Celebrating editorial art and Naikar’s legacy
The writers, the editors, and the learned contributors write, read, and evaluate a text as a matter of volition. They are intensely impressionable individuals with inimitable personal responses to life. They think, feel, record, and register such feelings in compositions. Their thoughts are in print as men speaking to men. They recreate, in manifold ways, their ideas. They imitate meaningful discourses with fellow human beings in plain and inclusive ways on subjects of regionalism, historical, political, social, and legendary stories of India, geography, and social milieu—folklores, life of people in the times of kingdoms, wartimes, and the colonial period.
The rich volume entitled ‘The Nativist Vision of Life in the Works of Basavaraj Naikar’ is edited by PV Laxmiprasad. The gift of editing is an art. It is an inspiration, and there is a divinity moving around him and guiding him to undertake the work of editing the research articles by creative and critically minded scholars with a fervour for extending the horizon of the literary world.
Basavaraj Naikar is a novelist of regionalism, history, and kings and queens. Laxmiprasad’s choice of Naikar serves two important objectives. One of them is to highlight the sacrifices of queens and kings in the erstwhile Kannada kingdom. He presents Kannada history to English readers. The themes are predominantly heroic, nationalistic, and focus on freedom from the British. On the other side, Naikar also deals with spiritual gurus in his works and brings into the limelight the great spiritual practitioners and their world.
A historian and a novelist, Basavaraj Naikar has authored a sizeable number of novels, novellas, and story collections rooted in Kannada soil. The typical Kannada culture impresses readers with a fine rendering of history. Locale, settings, and culture are typically Kannada. The names of characters are specifically drawn from the kingdom of erstwhile Karnataka. To this extent, Naikar has immortalised Kannada literature. All his works deal with a truly colonial conflict between freedom and oppression, faith and betrayal, Indian princes and colonial rulers.
Basavaraj Naikar has touched upon the predominant themes of self-respect and self-rule in the face of colonial conquest, which in our times is truly influential in invoking a sense of patriotism and honour. He influences both Western and Indian readers.
In conclusion of this review, every piece of writing serves worthwhile purposes. Wisdom—a spontaneous uprising of the mind fair and good—excels fully as light excels darkness. That which is crooked can be made straight by the excellence of knowledge gained through literary art to give life. Just as any other transitional phase of the postmodern world, the literary front also experiences a huge expansion of creative impulses and the evolving trends of literary expression.
The Indian creative genius, Basavaraj Naikar, has contemplated and produced wisdom with unassailable tempo and fervor to nourish the roots of Indian literature and writings in English. The volume ‘The Nativist Vision of Life in the Works of Basavaraj Naikar’, edited by the academician par excellence Dr P V Laxmiprasad, is well aligned with the evolving web of critical and theoretical tools. It is indeed delightful to observe the newly evolved texture of the art of criticism in Indian Writing in English.
The culturally resonant and refined faculty of the editor epitomises well-integrated knowledge and cherishes hopes to raise social consciousness, which is a vital aspect of human emancipation in society—thus extending the scope of literature. Naikar is consciously Indian in the expression of his sensibility, which is redolent of Indian culture. P.V. Laxmiprasad has done a commendable editorial job by bringing out a critical volume on the literary works of Basavaraj Naikar.
