Kannada Poet & Playwright Chandrashekhara Kambara. He is known for effective adaptation of the North Karnataka dialect of the Kannada language in his plays, and poems, in a similar style as in the works of D.R. Bendre.
Kambara’s plays mainly revolve around folk or mythology interlinked with contemporary issues, inculcating modern lifestyle with his hard-hitting poems. He has become a pioneer of such literature. His contribution as a playwright is significant not only to Kannada theatre but also to the Indian theatre in general as he achieved a blend of the folk and the modern theatrical forms.
He is a strong supporter of imparting school education with Kannada language as the medium of instruction. His justification for this stance is that only mother tongue can provide an ‘experience’, which is an integral part of learning and learning through any other language only gives people ‘information’, which makes them less competent. This concurs with UNESCO’s recommendation that “providing education in a child’s mother tongue is a critical issue.”
Kambara has to his credit 25 plays, 11 anthologies of poems, 5 novels, 16 research works and several scholarly write-ups on folk theatre, literature and education. Some of his popular plays include ‘Jokumaraswamy’, ‘Jayasidnayaka’, ‘Kadu Kudure’, ‘Nayi Kathe’, ‘Mahamayi’, ‘Harakeya Kuri’ and others. He was conferred with the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1991 for another popular play Sirisampige.
He is a pioneer in introducing Bailahongal’s famous Sangya Balya (bayalata) and Jokumaraswamy, a traditional ritual of his native district, to the literary world which have seen thousands of performances, not only in Kannada, but several other Indian languages as well. His most recent novel, Shikhar Soorya, is rated among the best Kannada novels.
In his lengthy narrative poem Helatena Kela (“Listen, I will tell you”) in the early 1960s, Kambara introduced some of the recurring themes which he would often return to in his later works. Themes of tradition and modernity, crises of feudalism, native identities, colonialism, march of history, sex, loss of faith, the death of God and several related themes explored later in his plays, novels and poetry had found metaphorical expression in the narrative poem. The eponymous, long narrative poem has the musicality and rhythm of the Lavani form and uses rich earthy imagery.
