Jayanth Kodkani (THE TIMES OF INDIA; June 11, 2019)

There were many Girish Karnads in the culture scene. Towering among them was the Jnanpith award -winning playwright who gave a new dimension to Indian theatre. The second was the director of films like ‘Vamsha Vriksha’, ‘Kaadu’, ‘Ondaanondu Kaaladalli’ in Kannada and ‘Godhuli’ and ‘Utsav’ in Hindi.

The third was an actor who shared screen space with Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah in the art cinema of the 1970s and ’80s as much as with Salman Khan in “Ek Tha Tiger” in recent years.

A Rhodes scholar, he was a publisher with the Oxford University Press for seven years. And then there was a Karnad who spoke his mind on issues social, cultural or political and quite often joined hands for a public cause. All this apart from the public positions he held with distinction. Some of these were parallel pursuits which he accomplished with the ease of a motorist switching lanes on the highway. But he was, without a shadow of doubt, a key figure in theatre.

Girish Karnad’s plays carried the force of present-day themes with a deeper gaze into the past. He wrote 15 plays, directed about a dozen films, TV serials and documentaries, and donned makeup for over 90 films in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. In his pursuits, he straddled two spheres: mainstream and arthouse as an actor; Kannada and English as a playwright.

As a director, he picked literary works — U R Ananthamurthy’s “Samskara”, S L Bhyrappa’s “Vamsha Vriksha” or the classic Sanskrit play, “Mrichakatika” by Sudraka — but had no qualms with the song-anddance routines of Bollywood. In his view, Hindi cinema could ward off the invasion of Hollywood because of its popular song-and-dance tradition.

Seldom has India seen such multipronged talent. But one aspect of his personality that remains etched in Indian minds is of a resolute, clearthinking liberal. He was amongst the most vocal critics of hardline Hindutva and police investigations had indicated that he was on the hit-list of a farright conspiracy. “If speaking up means being a Naxal then I am an urban Naxal,” he had said after he was seen sporting a placard around his neck at an event in Bengaluru. That was Karnad in his role as a champion of free speech.