Narayan Hegde
Photo by Rita Hegde
Bio
Narayan Hegde is Emeritus Professor of English at SUNY College at Old Westbury, where he taught English, Indian, and World Literatures. As a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, he has translated several works of Kannada literature, including Stallion of the Sun and Other Stories by U. R. Ananthamurthy, Annayya's Anthropology by A. K. Ramanujan, and a 19th-century drama, The Marriage Farce of Iggappa Hegade. He is a recipient of the Katha Translation Award. He is currently part of a team translating the 15th century Kannada epic Kumaravyasa Bharatha for publication by Harvard University Press in its Murty Classical Library of India series.
As an English language translator of some of the most significant authors in Kannada, one of India’s major languages, I often see myself as a negotiator between two disparate cultures – the English-speaking West and the multilingual India. As such, I need to be immersed in the milieus of both cultures. Some of the institutional supports that I have received in the past thirty years have enabled me to make periodic visits to India and some extended stays which, in turn, have made it possible for me to remain in close contact with the literary scene in Kannada. The latest such support is the Literature Translation Fellowship of the NEA which I am grateful to have been awarded. Without the continued support from institutions like the NEA for translation, important literary works from most non-Western languages are likely to remain unknown in the West.
From AVASTHE by U. R. Ananthamurthy
[translated from the Kannada]
When he was a young boy, Krishnappa had to work as a cattle-herd. Every day, his head covered in a coarse blanket, a sickle in one hand and a bamboo flute in the other, he would go through the village rounding up the cattle and take them for grazing. He talks about it as though the profound meaning it had was understandable only to him. Now that he is dying, does he feel that sometimes something mystical entered his life? Or, was such a belief necessary in order for him to transcend the banality of the present? – it’s hard to say. Intellectually, Krishnappa is an atheist. Yet, he talks about the god-crazed mystics like Kabir, Nanak, Allama, Meera, and Paramahamsa in a way that is admiring, mocking, and skeptical all at once. He jokes about his feeling of oneness with them. So, it is hard to say what his overall outlook is.
He harks back to those boyhood years. At the crack of dawn, he would go to the front of each house, untether the cattle, take them to the hill-side, or to the river, or to the grassy meadows for grazing, and bring the cattle back in the evening. He tries to remember the thoughts that came to his mind while sitting under the tree, watching the cattle with lazy eyes, playing some fanciful tune on the bamboo flute. And suddenly, an incident which would turn out to be significant unfolds in front of his eyes. But, before he starts talking about it to Nagesh, he tells with a laugh: “Please, young man, do not think that I was having a swell time then. If the cows happened to see a green rice-paddy anywhere, I knew I was going to be in trouble. They would go wild and before you knew they would have crashed the fences and trampled all over the rice-paddy. All alone, helpless in the pouring rain, I would go crazy trying to steer the cattle away from the paddy field. In the end, I would just give up and sit dumb-struck, thinking of the beating I was sure I would get later.” Narrating this, he acts out the fear and the pain he felt at getting beaten. At this point, he remembers Maheshwarayya who had delivered him from the drudgery of being a cow-herd boy.
No one knows who Maheshwarayya was or where he was from. Let’s say he moved to a new place, the first thing he did was setting up a tidy house. Although he lived alone, he kept a cook. But he used to wash his clothes himself. You should listen to him reciting Kalidasa’s poetry in Sanskrit or to his classical Hindustani style singing. A great pleasure-loving man he was. Describing his handle-bar moustache above his lips that were reddened by chewing betel-leaf, the glittering diamond studs in his ears, his closed-collar coat, the pure white dhoti which he wore elegantly, the silver-capped cane in his hand, and his serene demeanor, Krishnappa adds that he was also a great ascetic. Though Maheshwarayya himself would not have openly said it, it is Krishanappa’s guess that he left home upon coming to know of his wife’s having a lover. After letting his wife have a part of the estate, Maheshwarayya, who was a millionaire, put the remaining money in the bank, retired from everything, and set out wandering from place to place. He read all the time. Krishnappa believed that the man was a visionary who knew the past, the present, and the future. Let’s say he arrives at someone’s house. Upon sitting down, suddenly, he would let out a cry, “Bho.” Then there would be an uneasy look in his face. Though he knew that it was a foreboding about something, he wouldn’t reveal it, no matter how much his host begged him. Later, though, he would whisper it in Krishnappa’s ear. So, people were afraid of running into him for he might blurt out “Bho.” It was so spontaneous that he couldn’t help it. That is why, he would sometimes refuse people’s invitation. To Krishnappa he would say, “I don’t know what disaster is waiting to happen to that poor man – so, I won’t go to his house.” Sadly, though Maheshwrayya could foresee people’s future, he rarely saw any good coming out of it. The only time it was different was when he saw something good in Krishnappa’s future. This is how it was:
About U. R. Ananthamurthy
U. R. Ananthamurthy (1932-2014) is one of the most celebrated writers of contemporary India. He was one of the pioneers of the Navya (Modernist) movement in Kannada literature. His published work includes four novels, several short story collections, collections of poems, books of essays, and a play. He was the President of the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian National Academy of Letters), the Chairman of the National Book Trust, and the Vice-Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University. He is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor. He was nominated as one of the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. His recent passing caused a wave of grief across Karnataka where he received a full state funeral covered by major media. First published in 1978 and made into a feature film in India, Avasthe is the third novel in a trilogy that chronicles the social and political changes in India immediately after the country's independence from colonial rule. While the other two books in the trilogy are available in English translations, Avasthe remains virtually unknown outside southern India.