courtesy:seminar
The problem
THE Kannada writer, U.R.
Ananthamurthy, died on 22 August 2014. People mourned him as a great public
intellectual, a man whose quarrels, writings and conversations created a
commons of ideas for democracy. Ideas need sustenance, a language, a set of
metaphors, the enzyme of gossip to sustain them, which Ananthamurthy with his
feats of storytelling provided in abundant measure. This issue of Seminar is an attempt to assess the man, to provide some
sense of the world he created. How does one assess a life which permeates an
entire culture, quietly providing the songlines of debate?
I am reminded of a
wonderful friend of mine, an almost impish character, who was reading a tribute
to a great writer. He read it quietly, and then read it again. I was intrigued
by his silence and asked him what he thought of the piece. He said, ‘Droppings.
Name droppings. Word droppings. There is a connection between bloated words and
bloated egos. I wish one had talked about the man, what he felt, what he dreamt
of, who he loved, what mistakes he made, what regrets he had – not this
immaculate pastiche of politically correct phrases. If criticism becomes
correct, it will be the death of conversation.’ He stopped: ‘I love an India
where we build icons to iconoclasts.’ He smiled and then said: ‘The irony would
appeal to URA. At least here irony, metonymy, paradox, every trope he loved was
present. I remember a group of people celebrated his death with firecrackers. I
can see him, part of the crowd, watching the whole scene with quizzical
interest.’
In a way the man was
crafted like a novel where every sentence was a nuance, every line a strand
from memory. Memory was the commons from which his ideas emerged. Yet, he added
to memory the art of conversation. He was a remarkable listener and he crafted friendship
like his stories. He had a huge following but never considered it as a mass, a
collections of fans. Each individual, housewife, critic, bureaucrat, school
kid, taxi driver felt a personal link to him, a particular claim, a memory, a
special moment of remembrance. He was a ganglion of all who knew him. Each
story was concrete, personal and particular.
In that he was different
from almost any intellectual I knew. For example, some are obsessed with work
but they collect nuggets of information, not people. Others are admired for
what
they write but one does
not quite want to meet them. URA moved like a happy bee pollinating a
community. He thrived on the little moments, morsels enjoyed in anonymity. He
had an openness and trust which allowed people
to quarrel with him and
yet he hugged them in welcome the next day. One could differ with him and yet
had to love the man. There was something so endearing about him. He was a guru
but had neither gurukul nor gharana. He loved the openness
of café intellectuals which he grew on, the give and take of celebrating ideas.
He thrived on the yeast of conversation and he realized politics without the
art of difference is no longer politics.
He was a teacher, an
exemplar. He could be firm. I remember at one Ninasam session, in Heggodu, my
attention was wandering. I was tired after a long lecture, a bit irritated with
the questions. He reprimanded me quietly. ‘Listen, learn and respond, you owe
it to them.’ He was an immaculate listener. He could take any question, even a
dull one and turn it into a little work of art to which one wanted to
immediately respond. In a culture where intellectuals are content to score
points, he connected them into a picture. Yet, he could stand alone in an
intellectual fray, admitting that people were angry with him. He was passionate
about his ideas and their demands. Often he would be indifferent to readers
when experimenting with an idea. ‘Then I have to write myself out.’ He was
supple about himself.
URA was born on 21
December 1932 in the kingdom of Mysore, lived in a forest and as a brahmin boy
lived out the logic of pollution at its most intricate level. He lived in a
world where everything was sacred. A forest in childhood is a sensorium of
fears, sounds, smells, where each night brings its own trail of anxiety. Fear
needs to be domesticated by summoning the Gods, by invoking prayer, and without
these tremors of fear, no story can be born, no myth relived. A forest also
gives a sense of the sacred, providing a train of taboos, of worlds that one
should not touch. Violation of taboos brings the Gods down on you and the first
fights of rationalism and its protests are acts of sacrilege, of piddling in
defiance on temple stones. Oddly, even protest has its rituals in a brahminic
world, where rituals mark all things. Between taboo, ritual and the sacred, a
brahminic world creates its weave, implicating everyone mercilessly in it. Even
critics and rebels are but different kinds of storytellers showing how deeply
society has encoded them. These childhood years marked him as a sociologist of
ritual, where even protest as drama enacts a variant of society.
Beyond ritual and its
fascinations, the play of ideas was critical to URA. Maybe every act, every
debate, is a re-enactment of the conversations in a college canteen, where an
idea is always a commons, where each debate ploughs a domain till it becomes
richer. A few exemplary teachers and a hunger for ideas and friendship can
create an intellectual community. That richness of memory becomes the creation
myth of every later conversation. Conversation becomes a compost heap which
perpetually renews itself. The ascetic and the aesthetic combine here to create
a style which is unforgettable. One recites the name of every writer and
journalist as if one is savouring each creative act, each a puffball of
memories, works, debates. Kuvempu. Govindaswamy, Ramanujan, Subbanna, Karnad,
Chitre, Kasaravalli, Nagaraj and, as the years go on, a younger generation
feasting on a past, proud of a language that has given them a world in common.
It was a world where swadeshi and swaraj combined unconsciously and effortlessly.
Swadeshi was the local school
teaching vernacular. Yet swadeshi was never parochial, never confined to the
local. Locality was about rootedness, an embeddedness, of languages, soil and
cuisine which smelt of local in all its variants, the sensuality of the
everyday. Through translation, through interpretation, swadeshi became swaraj not only through the academic cycles of
storytelling, but through interpretations, re-reading, where every story
becomes a cosmos of reinterpretations. Such worlds revere the storyteller. URA
was a trickster who could put Galileo and Gandhi, Milton and Tagore, Jatra, Yakshagana and Kabuki together. Retelling is important
because stories have to be retold, to be renewed. Retelling is an act of
trusteeship and the storyteller an indispensable trustee of society. It reminds
one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, The Storyteller, where a tribe survives as long as their story is told again and
again.
This issue then is a
tribute to a storyteller, who was a public intellectual. It is an attempt to
analyze his ideas, his life, his milieu, as tribute and as critique. It asks
the following questions. What does the nature of language mean to a writer?
What does it mean to be a revolutionary in a ritualistic world? How does one
carry out a conversation of ideas which affects every citizen? How does one
compost childhood into the imagination? What is translation? How does one make
democracy more creative and the political more inventive? What is the role of
memory and invention in our culture? What is the relation between politics and
the novel? What does writing as creativity tell us about other arts? Can
listening to music tell you about writing?
This is not a journal of
techniques of a how to do it book. It is a quarrel, a set of conversations with
an extraordinary man. One can see him in the mind’s eye consuming it like
another story, responding like another Scheherazade with another ‘Once there
was…’
SHIV
VISVANATHAN
Rice and ragi: remembering URA
SHELDON POLLOCK
THERE is a time and
place for impersonal scholarship to assess the creative work of U. R.
Ananthamurthy, and to make sense of what it has meant and is likely to mean to
Indian literature in the future. There is also a time and place for personal
acquaintances to reflect on their friendship, and to make sense of what it has
meant to their own lives. The recentness of URA’s death and my long attachment
to him prompt me now to reflection rather than assessment. And while I want to
reminisce for the record – I know this is what URA would have appreciated –
what I see emerging from these reminiscences are two larger, even defining
features of his life and work around which I can organize my thoughts: his
relationship with India’s language order and his relationship with the order of
the world.
The face of (a very
young) Girish Karnad was staring from the screen at the end of the film version
of Samskara when I walked into a room at the University of Iowa in the spring
of 1975, as a twenty-seven year-old professor just beginning my career, and met
URA for the first time. I was coming to the university to teach Sanskrit but also
to succeed him as instructor in Asian literary humanities. Something in that
configuration of concerns – literature, Asia, and Sanskrit – and in fact in a
particular sub-configuration of that configuration, was to lie at the core of
our friendship for the next forty years. For it was a relationship that lived
on and sustained itself through literature in general, Indian literature in
particular, and the peculiar bond that exists between big and powerful
languages like Sanskrit or English and smaller and more embattled languages
like the one to which URA devoted himself heart and soul, Kannada.
I guess you could say
that the single most consequential act in URA’s writerly life was the choice to
take the side of the embattled – as he would do in all the rest of his life –
and to use Kannada for his literary writing. Others in this issue of Seminar will no doubt have something to say about URA’s postgraduate work
in Birmingham UK in the late 1950s: about the remarkable circle of friends and
mentors who surrounded him there (Richard Hogarth, Malcolm Bradbury, David
Lodge, Stuart Hall); the historic intellectual moment he participated in that
saw the dawning of cultural studies; the dissertation he wrote on the British
Marxist novelist Edward Upward (who, it is astonishing to learn, died only five
years ago, at the age of 105); and URA’s immersion in English literature in
general, for it was the field to which he would, academically, be affiliated
through his active teaching career. What for me is most significant about this
postgraduate experience, however, is the choice he made then to reject English in
favour of Kannada.
Anyone who has ever read the utterly charming,
seemingly artless English that URA wrote in his scholarly essays understands at
once that the act of abandoning the language in his creative work was not a
necessity but a choice. It was one that affiliated him with a deep history of
choices of which he was fully aware, just as he was fully aware of the politics
such a choice entailed. All these issues – political, historical, aesthetic,
and existential – that were associated with the decision to use the particular
literary language he did use marked as much as, or even more than anything
else, URA’s identity as a writer and – to move from great things to small –
marked the intellectual impact he exercised on one particular friend.
I saw these forces
vividly at work when at my invitation (and with the support of a Fulbright
fellowship) URA returned to Iowa City to spend the academic year 1986-1987.
Soon after he arrived, we decided to sit down together and translate one of his
first short stories, ‘Prakriti’.1 As we worked our way
through the piece word by word – despite the fact that my Kannada then was
rudimentary (as it has once again become) – I experienced at the most intimate
level both the large structural relationship between Kannada and Sanskrit but
also URA’s very careful modulation and balancing between the two codes. I
witnessed the powerful affective hold Kannada held for him, and the joy with
which he explained its nuances to an (almost) outsider. The translation itself
was to have appeared in one or another collections, yet never did; it is seeing
the light of day, finally, in this issue of Seminar.
‘Prakriti’ is, for me at
least, what Sanskrit would call an anvartha nama,
a word that perfectly embodies its referent, since the experience of
translating it lingers as a foundational one in my memory and life. Not only would
Kannada become a scholarly interest of mine from that point on, but a larger
research project began to take shape in my mind, on what I would come to call
the problem of cosmopolitan and vernacular in history. However vague at first,
the project would come to obsess me for the next decade and a half, and it was
one on which URA, in his own way as a contemporary writer grappling with the
problem, would be an active interlocutor.
When I say URA ‘chose’ to write in Kannada, I
want to make clear, if it is not already, that both the possibility of literary
language choice and the obligation to choose truly exist for many contemporary
postcolonial writers, especially Indian writers, in a way and with a degree of
compulsion (and anxiety) that they do not for others, the so-called
metropolitan writers. And in India, as elsewhere if less intensely, this choice
is by no means postcolonial; instead, the literary world had long been
structured by a complex ‘language order’ (a concept I borrow from Andrew
Ollett). For two thousand years, being a writer in India had always entailed
the necessity of choosing and, by that choice, affiliating oneself with one or
another competing – and sometimes conflicting – aesthetic, social and political
vision.
Ananthamurthy was fully aware of all this, since
he was deeply interested in the deep past, if less expertly knowledgeable about
it than he would have wished. (He could not help me with Old Kannada himself,
but he had the foresight to direct me to the great scholar T. V. Venkatachala
Sastry of Mysore.) Indeed, it was from discussions with him that my own long
gestating ideas took on greater nuance and cultural-political urgency. I began
to see that, as in so other many instances of deep cultural theory, classical
India had a great deal to teach the rest of the world: it had actual categories
for cultural phenomena that were common elsewhere but completely unnamed, and
hence, unknown. In this case the terms are marga and desi, languages of the ‘Great Way’ and those ‘of Place’, which, for
reasons I have tried elsewhere to clarify, I would eventually decide to
translate as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘vernacular’.
I began to see that
these were not only literary-critical terms but broadly cultural, informing
traditional understandings of diversity in everything from dance to music to
food. And they were, or could arguably be held as, broadly political, since
they were associated with varying forms of (respectively) transregional and
regional power. According to the analysis of Indian culture-power I began to
develop in the 1990s, Sanskrit ruled as the language of empire for a millennium
or more starting around the beginning of the Common Era, and would eventually
be replaced, some ten centuries later, by other, more circumscribed formations
that I called vernacular polities, in part because they prioritized regional
language for the expression of political power.
Of course, in many ways
a vernacular-political language such as Kannada could itself take on a certain
cosmopolitan character, both in its interaction with Sanskrit and in its
domineering relationship with languages of smaller worlds such as Kodagu or
Konkani or Havyaka (in which a movie version of the ‘Prakriti’ story has,
somewhat ironically, just been produced), or indeed, URA’s own language, which
was basically Tulu.2
This peculiar kind of synthesis that India found
generally so easy to effect – in contrast to more assimilative formations,
whether ancient empires such as Rome or modern nation-states such as England or
France – offered a kind of template that URA readily transferred to
contemporary politics. An example he was fond of citing was the election in
December 1984, which saw the ‘marga’ candidate Rajiv Gandhi elected from the
all-India Congress Party as prime minister of India, and the ‘desi’ candidate
Ramakrishna Hegde from the locally-inflected Janata Party as Karnataka chief
minister. He could similarly think of sociological categories in the same
terms: thus, class was ‘marga’ whereas caste was ‘desi’.
With URA’s help, I began to see that Kannada
itself was conspicuous in world literary history for its richly layered,
long-term arbitration of these different valences, not uniquely so – given, in
India, the somewhat later history of Telugu, among other examples, or, in
Europe, the considerably later history of Italian, again among others – but
conspicuously so. With the characteristically earthy wit of the Shimoga
villager he was always proud to be, he gave expression to this categorical
diversity through the metaphor of rice versus ragi, the ubiquitous white refined food of the urban elites (and
high-caste ritual specialists) and the very local hearty millet of the rural
poor. This was a conceit he long cherished: he mentioned it to me in
conversation first around 1986; so far as I can tell it first appeared in print
in an introductory essay to the photo album Karnataka: Impressions, 1989, and more recently in these pages in a 2010 interview with
Chandan Gowda (it derives ultimately from the 17th century Kannada poet
Kanakadasa).
The extension that he
could have made but did not, or did not wish to, make was that rural people do
not actually want to eat ragi, however wholesome they know it to be. They
prefer to eat the white rice that will weaken them… and to learn the English
that will weaken, or even kill, Kannada. Indeed, what pained URA as much as
anything in the world was to observe the long arc of the nourishing vernacular
tending toward decline under the power of white-rice English.
All these ideas – about
the writer’s commitment to Kannada and about the great Kannada poets and
thinkers past and present – manifested themselves not just in our purely
intellectual exchanges but in the relationships that URA made possible for me.
It is to him that I owe my friendship with the great Dalit poet Devanur
Mahadeva and the inimitable Girish Karnad, my acquaintanceship with the
playwright Chandrashekhar Kambar and the literary historian and critic
Kirtinatha Kurtakoti, among countless others. Even my interactions with my dear
colleague A.K. Ramanujan took on a special aura because of URA (Raman actually
edited the draft translation of ‘Prakriti’ in 1989).
But foremost among all
these new friends was D.R. Nagaraj, who before his tragic death in 1998 was
about to accept a professorial appointment at the University of Chicago (I had
thought of him as the successor – a man from the world of ragi rather than the
world of rice – for Raman, who died in 1993). It was his support for DR over
many years, his affection for and loyalty to him, his engagement with his
ideas, his shared temperament, that embodies for me everything that was so
wonderful about URA: passion for literature; genuine admiration for learning
with real depth; profound connection with Kannada as both an old and new
literary language; lifelong commitment to the battle against social inequality;
and last but hardly least and hardly negligible, magnetic charm and joyful
playfulness.
Ananthamurthy’s commitment to Kannada was
inseparable from his love of Karnataka. A good deal of his prose writing was
about the land and the people and the ways of life on that wonderful spot of
earth, object of such remarkable emotional attachment from as early as the 9th
century. ‘Between the Kaveri and the Godavari rivers’, so the great Kannada
treatise on poetry and polity, ‘The Way of the King of Poets’ (Kavirajamarga),
puts it ‘is that culture-land (nadu) in Kannada, a well known
people-place (janapada), an illustrious, outstanding political realm
within the circle of the earth.’
From an early date
Kannadigas had known to situate this special place in the wider world. Entirely
typical is a 12th century inscription from northwest Karnataka from a tiny
Brahman settlement: ‘In Jambudvipa, best of all continents, lies Bharatavarsha,
most exalted of regions… In it is found Belvala, native soil of the multitude
of all tribes… In it lies the Nareyangal Twelve, and therein is found the
celebrated agrahara named Ittagi.’ (In a way I cannot quite
articulate, this telescoping in – bringing the big world into the little –
seems to me different from and preferable to that of the telescoping out –
projecting the little world into the big – found in say Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: ‘Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes
Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The
Universe.’)
This peculiar orientation is a perfect
geographical counterpart to the ‘cosmopolitan vernacularism’ of Kannada writers
and thinkers, both ancient and modern, where the two great tendencies in
culture and power could each find its proper place. And it is entirely
evocative of URA’s own way of being: he lived his life and made his art in such
a way that the whole world was meant to be contained in the language and themes
of the ‘land of the black earth.’
