Kannada Fiction Recommendations

Kannada language fiction is one of the most well regarded in India and there’s been a decent amount that’s been published in translation. I’ve read some great works in translation that I enthusiastically recommend whether you are traveling to the region or not! I’ll hopefully continue to update this as I read more. I also have a page on Kannada film and music.

I loved Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar which takes place in Bangalore. It’s around 100 pages, crisp, and consistently compelling and entertaining. Reminded me a bit of R.K. Narayan for some reason, but darker and more cynical. It’s actually the first translated Indian book I read (back in 2016 I think, and it was years before I read another, shame on me) and I loved how it dispensed with the endless descriptions of smells and dusty streets that Indian English too often labors over and jumped right into the characters and conflicts. When I wrote this blurb in April 2023, I wrote “How come this got a lot of attention back in 2016, with a rave NYT review and everything, and yet nothing else of Shanbhag’s has been translated?”, but I’m happy to report that later in the year a new novel Sakina’s Kiss came out in translation. I look forward to reading it.

The one other Kannada novel I read is Vasudhendra’s excellent Tejo Tunghabadra, which is a favorite of recent times. I wrote more about it in my Hampi post, as it is set in Vijayanagar. It’s a highly entertaining historical adventure, a bit light on a character level but it’s very well plotted and has great historical detail. I didn’t realize until reading this that I liked historical fiction so much.

Since I was so into Tejo Tunghabadra, I picked up Vasudhendra’s short story collection The Unforgiving City. He has another collection that's been translated called Mohanaswamy, but I haven’t read that one yet. I’ve read eight of the twelve stories in Unforgiving City and am really enjoying it and look forward to reading more! The stories are mostly set in a mix of rural Karnataka and Bangalore’s IT scene (sometimes exclusively, sometimes in the same story). I really loved the second story When the Music Stops (straight up juicy soap opera), the fourth story Ambrosia (a rural folk tale), and the sixth story The Cracked Tumbler (family drama, folklore, and temple pilgrimage). Another great story is Nimmi, the only one in here that I'd recommend for kids (about a dog, and dedicated to Satyajit Ray but better than his short stories!). The rest were less successful as a whole for me, but they were generally pretty enjoyable reads with strong detailing into lives unknown to me. I’m normally not the biggest short story fan, but Vasudhendra’s stories have a completeness to them that I love. He’s a popular writer and his works aren’t super literary, rather they’re fairly melodramatic and fast paced, but I say that's a good thing!

I really look forward to more of his works. There's a lot that's yet to be translated, including a Silk Road era historical novel.

More literary, for better or worse, is the highly regarded Jayant Kaikini. Here is Aravind Adiga praising him. He is known for short stories that predominantly take place in Mumbai, and there have been a few English language collections. I picked up No Presents Please which was widely acclaimed. I read the first three stories and was pretty mixed. I liked a lot of things in all three of them, with strong setups, settings, and details of the characters’ interior lives. Unfortunately I also felt they all dragged on and were too oblique and unsatisfying, with too much poetry and not enough action. But that’s me! People with more literary tastes than me will probably dig this. I do intend to keep reading these periodically, though. As I said, I liked a lot of things about each story. They were an odd mix of compelling and frustrating.

Also set in Mumbai (or rather Bombay, as the book is from 1979) is Shikari by Yashwant Chittal. I’ve heard great things, it’s on my list! There was a translation published in 2017.

Kannada’s modern literary giants are U. R. Ananthamurthy and S. L. Bhyrappa but they have long careers and I don’t know what the good starting points are, and also which translations are good quality.

2025 update: I read Agnyatha: The Memoir of Tipu's Unknown Commander by Krishnamurthy Hanuru, a slim historical novel translated from Kannada. Though the subject matter was interesting and there were many great details of life and culture in the time of Tipu Sultan, the meandering, episodic narrative had little to latch onto and I found much of it to be dull. I read about 100 pages and then skimmed the rest. It is well regarded, maybe you'll like it more than me, or maybe it needs to be read in Kannada. I have no complaints with the translation, though, but rather was frustrated by the lack of a compelling story or characters, though it did periodically have great stretches.