When a pen name is a book’s cover

BENGALURU: When

Kannada author Vasudhendra

published his collection of short stories, Mohanaswamy, in 2013, he’d been writing for more than a decade. But when he started writing about homosexuality, he took the pen name Shanmuka S.

“The publishers were worried I would face a backlash. They told me, ‘Don’t risk it. You are an established writer’,” says Vasudhendra, who agreed to play it safe and take a pseudonym. “When I saw the pen name, I found it ridiculous. If the whole idea of writing was to tell the truth, then why was I hiding? So I went back to my own name,” says the 47-year-old author and LGBT activist who runs his own publishing house, Chanda Pustaka.

The ‘unmasking’ of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan novels about two women in post-war Naples have made her a bestseller across the world, has caused a bit of a furore in literary circles. Fans are upset with a disclosure that they feel is not only an invasion of privacy but reeks of outrage at the success of a writer who decided to publish her books on her own terms in a world where authors are always on stage.

In Kannada literature, there is a history of writers and poets taking pen names — from Kumaravyasa and Muddana to Kuvempu and Kamaroopi and Triveni, but the motivation for picking a nom de plume is varied.

Author Vivek Shanbhag says a writer takes a pen name not to hide oneself but to create an alternative environment in which to write.

“Kannada has a mature readership, which is not obsessed with every detail of a writer’s life. They are able to see art as art without linking it to the reality of the creator’s life,” he says, adding that it’s unlikely such an investigation into outing a writer or poet would be launched here.

He ascribes this ability to separate the art from the artist to yakshagana and other folk traditions of the state. On stage the actors are gods and kings, but a few minutes later, you can see them sitting in plastic chairs, sipping tea. “This mindset allows us to see art as art. Kannada readers understand the difference between the creative aspect and the rest of life. Reading a work by an anonymous author is like enjoying a magic show. They don’t need to have the magician revealing his tricks,” he says.

Mini Krishnan, publishing consultant and editor of literary translations for

Oxford University

Press, says pen names were a conception of the time when fiction was not considered high-brow. “There was a certain stigma associated with writing fiction, romance, genres like that, so men often wrote in the names of women, usually their wives. And women who had overbearing families took other names and expressed themselves,” she says.

Some writers find that a pen name gives them space to detach from their ‘regular’ selves. “I don’t use a pen name but to examine the truth in my own life and immerse myself in the writing process, I have to detach,” says Shanbhag. “Writers need creative space and sometimes a pen name gives you that.”

Then there is the fact that some writers believe their work is not a product of their own experiences. “Earlier, writers felt individual identity is not significant,” says poet, short story writer and lyricist Jayant Kaikini. “It was an expression of what happened in spite of them, not because of them. That humility was the reason they took pen names.” He points out that poets like Purandaradasa and Akka Mahadevi took names that reflected their bhaktha or devotion.

Shanbhag explains that artists draw from the body of work that has been created before, influenced by others’ ideas and using language that has been used before. “It is not about you. The name Ferrante has chosen is very close to a famous Italian novelist Elsa Morante — it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that the creative process is rooted in many things,” says Shanbhag.

Now, readers as well as writers are not as willing to accept that a work of art belongs to all of society, and that it is not one person’s creation. “Everyone is an I-specialist,” says Kaikini. “Man is self-obsessed so the idea of anonymity is no longer attractive,” he says, adding that it has to do with the institutionalization of literature and the arts, the giving of awards, citations and honours. “Writers want to step up and claim these,” he says.

Krishnan of Oxford University Press says it’s “a good thing” that writers in languages other than English are no longer “hiding behind some bush” and explains that with the influence of modernism and the entry of women into academia, it became fashionable to be published. “Authors are proud of their writing now. In the Indian context, the women’s movement in the 1950s and 60s and the right to write had a great bearing on writing becoming respectable,” she says.

Another reason for the abundance of pen names — or writers who just used their initials — in Kannada is that writers who owned publications often had to fill 80% of the content. “They found themselves writing five to six columns a week, each under a different name,” explains Vasudhendra. “It was a practical arrangement.”

Sometimes, the desire for a name that’s not one’s own is simply to avoid possible embarrassment and acquire confidence. “I was very shy, diffident, afraid of being laughed at by people who knew me,” says Vaidehi, one of Kannada fiction’s most popular writers who has gone by a pen name for more than 50 years. She didn’t choose her name; it was given by the editor of a popular Kannada magazine to which she sent an article and then retracted it in fear. “I had second thoughts after sending it, but the editor liked it and decided to publish it with the name Vaidehi,” says the author. “I liked the name. It has pathos, like all my writing has. So I kept it.” Vaidehi is the name her readers know her by, at home she’s called Vasanthi, and in school and college and on official documents, she is Janaki. “It has helped me to have different names. I didn’t worry about what people would think of my work. It took me 10 years to feel confident enough to say ‘I am Vaidehi’,” she says, likening her coming out to the removing of scaffolding only after a building is completed. “For me, a pen name gave me freedom to forget everything and write.”

Some of Kannada’s famous authors with pseudonyms

Dattatraya Ramachandra Bendre - Ambikatanayadatta

Kuppalli Venkatappa Puttappa - Kuvempu

Purohita Thirunarayana Narasimhachar - PuTiNa

Subramanya Raje Urs - Chaduranga

Daya Rangacharya - Sriranga

Bellary Mylaraiyya Srikantaiah - Sri

Anasuya Shanker - Triveni

Janaki Srinivas Murthy

– Vaidehi

M S Prabhakara - Kamaroopi

(With inputs from Manuja Veerappa)