Girish Karnad

Girish Raghunath Karnad, who lived from May 19, 1938, to June 10, 2019, was an Indian playwright, actor and film director whose rise as a playwright in the 1960s marked the coming of age of modern Indian playwriting in the Kannada language. He received the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor, in 1998, along with the Padma Shri in 1974 and the Padma Bhushan in 1992. His plays include his 1961 debut Yayati, based on the Mahabharata, Tughlaq (1964), a historical drama about a fourteenth-century Delhi sultan that served as allegory for contemporary Indian politics, Hayavadana (1971), which incorporates the traditional Yakshagana folk theatre form, and Nagamandala (1988), based on folk narratives; he also worked extensively in Hindi and Kannada cinema as an actor, director and screenwriter, earning multiple National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards.