Beerendranath Bhattacharya, a well-known Assamese writer met when he was President of the Sahitya Akademi, Gopalakrishna Adiga and asked him to name for an outsider like him the greatest creations of Kuvempu. Adiga was at that time known as a critic of Kuvempu’s grand style in poetry and from that criticism the ‘Navya’ literary movement had drawn ideas for a new language and idiom in Kannada poetry. I was also a strong defender of Adiga’s literary position, although, now looking back, I am aware of its creative strength and, at the same time, its intellectual and aesthetic short-comings.

Adiga was an outspoken writer and critic and his response to Bhattacharya adds a new meaning and a metaphorical dimension to what I just now have written. Adiga named the two great novels of Kuvempu, Kanooru Heggdathi and Malegalalli Madumagalu and was silent for a while making Bhattacharya guess what would be the third wok. Kuvempu’s Ramayana Darshana? No. Adiga replied: ‘the third great creation is his son, Purna Chandra Tejasvi.’

The young Tejasvi was closer at that point of time to the writers in the ‘Navya’ tradition than to followers of his great father, the best of whom wrote in an expansive, spiritually oriented style. This was true of most of the writers of pre-independent India. The best of them have come out of these influences and found their own paths. Tejasvi himself whom I knew from his student days outgrew the ‘Navya’ influence as well and found his own path. He is unique among the bunch of writers who emerged in the ‘Navya’literary movement.for he is present in his works only as an eye- a wondering compassionate eye. The narrative mode he chose is not consciously plotted to uphold any ideology. Yet one can say that Tejasvi would not have written what he wrote had he not come under the influence of Lohia, and the movement for decentralization and empowerment of the backward masses of India. He shared his concerns with people of great courage like the Raitha Sangha leader Nanjundaswamy, rationalist Ramdas and iconoclast Lankesh. Tejasvi was philosophically an anarchist (such an element is there in both Gandhi and Lohia too) and he could not wholly identify himself with any movement.

Tejasvi felt that the navya writers were getting too self-absorbed and in creative reaction he opened a new world in his fiction. From my knowledge of Indian writing in the bhashas I would say that Tejasvi is one of the great writers in whom the moffusil India got expressed. In the other writers there is the rural India and the city but not the bizarre world of the moffusil India.

His story ‘the post office in abachur’ is comic in tone but it has a sub text too. The post master there is a self deluded person for he imagines that being a post master he represents the central government. There is another story ‘tabarana kathe’ which became a famous film. It is a Kafkaesque story of bureaucracy. There is another called ‘Avanathi’ which describes life in a village with extraordinary characters but they don’t know what they are. The most beautiful woman in that village is valued only for her breast milk which can cure eye sores. A person who could have been a great artist becomes a degenerate carpenter and a handy man for the villagers.

Tejasvi wrote novels which again are unique. None of us, his contemporaries could have written any of them for although we came from villages we were urbanized and knew our villages only nostalgically. Tejasvi after his masters did not become a professor like any of us although he was the son of a great poet and vice-chancellor. He wrote about a world in which he lived -- a world which is shaping the new India and its democracy.

Tejasvi’s style in his fiction is not high-mimetic but low-mimetic, as it is in another important dalit writer, Devanuru Mahadeva. The comic element not only makes him eminently readable but gives him a compassionate view. He has all sorts of characters- cheats, liars, goondas, rabble rousers but they seem to be gifted people who degenerate because they have no possibility of growing to their full ability in a restricted and restricting society.

One of his greatest creations is Mandanna of the novel Karvallo. If much of our writing in Kannada can be read as allegories of decolonization, the novel Karvallo which reads like science fiction has a great metaphor for this process in the relationship between Mandanna, almost a village idiot and the man of scientific curiosity Karvallo. Mandanna looks idiotic but he has an abundant source of indigenous knowledge. He does not know the value of what he knows. He has seen a mysterious flying lizard which can illumine a biologist’s world of knowledge. The novel moves at a leisurely phase and the reader can’t even suspect that there are great hidden meanings in the narration. Tejasvi broke away from the ‘navya’ style of writing because he wanted an unselfconscious style; he broke away from the seekers of spiritual meanings because they also deliberately plotted their meanings. Tejasvi’s narration is like aalaap in music. He seems to follow where the story leads him by its own inner logic.

It may look like a paradox. He frees his narration from discursiveness, but produces a philosophical narrative. He frees himself from the so called Indian preoccupation with ‘the spiritual’ but produces a sense of vismaya- wonder which is at the root of all spiritual experiences.

I would say that Tejasvi combined in himself the best of the two great writers Kuvempu and Karanth. He is adventurous like Karant- he was a gifted photographer, learnt sitar and wrote on scientific subjects in a friendly style for the young. He delighted in fishing. and wandered in forests opening himself to the mystery of nature with a scientific curiosity. Kuvempu’s novels are also unstructured , vast canvasses of people and nature where nothing is big and nothing is low and the quotidian is the eternal unending music of life.. Tejasvi gets this from his father but the element of curiosity in his dealings with nature is reminiscent of Karant’s writing. Tejasvi is also an unselfconscious artist; more unselfconscious than Kuvempu, I would say. The pervasive comic sense makes this possible and the comic sense is subtle enough to allow many sub-texts in the narration.

Among my contemporaries, I have seen the fiery Lankesh in a suit, Adiga in a tie less suit but never Tejasvi. He wore loose shirts and loose jeans. He could never participate in ritualistic formal functions. (He once jeered at my weakness for formal functions)He loved to be at ease, as he expressed this in his loose informal clothes and in his prose style as well. . He lived intensely and died in the same manner he lived. He ate a good meal with Rajeswari whom he had loved and married without rituals, his lovely children and grand children washed his hands and died. But he was engaged until the last minute of his life. His wife told me that in the morning he had a meeting with people of his village and was concerned with the health of some village tanks. He always spoke his mind with politicians and officers directly and unceremoniously when it concerned the common interests of the people around him. He is one of the great writers of our times in India and if I say he died prematurely it is literally true for he was creative until he died.

We had some arguments when he was alive. I would have asked him ‘are you not dangerously becoming a charming writer? You seem so self-contained in your rural estate, while globalization is destroying agriculture and our languages?’ He had once told me that he would be happy if globalization and modernization destroyed our caste system. He often said what came most immediately to his mind but he made great literature out of the conflict of ideas in him as all good writers do. He had rejected caste and communal politics and was disgusted with the corruption that has become an organic component of our democratic politics. I just heard from one of his friends that he was shocked by a hate novel in Kannada which has seen many editions in a month. I wonder whether Tejasvi, like all great writers, would have found the necessity to make new experiments in his mode of writing to counter such cheap but dangerously propagandist popular writing in the creatively controversial democratic Kannada literary world.

We have lost some great creative minds in Kannada one after another—Lankesh, D R Nagaraj, Ramachandra Sharma and now Tejasvi.