Found in translation: A v. good list of Kannada lit

Editor’s note: Most of us were first introduced to Kannada literature by ‘Ghachar Ghochar’—the wonderful 2015 novella by Vivek Shanbhag. This year, Kannada lit claimed the spotlight once again when Banu Mushtakh’s collection of short stories ‘Heart Lamp’  won the International Booker Prize. We celebrate that win with this wonderful list of Kannada literature—tales of caste and queerness, myth and memory, love and alienation. 

Written by: Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer and journalist—mostly in that order. Covering literature, cinema and art through his writings, he's fascinated by the stories that shape our world. You can follow him on his Insta and X account. 

For many Indian readers, Kannada writing remains a literary continent only partially explored, if at all. In the spaces between the lines of the books below and in the rhythms of regional dialects, you’ll find stories that are universal because of their intimate localness. The ten translated works below depict the range, restlessness, and richness of Kannada storytelling. You’ll find tales of caste and queerness, myth and memory, love and alienation. 

No Presents Please by Jayant Kaikini, translated by Tejaswini Niranjana: What does it mean to write about a city without trying to capture it whole? Jayant Kaikini’s ‘No Presents Please’ gives voice to Mumbai through its canteens, cinema lobbies, Irani cafés, flooded taxi rides, and the cramped interiors of chawls. These sixteen stories, written over three decades, open with the ordinary and end somewhere else entirely. Kaikini’s characters are the unnamed, those who live on the edge of the metropolis: a runaway couple finds unexpected futures; a quiz show triggers trauma instead of ambition; a sick maid is forgotten by the family she served; a young woman working in an Irani café finds the stillness she never knew she needed. 

Amritesh’s take: This is a book of small doors, and each story opens onto a fragment of something larger: a habit, a secret, a city in motion. Mumbai remains just outside the frame, blurred by rain, by memory, by noise. And in choosing to see the city not through its landmarks but its overlooked gestures, Kaikini builds a portrait not of what Mumbai is but of what it makes possible.

A Teashop In Kamalapura And Other Classic Kannada Stories, edited by Mini Krishnan and translated by Susheela Punitha: Spanning almost a century of Kannada storytelling, from the early glimmers of modernity in 1900 to the edge of liberalisation in the 1990s, this anthology is a living archive in itself. Curated by Mini Krishnan and translated by Susheela Punitha, the collection offers a rare, layered view into how Kannada short fiction evolved in form, theme, and tone across three major literary movements: Navodaya (Renaissance), Pragatishila (Progressive), and Navya (Modernist). The stories here, interestingly, are stitched together by their human preoccupations: faith, doubt, cruelty, kinship, longing, and rebellion.

One story follows a tea seller whose compulsive lying tatters his life. Another takes the voice of a horse reflecting on servitude. In a third, a venerated guru is revealed to be a predator who drugged women under the guise of karmic destiny. Elsewhere, a woman divorced under Muslim personal law is returned to her mother’s cold judgment.

Amritesh’s take: From tales of caste hierarchy and failed romance to spiritual fraud and parental betrayal, there are no single notes here. Through it all, the Kannada language—its rhythms, idioms, inflexions—shapes these stories and their emotions. In reading these translations, you witness the collective memory of a region. If literature can be a mirror and a map, ‘A Teashop in Kamalapura’ offers both.

Havan by Mallikarjun Hiremath, translated by S Mohanraj: To read ‘Havan’ is to enter a world often pushed to the margins of literature and policy alike: of the Lambada (or Lambani) people. Once nomads, now loosely settled across parts of Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, the Lambadas have long carried the burden of movement—cultural, historical, and economic.

Set in Havan Thanda, a Lambani settlement near Kalluru, the novel has two parts. The first, narrated by Basappa Master, a schoolteacher posted to the thanda, offers an outsider’s perspective into the customs, songs, and stories of the Lambani life. The second, told by the community members, sees a more turbulent journey: their efforts to claim farmland, the betrayal by local landlords and internal fault lines, and the heartbreak that comes with cultural erosion. 

Amritesh’s take: Mallikarjun Hiremath’s novel, without flattening this history into tragedy or romanticising it into folklore, offers a textured portrait of a community trying to root itself in land, in memory, in dignity. It doesn’t pretend to have answers, nor does it engage in the fraught debate around “mainstreaming” tribal communities. 

Asprushyaru by Vaidehi, translated from Kannada by Susheela Punitha: In ‘Asprushyaru’, Vaidehi writes of a Brahmin household in coastal Karnataka to ask where, how, and why untouchability persists. It piercingly dissects caste as it is lived, not as some single act of exclusion but as a ritual repeated across childbirth, menstruation, marriage, food, and prayer. Untouchability persists because it is domesticated, woven into the very fabric of everyday existence, into habits, lineages, and fears. Even those who resist it carry its residue.

Amritesh’s take: Vaidehi creates a cast of compelling characters, with Vasudevaraya at its centre, an ageing patriarch divided between the liberal ideals of his youth and the casteist reality of his present. While his daughter Saroja questions everything, his wife Gowramma and sister Parthakka cling to purity. The central tension of the novel appears in Vasudevaraya’s family with Bhaskara’s marriage to Kumudini, a Dalit woman. Vaidehi refuses to simplify, and thus, the novel exposes caste less as a simple binary between the oppressor and the oppressed but as a hierarchy with gradations, internalised prejudices, and shifting justifications. 

Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra, translated by Rashmi Terdal: At once intimate and political, Mohanaswamy marked a rare literary moment in Kannada fiction where queerness wasn’t sidelined or caricatured but portrayed with honesty, subtlety, and dignity. Through a series of interconnected short stories, Vasudhendra traces the life of Mohanaswamy, a gay man from rural Karnataka, as he experiences heartbreak, shame and desire in a world that refuses to see him clearly. His journey includes the all-too-familiar instances: a mother attempting to "fix" her son, a friend’s betrayal turned to blackmail, the silence of a father’s cold stare, and the ache of watching a lover choose marriage over truth.

Amritesh’s take: Written at a time when open portrayals of homosexuality were still rare, even more so in regional literature, the book was undoubtedly an act of courage and defiance. Vasudhendra, who effectively came out with its publication, draws heavily from his lived experience to show what it means to grow up queer in small-town India, where love is hidden, mocked, or punished. A milestone in queer writing and Kannada fiction, Mohanaswamy reminds us that visibility, for many, is a right fought for, one story at a time.

Bride in the Hills by Kuvempu, translated by Vanamala Viswanatha: Rain lashes through these pages as weather, yes, but also as rhythm, backdrop, and breath. Set in these rain-soaked, dense, forested hills of Malnad in the late 19th century, ‘Bride in the Hills’ is a slow, thunderous epic that evolves through the lives of many—Shudra farmers, Dalit labourers, and landowning Gowdas—painting a portrait of a rural world bound by nature’s bounty and the clasp of caste. At its heart lie three love stories, tender and transgressive in their own ways, each pressing up against the walls of feudalism, patriarchy, and caste.

Amritesh’s take: Caste is everywhere here: in how people speak, how they bow, how they die. When a Dalit woman elopes, her brother is lynched. When a boy is moved by the music of a lower-caste musician, he recoils in shame. And yet, Kuvempu also writes of hesitation, ambiguity, mischief, and the occasional grace. He holds space for tragedy without sanctifying it, for nature without romanticising it, and for resistance without overstating it. The rain keeps falling, but it doesn’t drown the will to live otherwise.

Parva by SL Bhyrappa, translated by K Raghavendra Rao: To call ‘Parva’ a retelling of the Mahabharata would be to miss its ambition. Told almost entirely through monologue, each chapter inhabits the consciousness of a central figure—Kunti, Bhima, Draupadi, Karna, Vidura—as they face the encroaching war and reckon with the choices that led them there. Bhyrappa questions everything the Mahabharata leaves untouched: the legitimacy of polyandry and niyoga, the hypocrisies of Aryadharma, the caste politics of the Suta identity, and the burden borne by women bound to vows they never made. Krishna, in this world, is a shrewd diplomat; Arjuna is insecure; Draupadi, once a shared prize, is the book’s emotional and moral core. The war is brutal and unsparing—a cemetery filled with the stench of corpses and the futility of sacrifice. 

Amritesh’s take: In many ways, ‘Parva’ is political psychohistory, an autopsy of a civilisation on the brink. Bhyrappa’s use of flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness, and historiographic metafiction alters an ancient epic into a contemporary crisis. In this novel, there are no victors, only survivors left to make sense of what they once called dharma.

Nadira (Breaking Ties) by Sara Aboobacker, translated by Vanamala Vishwanatha: In the novel, Sara Aboobacker places the body and voice of a young Muslim woman at the crossroads of family, faith, and female autonomy. It follows the seemingly ordinary life of Nadira, a fourteen-year-old girl, illiterate yet emotionally perceptive, obedient yet aware of her worth. Married early to Rashid, she begins to glimpse a life of companionship and care, which her father uproots for his own material gain. The novel documents how laws, both religious and social, are wielded as instruments of controlling women. 

Amritesh’s take: Nadira depicts the one-sided burden of talaq, the extremely gendered terms of remarriage, and the violence in rituals masquerading as righteousness. It suggests education and inner resolve as paths of resistance and reform. Aboobacker, who herself was the first Muslim girl in her village to attend school, writes from within the community, challenging the selective dogma that silences it. 

The Inscrutable Mystery by KP Puranachandra Tejasvi, translated by PP Giridhar: A murder in a sleepy cardamom town. A government agent chasing vanishing yields. Students playing at revolution. Landlords gripped by superstition. In KP Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novel, these fragments coexist and collide with each other. Set in the fictional Malnad town of Kesaruru, it is both an absurdist detective story and a sweeping social satire. Beginning as an investigation into the death of a scientist and a drop in cardamom production, it becomes a chaotic, biting portrait of a society collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

Amritesh’s take: Tejaswi spares no one. Bureaucrats blunder. Brahmins scheme. Muslim timber barons rise through graft. Dalits and Lambadis tackle caste and land wearily. The youth talk rebellion but mostly fumble through their romantic desires. All the while, ghost stories, falling stones, and petty vendettas fuel a town more interested in superstition than science. Humor is Tejaswi’s scalpel, which he uses to expose greed, religious polarisation, and ecological apathy without ever preaching.

The Sour Mango Tree by P Lankesh, edited and translated by Nataraj Huliyar: Part memoir, part manifesto, part poetic expressions, ‘The Sour Mango Tree’ offers an unvarnished glimpse into the restless mind of P Lankesh, one of Kannada’s most iconoclastic literary figures. Translated from his autobiographical work ‘Hulimavina Mara’, this volume gathers a mix of prose and poetry, mapping the terrain between memory and self-mythology. For a writer who resisted all forms of hagiography, including his own, this book is both homage and resistance, a life retold clearly but never nostalgically.

Amritesh’s take: Lankesh, whose roles spanned novelist, poet, filmmaker, political essayist, and editor of the fearless ‘Lankesh Patrike’, is remembered for how unflinchingly he wrote what he wrote. These pages reflect that spirit, devoid of any convenient heroes, least of all the author. Instead, what you get is the portrait of a man who believed writing was an ethical act, inseparable from public life and private contradiction.