Jayant Kaikini
| Jayanth Gourish Kaikini | |
|---|---|
Kaikini in 2007
|
|
| Born |
24 January 1955 Gokarna, Karwar, Karnataka State, India |
| Occupation | Writer, poet |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Notable awards | Karnataka Sahitya Academy award |
Jayanth Kaikini (or Jayanta Kāykiṇi; born 24 January 1955) is an Indian poet, short stories author and a lyricist working in Kannada cinema.
Kaikini was born in Gokarna to Gourish Kaikini, a school teacher, and a Kannada literature and Shanta, a social worker. After a Masters in Biochemistry from Karnataka University, Dharwad, he moved to Mumbai where he worked as a chemist for many years. He now lives in Bangalore with his wife Smita and two children, Srajana (daughter) who is an Odissi dancer and a researcher/curator, and Ritwik (son). Apart from Kannada Jayanth is fluent in Konkani (his mother tongue), Marathi, Hindi and English.
Kaikini is regarded as one of the most significant of the younger writers in Kannada today. He is a writer of short stories, film scripts and poetry, and is based in Bangalore. His poetry is characterised by subtle imagism, a minute documentation of the seemingly commonplace, a colloquial idiom and a conscientious refusal to engage in any poeticising. He has so far published six anthologies of short stories, four books of poetry, three plays and a collection of essays.
In an introduction to Dots and Lines, an English translation of Kaikini’s short stories, critic C.N. Ramachandran writes, “To understand Jayanth’s works, we have to situate him in the literary context of the last two decades of the 20th century. During that period, there arose a group of writers who consciously differed from both the earlier Modernist writers (called Navya in Kannada) and those contemporaneous to them, the Writers of Protest (called Bandaya in Kannada) and Dalit writers. They did not subscribe to any particular philosophical or political system of thinking – be it Existentialism of the Modernists or the Leftist ideologies of the Dalit and Protest writers. On the other hand, what they wished to do was to select precise and authentic details of daily life and organise them in such a way as to culminate in a particular experience . . . Generally, their style was comic-ironic; and the language they used was the spoken language of day-to-day life. They were neither idealists nor cynics; they just wished to observe the life around them – generally mediocre – to register all the fleeting details that marked an ordinary man’s daily routine, and lead up to an experience rich in connotations. Jayanth was a major figure in this group of writers who, loosely, can be called ‘post-modernist’.”
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