The master of prose
|
Some interesting reads in Kannada...
|
Shabda Teera
by Jayanth Kaikini
Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 120
Jayanth Kaikini is one of the finest writers of Kannada prose. It is an ironical reflection on the current trends in literary criticism that I have to qualify the statement by explaining that this does not mean Jayanth has mastered the fine art of prose writing in a way that prose itself becomes an aesthetic dimension, autotelic and drawing attention to itself whatever be the content. He has made it a sensitive and sophisticated instrument to explore complex and contemporary human experiences, to lift moments from routine, everyday realities. He sees in them meanings that are concretely located in time and space and yet possess the timeless significance of epiphanies. Jayanth's prose succeeds allowing you to participate in the process of discovering the unexpected and the extraordinary in the routine; you share the surprise and pleasure of the writer when language ferries experiences to the shore of words.
There are occasions when the inventions of the writer seem unrealised and the reader can see him labouring. But the better pieces in this collection have the ability to surprise us with the complex truths about human beings. In "Chappale" (applause) Jayanth describes how the police have surrounded a shed housing Khalistan terrorists and a large crowd, including the writer is a witness. The police shoot dead a terrorist and the crowd applauds. A routine unconscious reflex action? A proof of our common culpability. An evidence of the degeneration of our times? Jayanth's prose keeps close to the small, physical details allowing the meanings to reverberate in our minds.
Jayanth is the quintessential "Mumbaikar" and "Mumbai" unravels for him all the grace, depravity nobility and evil the human world is capable of. (Of course, it is piquant but true that the finest miniature painter in works of Mumbai should be this Kannada writer) In another fine piece the washing line become an elaborate metaphor expressing the diversity of human life. The writer concludes that they constitute a script in which are written the impossibly plural worlds of human beings. The piece is an example of the way in which Jayanth works through images and metaphors. A similar example is the essay on `Dust' in which dust becomes a major metaphor through which life is understood. The essay is like a long catalogue of things which are shrouded by dust. But the catalogue itself goes on to become a way of knowing diverse and multiple human experiences, which co-exist. It is this use of tropes as not decorative but as means of grasping the world around us which helps Jayanth's prose to evade the conventional functions of prose - description and reflection. His prose gives the slip to these authoritarian asters of prose writing. His prose reconstructs and relives experience instead. It is for this reason perhaps the writings here have the power to take the reader in - into their unique, specific life worlds. In the piece on `Flat lives', with the flat characters on posters, Jayanth destroys our complacency. He concludes the piece saying that the contemporary world is quite competent to turn us into flat beings like the posters.
The power of Jayanth's prose is in its immersion in our present, unredeemed history. The irrationality, the violence and the stupid cruelty of the contemporary world is the frame in which the images of ordinary decency and depravity are caught.
Despite Jayanth's (willful?) vulnerability to compassion, sentiment and generosity, the frame itself is a brooding reminder of all those contemporary realities which threaten these values. A very significant part of the collection has Jayanth's enthusiastic and sensitive response to new writing in Kannada. There is ample evidence in these writings that Jayanth is an extra-ordinary reader, with his `negative capability' of entering into sensibilities of young writers very unlike him. He errs many times by being over generous. But he has been an `Adamic' reader, discovering and naming the potentialities of the new writers in Kannada. It is anybody's guess that the literary critical establishment will wait till the new writing is canonised.
RAJENDRA CHENNI
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
