India is undergoing a great age of translation – and, hopefully, one that will only get stronger with every decade. One of the strengths of the current age is the translation not only of literary texts, but also of texts with a broader cultural significance. An excellent example is the translation of the Courtesy of Criticism: Selected Essays of Kirtinath Kurtkoti.
Kirtinath Kurtkoti for a new generation
Kurtkoti (1928-2003) was a towering figure of Kannada literary thought. As noted, while the post-independence generation of many of the regional languages produced several highly regarded writers, less is known of the other contributors to the cultural eco-system – the philosophers, critics, popular historians and so on. This able translation by scholar Kamalakar Bhat (fluent in Kannada, Marathi and English) helps introduce Kurtkoti’s generation to contemporary readers.
Kurtkoti was born and lived for the most part of his life in the distinctive northern Karnataka region (Gadag, Dharwad, Belgaum), one that is perhaps less known than the more loquacious southern Karnataka regions of Mysore and Bengaluru. Kurtkoti, who was an English lecturer and strongly associated with an important Kannada publishing house, professionally also experienced the regions of Pune and Gujarat. It is likely that this well-travelled life allowed him insights into many aspects of Kannada literary lore.
The essays in the book are not arranged chronologically, but under the heads of literary history, literary theory and literary criticism. Each essay has a helpful initial abstract, giving context and dates of original publication. Going by this particular selection, it would seem that Kurtkoti’s greatest achievement was in the Literary History section.
This seems right, especially with regard to those particular generations that spanned the second half of the 20th century. The real achievement of those critics was their mastery of the entire span of the literary culture of a millennium – roughly the time from the birth of the regional language a little before the dawn of the first millennium, all the way to the end of that millennium. One can feel thousands years of verse at the tip of Kurtkoti’s tongue. This achievement feels truly splendid when scholars today often choose to specialise in a few decades of writing.
Kurtkoti writes with marvellous confidence about the foundational 10th-century poet Pampa. He notes how Pampa had to continually negotiate his incipient Kannada tradition with the aged riches of Sanskrit metre – the distinctive use of line pauses and the varieties of genres (ballads, blank verse, prose-verse combinations, dramas that intermixed the colloquial and the courtly registers). Indeed, post-Pampa Sanskrit works of the region often carried the stamp of Pampa’s influence, reminding us that the influence was never one-way. Within Kannada, Pampa’s influence lasted over two hundred years. Pampa also simultaneously negotiated Jainism and emergent forms of devotional and narrative Vaishnavite Hinduism, as he sought to re-tell the Mahabharata from a Jain-inspired perspective.
Kurtkoti is able to write of such poets, even as he is able to write of his contemporaries. Such a mode of scholarship is rare, not only due to scholars being increasingly specialised, but also due to the loss of importance of knowing these poems by heart from a young age. Neither the formal nor informal educational systems (or indeed, one’s grandmother’s knee) encourage learning by memory anymore. The loss to a culture’s aural cosmology is incalculable, and critics can no longer summon the full weight of a tradition to evaluate ambitious new work.
A distinct scholar
The nationalist moment was however a moment that re-kindled, after many centuries, that idea of cultural grandeur. Thus, Kurtkoti was fortunate to have lived in the era of a poet who too sought to absorb the millennial fullness of a tradition – in northern Karnataka, this poet was the beloved DR Bendre (1896–1981). Bendre draws a full circle – or an arrow of a line – from the heroic age of Pampa to the heroic age of language nationalism. Kurtkoti writes with care of many important Kannada writers of the latter half of the 20th century (Karnad, Ananthamurthy, Kuvempu, Kambara, Devanoora Mahadeva), but the one he manifestly adores is Bendre.
For him, Bendre was a peak – someone who had distilled an enormous tradition, and who stood both at the end of one, but also emphatically at the beginning of a new one: “Bendre recognised that it is insufficient for a poet to construct their poetic idiom just once”. Bendra was able to weave narrative and myth, enigma as well as eros. There is the creation of many voices, with many of them being seemingly remote from the poet’s own. All great poets must be chameleons. There is riddle and elegy, intimacy and comprehensiveness throughout his oeuvre.
What Bendre did with poetry – bravely summoning the entirety of a tradition to serve as muse – Kurtkoti hoped to achieve through the more modest voice of criticism, through what he has called a “moral ego” of praise and celebration of the many registers of literary history. Girish Karnad, perhaps the most successful re-kindler of the Sanskrit dramatic tradition in the 20th century, has written of the enormous debt he owed to Kurtkoti’s vision of a multi-dimensional tradition, a home with many deities, and with the possibility of many kinds of pieties, aesthetics, and stewardship.
We are grateful to this translation for giving us a glimpse of this capacious vision.
Nikhil Govind is the author, most recently, of The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata.
Courtesy of Criticism: Selected Essays of Kirtinath Kurtkoti, edited and translated from the Kannada by Kamalakar Bhat, Penguin India/Ashoka Centre for Translation.
