Hirekodige, a village in Koppa taluk of Chikmagalur district in the Malnad hills of Karnataka, was the birthplace on 29 December 1904 of Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa, known to every reader of Kannada by the compressed pen name Kuvempu. It was his mother's native village; he was raised a little to the north at Kuppalli, in the forested Thirthahalli country of Shivamogga. The rain, the hills and the dense green of that landscape saturate almost everything he wrote, and he is inseparable from it in the Kannada imagination.

Malnad childhood

Kuvempu's father, a landholder, died when the boy was around twelve, and much of his early education came through tutors at home and then at the Anglo-vernacular school in Thirthahalli, followed by Wesleyan High School in Mysore. He entered Maharaja's College in Mysore and graduated in 1929 with Kannada as his subject.

He began writing in English. An early collection of English verse brought him to the attention of the Irish poet James Cousins, then working in India, who told him bluntly that a writer of his ability should be working in his own language. Kuvempu took the advice, and Kannada literature was altered by it.

Scholar, teacher, Vice-Chancellor

Kuvempu joined Maharaja's College as a lecturer in 1929, became a professor in 1946 and principal in 1955. In 1956 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Mysore, serving until 1960 and becoming the first alumnus of that university to hold the office.

His administrative record was as consequential as his literary one. He argued forcefully that higher education in Karnataka should be available in Kannada rather than only in English, and worked to expand the range of subjects taught in the language and to build up scientific and technical vocabulary in it. He also pushed for the university to extend its reach beyond a narrow social base. His conviction that language, learning and social access were a single question runs through both halves of his career.

The major works

Kuvempu's output was large and formally varied — poetry, epic, novels, plays, criticism, essays, children's writing and autobiography.

Sri Ramayana Darshanam, published in two parts around 1949, is his central achievement: a retelling of the Ramayana as a modern epic in blank verse, reinterpreting the received story in humanist terms. It brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award and, in 1967, the Jnanpith Award — the first ever given to a Kannada writer.
Kanooru Heggadithi, a novel of the Malnad landed households, unsparing about caste hierarchy and the position of women within them.
Malegalalli Madumagalu (1967), a vast novel of the hill country whose central assertion is that there is no character in it who is small.
Jalagara (1928) and other plays, several of which take up the dignity of those placed lowest in the social order.
Poetry collections including Kolalu, Navilu, Panchajanya and Agnihamsa.
Nenapina Doniyalli, his autobiography.

He also wrote Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate, the poem adopted as the official state anthem of Karnataka.

Vishwa Manava and social reform

Kuvempu's philosophical position is summed up in his concept of Vishwa Manava, the universal human. His argument was that every child is born a universal being, unmarked by caste, creed, nationality or sect, and is then progressively narrowed by the society around it; the task of education and culture is to reverse that narrowing and return the person to the universal condition they started from. He set this out formally in a message addressed to the young, and it became one of the most quoted ideas in modern Kannada thought.

He put it into practice as well. He devised and promoted Mantra Mangalya, a simplified wedding ceremony stripped of priestly mediation and elaborate ritual, intended to be performable by anyone regardless of caste and at negligible cost. He was consistently critical of religious orthodoxy and of the caste order, and he wrote about both from inside the culture rather than at a distance from it.

Honours and legacy

Kuvempu received the Padma Bhushan in 1958 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1988. He was designated Rashtrakavi, national poet, by the Government of Mysore in 1964, and was given the state's highest civilian honour, the Karnataka Ratna, in 1992. He also held the Fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi.

He died in Mysore on 11 November 1994, at the age of eighty-nine. Kuvempu University at Shivamogga is named after him. His family home at Kuppalli is preserved as a museum, and the rock outcrop beside it known as Kavishaila, where he is memorialised, has become a place of literary pilgrimage. His son, Poornachandra Tejaswi, became a major Kannada writer in his own right.

For the Malnad villages, Kuvempu did something more specific than achieve fame: he made their forests, their rain, their households and their hierarchies the subject of literature of the first rank, in the language those villages actually spoke.