I was fortunate to have
been able to travel through much of the state with URA, typically on the high
hard seat of an Ambassador on loan to him in connection with this or that
administrative posting. I remember the glorious days we spent in Kodagu amidst
the coffee fields, or in the western ghats en route to the wildlife preserve in
Thekkady, where after several early risings we succeed in sighting not much
more than some elephant turd and Lord Rama’s three-striped squirrel. But then,
seeing animals was not really the point of the trip.
In the spring of 1987, URA asked me to sit and
talk with him about an invitation he had just received from the then chief
minister of Kerala to become vice chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, a
new postgraduate institution in Kottayam. Or perhaps the invitation was
mediated by Ramakrishna Hegde, the chief minister of Karnataka, for part of the
issue in URA’s decision whether to accept or refuse was the worry of
disappointing political associates in his home state. It was clear to me at the
time, and even more to URA himself, that accepting such a position for so long
– I think it was at least a two-year appointment – would seriously interrupt
his literary career.
And indeed, most readers
would probably agree that his output from the 1990s on did not reach the
heights of commitment and passion and artistry of the earlier works. But URA’s
decision to accept was based, aside from local political concerns, on another
core aspect of his character: his commitment to social and economic justice,
and to equal intellectual opportunity. To help build a new university in a
progressive state to serve the needs of common people spoke too directly to
many of his concerns to ignore. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is by
telling a few Kottayam stories.
When URA got to the
Kerala university he needed someone to help with the cooking. An acquaintance
of his, a political activist and member of the Irava community, had recently
died, leaving his family destitute. URA immediately hired his late friend’s
sixteen-year-old son as cook. It was inconsequential to him that the boy could
hardly find his way around a kitchen (he once succeeded in turning magnificent
fresh fish I had bought on a backwater boat ride into shoe leather). It was
entirely typical of URA that he preferred to eat poorly for two years, as he
wound up doing, rather than forego the chance to help a person in need.
I was not present during
the drive in 1989 (one not started by URA but vigorously promoted by him) to
make Kottayam the first city in India to achieve one-hundred per cent literacy;
among other things, URA arranged for reading glasses for aged illiterates eager
to be able, finally, to learn to read (the Silver Jubilee of this event was
celebrated in Kottayam this past June 25).
Another visit of mine to Kottayam later in that
same summer coincided with the tragic events of Tiananmen Square. I accompanied
URA to a tense meeting of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in central
Kerala (I forget now where; it might have been Alleppey). While the last
Stalinists in the world were busy purging any member who denounced the state
atrocity, URA stood up and gave an impassioned speech in defence of the
slaughtered students, entirely secure in the conviction that he must speak
regardless of the mood of the gathering.
URA ran his vice
chancellorship of MGU in the same way, receiving on a daily basis streams of
what seemed petitioners or even suppliants, whether from the staff, the
students, or, most typically, a union representative, who came seeking URA’s
intercession in this or that cause or with this or that person abusing their
authority. At the same time the vice chancellor was encouraging the most
intense discussions around freedom and dignity in the university’s School of
Social Theory. There was no theory-practice contradiction in URA.
It had been much the
same during his Fulbright year in Iowa City. URA had gathered around him a
group of brilliant young Indian students, all of them at once artistically
creative and politically radical, just like himself: Suketu Mehta, Kabir
Mohanty and Sharmistha Mohanty, V. Geetha, the late Bala Kailasam, among
others. His quest for social transformation was infectious. At the same time,
he travelled widely in the US, most memorably to the deep South, where he
talked to African-American youngsters about social change, non-violence, and
the ties that bound him and them together. URA believed that honest men and
women committed to real revolution must put their time and energy where their
mouths are, and unlike most of us, he did so constantly.
Others in this issue of
Seminar will, I hope, discuss more deeply than I am able to do URA’s actual
political life in Karnataka, such as his relationship to the old Socialist
Party and Janata Party of Karnataka, his unwavering resistance to the
Emergency, or his lifelong admiration for the (largely if unjustly forgotten)
political theorist and anticolonial revolutionary Ram Manohar Lohia, Ananthu’s
admiration no doubt in part stemming from Lohia’s own sense of priority of the
anthropological desi – caste – over the sociological marga – class.
Progressive politics was
baked into URA’s character, and it is no surprise he preserved that spirit to
the very end of his life, as his profound concern at the 2014 election testifies.
His death is a source not only of deep sorrow to his friends but of worry to
anyone who cares about the orders he cared about, the order of language and the
order of the world, and understands, as URA understood so well, how deeply the
two are connected.
Footnotes:
1. I feel sure he told
me it was his first, but the original appeared only in his second collection, Prashne, in 1963. URA apparently found unsatisfactory the translation by
Sumatindra Nadig (in Sixty Years of Kannada
Short Story, ed. L.S. Seshagiri
Rao, Kannada Sahitya Parishad, 1978; he mentioned another, earlier and very bad
version that cannot now be traced). Narayan Hegde, the translator of URA’s
short stories, published a Hindi version in Ajkal in 1963. (I thank him
for this bibliographical information.)
2. 2013; directed by
Panchakshari, produced by Art Films, Bangalore.
My Amarcord
SHARATH ANANTHAMURTHY
MY appa was not an intimidating father. In my memory, he is ever present,
immersed in the affairs of the world or in his writing, yet constantly with me,
a large, warm and comforting presence who could change my entire perspective on
an issue with just one word or an observation. My earliest memories, from the
days spent in Birmingham, are of creating from rearranged sofas and chairs
covered by bedspreads, darkened ‘tents’ where he would crawl in with me in
between his thesis writing lying in wait for the tiger. We would both be very
quiet and he would ask me to lie very still and keep a watch for the prowling
beast in the vicinity. The game would go on for a while and after a successful
capture (or hunt, for I was fascinated by guns and cowboys at the time) he’d go
back to his thesis writing.
On other days it would
be memory games, where he would make me listen with attention to a sequence of
words, phrases and as I got better at recalling, an entire short poem. He would
tell others about how I managed to listen to things and recall the entire piece
at one go. I can’t remember now if this feat was as remarkable as he made it
out to be, but I enjoyed seeing him say this to others beaming with pride, and
did not feel like spoiling this.
Still too young for
kindergarten, I would devise rituals at home to try and prevent him from going
to the university. One of the rituals was that he would have to say goodbye
several times while I hid behind the furniture and finally, as I let him go
reluctantly, he would have to turn back once near the gate and wave me a
goodbye as I watched him from the window above. I could not understand what
this ‘thesis writing’ was all about. From watching him typing away with one
finger on a typewriter, or making note cards, amidst the din of the Indian home
my mother had put together, I’d sometimes declare to Martin Green, the English
writer and critic who used to visit often, that I was busy ‘writing my thesis’.
We lived in a ‘poorer
England’ and appa had to support the family with a meagre scholarship. Our
small flat was made a home with furniture that was rented, and a TV set that
was recovered from an abandoned pile of things by the roadside. Appa, who had
an acumen for radio and TV repair, had fixed the broken TV painstakingly
figuring out the problem with the connections of the valve and tubes device.
The spool tape recorder would spew out, with the tone getting warmer as the
valves of the device heated up, old Hindi songs, and the Beatles, who had filled
the airwaves by then. He loved the Beatles and in later years I remember him
often talk about how they created both new sounds and a new consciousness in
the West.
I was nearly four when
we moved back to Mysore, with my sister Anu, an addition that happened in
England, and spoke only ‘British English’. Very few in Mysore could understand
me, but all my relatives, I remember, marvelled at the ‘young Englishman’. The
only friends I seemed to be making was with the girls who spoke to me in
English and who went to the ‘best school in Mysore’ which, as someone had
advised appa, was a convent run school. He had returned determined to
re-establish his connections with the Kannada cultural and literary world, and
it dismayed him that Kannada was yet to become my mother tongue. It was then
that I joined a school in Saraswathipuram, a middle class neighbourhood. Soon
after joining school I began to ask appa the meaning of some of the choicest
expletives in Kannada. This had probably reassured him as he had a big smile on
his face. A few fisticuffs later, bruised and crying, I had picked up Kannada
from the local boys in the neighbourhood school. We lived in a house that was
part of a row of houses opposite a large empty field where big ponds formed
each time it rained and filled the night with the sounds of croaking frogs and
chirping crickets.
I remember that almost for a year, on at least two
Sundays every month, Shivaram Karanth, the distinguished Kannada writer and
activist, would show up early in the morning, his big white ambassador parked
somewhere in the field opposite, his driver Anand patiently waiting with a
smile as I ran out and jumped into his car to spend a long hour or two chatting
with him. As I ran out, Karanth would surprise me, posing a funny question, or
sometimes just ‘meow’ like a cat! Appa, a young lecturer then at the Regional
College in Mysore, regularly had diverse visitors at home, ranging from his
English department colleagues, who were quite bohemian in their ways in an
otherwise conservative Mysore, to the doting young students mostly from Kerala
and Karnataka, who needed advice on their love affairs or petty quarrels.
Then there were the
Dalit activists and even the rationalists, who saw in the writer of Samskara a torchbearer in their fight against the evils of caste and
associated superstitious practices. Devanuru Mahadeva, a young man just out of
his teens, was a regular visitor. I remember appa talk to his writer friends
about the genius of Odalala, Devanuru’s novella that had just come out. I was
quickly losing whatever ‘English touch’ I had acquired, although with some
regret for this quality had given me much mileage in Mysore. As for appa, I
could notice a conscious and deliberate move towards a more desiKannada culture, in the causes he espoused in support of Kannada,
causing much discomfort in some of the more English-oriented department
colleagues and other cosmopolitans of Mysore who otherwise admired him.
My school days were a heady mix of fantasies
about the girls around in school and the neighbourhood and, at home, the
animated conversations that I watched or listened to in between my cowboy or
police-robber games that consisted mostly of running through the rooms of our
little house in Saraswathipuram, with Prakash my best friend in the
neighbourhood and his little sister and my own in tow. The conversationists,
who visited and mostly sat in the grill windowed veranda, formed the backdrop.
Their voices in the midst of a heated discussion rose and faded as we darted in
and out of the veranda.
They were from diverse
backgrounds – political activists that included both Lohiaites and communists,
young Kannada writers and critics, budding theatre artists and, I remember as
this had caused great excitement, a young and upcoming magician who had brought
with him a entire box of sleight-of-hand tricks as a present for me. All of
them came to share their experiences, often for advice about their work and
sometimes because they continued to be mesmerized by a speech he might have given
at a college, or bank employees association (I remember the magician was a bank
employee about to quit his job to follow his true calling). Once, the ‘math
wizard’, Shakuntala Devi, showed up at our doorstep, Samskara in hand, wanting
him to autograph it while she narrated her life story!
It could have been that appa was somewhere
fulfilling my appaiah’s (his father) desire to see him take up
mathematics as a career choice, for he would readily offer to engage himself in
our math homework. He had an uncanny ability for solving algebra problems, or
proving geometry theorems. Anuradha didn’t seem to need much help at school,
but I did, especially in math. We had a wonderful math teacher in school but he
mostly spent the class hour talking about atheism and Russell. So, all the real
problem solving was left to appa, who would first ask me for some basic
information by way of brushing up and then sit down and neatly derive something
or provide the proof of a difficult rider in geometry. Anu and I had a nickname
for him when he professed his math or analytical abilities. We called him
Bertek when he put on the hat of a mathematician or scientist. So we’d tease
Bertek about his ‘scientific interests’ to pull him down, especially when he
gloated about solving a difficult problem that had bothered us for long.
But growing up wasn’t
all just to do with math and science. Appa had a passion for nonsense rhymes
and poetry and encouraged us to make up long strings of interesting sounding
words that made no sense. A photograph in an old magazine with two characters
in a pool had caught my fancy making me christen them ‘fussy fuzzle fut and
mooshi moot’. Appa and I delighted in looking at this photo from time to time,
and each time these names would come into my head. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were our big time favourites and he used to read out different
passages from these works to us. One way that appa and Anu would get back at me
was by inventing new languages with some simple rules and conversing rapidly
with each other. One such was sa-bhashe, where they’d prefix a sa to the normal Kannada sounds, reeling off sentences in this manner
till I became really irritated at failing to decipher as quickly as they spoke
by taking off the sa from the syllables.
The seventies saw appa arguing his way through
Maoism and China with the leftist friends who came home. When I think back I
can’t recall when these political ideas and discussion seeped into my head and
got me interested in them, but I recall that I often talked to my classmates at
school about some of the things I heard at home during appa’s conversations
with these visitors. He educated both his brothers through their college and
they stayed with us in turn. Anil, the younger one studying MBBS, had a large
circle of Marxist friends who were regular visitors. One of Anil’s classmates,
Lakshminarayan, kept us abreast with the latest events in China. The Cultural
Revolution was a topic of much discussion. It all seemed quite exciting. What I
picked up from the animated discussions, jokes and loud banter, was a liberal
sprinkling of terms like ‘petite bourgeois’, ‘adventurist’, ‘lumpen
proletariat’, ‘comprador capitalist’ and so on. Appa’s disillusionment with
China’s experiments seemed evident from his later remarks about the irony
behind Mao’s Long March that eventually led the Chinese to Coca Cola! This
disillusionment was to slip further into a deep sense of anguish after the
Tiananmen Square incident he happened to witness on a visit to China.
The mid-seventies had a very special effect on me
and appa. I had found many new interests by then, many of them having their
origin in a bag of musical goodies consisting of cassettes and vinyl records
that appa’s hippie and campus radical friends had helped select for him during
his first long stay abroad as a visiting writer and fellow at the well known
Iowa Writers’ Programme in the US. These records and music, ranging from Miles
Davis and John Coltrane to the seventies bands such as The Band, Bob Dylan, and
to classical music (Rachmaninoff, Dvorak), transformed into a continuous
musical extravaganza in our little study. To this was added M.D. Ramanathan’s
deep tonality of Carnatic renditions and a record of Kumar Gandharva gifted by
A.K. Ramanujan on one of his annual visits from Chicago (his visits were
received by the whole family with great rejoice). The Allahabad High Courts’
indictment of Indira Gandhi was out and her arrest seemed to appa as if they
were ‘hanging her for a parking offence’, although her authoritarian politics
had deeply disturbed him.
The news of the
Emergency came amidst his activity with other socialists and student political
leaders in the university. Although it was believed that Karnataka’s chief
minister at the time, Devaraj Urs, was being somewhat kinder to the opposition,
many politicians in Karnataka, as elsewhere, went behind bars under the
infamous MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act). Many of them were appa’s
friends. He threw himself into many underground type of activities. Much of the
discussion with sometimes mysterious looking visitors to the house, amidst amma’s worry that appa was entangling himself in ‘quite unnecessary
things’, would be in hushed tones, while the music continuously played in the
background in our little study. As a thirteen year old, my own interest in
politics and the events in Karnataka were kindled by these goings on.
An invitation to appa
around that time from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla was an
opportunity to take the entire family on our first big tour to the North. In
Delhi, we stayed – both en route to Shimla and on the way back – with appa’s
close friend, the Hindi poet Kamlesh. I remember the days spent in his house
vividly. Kamlesh appeared preoccupied with many other matters amidst the
generous hospitality and late evening dinner parties he arranged in honour of
his good friend. After all the guests had left he would talk to appa about
someone’s visits or about some of the socialist friends who had been arrested.
On some nights, on our way back from the local sight seeing tours, he could be
seen near the house on the road waiting for ‘someone’.
One afternoon a visitor, who looked like a sadhu,
arrived at Kamlesh’s house. He asked appa if he recognized him and upon drawing
a blank remarked, ‘Good that you don’t recognize me’. I ran inside excitedly
and told amma that I recognized George Fernandes even in disguise while appa
had not! After he left, I realized that the Mark Twain book I was reading on
that trip had vanished! George Fernandes had to spend many long days in rooms
in churches or places where quiet supporters of his fight against the Emergency
accommodated him, and appa tried to console me that my book was being put to
some good reading. We didn’t realize till much later, when Kamlesh, along with
C.G.K. Reddy, George Fernandes and others was charged with conspiring to
disrupt the peace through violence (what became known as the Baroda Dynamite
Conspiracy), that all the gelatin sticks had been stocked in the house we had stayed
in.
In Mysore, appa continued to be actively involved
with a mix of people, all arraigned against the Emergency – leftists, Jana
Sanghis and also RSS activists, then in hiding or with pseudonyms. The RSS
network was responsible for passing on messages across the country and appa was
genuinely impressed by the discipline and commitment they had shown in this
enterprise.
We used to have a
‘Saliyan’, a dark complexioned person, visit our home at all odd hours. He was
the only visitor who would also talk to me in between his conversations with
appa. Soon after the Emergency was lifted and the RSS shakhas started to be held in the open, Saliyan gently suggested that I
visit one of their shakhas. I went one day and stood on the side watching. I
was quite drawn to the games they played and the exercise and drills. So I went
and asked appa if I could join. He said he would have no problem but what about
my friend Alamdaar who used to come home to play with me every evening? ‘Could
he join as well?’ I asked Saliyan. He only said that Alamdaar may not join even
if I asked him to come along. I never went to the shakha nor did Saliyan try
persuading me again.
