KV Tirumalesh (1940-2023) enriched Kannada poetry with his eclectic taste and cosmopolitanism

Once upon a time
hundreds of people got stuck
on a faraway island. 

First, they ate the plants on the island
Next, they finished all the animals there
Then they began to consume one among them once a week
Finally, there was only one man left. 

First, he ate his toes
Next, he ate his feet
Then he ate his fingers
After that his hands. 

He then ate his nose, ears, eyes one by one
Finally, he began to eat his own head. 

What! How is that possible?
Do not ask me. 

If you had begun asking questions
at the outset
Things wouldn’t have come to this pass.

— “Once Upon a Time On an Island”, KV Tirumalesh,

Among the many English professors who made a name for themselves also as leading lights of Kannada Literature, KV Tirumalesh had a unique place. He was a linguist who taught at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and intermittently at several other universities abroad. He was also a respected academic with several publications. But in Karnataka very few know him for his academic credentials, such is his renown as a poet. Tirumalesh easily wore many other hats – of fiction writer, translator, columnist, author of children’s verse, thinker, scholar, and critic. An author with more than 50 books to his name, he is still best known for his poetry.

Yet, he was never really in Karnataka. Born in Karadka in Kasargod, a Kerala district bordering Karnataka, he studied and worked in that state– and then in Hyderabad, where he lived most of his life and died as well. A polyglot, Tirumalesh wrote academic books in English, and translated into English, but never used English for his creative writing.

A man of eclectic tastes and a true cosmopolitan, Tirumalesh made sure that his Kannada poetry was enriched by all the languages he knew, and all the readings he engaged in. The voracious reader that he was, he made sure that his reading extended from literature and philosophy, through science and technology, to history and ethnology. And he wrote about everything that interested him. For him, poetry became the medium for every kind of articulation, even as he also explored other genres.

A poet with his own mind

Tirumalesh began writing poetry during the heyday of the Navya (modernist) literary movement in Kannada. His early collections of poems reflected this. But soon he began to drift away from what was then the dominant poetic creed in Kannada to chart his own peculiar path. The poems in Mukhamukhi and Avadha marked this clearly.

He devised a unique form of verse, unlike the complex and obscure idiom of the modernist Kannada poetry. He wrote poems that were accessible, with a touch of humour and intrigue. Perhaps inspired by Wallace Stevens and e e cummings, Tirumalesh wrote in a self-reflexive style on very ordinary subjects, but always in a manner that would make the reader curious. For example, his poem “Avaru”:

He had several wives, right,
what happened to them?

Oh, them? Some went away
to their native places. Took shelter
under someone else. Some others
turned to selling garlands near Char Minar.
The dust of the old city settles on all
the flowers.

Some became dancers. Embarrassed by touch.
Fell in love, truly. Sang a different tune
in front of different persons. When one or the other
among them died, nobody built tombs for them.

And some others became the endless lanes
that you tread on, that you quest after.  

This technique of leading the reader through a winding path before springing a surprising twist in the end, is very effective. His poems, often presented with Frostian simplicity, lead us to profound conclusions. Here is another example, “Van Gogh’s Shoes”:

Van Gogh painted
Cafes
Streets
Parks
Farms
Pine trees
Immersing them all in colours.

In disgust, “phooey,”
said the critics,
“would anyone paint such
things!
Death of Icarus
Apocalypse
Reincarnation
Now, these are the subjects
apt for a painting!”

Van Gogh then painted
a pair of shoes,
and made history.

Where are those enraged critics now?
Under those shoes.

‘Poetry is modern man’s play with possibilities’

Tirumalesh had mastered this style in his 1989 collection Avadha, which added a few other tricks including compositions in the manner of the mystic poet Shishunala Shareeph (a 19th century poet with immense folk following), songs, and personal lyrics. But before the style could be labelled how own, he had published a new collection in 1990 Papiyoo, which had lyric poems centring on narratives from diverse cultures and languages. Richly allusive, the poems in this collection referred to myths and legends of India, Persia, Europe, and elsewhere.

It was not the story that he focused on, but moments in the lives of the characters that illuminated some vision, some understanding. But Kannada readers were in for a feast of diverse rhythms, alliteration, word plays, and other rhetorical devices.

Tirumalesh believed that poetry has something inexplicable about it: “it is modern man’s play with
possibilities. It makes the reader think. It touches on the id, ego, and superego – the unconscious, sub- conscious, and conscious – simultaneously.”

His next collection, Arabbi, again explored new charters. In this collection too, we see Tirumalesh refining his poetic style and continuing to work on the lyric form without pursuing any notion of coherence, linearity, or totality. But, like the poets whom he revered, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, he was very vivid, concrete, and reflective. And so it went.

Tirumalesh continued to keep experimenting with poetic possibilities, including the fragmentary epic poems “Akshaya Kavya” (2010) and “Avyaya Kavya” (2019). The former has two lovers questing for
privacy as its focus, but really is a philosophical poem exploring issues of love and lust, history and
the contemporary, life and language. It is a poem that refuses the narrative frame, that defies genre,
that transcends structure. It is a poem on a journey of its own.

His most recent book of poems, Avyaya Kavya, is another experimental tour de force, a poem that collects fragmentary meditations on diverse incidents, weaving together the remembered and the read, the experienced and the reflected, in a ceaseless flow of allusions, memories, and meditations. It is a poem that examines the relationship between work and life through the eyes of a questing philosopher. In between these two, of course, he published a novel, collections of short stories, another book of poems, nine collections of children’s verse, several translations – including those of Shakespeare’s plays, all of which he translated into Kannada, though not all of them have been published yet), and Cervantes’s Don Quixote – as well as writings on philosophy, science, epistemology, language, and so on.

A permanent outsider

Tirumalesh was awarded the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award for his book Akshaya Kavya in 2010. He received many other awards for his works, but accolades and the limelight did not enamour him. He was very earnest and serious about what he read, wrote, and thought. He was enthusiastic about discussions on the matters about which he wrote. And he wrote about diverse subjects in many media including online magazines.

Tirumalesh was a compulsive experimenter who did not seek to conform to a single identity and to be rooted. He was a permanent outsider to any parochial thinking, any bounded identity, forever exploring the boundaries of understanding.

Always interested in the humane ways of existence, Tirumalesh was a man who lived a life of ideas. Here is a typical poem of his.

Infatuated by philosophy
People have
Deserted home,
Deserted monastery,
Left their native land,
Acquiesced to consume poison,
Habituated to alcohol as if to elixir,
Embraced prostitutes as if they are nymphs.

Why this infatuation?
I too decide to trod this path a few steps
And discover nothing but pervasive haziness,
I am myopic to boot;
No one has left any road signs,
Had they been there, they were not to be used;
This much have I learnt:
Philosophy, thus, then and for ever
Is a fugitive!

Partly, poetry too is like this.
And partly it is like this:
The poet, with empty pockets,
Walks with the swag of kings!
He is always with many others
Whether in woods or hills, or weekly bazaars
Even when he is alone
He is not lonely.

Sharmishta, Devayani, and who else does he like…
The queen of nymphs, alien, and just any belle.

On the other hand, these philosophers are wounded
In their body and mind
Yet aren’t freed from the infatuation,
Engrossed in the miracle of the mind  

— “Miracle of the Mind” by KV Tirumalesh.

All the quoted poems of KV Tirumalesh have been translated from the Kannada into English by the author.