I wrote half-a-dozen songs as I was in love: Karnad

Bangalore: Girish Karnad always aspired to become a poet. He dreamt of being compared with the likes of W B Yeats and W H Auden. And yes, he also wished to win a Nobel. “Instead, what I wrote first was Yayati, a play, and that too in Kannada,” the famed screenwriter gushed while talking about his life and works to a capacity crowd.
It was in the early 1960s, during India’s fledgling years of independence that Karnad, having just written his MA exams, sat down at his brother’s house in Gorakhpur to write ballads from his heart.“I had just finished reading the Mahabharat by Rajaji, and the story of Yayati struck me. For the next three weeks I sat there writing, and it came out as a play. It was a shock for me when it came out in Kannada because I wanted to write in English,” said the 76-year-old actor and director.
The ‘intensity with which the play formed’ in Karnad’s mind convinced him that he was meant to be a playwright and not a poet. To broaden his horizons, he headed to England during an era thriving on the legacy left behind by legendary playwright George Bernard Shaw.
But what Karnad saw left him disappointed. “I was hoping to draw some inspiration from people like (John) Osborne… but all those plays were quite terrible. Plays were held indoors, as if the British were afraid of the rain. This was supposed to be a generation of great playwrights but for a person like me from India, it had nothing to offer,” he recalled.
Some of the poems Karnad wrote were infused as songs into his 1972 play Hayavadana. “I wrote the songs because I was in love with someone,” he said candidly. “I wrote half-a-dozen songs and I didn’t know what to do with them. And then I wrote Hayavadana and I thought, ‘I can’t waste these poems, I must use them somehow.’ So I shoved them in.”