Mogalli Ganesh (1963–2025): The rain of impossible tenderness in the Kannada writer’s works

There are writers who come to literature as one might come to a shrine: with faith, caution, and awe. And there are others who arrive as a storm. Mogalli Ganesh (1963–2025) came as both. He entered Kannada letters with the humility of one who listens to the earth, and the ferocity of one who refuses to lie about it. Over four decades, he built an unrelenting body of work – stories, novels, poems, essays, criticism, an autobiography – that together form one of the richest and most original oeuvres in contemporary Indian writing.

To speak of Ganesh merely as a “Dalit writer” is to miss his true scale. He did not write from the margins or only about them. He wrote with a brilliance that asked questions to the margins and to the centres. His prose opened a door through which the silenced entered language as philosophers, not as victims, of pain. Ganesh carried forward the fierce inheritance from Devanooru Mahadeva and Siddalingaiah. In fact, he extended it from protest to inwardness, from identity to imagination. He realised the possibilities that his predecessors had announced.

His fiction – Buguri, Thottilu – are filled with silences that tremble like wounds under the skin of the sentence. He wrote...

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