Hombal is a village in Gadag district, in the dry northern plains of Karnataka where the black soil cracks in summer and the horizon is broken mainly by temple towers and the odd stand of neem. Chennaveera Kanavi was born there on 28 June 1928, and although he spent almost his entire working life in Dharwad, the sensibility he took with him was formed in that landscape — unhurried, plain-spoken, attentive to weather and season, suspicious of anything showy. He wrote poetry for more than seventy years, and by the end of it Kannada readers had settled on a name for him that no critic improved upon: Samanvayada Kavi, the poet of reconciliation.

A Schoolmaster's Son

His father was a village schoolteacher, and the household's literary weather came from him. Kanavi later described being introduced early to classical Kannada verse and to the tattvapada tradition — the philosophical songs of the Lingayat and wandering-mendicant lineages that circulate orally through north Karnataka, dense with metaphor and moral argument, sung rather than read. That double inheritance, the formal classical line and the sung vernacular one, sits underneath everything he wrote. It is the reason his poems so often feel like something between a lyric and a proverb.

He was schooled in Dharwad and studied at Karnatak University there, taking his master's degree in the early 1950s. Among his teachers was V. K. Gokak, later a Jnanpith laureate, who was then one of the presiding figures of Kannada letters. Kanavi's first collection, Kavyaakshi, appeared in 1949, when he was barely twenty-one and still a student.

Dharwad, and a Life in Books

In 1956 he joined the Prasaranga, the publications wing of Karnatak University, as its secretary, and stayed with the institution until 1983, eventually as its director. It is difficult to overstate what that position meant in Kannada literary life. The Prasaranga in those decades was a serious publishing house rather than a departmental office — it brought out scholarly editions, translations, criticism and creative work, and shaped what a generation of Kannada readers had access to. Kanavi ran it for close to three decades, which meant that alongside his own writing he spent his career making other people's books possible. Dharwad itself was then arguably the intellectual capital of Kannada, a small city carrying an improbable concentration of writers, musicians and scholars, and Kanavi was among the figures who gave it that character.

The Poet of Reconciliation

His career spanned every major movement in twentieth-century Kannada literature, and this is where the epithet comes from. He began within Navodaya, the romantic-renaissance mode of Kuvempu and Bendre, with its lyric warmth and its attention to nature and inner feeling. Then came Navya, the modernist turn — sceptical, ironic, formally restless, often anguished — followed by the Bandaya and Dalit currents that demanded that literature take an explicit political side. Writers who had made their name in one phase frequently found themselves dismissed by the next. Kanavi did not. He absorbed what each movement offered, adjusted his idiom, and kept writing without renouncing anything he had written before. Critics who wanted a clean quarrel found him frustrating; readers found him trustworthy.

Across more than twenty-five collections and something approaching thirty books in all — poetry, essays, criticism, editions — his subjects stayed recognisably his own: the natural world of north Karnataka, friendship, love, the texture of ordinary domestic life, and, increasingly with age, the moral condition of the society around him. He was not a poet of grand rhetorical gestures. His characteristic effect is a quiet turn in the last line that reorganises everything preceding it. He was also called Chembelakina Kavi, the poet of soft or beautiful light, and Soujanyada Kavi, the poet of courtesy — the second as much a description of the man as of the work. Contemporaries invariably describe someone gentle, unhurried and entirely without literary vanity.

Honours

The recognitions arrived steadily. The Sahitya Akademi Award came in 1981 for Jeeva Dhwani, the sound of life. He received the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award and the Rajyotsava Award from the state, and later the Pampa Award, Karnataka's highest literary honour. Kannada University at Hampi conferred the title Nadoja on him and an honorary doctorate in 2002 — the title by which he was most often addressed in his last two decades. In 1996 he presided over the 65th Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana at Hassan, the annual all-India Kannada literary conference and the closest thing the language has to a collective assembly of its writers and readers. He was also named Karnataka Kaviratna.

Last Years

Kanavi remained in Dharwad, writing and receiving visitors, into his nineties. He died there on 16 February 2022, aged 93, of complications from COVID-19 at a hospital in the city. Condolences came from the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Karnataka, and from a very large number of writers who had grown up reading him and had not expected the north-Karnataka literary world to continue without him.

What he leaves is not a single monumental work but a long, level line of poems written across seventy years, and an example that Kannada writers still cite: that it is possible to live through every ideological quarrel a literature can generate, take each one seriously, and come out the other side with your voice and your civility both intact. Hombal, the village in Gadag district where he was born, keeps his name on its board.