Chandrashekar Patil (18 June 1939 – 10 January 2022), popularly known as Champa, was an Indian poet, playwright and public intellectual writing in Kannada. Patil was a recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award for Poetry in 1989 and the Karnataka state government's Pampa Award in 2009. Patil had served as the president of the Kannada Sahitya Parishat, a Kannada language literary organization.
Life and career
Champa was the editor of the literary journal Sankramana started with two of his friends Siddalinga Pattanashetti and Giraddi Govindaraj in 1964. He was known for leading many social and literary movements such as Gokak agitation, Bandaya movement, anti-Emergency agitation, agitation for the implementation of Mandal report, Farmer's movement amongst others.[citation needed]
In addition to Kannada language, Patil also wrote in English. An anthology of his poems titled, At the other end, was published in 1983. The anthology included both poems written originally in English and his own poems translated from Kannada.[3]
Patil was a proponent of Kannada language as a medium of instruction in the state's government schools and had spoken out in 2019 against the then state government's move to introduce English as the medium of instruction in the state's government schools.[4][5] Earlier, in 2015, protesting the assassination of his friend and Vachana scholar M. M. Kalburgi, he returned his Pampa Award, the highest literary honour of the government of Karnataka.[2]
Patil died in Bangalore on 10 January 2022, at the age of 83.[6][7]
