M S Prabhakara (1936–2022)

Motanahalli Surappa Prabhakara, teacher, journalist, and writer in Kannada and English, died on the morning of 29 December 2022. He had been confined to his bed since October 2020, after a fall, and despite a successful hip-bone surgery. Immobility and dependence of the last two years left him in a great deal of physical and emotional pain. It only got worse as many of his friends and contemporaries, some of them much younger to him, passed away in this time.

Prabhakara was an important writer in the Navya (modernist) tradition of Kannada literature. He authored three books in Kannada, published by Manohara Granthamala, Dharwad: A collection of short stories titled Ondu Tola Punugu Mattu Itara Kathegalu (1969), and two novels, Kudure Motte (1974) and Anjikinyatakayya (1981). Given the bleak­ness of his themes—alienation and loneliness—he could be categorised as an existentialist writer. In Karnataka, he was recognised more by his pen name, “Kamaroopi,” which was a clever pun: Kamaroop was the original name of
Assam, the place that became his home for over four decades. Kamaroopi also means a person who can assume many forms. In English, he authored a col­lection of essays titled Words and Ideas (Anwesha 2007), followed by a collection of his published articles on the North East titled Looking Back Into the Future: Identity and Insurgency in Northeast India (Routledge 2010).