Appa was not an
authoritarian at home. He never forced me or Anu to pursue any particular
career. He lived a life steeped in a universe of ideas, ideas that often
complemented each other, or came into conflict. Being a teacher was for him a
way to pursue these ideas. We were brought up in a milieu wherein worldly
pursuits were looked down upon and lucrative career choices regarded with
disdain. One lived a worthwhile life only through living a life of the mind! So
my decision to pursue science was welcomed, for appa saw the life of an
academic and teacher as worthwhile. When Anu, who was studying medicine, moved
away from her Carnatic music practice, he was saddened that she was giving up
the pursuit of a great art form.
Appa continuously fought the Brahminism that he
saw around him and opposed other kinds of casteism that he encountered in
others. Although it was love that drew him to my mother when they married, the
fact that she was Christian, I can’t help feeling, had a strong role to play in
both his rejection of his own encumbrances attached to his upbringing as a
Brahmin as well as his attraction later on to asserting his caste identity at a
personal level through rituals that he started to observe. In the habits of our
quotidian life, wherein mother did not practice her religion actively, nor went
to church, nor tried to steer her children towards the Christian faith, but
left out all religious ritual and served non-vegetarian food on the table, we
found him, much more in his later years, asserting his vegetarian Brahmin
identity by refusing to eat the non-vegetarian food served.
Mother’s family is
Protestant Kannada Christian, and my grandparents from her side were devout
church goers. My thaata (grandfather), a man of great self-contentment
sat quietly, often deeply engrossed in painting and sketching wildlife. He
would be found sometimes upon visits to our Mysore home, notebook and pen in
hand, translating the Bible into Kannada. My grandparents’ view of their
Brahmin son-in-law, initially with a little trepidation about the possible
eroding of Christian values in our household, later transformed into adulation
and pride as they watched his growing fame in the Kannada literary and
political worlds. His long discourses about aspects of the Bible and gentle
admonishments to other younger members of my mother’s family about not studying
the Bible with enough care, helped matters further in earning him the favourite
son-in-law spot.
My first big move away from the comfort zone of
my home and the warmth and security of my Mysorean existence in moving to
Kanpur was the point in time when I felt ‘grown up’. Appa continued to be a
large presence in my life even then in advising me on all kinds of matters
related to love – I had taken quite seriously a college love affair that then
seemed to be the cause of my reluctance to study in a place other than Mysore –
growing up away from home, and the pursuit of knowledge. Appa, upon seeing me
in a state of agony about this affair, quietly went one day to talk to the
girl’s parents and her brothers. He returned grim faced and looked rather upset
at being lectured about life and decisions to be made by her still
wet-behind-the-ears brothers. He gently revealed this to me, and I could see he
didn’t think much of them or their advice! By his tone, I could make out that
he was saying that he had tried, but that I was free to follow my heart. I did
move out of Mysore and also away from the affairs of the heart. He continued
being this presence even as I left to study in the US, and in bringing close to
me many friends who are writers and artists and who I met because of him, while
studying there. Appa became guru to many of them.
I was thirty when I
returned to Bangalore, with much travel and years behind, but none the wiser
from these experiences, when I re-encountered appa. He had grown enormously in
stature. Our exchanges as adults marked a different phase in my life, but that
narrative I will save for another time.
Inheritances
SHARMISTHA MOHANTY
IN the flat, snow
covered plains of the American Midwest, U.R. Ananthamurthy came to us – a small
group of Indian students – bearing fragments of our own inheritance. With his
singular vision and energy, he helped us to begin to see some of the diverse
things that had made us. It was a transformation for us – students of writing at
the Iowa Writers Workshop, students of filmmaking and the sciences. He brought
out magical books from his bag. TheArdhakathanika, the first ever
autobiography written in India, in the seventeenth century, the just written The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy, and Simone Weil’s Waiting for God. The force of that encounter over many months
would leave its mark on all our lives. As would the paradox it contained, the
fact that an encounter such as this was perhaps more powerful in that far away
soil of Iowa.
The most searing thing
about Ananthamurthy’s novels and stories is their activeness. The best of them
do not reflect people and transformations, nor recreate or mirror them. What
they do is face and confront. They do not recollect or recount, the tale unfolds
as an intensely alive presence. Ananthamurthy was no doubt a public
intellectual, a thinker, but it was his writing that I believe formed the core
from which everything else emerged. It is in his fiction that he explored his
ideas and often found his own vision. ‘(In Bharathipura)
I give full scope to my ideological position. But the novel questions it,
reflects on it, interrogates it, and turns the other way. That should happen in
the process of writing. And I magically get it sometimes.’
One of the things at the heart of his gift as a
writer was his ability to locate and understand ambiguity, as something not
merely to be lived with, but to live by, especially in the context of India. In
a long short story, ‘Clip Joint’, the narrator is in England for an extended
period of time as a student. He has a close friendship with Stewart, an
Englishman. He says to himself, ‘...the intensity of a life that grows in the
stench of mud and urine – an intensity that precedes all mysticism. ...But here
in this clean and well-ordered land of Stewart’s, only genteel humanists but no
mystics are born.’
Ananthamurthy is best
known for his first book, Samskara. This is clearly a more allegorical work. Where
Samskara has dichotomies, Bharathipura has dilemmas; where Samskara has a
decaying corpse, Bharathipura has death and dead lives. Very rarely does a
novel have a narrator who acts with conviction, and is profoundly uncertain at
the same time, as Jagannath is in Bharathipura. The moment when Jagannath urges
the Dalits to touch thesaligrama is perhaps one of the most moving passages in Indian literature.
‘All that he wanted to
say stuck in his throat: "This is primary matter, touch it; I hold my life
in my hand as I offer this to you, touch it; touch the deepest part of my innermost
being; this is the propitious moment of evening worship, touch it. In vain is
the eternal flame burning there in the puja room. The people standing behind me
are pulling me towards them, reminding me of countless obligations. What are
you waiting for? What am I offering to you? This is the way it is: only because
I offer this to you as a mere stone, it’s becoming the saligrama. If you touch what I offer you, it’ll become a
mere stone to all of them. My anguish is becoming the saligrama; because I offer it to you and because you touch it and because
they see you touching it, let the stone become the saligrama and let the saligrama become a stone, even as the evening deepens.
Pilla, you’re not scared of the wild hog and even the tiger. Come on, touch it.
After this, you’ll have just one more step to take, enter the temple. Then,
centuries of belief will be turned upside down. Now, come on, touch this. Touch
it now. See how easy it is. Touch it".’
A gesture can hardly be
more ambiguous than it is here, a devastating ambiguity which holds both hope
and hopelessness. Jagannath’s consciousness oscillates between the two. This is
done in and through language, with a writer’s gift. He knows to say this in one
long paragraph, building it up sentence upon sentence that communicates the
intensity of Jagannath’s desire for change, sentences long and sinuous, broken
sometimes by the deepest questions, and the repetition of ‘touch it’ – all this
creates the entire world of caste and tradition and the centuries that stand
behind it, in one moment, together. So Ananthamurthy’s craft serves his gaze
and produces an emotion and insight that only literature allows.
Things are as active and alive in the masterful
short story, ‘Suryana Kudure’ (The Stallion of the Sun). Here the
encounter is between a village man, more or less a village idiot and an
educated man of the village who studied abroad and has returned to live in a
city. Here, the dialogue continues between the old and the new, tradition and
modernity, belief and doubt. At the end of the story, as in so much of
Ananthamurthy’s work, the ambiguity remains unresolved, that being the story’s
deepest truth, one that we must live by. The story leaves behind a strong
disturbance in the mind, a desire to choose between the two ways of being, and
the inability to do so, because an empathy develops for both. However much we
travel, upon our return there will be another way of living that confronts us
with its own certainties, making ours waver.
Octavio Paz, in his In Light of India,
says: ‘Hindu civilization is the theatre of a dialogue between One and Zero,
being and emptiness, Yes and No… The fast negates the feast, the silence of the
mystic negates the words of the poet and the philosopher.’ This was the arena
in which Ananthamurthy’s writing existed. Where Paz, as an outsider, sharply
saw the opposites, Ananthamurthy went much further to the place where yes could
become no, the saligram and the stone constantly exchanging places.
I remember a large photograph of Ramakrishna with
his eyes closed, turning in a kind of trance, in Ananthamurthy’s study in
Bangalore. In the same study was another photograph, Tagore and Gandhi together
in Santiniketan.
He spoke often of the
three hungers of the soul (after Simone Weil) that animated the previous
century in our country – the hunger for modernity, equality, and spirituality.
All over the country writers like him were inspired by these urges, he said.
‘But equality as hunger of the soul is not easily satiated unless it gets
coupled, as it does in some great sages of all times – with the other hunger,
the spiritual hunger. Both these hungers have their origin in the feeling that
all forms of life are sacred and our routine quotidian existence in the temporal
world is boring unless it glows with a transcendental meaning.’
Possibly, his fiction could have pushed further
in this direction. But the realist novel that he chose as a form would always
privilege the human drama, and push everything else to the background. If all
living beings and things were indeed sacred then literature would need a form
where the human and the non-human had a certain equality. It is surprising that literature in our context
has not taken on and made greater use of the overwhelming tradition that we are
still privileged to have – of myth, legend, magic, epic and so much that is
outside the framework of the rational. He once told me that Marquez would
remain limited because beyond a point ‘you cannot exceed excess’. There may well
be a grain of truth in that, but I felt he ignored the fact that the same could
be said of the realist novel which has lost its energy over time. It can as
easily be said that too much reality ultimately will be unable to express the
very essence of that reality. I think he possessed the gift of creating a work
which was not reducible to any kind of sociology or politics, but which
included both and much else besides. Perhaps the man of action and the man of
reflection were competing with each other in his work.
One issue he never
changed his mind about was Indian writing in English. Our arguments about this
continued over the years. He felt that Indian writing in English could never be
‘authentic’, that English did not have a ‘backyard’ as the Indian languages
did, that it could never manifest our most intimate feelings. These views have
drawn much criticism over the years. As part of a generation and perhaps a
class produced by English education, I could not agree. We are in some sense
made by history, and how are we to change our situation? Ananthamurthy used to
laugh and call us – people like his son Sharath and myself – ‘the petrol
generation’, products of movement, with spouses from other communities.
Over the years I have thought more about his views
on this. Possibly because I am aware of the radiance of his mind that I know
his words did not emanate from prejudice but from a deeper part of himself.
Today, I do see that Indian writing in English, especially fiction, lacks a
certain depth, and definitely a certain rooted-ness, unable to penetrate our
diversities and our paradoxes. It is difficult, I feel now, to write in a
language one barely hears on the street or in one’s daily interactions. There
is no access to the different registers a language always has. As a result, the
writing in Indian English can seem postured, its rhythms unmusical, its
attitude formal. The only way that English can be used maybe in a deeply poetic
mode where one speaks not so much to others but almost to one’s own soul.
One of the inheritances
Ananthamurthy has left behind for me is living with the ambiguity that he was
such a master at locating. As I continue to be a writer in English, I live with
the questions he raised, with a kind of acceptance and interrogation of my own
ambiguous situation. Ananthamurthy was a rare mind, and I continue to wonder
whether such a mind could have been produced without rooted-ness in a soil and
a community together with a going away to give it perspective. I will mourn his
passing, even as I celebrate the luminosity of his vision.
* Sharmistha Mohanty is
a fiction writer. She first met Ananthamurthy while studying at the Iowa
Writers Workshop, and he remained a teacher and a friend for thirty years.
Mohanty is the author of three works of fiction, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise.
Memories
VIVEK SHANBHAG
WHEN relatives leave
after a short visit, it is customary for them to give some money to the
children of the house. To immediately hand it over to ammais also customary. Once, my aunt, who was returning to Mumbai
after spending a few days with us, gave me ten rupees. ‘Buy something,’ she
said. Had this episode transpired at home, I would have had to hand over the
money to amma. I had gone to drop her off, and just before the bus moved out of
the stand, she had, in a hurry, stretched her hand out of the window and thrust
that folded note into my palm. I went straight to a bookshop without the
faintest idea of what book to buy.
As I stood there
browsing through the glass shelf, I saw Bharathipura,
its green title page covered with half sentences. The words left me shaken.
Till then I had neither come across such language nor such thoughts. I was
mesmerized. I have not yet forgotten the lines that I read that day at the
shop: ‘…because of Manjunatha our lifestyle has stagnated. We are rotting. Once
we destroy Manjunatha we’ll have to become responsible for our lives… What’s
important right now is to prepare the Holeyaru for it. We’ll have to make them
take their first step in history. Their first step across the threshold of the
temple may change the reality of centuries...’ I handed over my ten rupees,
bought the book and went straight home, not getting up till I had finished it.
I was 15 years old at the time.
The kind of disturbance
that Bharatipura created in me cannot be easily described. The way language had
been deployed was itself new to me. I myself went through the turmoil of the
protagonist.
After Bharatipura, I
turned towards a different kind of reading. This was a major turn in my life.
The magic of Ananthamurthy’s writings came from the fact that he could
articulate complex issues with great clarity and connect them to everyday
experiences. Using this magic, he reached every nook and corner of the reader’s
mind to transform an idea into an experience. I feel that it was this talent of
Ananthamurthy that angered fundamentalists. Ananthamurthy’s writings and the
metaphors he used obviously disturbed them deeply. The fundamentalist brigade
must have been astounded by the lucidity of his thoughts; I clearly recall the
restlessness I went through after reading Bharatipura.
Two years after I read Bharatipura, I got a
chance to meet URA. At the time I was studying in a small town called Ankola. I
was thrilled by the fact that a major writer like Ananthamurthy was willing to
come for the annual day of the Shetageri village high school. The famous critic
G.H. Nayak was responsible for bringing Ananthamurthy, and when I learnt that
Nayak was in Ankola, I went looking for him. Though I was a complete stranger,
Nayak spoke affectionately. He told me that Ananthamurthy was arriving by the
Bangalore bus the following morning and invited me to join them for breakfast
at his house.
I had been asked to come
at 7 am, but I was so restless that I reached the bus stand much earlier. I
had, since Bharathipura, read all of Ananthmurthy’s books twice over.
Meanwhile, my very first short story was awarded a prize. Therefore, I
entertained few doubts about my importance as a writer! Indulging myself in
such thoughts, I waited eagerly to see Ananthamurthy. There was only one bus
that came from Bangalore. It had yet to arrive. G.H. Nayak and the principal of
the Shetgeri High School were already there. We stood under a tree, chatting as
we waited for the bus.
That day the bus came
late, around 8 am. I spotted him sitting by the window, wearing a gray and
yellow sweater. Nayak went ahead and received him. And I was right behind.
Taking off his sweater, the first words he uttered are still etched in my mind.
‘There was a huge downpour in Bangalore. It was very difficult to find an auto
to reach the bus stand.’ Nayak introduced me to him. At around 9 am, I went to
their house for breakfast. I sat intently listening to their conversation. But
in a few minutes, I was disappointed. Ananthamurthy spoke about everything in
the world except literature. Farmer’s revolutions, the schools and colleges
that had been set up by Dinakar Desai, social revolution and much else – he
seemed more concerned about contemporary politics.
Now, as a result of the
many years of my close relationship with him, this aspect of his doesn’t
surprise me. It was inherent to his nature. Till his illness made it difficult
for him to travel, he loved going to schools and colleges in small towns. He
was extremely interested in what youngster’s wrote. Till his last days he never
lost the enthusiasm to read new writing and would contact the authors. He wrote
letters, and told everyone about it. Ananthamurthy could see the strengths and
limitations in a piece of writing and was honest in offering his criticism –
this was valued by new writers on the block.
In the days when I didn’t know him all that well,
he had written a letter to me after reading one of my stories; it remains a
cherished moment, and this is true of many Kannada writers. He would create an
informal atmosphere making it possible for anyone to approach him, to hand over
their manuscripts and ask him for an opinion. This kind of an interactive
environment, especially for younger writers, seems now a distant memory. If
someone were to put down some features of the Ananthamurthy era, this certainly
would be an important one.
Since he was deeply
interested in the world around him, no one that he came in contact with was
allowed to slip away. It could have been the carpenter, the farm labourer
Ramaiah, a computer engineer, or even the big and famous – he would talk to
them with great interest, without being judgmental. It was this interest that
made him such an active participant at the three-day science seminar at
Heggodu. He raised key ethical questions, which were seriously discussed at the
gathering.
Talking about questions,
I remember that he never treated even the most ordinary question with
disinterest. He genuinely believed that it was inner provocation that prompted
a person to ask a question and so helped them to articulate it with greater
clarity – a lesson in lucidity of thought, that also gave the person asking the
question a boost in self-confidence. But, if the question was to merely test
his integrity, he became immensely angry.
To share and to build
together was an integral part of his personality and thought process. People
came to meet him all through the day; he never rejected anyone. His thoughts,
his writing plans, political responses were discussed with several friends even
before they came to occupy public space. Irrespective of a person’s age and
background, he would engage in a meaningful conversation with them and, most
importantly, take their feedback seriously. If at all he could foresee a reader
response and its repercussions, this was probably the reason. I feel his
interactions with people of diverse backgrounds influenced the structure of his
narratives, the manner in which his thoughts developed, and his ability to yoke
together dissimilar elements.
