In Chandrasekhar Kambar's timeless classic The Bringer of Rain: Rishyashringya, a village afflicted with a deadly famine eagerly awaits the arrival of the chieftain's son, whose homecoming promises the return of rain. As the death toll rises, age-old secrets are unravelled and mythical forces step out of hiding. Will the sky relent?
Power and bloodshed run hand in hand in Kambar's latest, Mahmoud Gawan. Set in the fifteenth-century Bahamani Sultanate, it follows Gawan's rise to fame during a time of intense civil strife when empires routinely rose and fell.
Alluring and sublime, Two Plays is a must-read for anyone hoping to dip their toes into the rich waters of Kannada folklore and theatre.
Kambar employs subtle strategies to create a counter-modernist theatre brimming with poetry, humour, irony, suspense and starts an exchange among our classical, folk and modern traditions ... Krishna Manavalli has found the apt idiom to translate Kambar's plays into a language with an ethos and a syntax radically different from those of Kannada.This translation of
Rishyashringa and
Mahmoud Gawan is important for three reasons. It helps even the Kannada readers to have a new look at Kambar's plays from the perspective of a non-Kannada reader, raises some important questions of the politics of translation and fulfils the need of a fresh look at our present day problems.A must-read for anyone hoping to dip their toes into the rich diversity of Kannada literature as well as its folklore and theatreKrishna Manavalli has made the Kannada poet and playwright's creations accessible to English language readers with great skill and finesseThe first play is rooted in the folk mythology, but the second is a historical play with an element of phantasy woven into it. Krishna's translation of these plays, which are literally at the two ends of what I would like to call the "Kambar spectrum," is simply remarkable.
