Born in 1938 in a small village Sangavi in North Maharashtra's Khandesh region, Nemade graduated in literature from Fergusson College, Pune. He postgraduated in Linguistics from Deccan College, Pune and English Literature from the Mumbai University.
"I'm happy to have been honoured so. I'm proud of the way the Marathi readership tolerated my work and followed it. This is also special since I didn't have to suffer either a prison term for it or have ugly demonstrations outside my house," laughed Prof Bhalchandra Nemade reacting in signature style to becoming the 50th Jnanpith awardee and the fourth Marathi litterateur to get the honour.
Born in 1938 in a small village Sangavi in North Maharashtra's Khandesh region, Nemade graduated in literature from Fergusson College, Pune. He postgraduated in Linguistics from Deccan College, Pune and English Literature from the Mumbai University.
This PhD and DLit from North Maharashtra University has taught English, Marathi, and comparative literature at various universities including the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for his critical work Teeka Svayanwar.
He is most famous for his first novel Kosala (1963), a fictitious autobiographical work, largely based on Nemade's own youth. Pandurang Sangvikar, the young rural protagonist of the novel studies in a college in Pune just like Nemade did. The character uses everyday rural Marathi and his worldview too is rural Maharashtrian.
Extensively translated into various languages including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Assamese, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Oriya, etc Kosala's chronological autobiographical narration was once equated with the style of J D Salinger. "But doing so is being unfair to Nemade," says journalist-columnist Kumar Ketkar, who calls the Jnanpith conferred on Nemade an honour for parallel thinking.
"Nemade has always been unconventional, even to the point of seeming cantankerous sometimes. But no one can take away from the fact that his writing reflects a rare originality," Ketkar told dna adding, "Though well-versed in English literature, Nemade has often spoken of adherence to Marathi with passion. Not in a reactionary manner, he has often cautioned against giving up what are our literary roots. According to him, in doing so, we invite the danger of making our literary tradition second to the European."
After Kosala, Nemade presented a different protagonist, Changadev Patil, through his four novels Bidhar, Hool, Jarila, and Jhool. Another tetralogy begins with Hindu – Jagnyachi Samruddha Adgal in 2010 having Khanderao, the archaeologist as its protagonist.
As a critic, Nemade's has always underlined Deshivad, a theory that negates globalisation or internationalism, asserting the value of writers' native heritage. "Marathi literature ought to try to revive its native base and explore its indigenous sources," he has often exhorted.
His strident anti-Brahminism ("Domination by Brahmins and Hindutva organisations has ruined Hindu society,") has left many antagonised, just as his views on the short story, which he called "a genre inferior to that of the novel."
The Sahitya Academy Awardee, was conferred a Padma Shri in 2011.
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