His participation with the larger community had a
bearing on his writing process. Everything was kept ready somewhere, and it was
as if he was merely putting them on paper – he wrote his essays in one sitting.
Of course, he made minor corrections here and there, but there wasn’t much of a
difference between the first and final draft. Because of this ability, he could
dictate when unable to spend long hours before the computer. Another Kannada
writer who had this ability was Shivaram Karanth. Such an exercise is
impossible unless one has total clarity of thought.
This was true of his
speeches too. I never saw him make elaborate notes for any of his lectures. His
talks, like his writing, were also an outcome of his imaginative fabric. The
immediacy in his speeches came from here, I suppose. During the proceedings, he
would put down a few words on the back of an envelope, or make some random
jottings on the last page of a notepad – this was his preparation. He would
start talking and thoughts would fall in place. I feel he loved to make
speeches because of the creative pleasure he derived from the process, possibly
also the reason why they were so tentative and charming. He spoke with a sense
of wonderment as these creative impulses worked within him, and he had the
ability to transfer it to his audience as well. ‘It occurred to me at that
moment, just as I was speaking,’ was something I have heard him say so many
times.
I watched him closely when he was translating Tao The Ching. For nearly a month and a half in Mysore, he worked for 10-12
hours a day. Night and day he would think of only this, making a minimum of
four versions for each poem. It was not merely a translation, it was an excuse
for a search within. If you read his Foreword to Tao The Ching, the point I am
making will become clear. He could also create the solitude required for his
writing wherever he was. It didn’t need a specific place or time. Once having
started, the writing would flow continuously, the buzzing world around him
proved no impediment. That is how, even when he was travelling continuously and
actively engaged in public life, he could immerse himself in writing as well.
His views on contemporary politics, however, left
me nervous, almost as if I did not want to believe that it could happen. I had
a reason to feel so. In 1996, Ramakrishna Hegde and Deve Gowda were both part
of the Janata Dal during the assembly elections in Karnataka. On the day of
counting Ananthamurthy was staying with us. At seven in the morning, Deve Gowda
came to our house with a friend, who now occupies a key position in the
Congress. Deve Gowda’s confidence and political experience was so sound that he
could accurately predict the number of seats a party would win. When the
results were declared, there was a difference of a mere three seats.
Despite it being
counting day, there was a reason for Deve Gowda to spend those three hours at
our house. He wanted Ananthamurthy to convince Hegde not to come in the way of
his becoming the chief minister. I have a hunch that he left only after
extracting a promise from Ananthamurthy. After he left, Ananthamurthy wrote a
letter to Hegde. In it, he discussed the entire political scenario of the
country and also the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. No party may win a
majority, regional parties may become major players and would possibly come to
power at the Centre, his letter predicted. And in such a scenario, he advised
Hegde to move to national politics and let Deve Gowda take on the
responsibility of the state. At that point this seemed impossible. I don’t know
what Hegde took into account, what kinds of alliances took place, but Deve
Gowda did become the chief minister. The rest is history and every-one knows
how Deve Gowda expelled Hegde from the party! In retrospect, this letter
appears like a prophecy to me. Hence, the intensity of his emotions and views
on contemporary politics and Narendra Modi made me nervous.
Our last conversation
was when he was in hospital. His book Hindutva and Hind Swaraj was ready for publishing. It was a book born from deep thought. He
had revised it several times. The power of its language, the fiction-like
narrative, and the progression of ideas that seem like incidents from a novel,
will leave a lasting impact on the reader’s consciousness. That day, in the
hospital, he spoke about the thoughts of Richard Rorty. ‘It could be history or
sociology; if there is no faith that man can change, then all the work that’s
happening in these fields is useless,’ he said. A little later he spoke about
Shivaram Karanth, and recalling my comment, added, ‘It is time for us to reread
Karanth again.’ Both these responses were typical of his nature.
Like everyone else who came into contact with
him, I too was mesmerized by his persona, and experienced great happiness in
his company. As a writer it was also inevitable that I would seek to break free
from that influence. All these thoughts are a recollection of those moments of
pleasure and anguish.
In these 25 years since
I have been a part of his family and closely interacted with him in those
thousands of meetings, I never returned empty-handed. He always had something
new to share. There was always some new idea, new thought or a new book to talk
about. This was true till the last meeting. It is indeed rare that someone who
you are close to remains constantly new, even after all these years.
* Translated from
Kannada by Deepa Ganesh.
Transcending imaginary divisions
SRIKANTH SASTRY
THE first time I saw and
heard Ananthamurthy was on a vacation home to Bangalore from Boston where I was
pursuing a PhD in Physics at the time. In the long years away from home, I had
begun to dabble with writing in Kannada as a way of keeping alive a meaningful
connection with my mother tongue, and to catch up on Kannada literature that I
had not paid much attention to when I lived in Bangalore. This engagement with
writing in Kannada had become quite a serious preoccupation in those days, and
all things literary took priority over other engagements during the visit.
When M.S. Murthy, an
artist in Bangalore who I had recently met, told me of a public discussion at
Ravindra Kalakshetra with Ananthamurthy who was visiting town (he was vice
chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala in those days), I eagerly
tagged along. I don’t recall much of what was actually said, but do remember
that it was an extended dialogue, with Ananthamurthy engaging his interlocutors
with obvious relish and earnestness. It was an appealing vignette of an
engagement that I was an outsider to, but for quite some time it would remain
an isolated cultural experience, given my intellectual and geographic distance.
It was a pleasant
coincidence that drew me back into contact with Ananthamurthy after returning
to India. Owing to a shared profession and common friends, I met Sharath, his
son, and we got to know each other well. Soon thereafter, there were frequent
occasions for me to meet Ananthamurthy, and to have conversations that covered
a vast cultural universe, which became, over time, a beacon for how I view
myself, my work, society and culture.
What struck me the most
about Ananthamurthy was his serious and incessant engagement with ideas and the
world around him. This was a constant, enduring meditation of a man who never
ceased to strive to comprehend, to synthesize, and to formulate a position on
all that came his way, and was ever eager to share, to question, and be
questioned. The process itself, rather than any purpose that lay beyond, was
the ultimate, unremitting yajna, which was at the same time effortless as a
natural part of his being, but with a fierceness of focus that could easily
tire the less energetic ones around him.
The broad canvass of
Ananthamurthy’s contemplations were his deep concerns about the directions of
modern civilization, the fate of dominated cultures, ways of living and
knowing, and what notions of development held in store for them. Many concerns
revolved around globalization, cultural and economic, and its relation to
civilizational trends.
A particular strand of his concerns revolved
around the role of science in determining the nature of contemporary society.
As a practicing scientist, I often found myself being a sounding board, and
sometimes a punching bag, to his engagement with this theme. Ananthamurthy’s
principal concerns revolved around what may be called the epistemic hegemony of
science, the implications of scientific knowledge, past and present, on human
affairs, and the nature of the public participation of scientists in these matters.
A common experience when
I visited him at home would be for him to tell me about the latest matter that
he was engaged in a public discussion about. At some point during this
discussion, he would interject a comment – ‘and no scientist is talking about
this’. He felt that scientists should actively participate in public discussion
on matters of societal importance, and was generally disappointed at the level
of such participation. This point is an interesting one to ponder over.
Ananthamurthy, by virtue of a tradition in the Kannada literary world, and his
own personality, took it upon himself to be a conscience of society, and a
public voice of dissent. Many scientists who may well share these views either
do not see themselves as obligated to speak out, or feel that they do not have
a forum to speak. Indeed, during one such discussion about science where
Ananthamurthy appeared to imply that scientists have significant influence over
public policy, Roddam Narasimha, a prominent scientist with significant public
involvement about the use of science and technology, remarked wryly that
Ananthamurthy had much more influence over public policy given the visibility
of his views than most scientists.
The setting was a
workshop on the ideas of science held at Ninasam, Heggodu, a theatre institute,
and venue of an annual workshop on culture that Ananthamurthy was director of
till last year. In the same discussion, Ananthamurthy insisted that given the
prominence of science as a knowledge system and its role in the economy, there
was no room for scientists to maintain a position of innocence and neutrality.
One response, articulated by Roddam Narasimha, is that expecting scientists to
bear responsibility for societal problems that science may have a bearing on is
just as misplaced as the presumption that science will have answers to all
questions of social and human concern. Whether these expectations are to be
viewed as applying to individuals, or the community, and whatever the origins
of the present state of affairs, the nature of the involvement of active
scientists in public discourse on matters of broad social concern that involve
science in some form (and those that do not necessarily involve science in any
direct way) deserves introspection.
A deeper set of misgivings Ananthamurthy had about
the role of science revolved around concerns about the dangers to a democratic
world view concerning cultures and knowledge systems under attack from the
forces of market oriented globalization, and a certain perspective on what
development entailed. Science as an instrument of bestowing legitimacy or
otherwise to knowledge systems or social programmes bothered him and, in
spirit, his misgivings echoed those of Gandhi. He was critical of the tendency
to seek justification about other ways of knowing through science, expressed a
stand against the notion of development, and was fond of describing himself as
a Luddite.
It was a mixed bag. Just as Gandhi’s critique of
modern civilization resonates with many who continue to hold deep convictions
about a scientific approach to the acquisition and employment of knowledge
about the world, Ananthamurthy’s views on science too were not, to me,
acceptable in their totality. The concerns from which these views arose were
beyond dispute. They were motivated by a deep desire for social justice,
freedom of thought and ways of knowing, and opposition to all forms of
oppression. Many of his portrayals of the consequences of a technocratic
civilization were well placed. The ambiguity and the difficulties resided in
how one might embed what was valuable in a scientific world view in a social
and cultural matrix that was just and nourishing. The issues involved are
complex, and at the same time all-important for the future of human
civilization, and Ananthamurthy, characteristically and rightly, was vocal in
drawing attention to them, albeit as a dissenter.
As a writer, and
storyteller, it was perhaps natural that Ananthamurthy had reservations about
scientific inquiry and conclusions serving as an oracle for all matters that
pertain to human experience, and few would disagree. But on the other hand, his
views that advocated a place for traditional knowledge, grown organically,
based on accumulated experience, apparently to the exclusion of scientific
investigation, did not seem consistent with a commonly held view of science as
organized common sense. These views also seemed to assume a certain
completeness and adequacy to such traditional knowledge and traditional ways of
life, which are questionable.
More problematic for me
were his sentiments against the use of scientific knowledge and technology for
the betterment of human welfare. I recall asking him what choice he would have
made, in the face of widespread starvation, regarding the improvisations of the
green revolution. He did not respond, perhaps because he saw the point of it,
but this was not a satisfactory choice. He spoke approvingly about F.R.
Leavis’s position against the well knownTwo Cultures thesis of C.P. Snow (who placed his hopes for
meeting mankind’s needs on scientists who had ‘the future in their bones’, and
who pleaded for better communication between the two cultures of natural
sciences and the humanities), and I suspect, would have taken issue with
Nehru’s assertion that ‘the future belongs to science and those who make
friends with science.’
But the public positions may have concealed what
was privately an enthusiastic appreciation of the ideas of science and even the
potential of technology as a liberating force. Ananthamurthy was fascinated by
scientific ideas as he was by much else, and was equally interested in
technology. One of his many nicknames from his children was in jest of his
fascination of gadgetry, and he had a detailed appreciation of medical facts
that concerned him. One of the stories he was fond of narrating was about
Gandhi’s fascination for the Singer sewing machine, which he saw as a
liberating device, freeing women of the tedium of sewing by hand. But it was
technology a la mesure de l’homme, technology that was tailored to fit and
satisfy human needs that was interesting, and not the monstrosities of
industrial society run amuck. With the emergence of concerns about global
climate, the environment and sustainable technology as overarching existential
preoccupations today, even as many societies, including Indian society, rush
headlong towards the dream of a consumerist paradise, such a vision of a
humanized technological future is no longer esoteric and utopian, although it
is as yet dim and at a distance.
The last conversation I had with Ananthamurthy
was a few days before he passed away. On that day, in spite of the serious ups
and downs in his condition in the days before, he was quite alert and lucid.
Earlier that day, I had been reading news of a mathematician of Indian descent
working in Princeton, Manjul Bhargava, receiving the Fields Medal in
mathematics. Apparently, Ananthamurhty had also heard about it. At the mention
of Manjul Bhargava in our conversation, he asked, with an eagerness in his
voice so characteristic of him, ‘Can you tell me what he has done?’ I had to
confess that I did not know enough to explain, but said I would learn about it
well enough to explain it to him and promised do so soon. Sadly, that occasion
was never to be.
So much has been written
and said about Ananthamurthy’s outstanding qualities, especially since his
passing away, that it is hard to say anything that has not already been said
elsewhere. Nevertheless, I must record my own list of qualities that I found to
be deeply appealing, in addition to what I have already described above, and
aspects in which he was a role model par excellence.
He loved life. In
addition to delighting in his intellectual pursuits, he enjoyed the sundry
pleasures of life. And he loved being with people, and connected with those
around him with a warmth that went beyond mere affability. One of my fond
memories is seeing him join a crowd of youngsters dancing at a social
gathering, with an exuberant smile on his face that proclaimed he wasn’t going
to let the fun pass him by. He was generous with people to a fault,
particularly those younger than him, and engaged with them as equals, without
condescension. I can think of many occasions when he spoke warmly and
enthusiastically about younger writers, and such encouragement no doubt meant a
lot to them.
Ananthamurthy’s engagement with emerging writers
in Kannada was perhaps part of a broader, and passionate, concern he had for
the fate of Kannada as a living language, and that of other Indian languages.
He had a strong and defiant sense of the autonomy and the intrinsic vitality of
these languages, and wished to see their traditions live and flourish,
resisting the homogenizing tendencies of dominant linguistic cultures. My own sentiments
in this regard had drawn me to my first encounter with him. His attempts to see
universal themes find a place in Kannada discourse, and to find a place for
Kannada in the larger world were valuable guidance.
There is a curious
symmetry to the two occasions that book-end my interactions with Ananthamurthy,
which I treasure. On the first I, a student of science and a hobbyist in
literature, went to listen to him as an iconic literary figure. On the last
occasion, he had wanted me, as a scientist, to explain to him the work of a
mathematician. As usual patterns of the division of the two cultures go, his is the more remarkable curiosity. But in
spirit, he transcended such imaginary divisions.
That I did not have an
occasion to explain that work will remain an emblem of many unfinished
conversations with him, which I will one-sidedly try to get through in the
years to come.
Decoding URA’s poetry
J.N. TEJASHREE
U.R. Ananthamurthy’s
poetry is an extension of his thoughts on culture and society. His poems
construct a unique poetics, with its origin in the poetical traditions of our
country. This essay attempts to analyze the relations bet-ween his poetry and
his writing in other genres. In the context of his powerful prose, URA’s poetry
was generally relegated to the background. However, one notices that the ideas
deve-loped by him in his fiction have subtle parallels in his poetry. I quote:
‘I have never considered poetry and prose as different modes of expression. But
there are many periods in my evolution when I have felt that certain things can
be expressed only in poetry, where language becomes symbolic and gestural.
Prose with its focus on details is incapable of doing that. Both of them are
complementary in a search for unique identities.’1 These ideas merit close attention by those interested in a study
of a writer’s concerns about literary forms and the corresponding linguistic
styles.
Ananthamurthy is best known and appreciated for
his short stories, novels, literary criticism and cultural criticism. He began
his writing career, however, as a poet. The fact that he did not persist with
poetry as his major mode of expression could be a consequence of his personal
preferences, as also the cultural needs of his times. This was equally true of
many of his gifted contemporaries such as P. Lankesh, Yashawant Chittal,
Poornachandra Tejasvi, Girish Karnad, Shanthinatha Desai and others who started
writing during the sixth and seventh decades of the previous century. It is
significant that all of them were deeply influenced by Gopalkrishna Adiga’s
poetry. But they were unwilling to imitate him. Fiction and drama became
alternative avenues for their creativity.
If one moves beyond
Kannada poetry and looks at the European situation, we notice that the earlier
prosaic models of English poetry gradually gave way to William Blake and others
of his kind who created a new poetic style, capable of churning an experience
to find latent and new meanings. This happened right from the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Subsequently, poets seemed more concerned about truths that
have to be deduced through one’s vision rather than those that were visible to
the eyes. The newness of the language to realize experience became as important
as the experience itself. A close scrutiny of the words that poured out of a
poet’s inner mind became the felt need of those times. Modernist poets of
Kannada concurred with this point of view.
URA attempted to
transcend various conceptual models of poetry that prevailed during his youth
and forge new ones, which also differed from those adopted by his peers. He
says, ‘A few of my stories and some poems were published in the fifties, rather
diffidently but truly in search of one’s own identity. In those days, I admired
Gopalkrishna Adiga hugely and that has continued to this day... He was
ruthlessly dismissive of the poetic practices of his predecessors… But there
was a constant endeavour in my writings to be different from Adiga.’2 The modes in which URA has negotiated the challenge posed by
changing times become evident when one compares the intensely passionate poems
of his early days with the deliberately prose-tinted and totally controlled
poems of later periods. I believe that a departure from the ‘tradition’ is also
a protest.
