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The Adya Rangacharya – Sriranga Birth Centenary Some Thoughts
By Usha Desai
The centenary year of the birth of Shri. Adya Rangacharya, my father or Sriranga as he was known, started off in Bangalore on 26 th September 2003 with a festival of his plays in Kannada and seminars on his work sponsored by various theatre and cultural Akademies and by The Ministry of Kannada and Culture, Government of Karnataka. This was followed by similar festivals in Dharwad and in Bijapur. Bijapur was his janmabhoomi and Dharwad his karmabhoomi as many writers put it. The various Kendras of Akashwani in Karnataka had a series of his one- act plays in the month of November. A newspaper item said that the Governments of Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu and Kerala were organising theatre workshops in his name. Can one think of a better way to remember a person to whom the theatre was his whole life? We as members of his family were closely associated with the organizers though we cannot consider ourselves as experts in this area. Nevertheless, participating in this program has been not only a pleasure but also an eye opener as we have had the opportunity of looking at him not as a father or a grandfather but as an intellectual, a writer with a cause, and an ardent devotee of the theatre.
My father, Adya Rangacharya, Sriranga (his penname) or Rangacharya Vasudevacharya Jahagirdar as he was earlier known was born in the sleepy little village of Agarkhed near Bijapur in Karnataka on the 26 th of September 1904. Agarkhed is a remote village in a drought- ridden area, backward even today in all respects. I was there recently and tried my best to see how this place could have influenced my father’s formative years for I am told it was very early in life that he started writing plays and that his first play at the tender age of 11 was a play written in Sanskrit. The family as each one recalls so proudly today is that it was a family of “acharyas” or very brainy individuals. However much I looked around, I could not find anything in the environment that could have had an effect on the mind of a child. So I said to myself it is his innate genius.
This centennial year of our father has been especially for my sister and me a revelation in many ways. It has been a pleasure to know he is being acknowledged for his contribution to the theatre, an education and a learning experience, - watching plays, attending seminars by academicians and scholars. All this has given us a perspective of Sriranga that we never had – that of a writer and as a dramatist; for to us, - to me and to my sister Shashi, and to our children, Sriranga or Anna as we called him was always just a father or a grandfather. Even when we were young, though we knew he wrote plays, we knew he enacted them it was only much later that we or at least I realized his contribution.
When I am told today that though people are aware of Sriranga the writer, there are very few who really knew Sriranga the person, it is a surprise to me. I am surprised because I always thought that being a simple person his life was an open book. But soon there is the realization that with his sharp intellect how unapproachable he could be. He could literally be close to you and yet so aloof. Even when he was with a group, he could shut himself off totally when he wanted to and we could immediately sense that this was not his cup of tea. As the eldest, I always shared a special relationship with him. It was a close bonding where we shared all our worries and troubles. This bonding stayed so till the very end.
