‘Touring Talkies’: Jayant Kaikini’s essays about movies speak to his remarkable aesthetic curiosity

In the early 1970s, a young, charming, restless Jayant Kaikini, freshly enrolled at Baliga College in Kumta, skips his practical exams and boards a bus to his hometown, Gokarna. The reason is neither romantic pursuit nor medical emergency. It is to see Dr Rajkumar in Choori Chikkanna (1969), playing at Kalpana Touring Talkies. He arrives just in time for what might be the film’s final screening there, before the reel travels on to other villages.

But it is raining. No one else is coming. Outside, new posters for the next film are being pasted over Rajkumar’s fading ones. Inside, the muffled voices of the current screening’s climax hang in the air. He waits anxiously, unsure if the show will begin for him at all. At last, Kasim, the industrious caretaker, breaks the news: they cannot run it for one or two viewers. Kaikini returns home crushed and vows to never watch Choori Chikkanna again.

Excessive, perhaps. Yet in that suspended realm between cinema and reality lurks this maigalla cinevyamohi (lazy cinephile). Such telling vignettes fill Touring Talkies (2013), Kaikini’s collection of 60 film-related essays.

While still in college, Kaikini published his first poetry volume and became the youngest recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award at the time. He would later grow into one of Kannada’s...

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