Ananthamurthy sidesteps the models forged by his
seniors and contempo-rary Kannada poets: Adiga’s nuanced, taut structure;
Lankesh’s synthesized lyrical quality and objective attitude; Ramachandra
Sharma’s forging of mysterious and unfathomable poems, and A.K. Ramanujan’s
exploration of linguistic possibilities were some of these models. URA’s poetry
oscillates between two poles. He reverts to mythology whenever his poems become
logical and depend on causal relations. He seeks recourse in poems of
intellectual pursuits when he gets bogged down in excessive passion and
sentiments. By doing this, he is protesting against the demands of his times.
This is also the protest of the inner poet against the ‘contextual poet’. It is
beyond dispute that a desire to achieve this balance kept him in a state of
alertness throughout his career.
URA’s poems written
after the mid-’80s are simple and straightforward in terms of their themes and
style when compared with his earlier poems, where he makes use of the persona
of ‘king’ (raaja) as his ‘mask’. A keen reader of URA’s work knows well
his liking for W.B.Yeats and his idea of ‘masks’. Yeats was intrigued by the
internal and the external self of a person, i.e., the true person and the
aspects a person chooses to represent his self. He wrote, ‘I think all
happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a
rebirth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and
perpetually renewed.’3
URA’s second collection
of poetry takes a deviation by getting rid of ‘masks’. This is how a writer
deconstructs and rebuilds himself. An excessive use of prose style was novel in
Kannada poetry of those times. Many of the stories in his first collection, Endendiguu Mugiyada Kathe (A Story that Never Ends), were lyrical, while
the poems he wrote concurrently were closer to prose. Even this was probably a
part of his experimentation. During the mid-eighties, however, Kannada
literature underwent major changes. The voices of Dalit and ban-daya (rebel) poets became far more prominent. Unswayed by them, URA
made a sincere attempt to be himself in his choice of themes and the use of
language. The structure of his poems demonstrates how he differed from his
peers.
Ananthamurthy agrees with our ancient scholars
when they compare poetry with Kanthasammitha (persuasive words uttered by either a wife or a
beloved). The act of writing is close to a conversation between lovers, where
one continues and completes what the other has said. This probably explains why
many of his poems have two words/phrases linked by the conjunction and (mattu)
in their titles: ‘Shit and Soul’, ‘The King and the Bat’, ‘Love and Duty’,
‘Dalailama and History’, ‘Gandhi and Henry the Eighth’, ‘The Gypsy and the
Tree’ are some examples. It is not only the individuals who complement one another;
even ideas and emotions act in tandem. For Ananthamurthy, the intellectual
needed to transcend analytical skills; what is needed is a method of expressing
the inner turmoil.
One requires this framework in order to
internalize URA’s poetry. This multitude of poems that are linked by the
conjunction ‘and’ draws our attention to the element of duality and nuanced
thoughts that pervade his poetry. The following remarks by him are perti-nent:
‘…My grandfather used to say this as though it was a divinely ordained eternal
truth: "There are still some good people living in this world. That’s why
it rains regularly and our lands yield crops without fail." These were
notions born in a mind with an implicit faith in the other world. It is not
possible for me to either console others or console myself with these words,
because my rational mind makes me feel embarrassed. I often think that I am
waiting to create a poem which could transcend the pitfalls of literal
statements and the determinism of logicality, infused with suggested meanings
that would make even clever people stare at it in amazement.’4 Nuanced thoughts like these have given rise to many debates which
kept the lite-rary and cultural atmosphere of Karna-taka alive and alert from
time to time.
An anecdote in URA’s
autobio-graphy Suragi unveils his poetic universe beautifully. His
family had a maid servant named Abbakka. She conveyed town gossip to his
mother. Her cheeks were smeared with turmeric and the vermillion mark on her
forehead was prominent. Her eyes were full of love and empathy. She used to
share a swig of tobacco with URA’s mother. All these details are delineated
fondly. Occasionally Abbakka’s body became a vehicle for deities. This
transformation of a human being into a goddess was one of the wonders of his
childhood. Once, when Abbakka visited his home, the young URA said in jest: ‘Abbakkanna
Gubbakka Kachkondhooytu’ (Abbakka was carried away by a sparrow). His
mother was struck by her son’s verbal magic and the incident was narrated to all
and sundry. It was nothing great in terms of meaning and imagination, but the
alliteration of sounds and the elongated vowels succeeded in lending a dramatic
quality to a simple statement. ‘Looking at the incident, from this distance in
time, I feel that I was handed over a magical key to a mysterious universe.’5 This is probably the ‘key’ with which he tried to fuse the
emotional and the intellectual within the magical realms of poetic language.
In the preface to his second collection of poems, Ajjana Hegala Sukkugalu (The Wrinkles on Grandfather’s Shoulders, 1989),
URA opines: ‘For me, poetry is like a visiting guest, who arrives, departs and
comes back as he pleases. I was immersed in poetry during the fifth decade of
the 20th century, but I became a short story writer. However, I was trying to
create poetry in my stories and novels also. Even my intellectual
preoccupations are not those of academics. They belong to a person in love with
poetry. This is neither a matter for jubilation nor diffidence. This is just
what I am.’
He revisits this opinion
in Samasta Kaavya. ‘Those were the days when a bat – which is neither a bird nor an
animal – was my favourite metaphor. I could not arrive at cocksure decisions… I
was finding it difficult to use language in a manner that would convince at
least me. Of course, this difficulty persists to this day.’ It is possible for
us in these musings to witness his introspective and self- critical
personality.
Ananthamurthy’s concept of poetry gave equal
importance to intended meaning and the structural devices required to embody
that in a poem. But he believed in suggesting the meaning rather than stating
it explicitly. This is known as vastudhvani in Indian poetics. The intellectual component of
his poems, however, also carried an emotional load. Occasionally his poems
assume the tone of a debate and try to explain the pros and cons of a
proposition. For instance, in a poem titled ‘Poetry as Archibald MacLeish
Perceives It’ (Archibald MacLeish Helu-vante Kavite), URA has this to
say:
A poem should be bereft
of words
As a bird flies without
foot marks
It should be fixed
silently in time
As the moon rises in the
sky
Poetry should not say
anything
Being is everything.
This poem illustrates
the ambiguities of language and also its limitations. The title of the poem
does not mean just what it states. It also suggests that poetry involves the
rhyth-mic movements and tonal variations required in the enunciation of the
words ‘Archibald’ and ‘MacLeish’.
URA explains the process
of a poet’s search for meaning and a unique idiom, in the poem, ‘Kayaa,
Vachaa, Manasaa…’ (‘In Body, Word and Mind…’:
…The idiom of poetry
Is a bent rod
That becomes a hook,
In to the well, it goes,
And then,
Searching
Probing
Fondling,
Nibbling
Understanding
Finally, finally
Grasping
Lifts it up and
Gives it you
If you are lucky
And if the words are
cleansed
…If it dries up
And if strength remains
even then
And if there is God’s
grace along with the dried up sap
If and if and if. . .
This bloody bitch
(Look at its arrogance)
May give up its rotten
habit.
This complex poem
demonstrates the elusiveness of language as also its capacity to hold different
dimensions of an experience. This plurality of meaning is a striking aspect of
URA’s poetics.
The process of confronting the works of a writer
like URA is very much akin to the ‘Just Connect’ concept of E.M. Forster.
Readers familiar with the works of URA know that his perceptions start at a
subjective level and gradually outgrow those limits to encompass wider temporal
and spatial contexts. These perceptions coalesce into an integral vision. His
method, which brings together different individuals and ideas under a
microscope and subjects them to minute analysis, gives rise to a number of
questions and debates. It tests the veracity of ideas. This search is conducted
with humility, a humility which is also capable of puncturing an exaggerated
sense of self-importance. For him, humility was a great virtue. Consider these
lines:
Is there an excess or a
limit to humility
A man becoming humble
Is like milk solidifying
as cream (‘Humility’).
This humility of yours
is as sweet as
A Parijaatha flower.
Lord, you bestow your
company
To the meanest of
insects
Your grace moves in to
small seed
You rest in the great unperturbed.
Simple
Simple my Lord
This humility of yours
(‘This humility of yours’).
During the morning walk
I saw your grace
Glowing sun and a little
chill
The permanent is tickled
by the fleeting mist.
How many coloured birds
If only you look for
them.
Amidst the leaves
slowly, serenely, secretly
This adult man gaining
weight
Shedding this artificial
weight
I am moved by your
bounty and beauty
For a moment (‘Love’)
A critical comparison of URA’s ‘Raja’s Requests
for the New Year’ and Gopalakrishna Adiga’s celebrated poem Prarthane (Prayer) reveals curious associations between them. Adiga read
URA’s poem and later composed his masterpiece. URA had this to say about the
incident: ‘My poem is a minor effort. Adiga’s effort is a major work of art
which has internalized my poem.’ URA would have discontinued writing poetry if
he had taken that as a personal failure. His love for poetry springs from a
greater love for life. He wants to be in perpetual wonder. He wants to find his
way towards a vision. His poetry wishes to get realized in the readers and the
poet wants to see his poems through the eyes of others. Therein lies his joy.
This is how the personal is transformed into the social and the universal.
URA is important for his
ability to adopt the contemporary political scenario into his poems. We can
notice the close connections that prevail bet-ween his poems and work in other
literary forms written concurrently. This work, in its totality, makes us
realize his sincere attempt to look at political attitudes with a humane
approach. It is virtually a war between the writer’s convictions and principles
with murky contemporary realities. His writings are infused with an awareness
of the contemporary and critical attitudes towards it. He picks up regional issues
and studies them in a universal context. This practice saves him from narrow
chauvinism.
For instance, consider his poem on M.N. Roy. It
brings in diverse personalities such as Ambedkar, Gandhi, Stalin, Nehru, Bose
and Jayaprakash Narayan under the scanner and indulges in a comparative study.
Focusing on the principles, theories and conflicts of Roy, it concludes that
all theories should merge in the individual and result in an integrated stance.
The idea that experiences and situations could be viewed from different vantage
points is a strand that runs throughout URA’s writings.
The fact that truth gets
transformed continuously in the psyche of the individual is another theme that
engaged his creativity. This attitude has given a pluralistic dimension to his
thoughts and writings. It is per- haps no coincidence that he titled his poetry
collection as Samasta Kavya (which means poetry that includes everyone and
belongs to everyone) instead of Samagra Kaavya (meaning collected poems). This serves as an important
clue to understand his life and writings.
* All translations in
this essay are by J.N. Tejashree. URA’s six volumes of poetry include, Hadinaidu Kavitegalu (1970), Ajjana Hegala Sukkugalu (1989), Mithuna (1992),Bidi Kavitegalu (2001), Abhaava (2009) and Pachhe Resort (2011).
Footnotes:
1. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
Preface, Samasta Kavya (in Kannada). Abhinava Prakashana, Bengaluru,
2011, pp. v, vi, 438, 113, 81, 83, 80, 42.
2. Ibid.
3. William Butler Yeats,
‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’, in William H. O’Donnell (ed.), The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Later Essays (vol. V). Simon and Schuster, New York, (1917)
1995, p. 10.
4. U.R. Ananthamurthy, Suragi. Akshara Prakashana, Heggodu, 2012, p. 414.
5. Ibid., p. 26.
Women protagonists in URA’s fiction
M.S. ASHA DEVI
OURS is a time of
transition. The modern Indian community is looking back and evaluating the path
it has taken. Various art forms, including literature, are being reviewed and
re-evaluated; and this is a curious, decisive time. It is true that texts of
art are always engaged in a dialogue and a confrontation with the established
value system. Such texts perform the social and ethical duty of keeping alive
the space to confront the establishment, and serve as conscience keepers.
Besides aesthetics and
poetics, factors such as caste, class and gender play a big role in such a
re-evaluation. They enable new ways of reading and help foreground hitherto
neglected aspects in art and literature. Attributing the change solely to fresh
research and op-ed articles on ‘social justice’ and ‘gender’ would be to ignore
the persistent efforts of the social struggles of the past few decades.
U.R. Ananthamurthy (URA)
produced a major part of his literary corpus when a self-proclaimed modernity (navya)
was in vogue. I use the term ‘self-proclaimed’ because the modernist’ attempt
to differ from the pre-modernists (navodaya) was over-emphasized. As
Edgar Alan Poe says: ‘Let the poet be modern / Modern from head to toe’.
This was what navya writers believed in. I say
this keeping in mind the immense contributions navya writers made to aesthetics
and poetics. The navya movement began as an ambitious protest against
pretentiousness and self-deception, but often fell into its own trap. Because
the navya writers believed in socialist humanism and considered liberalism as
the myth of the weak, they often created literary texts that were anti-life.
Elsewhere I have
observed that URA’s oeuvre can be identified with the theoretical phrase, ‘This
is mine, yet not mine’ (William Blake), and I endorsed it as a life-evolving
process. The protagonists of his ‘trilogy’ (writer K.V. Subbanna named it as
such) represent the three stages of evolution. If Naranappa and Jagannatha of
the novels Samskara and Bharathipura represent the larva and
the caterpillar, Krishnappa of the novel Avasthe(Predicament) evolves
into a butterfly. It is an evolutionary process from Naranappa to Krishnappa
(from vyashti to samashti).
URA began his
confrontation with the value system in a limited way through Naranappa and
prepared the ground to convert it into a bigger narrative through Jagannatha.
The process reached completion when Krishnappa, by going beyond his own
concerns, yielded to the well-being of the community. I wish to clarify that
URA’s narrative, for me, includes not merely his stories and novels but his
cultural criticism, public talks, and even his dreams of a common school
system.
URA was committed to the
role of a Kannada and pan-Indian intellectual, fulfilling all functions
expected of such a personality. The fundamental question is whether his female
protagonists derive from this position. There is little dispute that URA
consistently confronted the question of class and caste. As for the feminine
sensibility – in his own words – he was interested in it but did not really
confront it. This aspect can be discussed by comparing URA’s perspective with
two of his contemporaries – writers who focused on women as an inevitable part
of their writing – Lankesh and Shanthinath Desai.
Lankesh’s writing is
invested with both an attraction to and restlessness towards women as he traces
different paths of liberation for women. In an anthology of stories, Kallu Karaguva Samaya (When Stones Melt), the women protagonists
Shyamale, Devi and Subhadra, like Anebaddi Rangavva of ‘Mussanjeya Katha
Prasanga’, are all travellers in the great gender journey.
The question here is whether the credit should go
to Lankesh, the story writer, or Lankesh, the person who threw himself into Karantaka’s
public life with a deep passion for changing the sensibility of a whole
community. It cannot be denied that Lankesh’s sensibility strengthened women’s
discourses in Kannada like never before; it also catalyzed the emergence of
genuine women writers through his weekly, Lankesh Patrike, whose writings inspired women to seek liberation on their own.
Shanthinatha Desai is
one of the very few writers with a genuine modernist sensibility. He treats
women as equal to men. He succeeds in portraying the shifting perspectives and
sensibilities of urban women. He grasps the turmoil of women in the institution
of marriage. The difficulties and sexual aspects of a women’s life are all
grasped without prejudice.
Women occupy a prime place in many of URA’s prominent
stories and novels. How are they represented there? Let us look at some of his
popular characters who are most debated. Chandri of Samskara is very well
known. As Naranappa’s low caste mistress, she plays a crucial role in helping
cultivate the inner rebel in his personality. However, her character becomes
significant for showing Praneshacharya a way of liberation. She treats
Praneshacharya, devastated in the face of life and death questions, with a deep
sense of empathy (jeevakarunya), and thus leads him to a very primordial
experience.
Scholars have viewed
this situation in curious ways. The new world that she ‘reveals’ to him and the
unique experiences she provides, transforms him into a new personality.
Praneshacharya’s very view of life turns upside down. Much before this
incident, Naranappa invites Praneshacharya to sleep with a woman like Chandri.
Praneshacharya, undergoing this experience in new circumstances, is one of the
most successful parts of the novel.
Praneshacharya, who has
experienced life only through theoretic profundity, ‘lives’ it intensely by
fulfilling his carnal desires with Chandri. How would this look from Chandri’s
perspective? Or, how is Chandri’s character represented in this situation?
Doesn’t it seem that she is merely a tool to provide enlightenment for
Praneshacharya? Not even a small portion of the legitimacy of his renewed
experience of life is granted to her. Her experience is of no relevance at all.
It looks like it was her destiny or duty to provide an intense experience to
him. There is no hint of anything to her beyond her erotic personality. She is
at best a mere sensuous body and not a person in her own right. Now juxtapose
this with Praneshacharya’s deep scholarly and intellectual personality. URA’s
modernism had not adequately acknowledged the question of gender.
Let me make my
theoretical premise clearer. It is possible to perceive a woman’s personality
in all its sophistication only by those who have experienced ‘inner awareness
and conflict’ about women. This is evident in the two writers discussed
earlier: Lankesh and Desai.
Let us consider another woman character of URA’s.
Yamunakka of Ghatashraddha is construed as one with an erotic premise who
buries herself in mundane chores. The patriarchal violence is documented in
detail. Towards the end, she sacrifices herself to the mundane demands of life.
It is a true portrayal of the mundane realities of life. But what do we see
when we compare the sexual experience of Praneshacharya with those of
Yamunakka? For Praneshacharya, the experience provides a ‘divine’ moment, but
Yamunakka appears as one who cannot restrain her sensual demands. She is
haunted by a primordial physical need, but the author fails to subject the
patriarchy of her situation to inquiry. This clearly indicates that URA does
not subject a patriarchal system to the necessary introspection or protest the
values that subject Yamunakka to unbearable turmoil.
