Kannada writer, poet, playwright Late Girish Raghunath Karnad. For four decades Karnad has composed plays, often using history and mythology to tackle contemporary issues. He has translated his plays into English and has received various awards. He was active in the world of Indian cinema working as an actor, director and screenwriter, in Hindi and Kannada cinema, and has earned awards. When Girish Karnad started writing plays, Kannada literature was highly influenced by the renaissance in Western literature. Writers would choose a subject that looked entirely alien to manifestation of native soil. He found a new approach of drawing historical and mythological sources to tackle contemporary themes and existentialist crisis of modern man through characters locked in psychological and philosophical conflicts. Yayati was published in 1961, when he was 23 years old. It is based on the story of King Yayati, one of the ancestors of the Pandavas. His next was Tughlaq (1964), about a rashly idealist 14th-century Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, and allegory on the Nehruvian era which started with ambitious idealism and ended up in disillusionment. Karnad made his acting as well as screenwriting debut in a Kannada movie, Samskara (1970), based on a novel by U.R. Ananthamurthy and directed by Pattabhirama Reddy. In television, he played the role of Swami’s father in the TV series Malgudi Days (1986–1987), based on R. K. Narayan’s books.
His Hindi movies include Nishaant (1975), Manthan (1976), Swami (1977) and Pukar (2000).
