ABSTRACT
People have often felt a surprise: that, being rooted in a literary tradition of more than a thousand years, the four major and most significant 20th-century Kannada writers – Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, D. R. Bendre, K. Shivarama Karanth, and K. V. Puttappa – of the first generation of navodaya (modern) writers have largely remained limited to the geographical boundaries of the state of Karnataka. But U. R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, and K. P. Tejaswi, of the next generation – the navyas (modernists) – are better known outside Karnataka too. What factors might have caused this turn which may look unseemly?
This chapter seeks to identify the nature and the limits of such fame. Since this happens to be the story of most other Indian languages, it serves to show how ‘give and take’ has rarely been done more than mere importing.