One may recall another
important Kannada story, ‘Naa Konda Hudugi’ (The Girl I Killed) by Ananda. The
protagonist, though not directly responsible for the death of a woman, decides
that he will be unable to free himself of this guilt. What is considered
primordial and natural for men and women are treated very differently here.
It is easy to argue that
Yamunakka is portrayed as a victim of the social system. But representational
tactics decide what a fact suggests in creative terms. Naranappa of Samskara,
for instance, attempts to overcome his existential reality through liquor, meat
and women, while Jagannatha of ‘Bharathipura’ does the same by holding the holy saligrama in his hand. However, this manner of perception is specifically
missing in the representation of Yamunakka.
That URA can represent
women with sympathy but not with insight is evident in his portrayal of Gouri
in the novel Avasthe. On her return from America, she meets Krishnappa who is
already bedridden with paralysis. She approaches him out of the spontaneous
love that she holds for him. Interpreting it to mean only an interest in sex,
he says that he is in no position to reciprocate. Krishnappa cannot even
imagine that a woman could approach him in a maternal way. He fails to
acknowledge a womanly warmth and intimacy that transcends mere carnal
engagement.
Why does this happen? URA believes that the
ability of the human mind to deceive and cheat is immense. This propels much of
his writing and thinking. There is a proximate relation between this belief and
his views about women. He is a writer whose stories are self-consciously modernist.
He believes his stories liberate women because of the manner in which they are
portrayed. This is the kind of self-deception the stories are sub-consciously
suffused with. Starting from Krishnappa of Avasthe, through the protagonist of Bara (Drought), all the way to the hero of his important last story
‘Pacche Resort’, it is the same.
Consider Rekha, the
female lead of ‘Bara’. This is the story of an IAS officer who, despite
believing that he can usher in change as a bureaucrat, fails. Though more sensitive
than her husband, she is confined to following the experiments of her husband.
‘Pacche Resort’ is an acclaimed story that URA wrote in the last phase of his
career. Here too, the female protagonist Bhagirathi faces a similar fate.
Starting her career as an IAS officer, she gives up her job. But where does she
find meaning in life? It is in the adoration of her mature body by her
childhood friend, who utters her name, ‘Rathi, Rathi’ (Rathi, the wife of
Kama).
Without critically engaging with and interrogating
a value system that consumes and discards woman, an author indirectly endorses
the system. URA’s stories are fraught with such danger. It is sad to see that a
great writer, who practised a healthy socialism throughout his life and held
Mahashweta Devi, Medha Patkar and Aruna Roy as the heroes of contemporary
India, failed to adequately address the question of women. Yet, while lamenting
such a loss, we need to take into account another social truth as well. It is
relevant to us for various reasons.
How we choose to
confront gender and other challenges posed by Indian society matters. The
objectivity, openness and self-criticism required to address caste,
particularly Dalit issues, is not easy to come by. Addressing the feminist
question is equally difficult. Hence the changing evaluative criteria in art
and literature have become an ordeal by fire for all writers, male or female.
I am aware of
presenting my views in a slightly exaggerated manner, but I believe this
is necessary to address a deep-rooted problem.
* Translated by S.R.
Ramakrishna.
Thinking through Ananthamurthy
AKSHARA K.V.
I knew Ananthamurthy
well before I knew him as a writer. My father’s friend, he often came home, and
stayed on for days. During one such stay in the early 1970s, he spent most of
his time sitting in one room, writing page after page for several days. Much
later I came to know that he was writing his novel, Bharathipura.
I vividly remember an
incident from those days. I was 11-12 years old and found it intriguing to see
a person writing all day. I would go stand in front of the room, peep from the
corner of the door to see what he was doing.
Once, I was caught. At
that moment, instead of writing he was looking towards the door and thinking.
He suddenly saw me and said, ‘Good that you came when I needed you. Tell
me...,’ he continued, asking me a specific detail from the story Alice in Wonderland. Rural boy that I was, I had no clue that there
was a story by that name and stood silently. He then asked me what I read.
Without knowing how to answer such a question, I blurted outChandamama.
Immediately he started a conversation with me on Chandamama stories and made me
narrate a couple that I had recently read.
I mention this episode
because years later, when I read Bharathipura, I found in it a reference not
only to Alice in Wonderland, but also a couple of Chandamama-like stories,
which I secretly cherish as my contribution to that novel! I often wonder if
this might be the subconscious reason why I regard Bharathipura as his best
writing, an informed choice that I made decades later.
I encountered Ananthamurthy as a writer and
thinker when I was studying in the 12th standard. I read his extraordinary
essay on existentialism published in his first collection of essays, Prajne Mattu Parisara (Consciousness and the Environment, 1971). The
essay begins with the story of a young man in Europe who has to make a
difficult choice between his duty as a citizen and responsibility towards his
mother. He goes on to search for an answer to his dilemma through Marxism,
Christian faith, and finally existentialism. Interestingly, the essay is like
an open-ended play – where there is a central character and several
possibilities of action. It is also something like a long monologue that
reminds us of the play, Hamlet.
At that time, a
classmate of mine who was facing a problem with his parents also read this
essay. We spent hours together applying the essay to his life, embarking on a
futile search for concrete solutions to his dilemma. After many days, my friend
announced that he had found an answer through that essay. I was curious and
asked him, ‘But Ananthamurthy does not offer you an answer there’; to which my
friend responded, ‘But he gives you a way of thinking.’ This, it became clear
to me later, was essentially what Ananthamurthy did all his life – with his
writing, speeches and actions as a writer, popular speaker and public
intellectual in Karnataka.
I can give any number of
examples for this from his works of fiction. His story ‘Mouni’ (The
Silent One, 1966) is a confrontation between Appanna Bhatta and Kuppanna
Bhatta, two average Brahmin landowners from a Malnad village, stuck in an
entangled property dispute. The former is talkative, practical and therefore
more successful in life, while the latter is silent, an introvert and
impractical. At the end of the story, the practical one wins the battle in a
worldly sense. However, when Kuppanna comes for the final encounter, Appanna
remains completely silent, and through his silence ‘defeats’ the former. There
is nothing ‘political’ in this story except for a dramatic confrontation
between two characters; the story does not even comment on either of them,
except that it provides the reader a richly variegated way of thinking which is
evocative enough to enable us to read the story in many contexts, ranging from
feudal land relations to globalization.
Another story, little known outside Kannada, is
‘Clip Joint’ (1964). It is a story about an Indian student in England who goes
on a pornographic trip with his colleague, and as one experience leads to the
next, it becomes a never-ending search for bodily pleasures. Alongside this
physical journey is also a mental journey – the Indian student remembers his
grandfather who embarked on tapasya, an experiment in which he progressively
renounces bodily pleasures. Here again we have a drama with two characters
contrary in nature, but the story privileges neither of these journeys.
However, at the end, there is a question – are these two trips not isomorphic?
I first read ‘Clip
Joint’ during my college days, and later, when I went to the UK for training in
theatre, it came back to me as a plot for a student production that I had to
do. But for a variety of reasons, I found myself unable to adapt this story
into a play. While I was desperately searching for a way out, I suddenly
remembered the classical Sanskrit farce, Bhagavadajjukeeyam, which I felt embodies Ananthamurthy’s ‘Clip Joint’ way of
thinking. I finally produced it; in English it was called ‘The Priest and the
Prostitute’. I mention this as an instance of how Ananthamurthy has been with
me all these years.
The two best examples of this kind of dramatic
positioning of a way of thinking are Ananthamurthy’s celebrated story ‘Sooryana
Kudure’ (The Stallion of the Sun, 1995), and his novel Bharathipura (1973).
‘Sooryana Kudure’ is the classic instance of a confrontation between two key
characters – Ananthu, the protagonist, and Hade Venkata, a childhood
acquaintance from his ancestral village. Initially, Ananthu suspects the other,
even thinking that the other is ‘useless’. Then the educated protagonist probes
his idiot friend with sharp comments as well as through a series of monologues
with himself. Hade Venkata’s answer to all this is mostly in the form of
silence, by completely ‘ignoring’ the presence of the other. At a climactic
moment of the story, Hade Venkata takes Ananthu to his home and gives him an
elaborate oil bath (abhyanjana), which eventually takes the form of a
ritualistic ceremony. The process begins to resemble something that
Ananthamurthy himself has elsewhere termed, raavu bidisuva kriye, an act of exorcising the devil. We do not know who the devil is,
nor who cures whom, but the reader definitely begins to confront what could be
seen as a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Unlike many readers who
think that ‘Sooryana Kudure’ and Samskara (1965) epitomise the
best of Ananthamurthy’s literary output, I for one think that Bharathipura is
the best representation of the Ananthamurthy method. Samskara is attractive,
enchanting and captures the reader with a wonderful metaphor presented in a
clear and crystalline structure. With a background in theatre history, I often
see Samskara as a medieval Christian morality play in the garb of a
contemporary tale. History books inform us that a common feature of the
settings in which such morality plays were staged, there was heaven at one end,
hell on the other and all other locations lay in between.
In Samskara, Praneshacharya’s house is at one end
of the village, Narayanappa resides at the other end; this might signify heaven
and hell. Theagrahara brahmanas of various hues – the serious, the comic, the hungry, the
lecherous, the pious, the greedy and so on – lie in between. Praneshacharya’s
search to unravel the shastric conundrum of how to perform the final rites of
an outcaste appears almost like the agony of a medieval Christian saint.
Therefore, when a brahmin friend once told me that the predicament of Samskara
does not constitute a problem for a traditionalist, because once he realizes
that the shastra does not offer a solution, he would resort to apaddharma, which recommends context specific solutions. I tend to agree
with him (but also advised him to read this novel as a metaphor, and not a
‘realistic’ social science document).
However, after reading
Samskara if one enters Bharathipura, everything in the landscape, timescape and
the mindscape changes. From the serene, but plague ridden agrahara of yonder
times, one is thrown into a busy street of a contemporary Indian small town,
where everything seems erratically out of sync – from traffic to human
behaviour. The characters in this novel are also ‘sketchy’ compared to the
earlier novel; their caste identities have receded to the background (but still
strongly present), and many other identities (such as merchants,
administrators, politicians and so on) have been made stronger. Therefore, it
is impossible to draw a clean and clear character sketch of any of these
people. Jagannatha, the protagonist is no different. He is many ideas rolled
into one: the Lohiaite socialist of the ’70s, the environmentalist of the ’80s
and even the ‘decolonizer of the mind’ of the ’90s. With such diversities
residing together in its characters, plot and structure, some Kannada critics
argue that Bharathipura is incomplete and patchy; I, however, feel that the
incompleteness is its biggest strength.
Unlike the crystalline metaphor of Samskara,
Bharathipura is a ‘broken and scattered metaphor’ and, therefore, can show more
than what it reflects. Its incompleteness is rather an invitation to the reader
to struggle and play with it. It is like pieces from several jigsaw puzzles
thrown together, which do not combine to make a picture. Therefore, I have
always felt that while Samskara is beautiful, Bharathipura is evocative, richer
in its resonance, and that the Ananthamurthy method that I referred to earlier
takes on a much more complex formulation in this novel. Instead of two key
characters confronting each other, we have here a multitude of confrontations,
multiple ways of thinking and, thus, multiple possibilities of reading the
work. Bharathipura, therefore, represents to me the high point of
Ananthamurthy’s method.
Now, to extend this
method from Ananthamurthy’s fiction into his essays, and even to the foundation
of his activism as a public intellectual in Karnataka, I take the example of
his controversial essay, ‘Bettale Pooje Yaake Koodadu?’ (Why not Worship
in the Nude? Written in 1986, published in Kannada in 1996). The essay starts
off as a response to the incidents surrounding the ritualistic ‘nude worship’
that took place as part of a tradition in his home district, Shimoga. In 1984,
some social activists went there to protest and stop the practice, accompanied
by a band of press photographers to record it. But since the worshippers
outnumbered the protestors, a complete reversal took place. The worshippers not
only performed the ritual but also attacked the protestors and photographers,
forcing some of them to march with them half nude.
The first part of the
essay dramatically narrates a meeting that URA’s journal Rujuvatu had organized in Mysore to discuss the implications of this
incident. Like many of his stories and novels, different sets of ‘characters’
representing anthropologists, feminists, civil society workers and writers
(including the author himself) confront each other at that meeting, arguing
vehemently for and against the practice. The author then moves into a
self-reflective mode that leaves the debate far behind; it notes how many of
his past works have come out of just such a confrontation of ideas. The essay
eventually concludes that most of his contemporary writers in Kannada too share
this method, though in different ways. Bypassing the controversy surrounding
that essay, I propose to read it as a meta-metaphor that attempts to understand
the mystery of its own metaphor making.
Most of Ananthamurthy’s public interventions
mirror the method of this essay. Some readers found the contrasted reading
problematic; some accused him of opportunism; others grumbled about betraying
the idea that he himself had set up, each time he took a controversial stand on
an issue. During the pro-Kannada Gokak Movement of the late 1970s, he
articulated a pro-English sentiment, and became unpopular, even being branded
anti-Kannada. In the controversy over nude worship, his articulations on behalf
of the worshipping community were viewed as anti-modernist. He was calleddwandwamurthy (idol of contradictions) and, throughout his
public life, the right hated him while the left never believed him. Many
brahmins accused him for being popularly anti-brahminical, while many dalits
viewed him with suspicion as a brahmin in disguise. But Ananthamurthy was
unmoved by any of these labels, and continued to make controversial statements.
I want to suggest that he was not making
controversial statements; rather, he followed his method of understanding one
position always in juxtaposition to its opposite side. The reason for this, I
feel, is that he was at the core of his personality a ‘writer’, probably
viewing life as a metaphor, and treating contradictions as a way of advancing
thinking. In my experience as a theatre director, I often see actors mistaking
posturing for acting. I guess Ananthamurthy resisted this trap at a
sociopolitical level, of proclamations of activism being mistaken for action.
Ananthamurthy was never
my teacher, but I learnt many lessons from him while watching him function as
the director of the Ninasam Culture Course that my organization conducted every
October for the last 25 years. While it was indeed very rare for him to give
long and comprehensive lectures in those sessions, he was nevertheless present
in all the sessions from morning to night, responding wherever he was excited.
In those short but charged interventions, he made remarkable connections
between theatre and literature, between music and politics, between theory and
practice, between life and the arts. He was essentially a ‘conversationalist’
and therefore always eager to engage with the other, especially when the other
was an opponent.
I remember many
instances when young people asked him unrelated questions after a speech. He
would never snub or brush them away, but rather correct the question itself.
Typically, he would say ‘...instead of asking this question that way, it will
be more significant if you ask it this way’, and then proceed to answer it. As
I watched him do this, the expression on his face made it appear as if he was
not merely in dialogue with the other, but also with himself. That is exactly
what his characters did in his essays, stories and novels. There are many writers
and thinkers I admire, but it is indeed hard to find another person with such a
culture of conversation.
A few weeks ago I finished reading Ananthamurthy’s
last book, Hindutva athavaa Hind
Swaraj (Hindutva or Hind
Swaraj, 2014). Prompted by Ananthamurthy’s anti-Modi statements in the recent
years, many think that this book provides an intellectual justification of his
anti-Modi stance. But for me the central concern of this treatise is different.
In this long essay, Ananthamurthy engages in an extended monologue on the
crisis in Indian politics post-2002. He traces the crisis back to the times of
Savarkar and Gandhi, and eventually poses a question on how to remain
democratic even as one resists majoritarianism. Like in his writings, he does
not give us ‘his’ answer to the question but transfers the legacy of thinking
to the reader.
My journey with
Ananthamurthy continues. He is physically no more, but there are times when I
feel I am still at that door, peeping and watching him creating a world through
his words.
* I am indebted to Deepa
Ganesh and Vivek Shanbhag for their help in preparing this essay. And, thanks
to Shiv Visvanathan for making me write it.
The creative process
DEEPA GANESH
‘Tell me a story,
something…,’ Ananthamurthy had urged me on that still evening. What story could
one possibly tell a master storyteller? Kumar Gandharva’s rendering of ‘Sunta
Hain Guru Gyaani’ hadn’t let go of me all through the day. As a result, Kabir
was uppermost on my mind when he coerced me into telling a story. URA was very
fond of nirguni bhajans, so I decided to narrate a little story which
was a prelude to the Kabir composition: ‘Heli Mhaari, Nirbhay Reeje Re’.
There’s a large forest
with a huge tree. A little bird visited the tree every day. She fed on the
fruits and flowers of the tree, had a happy conversation with the indulgent,
generous tree and flew away to return the next day. One day, there was a forest
fire and the tree began to burn. ‘You have wings, fly away,’ the tree implored.
The bird, with tears in her eyes, refused to go away. ‘I have eaten your fruits
and flowers. My friend, to abandon you is notdharma. How can I be
separated from you, let me burn along with you,’ the bird says.
The story stops there;
echoing the vast, eternal expanse of the desert of Rajasthan, the folk
musicians sing ‘Heli Mhaari… (My friend, fill your heart with compassion, be
fearless)’. The endearing story that I narrated to URA is perhaps something
that the folk singers have added to take you to the nirgunaexperience of Kabir through the saguna. After moments of
silence, URA stated that self-negation was an important aspect of Kabir.
