Writer’s Corner: Ex-IAS officer Chiranjiv Singh’s literary journey from Punjab to Kannada

He recalled, “When I came to Karnataka I was delighted that I would be learning a new language….in the IAS exam forms they give you three choices for states. I chose three for linguistic reasons, languages that I would love to learn – Nagaland, Odisha, and Karnataka. To my great good fortune, it was Karnataka and Kannada.”

He first came to Karnataka — specifically a village called Moka in Bellary — in April 1970 as a probationary assistant commissioner. It was also an exposure to the Telugu language, as this was very close to the Andhra Pradesh border. Singh said, “The best part of my training was the village stay – the folk songs in the evening, the ebb and flow of village life, all the things that I saw”.

Between his postings here and Chikmagalur, he fell in love with the state, and would go on to see Karnataka change for the better and for the worse — on one hand, the beautiful natural landscapes of the rural area, but on the other hand, a hill that he had once loved was mined to dust for iron ore.

Later in his career, he headed the Information and Publicity Department, which was responsible for promoting Kannada culture, during the tenure of Chief Minister Devaraj Urs. He subsequently led the Kannada and Culture Department when it was established. His work in promoting the state’s cultural heritage brought him into close contact with several figures who would go on to become icons of modern Kannada literature and culture, including P Lankesh and U R Ananthamurthy.

While Chiranjiv Singh’s book Yaava Janmada Maitri was published in 2021, its origins were somewhat unusual. Around that time, several IAS officers had published their autobiographies. Senior journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju, Singh’s friend and then editor of Vijaya Karnataka, approached him with the suggestion that he write his own autobiography, which Srinivasaraju would serialise for him.

Singh was initially reluctant. Responding with characteristic humour, he quoted an Urdu shayari by poet Akbar Allahabadi, who had reportedly faced a similar request to write his memoirs: “B.A. kiye, naukar hue, retire hue, mar gaye” — loosely translated as, “Got a B.A., entered service, retired and died.”

As Singh saw it, merely spending a career making notations on government files did not necessarily qualify one to produce a Kannada literary work.

But Srinivasaraju persisted. His wife, Rosy D’Souza — a Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award-winning translator — eventually arrived with a laptop to transcribe whatever Singh dictated. The work that would later become Yaava Janmada Maitri thus began as a fortnightly column.

It was not, strictly speaking, an autobiography, according to Singh. While it drew initially on his memories of his early years in the IAS in Karnataka, the column also engaged with contemporary events and subjects that interested him — an election, for instance, or the centenary of Hindustani classical singer Gangubai Hangal, with whom he had shared a close association.

At present, Chiranjiv Singh is working on a Punjabi-language critique of Punjabi literature. He has also written five collections of Punjabi poetry, which he plans to publish when he next visits his home state.