The legendary writer on the best Indian authors of the century.

I will just mention the authors who have mattered most personally to me in this century. But these are only Indian authors, but personally speaking -- making me the person I am and the writer I am -- there are others but they are not Indian authors.

I have been a professor of literature and therefore there are many writers whom I appreciate academically, but I am not including any of them. This is a serious question and I shouldn't make a mere intellectual statement. I must also add, when I list out Indian authors who matter to me personally, I am not claiming they are the greatest writers of this century.

Gopalkrishna Adiga (left): He was a great poet of our times who made me a writer and got me in touch with the deepest source of my being. He is still for me an important poet.

D R Bendre (right): The writer who awakened in me a feeling for poetry in general was D R Bendre, again a Kannada poet of a generation previous to Adiga's.

K Sivarama Karanth (left): My social conscience was awakened, while I was at high school in a village, by Karanth who dominated the literary scene of Karnataka for most of the 20th century. He was pre-eminently a novelist in Kannada.

Kuvempu (near left) and Masti Venkatesha Iyengar: Two other writers, again in my language Kannada.

Karnataka and my language Kannada is a universe for me. I opened out to the world through Kannada. I have some distinguished contemporaries in Indian languages who have also mattered to me. To name a few:

Nirmal Verma of Hindi whom I have read in translation, O V Vijayan (left) of Malayalam whom also I have read in translation, and Dilip Chitre of Marathi whose intelligence I admire. And, of course, the greats like Rabindranath Tagore (right) -- but all these are writers I have read in translation and they have touched my mind and not my heart -- which is possible only in your own language.

This is a personal statement as I said earlier.

Although the following writers I mention are not Indian writers, they are spiritually Indian in the way they affected me -- I mean such writers as the British D H Lawrence, the great Russian Leo Tolstoy and the French Albert Camus. Others whom I admire are old writers or ancient writers -- people like Shakespeare and Veda Vyasa.

A hundred years is too short a period for an Indian reader -- for instance among the writers who matter to me are some ancient writers in my own language like Pampa of the tenth century and Basava and Allama of the twelfth century.

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