Noted Kanada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy passes away

August 22, 2014

Eminent Kannada writer and one of the most heralded public intellectuals in the country, U.R. Ananthamurthy (82) passed away.
He was a contemporary writer and critic in the Kannada language and is considered as one of the path-breakers of the Navya movement.
Awards and Honors:
He was conferred Jnanpith Award– the highest literary honor in India– for the Kannada language. He is the sixth person among eight recipients of the Jnanpith Award for the Kannada language. In 1998, he was honored with the Padma Bhushan award from the Government of India.
Navya Movement
In the 1950s, a new modernist school of writing called Navya evolved even as the Pragatishila merged back into the Navodaya mainstream. A new (Navya) movement, the Navya Movement (Modernist Movement) was born around 1950. Though formally introduced by V. K. Gokak with his Navya Kavitegalu (“Modern Poems”, 1950), it was Gopalakrishna Adiga who best illustrated the spirit of the movement. Gopalakrishna Adiga is known as the father of this form of expression with his Nadedu Banda Dari (“The Path Traversed”, 1952).
The most effective vehicles of the movement were Poetry and short story. The Navya authors questioned the time-honoured standards of plot of the Navodaya; life was seen not as a pursuit of already existing values, but as an introspective search for them, at times narrated in stream of consciousness technique.
The study of Kannada literature is divided into 3 movements: