By IANS,
Mumbai : Eminent Marathi litterateur and Jnanpith Award winner Govinda Vinayak Karandikar died here Sunday morning, a family member said. He was 92.
Karandikar, who was better known as ‘Vinda’, died at the Guru Nanak Hospital in Bandra east, his son Uday Karandikar told IANS.
He is survived by two sons and a daughter. His wife had expired last year.
Karandikar’s body will be kept at his residence in Sahitya Sahwas in Bandra east to enable people to pay their last respects Monday.
“As per his will, his body will be donated to Sir J.J. Hospital later,” Uday said.
Maharashtra Governor K. Sankaranarayanan described Karandikar as “the brightest star in the literary world”.
“He was a genius who earned a large fan-following with his vast and diverse writings and poems. He had the remarkable ability to establish a rapport with the young and old generations alike,” said Sankaranarayanan.
Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, paying rich tributes to Karandikar, said that “with his demise, it is the end of an era in Marathi literary field”.
Born Aug 23, 1918 in Khandval village in Sindhudurg district, Karandikar started penning poems at an early age.
Besides collections of poems in Marathi, he penned a collection of poems in English, titled “Vinda Poems” in 1975.
Over the years, he was conferred with several literary awards, including the Keshvasut Prize, the Soviet Land Nehru Literary Award, Kabir Samman and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1996 for lifetime achievement, crowned by the Jnanpith Award in 2003.
Experimentation was a key feature of Karandikar’s literary works, especially his poetry that catapulted him to the top echelons of the state literary circles.
He translated Aristotle’s “Poetics” into Marathi and rewrote old Marathi literature, including “Dnyaneshwari” and “Amrutanubhawa”.
His writings included “Shwetaganga”, “Mrudgandha”, “Ranicha Baug”, “Sashyache Kan” and “Pari Ga Pari”.
After Vishnu S. Khandekar (1974) and Vishnu V. Shirwadkar (1987), Karandikar was the third Marathi writer to bag the Jnanpith Award for his work of poems “Ashtadarshan”.