatises and revolutionary essays, what is the point if your reader gets deadly bored, or gets dangerously confused after reading your work?

If we briefly look at the timeline of his works, we see that Poochante started writing in line with the Navya Sahitya (new literature) movement of his time. Starting with a collection of short stories and another collection of poems, wrote quite a few essays, and then moved onto novels, and these form the best of his writing.

In his early works, many of which are essays and critiques, we notice a clear opposition to sanskrit-inspired literature, an active resolution to fight against the traditionalism of the Hindu society. I think at least at some point Poochante had a very active thread against the so-called Brahminical Kannada Literature, and a conviction that such literature is not the true literature. I think he was convinced that literary movements which do not influence society into a transformation, sometimes resulting in a widespread change in a region's outlook to its country - read his thoughts on Tamil movement - were useless. I guess he retained most of these thoughts to the end of his career, but he does not seem to have written so actively, or campaigned for such a literary-societal movement in his later life.

But he did move away from all that, lived a farmer's life in a small corner of Karnataka, interacted with nature to an extent unheard of by other authors, and defined his own niche, where he explores human life and its interactions with mother nature. This forms the bulk of his writings, especially his masterpiece - Karvalo.

The biggest complain about his literary career I have is that he wasted a lot of effort into bringing out translations from English into Kannada. For a man of his originality, this was indeed a wasted effort - not that the output was in any way less than excellent - his translations of Kenneth Anderson's experiences hunting down man-eaters remain arguably the most vibrant record of hunting in Kannada. Many of his later books are collections of essays about geography, science and history - a far cry from the indecipherable connections created between elephant, man and nature in Krishnegowdana Aane, (Krishnegowda's Elephant) the short story I rate as his best.

But then, apparently he was that type of a person - interested in a lot of fields, curious about nature and man, and impossible to pigeonhole. His experiments at photography, sketching and other forms of expression remain an inspiration to our generation.

Lastly, did I know the man? No, I never even met him - except for a glimpse of him in Shimoga in a function full of people, through a window out of the building, where as a 12-year old I had to ask my father to point him out for me. I know him only through his pen, and some say that is the easiest way to be misguided. But then, his pen has kept my admiration of him alive for nearly 17 years, and basically made at least one 15-year old sacrifice afternoon cricket and pickup books to read and re-read. Well, if that cannot make an author proud, what will?