Nationality Indian Education Master of Arts, PhD Died 1998 | Name D. Nagaraj | |
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Born Doddaballapura Ramaiah Nagaraj
20 February 1954
Doddaballapur, Mysore State, India ( 1954-02-20 ) Occupation Literary critic, thinker Notable works Sahitya Kathana
The Flaming Feet and Other Essays | ||
Literary movement Bandaya movement | ||
D. R. Nagaraj (1954–1998) was an Indian cultural critic, political commentator and an expert on medieval and modern Kannada poetry and Dalit movement who wrote in Kannada and English languages. He won Sahitya Akademi Award for his work Sahitya Kathana. He started out as a Marxist critic but renounced the Marxist framework that he had used in the book Amruta mattu Garuda as too reductionist and became a much more eclectic and complex thinker. He is among the few Indian thinkers to shed new light on Dalit and Bahujan politics. He regarded the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on the issue of caste system and untouchability as the most important contemporary debate whose outcome would determine the fate of India in the 21st century.
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He was one of the founders of the Bandaya movement along with Shudra Srinivas and Siddalingaiah, and gave the movement its famous slogan, Khadgavagali kavya! Janara novige midiva pranamitra! ("Let poetry be a sword! The dear friend who responds to the pain of people!")
Early life
Doddaballapura Ramaiah Nagaraj was born on 20 February 1954 to Ramaiah and Akkayyamma in Doddaballapur in the erstwhile Mysore State of India (present-day Karnataka). His family belonged to the weaver caste and his father was a teacher. Nagaraj was schooled in his home town, after which he studied at the Government Arts and Science College, Bangalore. He was known as an excellent debater in college and it was during these intercollegiate debates that he got interested in Dalit and Bahujan politics.
Nagaraj went to study further and obtained a master's degree and then a PhD from Bangalore University. In 1975, he joined Bangalore University as a research scholar in the Kannada Department (formally known as the Kannada Adhyayana Kendra), and subsequently became part of the Kannada faculty.
Career
Nagaraj rose through the ranks at the Bangalore University quickly, becoming a Reader and then, just before his death in 1998, he was named for the newly established Kailasam Chair.
In addition to his primary affiliation with the Kannada Department of Bangalore University, Nagaraj was a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (1993–4); Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS, Delhi (1994–6); and Visiting Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago (1997 and 1998).
Nagaraj wrote six books among several essays in Kannada. He has also edited 15 Kannada books, including an anthology of Urdu literature. Flaming Feet is his collection of essays on the Indian Dalit movement whose title article "Flaming Feet" discusses the varied philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar on Dalit emancipation and tries to find an underlying unity. A revised and extended version of this book was posthumously published as The Flaming Feet and Other Essays: The Dalit Movement in India in 2011. Listening to the Loom: Essays on Literature, Politics and Violence is his other collection of essays. These books have been translated into Tamil and Telugu languages. He also published many essays in English. Many of his Kannada essays have been translated into English and other languages since his death.
At the time of his death in 1998, Nagaraj was serving as the Director of Shabdana — Centre for Translation, a project of the Sahitya Akademi, and editor of Akshara Chintana, a series of critical works published by Akshara Prakashana of Heggodu. In the months preceding his death, he was "probing the nature of feminism as a frame for a new dalit literary criticism."
Personal life
Nagaraj met his wife Girija, while he was teaching at Bangalore University. Girija was a student of literature as well as science. They have two children, Amulya and Anoop. Nagaraj died of a heart attack in 1998.