A N Krishna Rao(Aa Na Kru), popular Kannada litterateur, was the one who made Kannada literature popular and took ‘Kannadatva’ to every household, said Prof U R Ananthamurthy as he shared the experience of reading the ‘popular’ fictions by late Aa Na Kru.

He was speaking after inaugurating the two-day national workshop on “Popular Fiction in Indian Languages” organised as part of Aa Na Kru Birth Centenary Celebrations by Sahitya Academy, in Bangalore on Saturday.
Aa Na Kru’s contribution was not his popular fictions alone but, making Kannada literature adorable to people and popularising the habit of reading as a virtue, Ananthamurthy said. “Aa Na Kru spread ‘Kannadatva’ to every household. Kannadatva or similar feelings to any language keep people’s culture and heritage intact in all inclusive manner, unlike Hindutva which kills them(culture and heritage)” - he said.

Popular fictions

Speaking of popular fictions, Mr Ananthamurthy said that a common feature of popular fictions was that they create characters studded with good virtues since people have a weakness of searching goodness in the characters they read. Usually, writers carry a conflict between modernism and progress, he said, while explaining the literary angles of ‘popular’ fictions.

Eminent Critic C P Ravichandra delivered a key-note address on the way popular fictions were viewed in different time spans of literary history and also the trend of labelling certain forms of literature or art expressions as lesser in value than others.

 Later session
At the later session, eminent writers made presentations on Popular Fiction in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Indian English before an interactive audience.

Interactions

On Sunday, a session of presentations and interaction on Popular Fiction in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada will be convened at 10.30 am, while a discussion on ‘A N Krishna Rao: The Writer’ will follow at 2 pm.
The venue is Senate Hall, Central College Campus, Bangalore, sources said.