Navya Movement
Influential modernist literary movement in Kannada initiated by Gopalakrishna Adiga’s two poetry collections, Nadedu Banda Dari (1952) and Bhumigita (1959). The movement is described in G.B. Joshi and Kirtinath Kurthakoti’s major rewriting of Kannada literary history in a 3-volume book with the same title as Adiga’s anthology, Nadedu Banda Dari (1959). Navya represented a departure from Navodaya’s transcendental romanticism, emphasising instead a more limited protagonist placed within contemporary mass-culture and consumerism. It acknowledged the influence of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and Freud. The movement reached its creative pinnacle in the late 60s with U.R. Ananthamurthy’s fiction (Samskara, 1966) and developed an uncompromising political opposition to the hegemonic Brahmin élite. It extended directly into the cinema with Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s film of Samskara (1970), encouraging modernist writers, playwrights and stage directors to turn to the cinema (e.g. P. Lankesh, Girish Karnad, Chandrasekhar Kambhar, B.V. Karanth, Baraguru Ramchandrappa, actor C.R. Simha et al.). The shift into cinema perpetuated the belief that film is an extension of literature, spawning many adaptations of the writings of e.g. Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Chaduranga, Triveni, T.R. Subba Rao and S.L. Bhairappa. In retrospect, only three films - Samskara, Lankesh’s Pallavi (1976) and Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghattashraddha (1977) - have direct political and formal links with Navya. Later, many ‘kalatmaka’ (artistic) or ‘Prayogika’ (experimental) films claimed to derive e.g. from Chaduranga’s novels (the writer filmed his own novel Sarvamangala, 1968), while directors like N. Lakshminarayan, G.V. Iyer and Puttanna Kanagal went on to formulate an art-house aesthetic quickly enshrined in Karnataka film and TV policies.