The conversation then
shifted to Kumar Gandharva, a musician whose affinity with Kabir fascinated
him. Talking about Kabir’s self-negation, we recalled Kumarji’s self-negation.
URA, in his poem ‘Kumar Gandharva’, points out how Kumarji could negate his
ordinary self through the creative act and achieve the shoonyata that Kabir spoke of.
‘I heard you first at
Lalit Mahal
I felt,
I was being born again.
I felt
the sound coming out of
you
wave after wave
was there before you
were born.
I saw the listeners
sitting before you
their boundaries
dissolved.’1
‘My first encounter with
Kumar Gandharva was in Mysore in 1989. His music and our meeting later was so
intense that I just had to write a poem,’ URA explained once again. I had heard
this anecdote from him many times earlier. Each time, with genuine fascination,
he would recall how Kumar Gandharva could leap beyond the self and soar to the
edge of the text and leave one with its mysteries, but with equal felicity also
completely shed this mystical self and come back to being an ordinary man
thinking of food, pain and all the everydayness. ‘His music was transmitting
the power of Kabir’s nirgun into his listeners. I was mesmerized. But later,
as we all sat down for dinner, the manner in which he recovered himself into an
ordinariness was astonishing,’ he said. This was something that he had written
about in the poem too.
‘Grumbling that your
hand was swollen with rheumatism, your leg too, praising the Mysore climate,
praising my friend Ashok from Bhopal a little too much, you showed you were an
ordinary fellow who could be my friend. You conspired to free me from the spell
that bound me.’
After hours of intense music, Kumar Gandharva had
spoken continuously, hungrily devouring his food as if he simply could no
longer bear the wild,avadhoota Kabir riding on him; he had to break free from him. ‘I was
disappointed as he stripped himself of his mystic attainment. But I realized
that anyone who leads such an ecstatic life, in his case of music, has to
transform himself into the ordinary. The intensity can become unbearable. Aa putta hak-kiya utkatateyoo inthadde alwa…
suduva utkatate… (the intensity of the
little bird is similar, isn’t it… the longing to burn…),’ he observed, uniting
self-negation and intensity in one stroke.
‘I wondered how that mad
Kabir from the far North could haunt our southern Kumar from Belgaum. I admired
the celestial Gandharva’s worldly wisdom – how he freed himself by hurling that
mad creature on innocents like us.’
Didn’t he speak of
dissolving boundaries? Was it the dissolving line between the singer and the
listener? Was he talking about how Kumar Gandharva dissolved the ‘guna’ of the
text into ‘nirguna’ and thereby take Kabir’s formlessness onto a higher step?
Or was he speaking of the leaps that both of them, Kumar Gandharva and he, were
making into that Kabir space and thereby negating their selves?
I have often wondered
what it is about Kumar Gandharva that makes him the most authentic voice of
Kabir’s nirguni poetry? What made him so dear even to URA? This URA, who would
lodge a complaint against Kumar Gandharva for demystifying himself, was someone
who too comfortably straddled both the worlds of ‘ordinariness’ and
‘extraordinariness’. Was he perchance trying to understand his own worldly self
and the pangs that he experienced through this musician? Many such thoughts
swirl through my mind as I try to dig deeper and attempt to understand the
creative processes of these dissolving boundaries.
Ananthamurthy would often remark that in good
writing there invariably comes a point when it escapes the writer’s conscious
self. The characters assume their own will and begin to take a route of their
own. Such writing involves labour as well as a magic, the inexplicable element
in them. ‘I always feel I am writing well when I go beyond my opinions; then,
incidents present themselves to me like gifts from an unknown source,’ he would
say. ‘I believed then in Eliot’s theory of impersonality. The man who suffers
and the man who creates are different. Therefore, the writer is present in his
work only as a catalytic agent. I like Eliot’s humility and his suspicion of
author-arrogance but I no longer agree with him.’ He felt that Blake was more
profound on this matter. Blake, and also Bendre, who uses the metaphor of a
spider spinning out its own outer web from an inner substance, understand the
sea change of the creative process. ‘A writer feels lucky and surprised when it
happens. Then it would be possible for a writer to say with Blake "this is
mine yet not mine". I want to be able to communicate such a feeling to my
audience.’
Kumar Gandharva too
often spoke of dissolving boundaries in the creative space, ‘the mine, yet not
mine feeling’. ‘When I want to compose a bhajan, I don’t just read the poetry.
I look, then I leave it alone, look and leave it alone. What does Kabir want to
say? The whole thing that he has said, I say it myself – then I think… no
that’s not it. There must be something higher that can be said through the
medium of svara. Only then there is some point in composing.’
This wonderment and negotiation was a relentless process. In a conversation, he
insisted that it was not in his music, but rather embedded in Kabir’s poetry
itself. ‘No, I didn’t do anything. This exists in Kabir’s poem itself,’ he
insisted emphatically. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Kumar Gandharva
enables his listeners to enter into that experience of shoonyata, the universe
of emptiness where all that is mine dissolves into the not mine.
‘Bring me some Kumar
Gandharva’s nirguni bhajans,’ URA asked. Text, he said was only a pretext. We
argued over it. Musical meaning is perhaps greater than lyrical meaning, and
perhaps they have a meeting point – we finally agreed on this. ‘To achieve the
quality of nirguna in music is very hard. To bring in meaning and yet emphasize
no-meaning is not easy,’ he added. Allama Prabhu, the 12th century Kannada
mystic poet, presents probably the greatest example of nirguna. He creates a
language for himself through which he attempts a perpetual negation. ‘You
arrive at a meaning, but you are also giving up the meaning.’
But Raghava Menon in his book, The Musical Journey of Kumar Gandharva, makes an observation that stands contrary to
common notions of musical meaning. ‘He sang out of the bandish and not out of the raga,’ he writes. Kumar Gandharva subordinated the
raga to the bandish, never letting the raga take priority over the bandish.
‘This was the consequence of a highly developed and delicate literary grasp of
the nature of the words of a language and the way they are spoken while being
sung,’ writes Menon. For Kumar Gandharva, the content and composition were
equally important – the poetry of Kabir which was his philosophical voice,
finding expression in his music. In other words, Kumar Gandharva who believed that
thesvaroopa (form, structure) of the
raga emanates from the nature of the bandish believed in the superiority of the
idea and not of form.
Ananthamurthy would make similar observations,
especially with respect to poetry. He often said that rhyme, alliteration,
scheme, the ornamental aspects of poetry, are not as important as the poem
itself. ‘It can be a prose poem too,’ he would say, particularly during the
days that he was translating the poetry of Brecht and Rilke. ‘Let ideas
determine the form; form should not control ideas’, he would repeatedly say.
Raghava Menon captures this beautifully with respect to Kumar Gandharva, which,
in a way, is also true of URA’s ideas of literature. ‘While there was a
flexibility with respect to Kumar on the characteristics of gharana, he was inflexible in his vision of what music should be,
boundless, beyond frontiers and paradigms.’
URA and Kumar Gandharva
were rooted in their respective traditions, passionately engaged and in
constant dialogue with it. URA drew his inner reserves from the likes of
Shivaram Karanth, Gandhi, Ramana and Ramakrishna, but built his own thought on
their legacy. ‘Like everyone else, I too strive to find my "voice",’
Kumar Gandharva had said. ‘One needs to keep at it hoping to find the elusive
voice.’
In many of our everyday
conversations, URA would speak of rejuvenation. ‘I have to begin afresh
everyday, else this samsara is too much to take. Also, my yesterday’s ideas
have to find new resonance today.’ Once, when he wrote a story after a gap of
nearly two decades, he telephoned in great excitement from Kerala. ‘I am so
happy that something which I thought was long over in me was reborn today.’ But
once he began dialysis, this metaphor assumed a different meaning. ‘I am born
every day, with new blood flowing in me…,’ he would say, and this was never
just literal. ‘I am a practitioner of the most perishable art: everyday I die
singing. That Kumar Gandharva who was singing, that raga Tilak Kamod that he
sang – both are dead. Tomorrow again Tilak Kamod will be sung, and Kumar
Gandharva will sing, but it will not be the same. In music whatever has
happened once, by whichever person, may happen again, but it will not be the
same,’ this was the creative Kumar Gandharva speaking.
Ananthamurthy was always thinking, revising,
revisiting, reformulating… in the process he appeared inconsistent. But in the
deeper sense he was shattering the ego, the process of self (sva) visarjane. He did it to Praneshacharya, to Jagannatha, to Ananthu, to
Kuppanna Bhatta and each of his characters. Kumar Gandharva, through his music,
was constantly pushing the boundaries. He was reworking tradition, and had also
placed Kabir ‘shoonyata’ in the essence of his being. The sense of ‘I’ to both
these path-breakers represented a roadblock to their destination. ‘Let your
intelligence be grounded, listen to the earth,’ says Kabir. URA was always
listening, to everyone. In the process of listening and thinking, he was
reinventing. Kumar Gandharva epitomized Kabir’s ‘nirbhay, nirguna, gaaonga’, and URA personified it – the joy of freedom
and of losing one’s self-identity.
The tree, the bird, keep
rising like the phoenix. They perish, but they live on.
Footnote:
1. Translated by Linda
Hess.
Conversations
GANESH N. DEVY
I first met him in 1980,
in Mysore. He was a professor at the university and taught English Literature.
Having read V.S. Naipaul’s account about him and heard about his activities
during the Emergency from a Kannada writer friend, I had always wanted to meet
him. In those years, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah’s literary centre,
Dhvanyaloka, used to attract scholars and writers from different parts of the
country. I had gone there for a seminar when, during an afternoon session, I
saw him. The Kannada Dalit writer, Devanoor Mahadeva and English novelist, R.K.
Narayan were present too.
I recall Ananthamurthy
making a brief comment on how he preferred Kannada writing over the
Indo-English – as it was called those days – and why he admired Dalit writers,
but would not himself like to write like them. He knew he was a modernist and
belonged to the Navya school of Kannada literature. While he had no difficulty
in bearing a close literary kinship to D.H. Lawrence and Albert Camus, he wrote
out of an ethos that spoke of his Udupi childhood. He drew sustainance from
K.V. Puttappa and Gopalkrishna Adiga. While attached to the politics of Lohia,
he knew that he did not have to hide his identity as a Brahmin.
Here was a writer with
wide horizons but whose cultural roots were intact, whose political commitment
was progressive but respect for freedom of the individual uncompromised. He
was, therefore, unusual for the time – simultaneously traditional and modern,
at once critical and compassionate to both tradition and modernity. His brief
comment that afternoon in the winter of 1980 convinced me that I was going to
like and admire him for a long time.
During this first and
fleeting meeting, I was a mere greenhorn, and there was no chance of him ever
registering my presence at the Dhvanyaloka discussion. When I met him again –
this time in Thiruvananthapuram at another literary seminar – it came as a bit
of a surprise when he told me that he knew I was a student of Shantinath Desai,
a highly respected contemporary of his in Kannada literature. URA steered the
conversation towards a comparison between Gandhi and Aurobindo, sympathetic to
both but preferential to Gandhi. This too came as a surprise; my doctoral work
was on Sri Aurobindo and I did not imagine that he would have known about this.
Those were times when academic hierarchies were taken rather seriously and it
was ‘natural’ for professors to be intolerant of dissenting younger colleagues.
Playing safe for the
first few minutes of the conversation, I stuck to inanities. But, within
minutes, I realized that this professor was serious about the conversation and
was inviting me to express my convictions, my understanding, my response.
Despite the differences in our views, the empathy with which he listened to
what I said struck me as very unusual. Also that he thought of himself not as a
scholar, not as an academic, not even a literary artist, but as a thinker, as a
kind of public intellectual. This put me at ease in talking to him and our
conversation became more natural.
Since then we met in numerous places and had
short and long conversations. Increasingly, they became easy and enriching as
we rarely talked of ‘isms’, books and authors. Invariably we spoke of
movements, contexts, cultures and nations. Lohia, Gandhi, Marx, Ambedkar,
Tagore, J. Krishnamurti, Aurobindo and Coomaraswamy cropped up as familiar
stops during these conversations. In these conversations, we would refer to
what was traditional and what was modern as if we had easy access to both and
could be equally critical and conformist to both, as if we were free to do this
without seeming to contradict ourselves. It was this freedom ‘to be at once
there and not there, to contain paradoxes within oneself’ that he chased
through his entire life. For me, U.R. Ananthamurthy remains an extraordinary
example of a never ending quest for the right to be at home in alienation,
becoming an alien at home. I felt close to him because of this. He felt
comfortable conversing with me because he understood I was not going to
typecast him in any literary ‘ism’.
During the eighties, I
had launched a journal for literary translation. Since it was visualized as a
bridge between languages, it was titled Setu. It appeared in English
as well as Gujarati. I wanted to introduce Ananthamurthy to Gujarati readers,
and so decided that his Ghatashraddha would be translated into Gujarati for
publication in Setu. Ajit Kulkarni, a physicist at the Baroda Planetarium,
undertook to translate it. The ethos of Ghatashraddha is that of a traditional pathshala of the forties. The Gujarat of the eighties had no clue of that
ethos; nor was a really appropriate strain of language available to bring it
alive in Gujarati. Ajit Kulkarni’s only option was to make up for the ‘lack’ by
generously using Sanskrit terms. This he did well and the translation managed
to create a work fairly close to the original Ghatashraddha. Most of all, the
experience of love seen at a tender age, without fully knowing what it is, came
through quite well. Readers in Gujarati responded to Ananthamurthy’s fiction as
warmly as they would respond to L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between, a similar story from a slightly earlier era and a different
culture.
Before Ghatashraddha appeared in Gujarati, the
literary class in Gujarat had read about U.R. Anathamurthy in the pages of
Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. They had also heard about him through three of
his literary friends who worked in Gujarat – M.G. Krishnamoorthy and A. K.
Ramanujan – both had worked briefly at the Baroda University during the early
sixties – and Kurtakoti, who taught at Vidyanagar till he retired in the
eighties. By then, A.K. Ramanujan’s outstanding translation of Samskara had already carried Anathamurthy’s name outside Kannada to other
languages in India, and other English speaking countries.
In the field of
post-colonial studies – described during the eighties as Commonwealth
literature – there was, at the time, an active debate on the authenticity of
literary production in English, which for most African and Asian writers was a
second language, not their mother tongue. And with critics like Meenakshi
Mukherjee and Helen Tiffin, Samskara, became the most prominent example of
‘authentic’ Indian literature. Of course, they would simultaneously argue that
the ‘twice born’ Indian English writing or the African English writing had an
authenticity of its own, but works like Samskara exemplified an authenticity
drawing upon an ability to be natural at once in two cultures.
This debate cropped up everywhere in discussions
about Indian writing in English. And throughout the seventies and eighties, it
engaged writers in Indian languages who felt that their writing had not
received the kind of attention like the works of Tagore or Premchand in an
earlier time. Indians writing in English were being discussed by Indians, who
felt that it was necessary to make a common cause with writers from other
former colonies as a strong rejoinder to the colonial cultural impact. They
were also being discussed in the UK as literature in England was passing
through a lean phase, and good books had started coming out of the colonies. In
all these discussions, works like Samskara – not written in but available in
English through an AKR translation and with OUP as its publisher – figured
prominently as examples of authentic Indian language literature. Through these
debates, Anathamurthy became a familiar name in literary circles throughout the
English speaking world.
Within India, the
post-Nehru era, the post-Emergency time, the rise of a new generation with high
aspirations, with rapid urbanization pulling India away from the cultural
memory of rural lore, the spread of English hurting the life fountains within
Indian languages, the related emergence of spirituality cults, adjustment
politics and memory fragmentation, collectively made Samskara increasingly
meaningful. In one of our conversations, I mentioned to Ananthamurthy that his
short novel almost stood like an eloquent critique of India of the day. He
responded by saying that he feared it probably did. Little did the readers of
Samskara outside Karnataka know
that there was an Anathamurthy who wrote poems and short stories as well. Bharatipura andAvasthe, novels larger in span and
more complex in its weave, too, were translated into English, but failed to
receive the same attention. Ananthamurthy continued to remain outside Karnataka
as the writer of Samskara, just as Srilal Shukla continued to be identified as
the Raag Darbari writer outside the Hindi world. But, to his
pan-Indian reputation, two more strands were added towards the end of the
eighties – of being an excellent institution builder and as a cultural
activist.
Towards the end of that decade, he was chosen to
head the Mahatma Gandhi University at Kottayam in Kerala as its vice
chancellor. When he concluded his term, he was asked to head the National Book
Trust as its chairman; and probably, even before he completed his tenure at the
NBT, Ananthamurthy was elected to preside over the Sahitya Akademi. Throughout
the nineties, URA became a familiar presence in Delhi, gently guiding those
innumerable discussions that the Sahitya Akademi organized during his time and
firmly pushing the NBT and the Sahitya Akademi to more relevant areas of
literary discourse. Before his time, these institutions were a little too
burdened by a general atmosphere of respect and respectability. He loosened the
straitjacket and infused an air of free discussion, dissent and open inquiry.
He managed to lower the average age of participants in the Akademi’s seminars
from strictly a 50 plus to a generally 30 and 40. Youth was given a chance,
their voice was given a hospitable place.
He did this all
knowingly, leading the institutions from the front, but without ever allowing a
coterie to take control. What added to the glory of URA’s heading these
national institutions was his graceful respect for dissent and his charismatic
personality, an unrivalled combine. He brought it to other institutions he
headed or advised, whether it was the Film Institute in Pune or the CSDS in
Delhi. URA’s way of working with institutions was unique.
