India’s leading playwright, actor, director and public intellectual, Girish Karnad died at the age of 81 on Monday.
Born in Matheran, near Mumbai on May 19, 1938, Karnad grew up in Dharwar on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border and lived mostly in Bangalore, where he passed away on June 10, 2019.
Karnad graduated from Karnataka University in 1958 and later was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford where he studied philosophy, politics and economics.
Relatives and friends carry the dead body of Indian actor and director Girish Karnad during final rituals, in Bangalore, India, 10 June 2019. Source: AAP Image/EPA/JAGADEESH NV
He wrote his first play, Yayati, while still at Oxford.
His next play, Tughlaq, was a story of the 14th-century king Muhammad Bin Tughlaq which is one of his best-known plays.
He later wrote other important plays like Hayavadana and Naga-Mandala, as well as award-winning screenplays.
Karnad wrote plays and other literary prose primarily in Kannada and English, but was multilingual, worked in plays and movies in Konkani, Marathi and Hindi.
Indian actor and playwriter Girish Karnad at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Jaipur, Rajasthan, on Jan. 20, 2012. Source: AAP Image/AP Photo/ Manish Swarup, File
He wrote, directed and acted in plays for the theatre, but also had a successful career as a film-maker and a film and TV actor, where he worked in a range of movies and television series, from Kannada to Hindi and art-house cinema to mainstream Bollywood.
Karnad was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Jnanpith Award, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Kalidas Samman, in addition to numerous National and State awards for his films.
