Welcome to the Third H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture. I thank you all for joining us on this occasion, which had he been here, would have been Sharada Prasad’s 88th birthday. Also on behalf of my mother, who unfortunately cannot be here, since she is confined to bed after two recent fractures.
Throughout his life, Sharada Prasad, or Shouri as family and old friends called him, engaged with a very wide spectrum of ideas, people and institutions, which enriched his life tremendously, and to which he contributed. Our conception of the annual Memorial Lecture was to celebrate each of these diverse engagements. In the first lecture, Mukul Kesavan spoke on the nature of the Indian Republic and the dominant strand of the freedom and nation building enterprise of which Shouri was a part. The second lecture was by Sanjaya Baru on the media, its business and ethics, again an institution and its issues with which Shouri was constantly involved. This year, we visit another theme in which Shouri had a lifelong involvement – language and literature, particularly his mother-tongue Kannada, its relationship with the world, and translation. Sugata Srinivasaraju will speak to us on “Negotiating Two Worlds: Bilingualism as a Cultural Idea”.
Some time ago, in another part of this Centre, Ram Guha cited Sharada Prasad for his linguidextrousness, and the importance of his contribution to both the Kannada and English literary worlds. Sitting in the audience, this was a pleasant experience, a revelation to me. For, while I knew my father knew a handful of languages, and wrote compellingly in both Kannada and English, I never associated him with a polyglot facility for picking up languages quickly– unlike say his teacher B. S. Kesavan, or his close friends from college, NV Krishna Murthi and MV Krishnaswamy. Or maybe I was unconsciously comparing him with the gold standards of multilingual dexterity set by Mysoreans such as BM Srikantiah through to AK Ramanujam.
It is about 70 years ago that Shouri began writing (in the public, publishable sense of the word), in English and in Kannada. At age 18-19, during the Quit India Movement, he maintained a diary in prison, a volume of which my mother discovered a couple of years ago, and which Sugata edited and published two years ago as “A Window on the Wall”. Rosy D’Souza, who is also with us here, translated it from English into Kannada. Around the same time in the early 40s, Shouri also translated into Kannada R. K. Narayan’s first novel “Swami and Friends”. Indeed, for many Mysoreans of that generation, Shouri’s translation was their first encounter with the charming town of Malgudi and its residents.
Most of Shouri’s later translations were in the other direction -- from Kannada to English – chiefly the novels and autobiography of his friend and true renaissance man Shivaram Karanth: Hucchu Manasina Hatthu Mukhagalu (translated as Ten Faces of a Crazy Mind), Maimanagala suhiyalli (translated as Woman of Basrur) and Kudiyara Kusu (translated as The Headman of the Little Hill). And several short stories and essays of writers like Masti Venkatesh Iyengar and others.
It is now my pleasure to introduce this evening’s speaker, Sugata Srinivasa Raju. Sugata is a journalist, writer and translator. Many of you may have seen his articles in Outlook Magazine. Prior to this he worked with The Hindustan Times, Deccan Herald and contributed to the Irish Times in Dublin. He was also the founding faculty member of the INDIAN INSTITUTE OF JOURNALISM & NEW MEDIA in Bangalore. At 26, he was the youngest editor of ANIKETANA, a quarterly journal of Kannada language and literature in English, published by the Academy of Letters in Karnataka.
In 2000, he was awarded the British Chevening Scholarship for print journalism at the University of Westminster and between 2008 and 2010, he was an ILI Fellow of the Aspen Institute in Colorado.
Beyond sharing a journalistic gene, Sugata combined Shouri’s love for both his mother tongue with a facility with the other tongue (or what one of my parents’ professors called the Step-mother tongue).
Sugata's books include EKUSHEY FEBRUARY, a volume in Kannada published in 2004. PHOENIX AND FOUR OTHER MIME PLAYS, published in 2005, was a translation of his father's plays from the Emergency years, which won him the Karnataka Sahitya Academy translation prize. In 2008, he published KEEPING FAITH WITH THE MOTHER TONGUE - THE ANXIETIES OF A LOCAL CULTURE. Most recently, in February 2012, his book PICKLES FROM HOME- THE WORLDS OF A BILINGUAL was released. Sugata is currently working on a biography of Shivaram Karanth. I am still awaiting the release of a long overdue book on my parents’ dear friend and my “guru”, the film-maker M V Krishnaswamy or MV Kittu.
It was through MV Kittu that Sugata was introduced to my parents. And very soon became someone that Shouri in his last years used to refer to as my “new young friend”. Even in the last few months of his life, when he was frequently disoriented, Shouri’s eyes would light up on hearing that Sugata was on the phone. And I can never forget that look of pure innocent joy on his face when a packet from Sugata arrived with Ballavaru Bahalilla, the second volume of the Kannada translation of Shouri’s “The Book I Won’t be Writing”.
So let us all welcome Sugata Srinivasa Raju.
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