Jayant Kaikini is a well-known and much-loved person. He has filled our homes and hearts for nearly fifty years with his stories, plays, poetry, film songs and television shows. Behind the genius is a simple, down to earth human being. Let us read what he has to say about his childhood, parents, mentors, writing style, interests and more in this captivating conversation.
(English translation of the Kannada interview)
Images courtesy: Jayant Kaikini
You are very well known to everyone. You have participated in many interviews, so it is difficult to think of questions that have never been asked. However, we will make an attempt at asking something new.
Jayant Kaikini: Arvind, I am very happy to talk to you like this, to chat. [We] change in different ways. I might have answered a question about the same subject ten years ago. The answer to the same question today might be something different. Our stream of consciousness constantly changes. The context changes. So it’s a pleasure to have this conversation.
You have spent a third of your life in smaller places such as Gokarna, Kumta, a third in a mega city Mumbai and another third in Hyderabad and finally in Bengaluru. Each brought a major change in your career and life as such. Do you think back on the journey? What are your thoughts?
Jayant Kaikini: It is interesting. When the film Mera Naam Joker came out, we were all curious because it had two intervals. It was a three-segment film. Your question about my life in three parts reminded me of the film. Life in Gokarna was intensely formative. Gokarna, as you have read in my stories, is a pilgrimage site. A lot of tourists came to visit and we had this hobby of watching tourist buses. We eagerly counted how many vehicles came to the fair. The previous year, two hundred came, but this time it was three hundred and so on. In those days, they would park the bus outside the town. So, going to that bus stand itself was a big pastime.
Then, we observed the dressing styles of the people who came there. Tourists coming from the northern parts dressed differently. In those days, even someone coming from the neighboring state of Maharashtra was north for us. If someone came from Goa, they would look even more modern wearing cooling (dark) glasses. Here, I am talking about the 60s and 70s. So many such things and any tourist place, whether it is a pilgrim centre or famous for anything else, by default is liberal. If it is very conventional, it is not good for business.
You would see signs with a long list of rules, of dos and don’ts. But, people would often tell you, “Come, come, come, it’s ok. Don’t worry about it.” And the other interesting fact is that while other pilgrimage centers may be famous for one God, Gokarna had hundreds of temples. So, there were festivals, Yakshaganas, and drama companies throughout the year. This enriched my childhood. And teachers…we got very good teachers. All these experiences were part of my childhood.
Then came hostel stay. Leaving Gokarna, going to Kumta, Dharwad or somewhere else was the first culture shock. After going there, the shift from Kannada medium to English medium was another culture shock. I just could not follow what was being said, after 10th standard. That became an identity crisis.
When we were in Gokarna, my father, Gourish Kaikini, was a well known teacher. Being a teacher’s son is a double problem. Whether you studied or not, people passed snide remarks. If you did well, people commented, “What’s so great, after all you are the teacher’s son.” If you did not study, they said, “You’re the teacher’s son and yet you don’t study.” It felt as if everyone in Gokarna was taking the form of a teacher and nagging me.
I got fascinated by literature after I moved to the hostel. I started to write and send it to various magazines. If my poem appeared in Mallige, or in Prajavani, it felt good and gave me a sense of self-esteem. If the girls talked about my poems, it was even more fiercely satisfying. If you remember, boys and girls did not mix freely in those times. The ladies’ room seemed to have the strongest magnetic pull on the earth. We could not even look in that direction!
Dharwad had students from all over Karnataka in the hostel. [There were] different dialects of Kannada from Bellary, Mysore, Dharwad and Davanagere. When I went there, I saw an English film for the first time … Dr. Zhivago, Tora Tora Tora… I had never watched an English film before. I saw Samskara (Rites of passage), my first experimental film there. Then I saw the play Sattavara Neralu (The Shadow of the Dead). I started participating in poetry festivals. My first collection of poems, Rangadindondishtu Doora (At a Distance from the Stage) was released when I was a student in 1974.
Around the time, I came to Bengaluru and tried for a job. But, there were not many job prospects here. At that time there was only CFTRI and Indian Institute of Science. At the Indian Institute of Science I did not fare well in the interview for admission, for research. Then Pallavi by Lankesh had just been released. I was more eager to watch the film. Lankesh was at the screening and I met him at the gate of the theatre. He was very keen to know how the film was. I remember telling him that it was good.
Then, I went to Mumbai (then Bombay). Of course, it liberated me in many ways. That was the second phase. Most of you have read it in my stories. It liberated me from everything, caste, creed, etc. To use a visual metaphor, we wash T-shirts inside out to prevent the print or color from fading. Similarly, Mumbai turned me inside out (changed me) as a person. It liberated me from everything.
I was there for twenty-five years but no one asked me my caste, whether I was veg(etarian) or non-veg(etarian), if I owned a vehicle or not, owned my house or rented it, if my vehicle was first hand or second hand, did it run on gas or petrol etc. All these “periodic table questions” I heard only after coming to Bengaluru.
