A.R. Krishna Shastri

The Story

Krishna Shastri was a scholar of Sanskrit and Kannada who devoted his life to the recovery of the Kannada classics. In an age when much of the ancient literature survived only in fragile manuscripts, he travelled, collected, and edited — bringing to light works that had been read by no one for centuries.

His editions of the great Kannada classics — including the poetry of Pampa and the works of the medieval saints — with his scholarly introductions, set the standard of Kannada criticism and made the classics accessible to a new generation. His literary histories and critical essays shaped the understanding of Kannada's thousand-year tradition.

He taught for decades, and his students became the scholars of the next generation. He died in 1968, honoured as one of the founders of modern Kannada literary scholarship — the man who gave the language back its own history.