The only question I was asked was “Kya Kaam Karta” (what work do you do?). That is the sign of a true working city. That is why I have dedicated one of my books “To Mumbai, where work is worship and to Gokarna, where worship is work”. An outsider to Mumbai will discover the bylanes and the secrets of the city better than the person who is born and brought up there.
Those who go there get a different kind of anonymity and freedom. Along with that comes a responsibility. So, they are all connected. And I never felt alienation, loneliness, that is a kind of cliche, a kind of romanticization. “Ek akela is shehar mein abudana dhoondta hai”, that kind of thing happens if you are obsessed with yourself. Loneliness is the price paid by the self obsessed. If you love life, then that doesn’t happen. Many people mistake love for themselves as love for others. They want to love themselves through others and then all these troubles happen.
Yashwant Chittal, Arvind Nadkarni and other major writers were in Mumbai at the time. Chittal wrote Shikari, his major novels Purushottama, Chheda. I heard them in his own voice. During the weekends, I visited him and he would read it to me. I would also go to poet Arvind Nadkarni’s house. We were all bachelors and if we got some nice home-cooked food on the weekends, we were delighted! Satyadev Dubey was very, very active in those days. I saw Are! Mayavi Sarovar, many Badal Sarkar plays. The funny thing was that it cost five rupees to see a play but you could watch the rehearsal for one rupee. Once, I saw Anant Nag rehearsing on a terrace for a Konkani play. He had still not become a film actor, before Ankur was released.
You once said that you write your stories from beginning to end in one go. Then you said that we write fast, but our mind (speed of thought) thinks faster than that, but the faster our mind works, the more fickle it is. So when you have to write a story, how do you handle a disagreement in your mind?
Jayant Kaikini: When I write a story, I am so immersed in it and I listen to my mind. I am a very impulsive thinker and writer. I am driven by my mind, I don’t think too much. I just go as per the flow…if [the flow] asks me to stop, I stop writing. That is why I write by hand. The story itself says, enough is enough, leave me alone. Whenever I have fiddled with the story, that’s where it creates discord. Every story has its space, its boundaries, and it should stop there. To quote Chittal again, he once said, “I don’t write what I know; I write to know.” See, writing is a mode of thought for him. If I start writing thinking I know, then it becomes arrogance. I am trying to know something. Writing is a window. Through that window, I am trying to see what it is… I look for what I can find.
Usually, my stories are looking for a moment of transformation in an individual through an incident. Once that happens, the story ends there. But if you say it in one sentence, it doesn’t work. There is a lead to that transformation, the story is about that lead. Many people say that there is no conventional end in my stories. My mother was also very disappointed about that. Any story, novel or book, she would read the ending first. She did not want the anxiety of waiting to know whether someone died in the end or ran away or got married or not. Who was the thief? Who was the murderer? Unfortunately, there is nothing like that in my stories. So, she was always disappointed.
Most of the characters in your stories are down to earth common people. people who we barely notice in real life. You introduce the reader to their mind, thinking, and a myriad of emotions. What made you choose such anonymous characters? Are they based on people you have observed in real life? How do you understand the mind of these people?
ಅನಿಸುತಿದೆ ನನಗೆ ಇಂದು - ಜಯಂತ್ ಕಾಯ್ಕಿಣಿ ಜೊತೆಗೆ ಸಂವಾದ (Original Kannada interview)
Jayant Kaikini: There is no such deliberate choice, they are part of our sensibility. Now if I write a story today, that person may not be someone I saw yesterday. He may be someone I saw somewhere in our town fifty years ago. The problem is that we think of them as black and white. I think that we are all extensions of each other is an element of the celebration of literature. See, there are thousands of people, we are indebted to them. This social indebtedness is the real essence of our being.
Live life and love people. You don’t have to stand and stare at them to write a story or poem. You don’t have to go looking for material for your stories and poems. Someone once asked me, “Sir, where do you find good poems?”. I answered that wherever you don’t have a network, you will find good poetry. Many people did not understand it. They trolled me. They commented that he is living in a different era. They wrote that I am very popular because of the network. Posturing, networking and self promotion has become the essence now…. that is necessary [but] it is secondary. Before that, you should create something. For that, the feeling that we are all one is very important.
When a Sachin Tendulkar stands up to bat, the person batting there is a pure living being. The name Sachin Tendulkar is not important. When Kishori Amonkar is in alaap (a slow, meditative, melodic prelude) or S. P. Balasubrahmanyam sings, it is a pure living being performing there. If a writer also wants to write, one needs to be like that, a life that encompasses everyone. You practice yoga, prayers inside but as soon as you come out, all the man-made divisions are back in your head. We start thinking that all the people in the neighborhood are like us; and over there are the others. Who are these “us” and “others”? Ramana Maharshi said that there are no others.
You wrote an essay called Extra Sambar about Bengaluru in 2004, so descriptively and humorously. For example, “helmets [middle class people riding scooters] carrying the dream of [buying home] sites”, “the person who was served a litre of sambar finished it for just one idli and expertly swam through the crowd of people like a Superman to get extra sambar for the second idli”, “Darshinis [fast food restaurants] that have eaten up the footpath”, “left-wing drivers [drivers who overtake from left, i.e. wrong side]”, “solemn looking buildings wearing blue glasses [tinted windows]”. Twenty-two years later, it still feels true, a timeless truth. What do you think of Bengaluru now?
Jayant Kaikini: There are more high-rise buildings now, more multi-storey apartments. Too much cement, too much pollution. There was no Metro then, now we have it. Oh, and Rangashankara was not there. Rangashankara is playing a key role in theatre, which is very important. It develops artistic taste. Rangashankara is inviting more people every year. They do three or four festivals. They have good theatre groups from different parts of the country.
Bengaluru was once home to giants of literature – Niranjana and Jayanagar, Basavanagudi and Lankesh for example. Today, is literature and particularly Kannada literature slowly losing its place in our society and culture?
Jayant Kaikini: No, it is a universal problem everywhere. Reading has decreased, but infrastructure wise there is a lot more publication now than before, because publication is easy. Now everyone can use DTP themselves. Earlier, individual metal letters known as type were set into lines of texts and placed in a wooden frame. A minimum of thousand or at least five hundred copies were printed before it was dismantled. Now it is not like that, you can print a book whenever you want using DTP. I write love songs about heartbreaks for films, but here my own heart broke when I learnt this. Nowadays, not more than a hundred copies of a book is printed when a new book comes out. Only when there is a demand from the bookshops the publisher prints extra copies. This is the current situation, so it is not a very encouraging sign.
You have written plays, stories, travelogues, essays, screenplays, and dialogues. Which of these is your favorite? Or which do you find easiest or most difficult?
Jayant Kaikini: Everything has its own difficulties and joys. All of them were not by choice, some of it was needed to earn a living. But the quickest is the poetry. I used to have a habit where if I wanted to write a story, I would first write a poem like sharpening a pencil, and then start on the story.
Two of your books came out in English. No Presents Please, followed by Mithun Number Two. No Presents Please won an international award. How did the proposal to do this translation come about?
Jayant Kaikini: Tejaswini Niranjana and I are contemporaries. From the beginning she has been liking my stories. For about fifteen years she had been [translating] the stories she liked when she had time. Then she thought why not put all this together and make a [book]. It was her idea. I did not write all those stories together, it was picked from different collections, from different stories. I always feel translation is safest in the hands of a poet. She is basically a poet…one of the finest poets. She wrote her first collection of poetry in English called Liquid Sapphire. Her father Niranjana published it. I think it was also in 1973 or 1972, at the same time when my book came out. She was a child prodigy, very brilliant. There are a lot of poetic elements in my expression in my short stories. She has tried her best to keep it intact and it is very safe. It is difficult to translate my writing. There is a rhythm in the entire sentence. She captures it very well, so, in fact I am very thankful to her for doing it. Then, she did Mithun Number Two also very well.. The first collection has the portrayal of people who lived in Mumbai. The second collection is about people migrating from other places to Mumbai.
What are your favorite authors or books? What are you reading now?
Jayanth Kaikini: I like Shantinath Desai, Yashwant Chittal, Ananthamurthy, Lankesh, Tejasvi, and Raghavendra Khasnis very much. Among the poets, A.K. Ramanujan and K.V. Tirumalesh. There was G.S. Avadhani in our Uttara Kannada district. One of his poetry collections came to my father with a request to write a preface. I was in college but I was resting at home because of paratyphoid, If I had not read his poems, I probably would have never become a poet. It was a different kind of poetry. Then there is A.K. Ramanujan’s Hokkulalli huvilla (There is no flower in the navel), Gangadhar Chittal’s Hariva Neeridu (This is flowing water) and Tirumalesh’s Mukhamukhi (Face to Face). These four collections of poetry, they made me a poet.
They are the poets who made me understand that poetry is not just meaning, poetry is an experience. We all look for meaning. My response is that life itself has no meaning, so where would a poem get it from?
People tell me that my film songs are very meaningful … there is nothing really meaningful in them. The girl is in love with the boy, she has something to say to him, whatever poetic element there is also plays a role in the scene, that’s all. If you want my poetry, one should read my collection, because my real poetry is there. In films, my poetry is playing a role just like an actor does. Many people don’t even know that I have written a collection of poems outside films. It’s very difficult, and needs some skill because it is written for a pre-composed tune, which is not at all easy.
Do you think the new generation is interested in literature and art?
Jayanth Kaikini: If they read a couple of good books and if they get a taste of it, then they will start. If you remember, in the old days, one had to start cars by using a hand crank (rod). Just like that we should start and leave it to them. See, the new generation is different, this preaching mode has gone, it has no more meaning. After twenty minutes, no one listens to anyone, everyone is sitting looking at their mobile phones. We writers continue with our long speeches. If we cannot convey our point in ten minutes, then we won’t be able to do it even in two hours.
The poem “Kaanuvanthe Mayavaadaro” (They visibly disappeared) in Jayant Kaikini’s handwriting