But, probably, the one institution that most
consumed him was Ninasam at Heggodu with which he remained involved ever since
Subbana, his friend from his young days, started it in the stunningly beautiful
environs of Shimoga. A Ninasam Culture Course, its annual fete, without the
towering presence of Ananthamurthy is difficult to imagine. He brought to
Heggodu all that was his – learning, questioning, literary acumen, political
philosophy, activism, generosity, grace, anxieties, everything that made URA
what he was when left to himself.
During the early years
of the nineties, a curious essay titled ‘Why Worship in the Nude?’ circulated
in India. It was written in the wake of a pitched protest against the practice
of women being required to worship in the nude at a folk-pilgrimage site. The
protest had mobilized enlightened opinion against what looked like a ‘primitive’
practice, obviously detrimental to women’s dignity. On the other side were
defenders of the practice who wanted to retain the autonomy of their faith and
opposed any interference in the Hindu ways of worship and middle class
morality. Anathamurthy wrote a detailed critique of this phenomenon and the
protest. I believe it to be as thoughtful as his novel, Bharatipura. He found
it necessary to defend both views and at the same time be critical of both for
reasons stated with extreme precision of word and tone. If anyone felt, going
by Samskara alone, that URA was like Albert Camus, reading this essay would
make him look more like Sartre, a philosopher of ‘the human condition’.
After he moved out of Mysore, first to Kottayam
and then for intermittent stays in Delhi, he was probably hoping to move to his
village, but ended up in Bangalore. He spent nearly two decades there as the
conscience keeper of Karnataka. At the same time he also played at being the
crusader for the city and Kannada. Thus resulted his public stand on the
question of the Kannada language and the name of the city, now called Bengaluru
as advocated by him. These decades also saw an unusual increase in his writing.
I met him several times
in Bangalore, of which two were very special. The first time was just when he
had decided to move there and I had decided to quit teaching at the Baroda
University for taking up the work of revitalizing folklore in the languages of
the Adivasis. This was in a semi-formal meeting of the Sahitya Akademi with
him, K. Satchidanandan and Chandrashekhara Kambar present. I presented some
slides on tribal communities using a portable slide projector I had borrowed
from the architect Karan Grover. URA watched the slides and agreed that I bring
out a series of books based on the work. However, he looked worried, and
genuinely so, about my finances. He asked if the risk of going hungry did not
bother me; if I had carefully thought about my plans. I had, and knew the
implications well. So despite his concern and worry, I took the next step. On
his part, he made a provision for a small stipend without my asking for it. In
the years that followed, I heard from numerous friends that he was
over-generous in his compliments about the work I was doing. I had based my After Amnesia on the key terms ‘marga’ and ‘desi’,
terms that URA too had made familiar in his lectures. This time, he knew that I
had probably gone a bit too far into the desi.
The last time I met him in Bangalore – though we
did meet in between in other cities – was after a gap of eighteen years. By now
I was neck deep into the People’s Linguistic Survey and had gone to Bangalore
in relation to some work with it. With the help of Vivek Shanbhag – a writer I
genuinely admire and who happens to be related to Anathamurthy – I made it to
the Ananthamurthy house. He told me that URA was on dialysis several times a
week. The day I was there was not one of those, and we could have a long
conversation. His wife Esther, his daughter and Vivek were all in the room. I
was aware that they did not want him to feel too exhausted by my visit. They
knew that they were in vigil over a genius. In my heart I prayed for his
health. He asked me about the language survey and after hearing me, he said
that this was the kind of work that one must do. Sporting his peculiar smile, a
smile that was only his – at once shy and wise – he said, ‘Eh, Devy, you have
done it.’ For me this was like a long awaited endorsement of the path I had
chosen in life. I left the URA house with Vivek. One knew that to expect time
to stop was foolish, to expect it to hold Anathamurthy for long was greedy. I
was at that moment shamelessly both.
In between these meetings in Bangalore, I met him
once in Ahmedabad. He had come for the convocation of the university
established by Mahatma Gandhi, the Gujarat Vidyapeeth. His host was the eminent
Gandhian, and an equally eminent writer, Narayan Desai. Narayanbhai invited
some of us to come for an evening meeting. Seeing the two together, it was not
unnatural for one to think of a meeting, in some older time, between Tagore and
Gandhi. However, that was another age. This was Gujarat in the first decade of
the 21st century. The contexts had changed; so had the meanings of words like
faith and commitment, freedom and expression.
Both Narayanbhai and
Ananthamurthy, in their hearts, had been deeply agonized by the rapid shift in
the social discourse, worried about the rise of intolerance and let down by the
silence of the literary community. They said so. A few months before Ananthamurthy
passed on, he made this feeling known to the world in no uncertain terms. Then
he left us, leaving behind a void. If Mahasweta Devi and Narayanbhai Desai are
by now unable to do what they did earlier as our conscience keepers, and if
U.R. Anathamurthy too is no longer with us, I wonder, and worry, from where and
how public intellectuals will arise in India to defend diversity, dissidence
and the voice of the people, from where and how writers will arise who are
world class because they are a school by themselves. I do not know. To know
them, to have known them, has made, at least for me, life worth living.
The ‘insider-outsider’
N. MANU CHAKRAVARTHY
ALMOST a decade before
Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared, considerably altering the structure of
literary studies, many departments of English in India had restructured their
syllabus and reworked their tools of literary analysis. The expression
‘Post-Colonial Literary Studies’ had still to emerge at the stage. But it is
widely accepted (many scholars who have written on the changing nature of
literary studies in English in India have recorded it clearly) that the
departments of English in India began to recognize that there was much more to
a literary programme than the standard English (to mean British) literary
curriculum which was strictly chronological and linear and featured authors and
texts that were quite mediocre.
This was bound to happen
as the departments of bhasha literatures had outstanding scholars who
regularly produced works that teachers of English, not insiders to the bhasha
traditions, found difficult to match. In the main they appeared derivative,
clearly revealing that they were based on secondary sources. In retrospect, the
simple point that the bhasha departments far excelled the departments of
English became difficult to contest, notwithstanding the reputation English
departments enjoyed all over.
C.D. Narasimhaiah of the
Department of English at the University of Mysore was primarily responsible for
bringing about this change in Indian universities given the kind of influence
he had at various levels. Probably, it was his gradual entry into Sanskrit
poetics, aided by the Sanskrit scholars he interacted with for different
reasons, which helped extend his range, freeing him from the notion of a great
tradition that he had inherited from the formidable F.R. Leavis at Cambridge.
(It is only fair to record that Leavis in his note in the last volume of Scrutiny observed that literatures from other parts of the world would lead
to different ideas of literature in the decades to come).
CDN brought American,
African, Australian, Canadian, Indian literatures, to name a few, into the
English curriculum. Sanskrit poetics moved into the framework of literary
criticism with Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Kuntaka, Sri Aurobindo, M.
Hiriyanna and others, strongly contending with L.C. Knights, Wilson Knight,
F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks and the other new critics.
Consequently, new modes of reading literature began to acquire a cultural base
that was no longer simply Anglo/Eurocentric. Much more could be written about
this, but that would be a different story altogether, not quite necessary in
the context this essay attempts to capture.
No account of U.R. Ananthamurthy as a teacher of
English, a creative writer and socio-cultural critic, can afford to overlook
the background sketched out at the beginning of this essay. Ananthamurthy
throughout remained inextricably connected to his pedagogical edifice, and his
creative and cultural roots that actually shaped his many intellectual
reincarnations as a teacher. As a creative writer of the modernist phase of the
Kannada literary tradition called the navya, Ananthamurthy brought
into his creative processes a rare quality of creating dualities and paradoxes
that, of course, drew from the contradictions of the complex Indian realities –
without ever constructing binary opposites, or making simplistic choices while
confronting irresolvable opposing positions. This is a major reason why
Ananthamurthy throughout his life remained an alien, an outsider to his own
immediate tradition, and an unacceptable entity to those who were utterly
hostile to his intellectual and cultural ideas.
Ananthamurthy thus
became whatever people wanted him to be, and resolved to see him as, going by
their own reductionist ideologies. Samskara, URA’s first novel,
continues to represent this particular location of his public being, implying
that Ananthamurthy remained an outsider even as far as his particular literary
tradition, the ‘navya’, went. The navya was not a unitary tradition – there
were poets who borrowed heavily from the ancient past, the Vedic to be
specific, and there were other writers who tried to uphold a secular, rational,
modern outlook with an utter disregard for the Vedic past. It was only
Ananthamurthy who almost singularly, freely and openly negotiated with both
without either privileging any or creating a hierarchy between them.
Ananthamurthy’s works display a very delicate and
refined openness that has always been derided as ‘status quoist’, ‘reactionary’
by so-called liberals and considered to be ‘anti-tradition’, ‘anti-Brahmin’,
‘anti-Hindu’ by self-styled traditionalists. Ananthamurthy courageously carried
all these burdens till the very end without ever being pressurized into
sacrificing his essential creative vision for politically correct positions. He
internalized all these with wisdom, realizing that they stemmed from the
polarities generated by a heavily casteist social order and the inequalities of
an economic system which was a part of the capitalist world that India was
gradually sliding towards.
Even when attacked by
his contemporaries from the literary world, Ananthamurthy refused to accept
fossilized notions of India as an area with only an ‘oppressive Brahminical
past’ to deal with, or simplistic ideas of egalitarianism that the modern world
seemed to promise to many. Both were for him untenable propositions, and not
for a moment did he endorse either tradition or modernity as unproblematic
sites that one could reside in comfortably.
Ananthamurthy truly
situated himself in the tradition of Tagore and Gandhi as far as ideas of
tradition and modernity were concerned, and most certainly with regard to
India’s relationship with the West. The ambiguous quality that Ananthamurthy
consistently displayed distanced him from both the right and the left even as
his middle position too was not in alignment with centrists, who more often
than not were vague and amorphous in their choices and attitudes. This is why
Ananthamurthy does not fit into any prior category of description for he was
constantly shifting positions, restructuring his ideas and altering his
beliefs. As a thinker, he was constantly confronting his own perceptions and
positions, and even the term ‘critical insider’ does not adequately capture the
transformations he underwent, for he always embraced an ‘insider-outsider’
position.
With a doctorate from Birmingham, Ananthamurthy’s
return to India and entry into the academic world as an English teacher marks
another crucial encounter of his life that became a part of his creative and
critical endeavours until the end. I must add that all the details about Ananthamurthy’s
intellectual and creative life fully reflect the tensions and conflicts of the
academic and social realities of modern India. In that sense, Ananthamurthy’s
journey symbolizes the very complex journey modern India has made, especially
during recent times.
I entered the Department
of English at Mysore in the mid ’70s as a student and, like many others, was
stunned by the intellectual brilliance of Ananthamurthy. The sweep and range of
his mind was overwhelming, leading me to believe that his mind was always ‘on
fire’. I also came face to face with the solid presence of CDN, Ananthamurthy’s
teacher in the ’50s, and his heavy articulation of the value and significance
of the Indian tradition in spite of his deep indebtedness to English as a
language and culture that he never disowned. Sanskrit poetics and western
literary criticism were complementary for CDN, who moved easily from one to the
other.
I have all along been a close witness to
Ananthamurthy’s profound struggles with Sanskrit poetics and western literary
criticism, even though he was deeply influenced by both. Ananthamurthy’s basic
Kannada sensibility worked subtly to prevent him from establishing a cosy
relationship with Sanskrit and English. While CDN could be content with
Dhvanyaloka, Vakrokti Jeevitam and The Common Pursuit and New Bearings in English
Poetry, Ananthamurthy wrestled
with all of them for two primary reasons. First, with all his socialist
concerns and immediate experiences with the working class children of England,
he felt impelled to further the frontiers of literary studies by introducing
genuine socialist criticism into the curriculum. Thus he carried the texts of
Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Georg Lukács that unsettled many
canonical texts into the classroom. Engagement with ideological issues expanded
ideas of literature, literary value and universality that for a long period
were defined and shaped by middle class liberal notions. The liberal humanist
views gradually made way for genuine socialist views, forcing a revaluation of
commonly accepted literary values.
The purists of the
English literary world were unable to accept these rather sweeping changes, for
their belief in pure literary values was being questioned, if not entirely
dismissed. They also felt that ideological issues polluted the ‘sacred’ reading
of literature that was above and beyond temporal concerns. With Marx in the
background, Ananthamurthy created strong ripples in the calm and placid lake of
the liberals, especially by introducing literary works that broke the high
walls carefully nurtured and sustained by liberal intellectuals and critics.
Many of us were gradually introduced to the ideological positions of both the
classical Marxists and the views of the new left with a special place given to
the Frankfurt School, especially the works of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer
and Jurgen Habermas. Ananthamurthy had launched a frontal attack on the
conservative nature of the liberal humanists though he never, ever, endorsed
the ‘vulgar Marxists’ who were reductionists.
Ananthamurthy never became a leftist in the
conventional sense. He was a left-winger for the conservatives and a reformist
for the extreme left. It is a fact that both camps clearly misinterpreted and
distorted his views on literature and cultural politics. Ananthamurthy’s
radical ideas in the Department of English at Manasa Gangotri did not go down
well with people like CDN, who still held onto the ‘spiritual’,
‘transcendental’, ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ dimensions of literature. For
them, any engagement with quotidian elements and the ephemeral nature of
history ruined the eternal principles of literature. Ananthamurthy’s alienness
in the Department of English originated from this specific centre of
confrontation with the literary traditionalists who did not modify their ideas
about pure, unmediated experiences of literature.
Second, Ananthamurthy
had to come to terms with, yet again, people like CDN who, even as they opened
up to Sanskrit poetics, could not visualize the Department of English
accommodating Kannada literature, or the other bhasha literatures for that
matter, as part of the great tradition. CDN, in particular, saw the
relationship between bhasha literatures and English as counterproductive in
intellectual terms. I must, however, add that CDN was never anti-Kannada or
anti-bhasha in any sense. But he was too fixated with an idea of Englishness
that prevented him from seeing bhasha literatures as vital to the future of
English Studies in Indian universities. However, Ananthamurthy, with his heavy
baggage of Pampa, Kumaravyasa, the Vachanakaras,
Kabir, Vaikom Basheer, Fakir Mohan Senapathy, the Sangam poets and several
others from the various Indian bhashas, bombarded the English and Sanskritic
traditions, leaving those who refused to accept his postulates speechless. In a
very real sense those who were familiar only with English were
intellectually impoverished, a fact that became obvious as Ananthamurthy
explicated his views in detail.
Ananthamurthy challenged Sanskrit poetics and the
Anglo-Saxon critical tradition by shifting attention to the riches of the
bhasha literary traditions and poetics, notably without regarding the Sanskrit
and western traditions as inimical to the bhasha traditions. There was
certainly no parochialism at work in Ananthamurthy’s arguments; he was only
trying to undermine the unverified claims of universal supremacy of both the
West in relation to the non-West, and Sanskrit as regards bhasha traditions. As
a Kannada writer and an English teacher, Ananthamurthy felt intellectually
obliged to foreground the value and worth of all traditions in a
non-hierarchical manner. Further, Ananthamurthy created a dense and richly
complex sense of tradition and culture by treating the multifarious oral traditions
as equally important and significant as the written ones. It was a great
attempt to demolish all kinds of hierarchies in the academic world, and in a
cultural sense, a struggle to highlight the fact that all civilizations and
cultures flourished in states of plurality and heterogeneity. Moreover, any
effort to homogenize, standardize and hierarchize them was sure to lead to
cultural fascism.
The Department of
English at Manasa Gangotri was virtually a profound intellectual battlefield
with CDN and U.R. Ananthamurthy as the commanders of two opposing armies that
fought each other only to enhance their respective scholarship and
sensibilities. At this juncture one cannot forget the quiet, sophisticated
scholarship of B. Damodar Rao, perhaps the only one in the department whom
Ananthamurthy often turned to, seek clarifications about his intellectual
formulations. From the ’70s to the mid-’80s, I was a direct and immediate
witness to these battles that were totally untouched by malice, bitterness and
animosity. CDN’s Englishness and Sanskritic leanings had to equip themselves
more to meet the bhasha orientations of Ananthamurthy, who in every argument
established the fact that Kannada and other Indian bhashas drew quite seriously
from Sanskrit and English without any hesitation, but devoid of any inferiority
complex or sense of being secondary. Ananthamurthy wanted this to be
acknowledged at a serious intellectual level without a patronizing or
condescending attitude.
In the larger socio-cultural context, Ananthamurthy’s
formulations appeared bizarre, grotesque and anachronistic to conservatives,
progressives, secularists and rationalists alike. He appeared to be a thinker,
not sure of the implications of what he stated. There were also groups that
believed he was a public figure who generated controversy for its own sake. The
depth of Ananthamurthy’s polemics was never realized in a serious way; almost
all the controversies surrounding him were backed neither by scholarship nor
social imagination. I would not regard them as anything different from slander
and gossip. To state it differently, the debates Ananthamurthy introduced were
not scaffolded by a proper intellectual contextualization. However, there were
some debates he initiated which even now are central to the political and
cultural discourse in Karnataka. Unfortunately, they often get reduced to
street comments about his integrity and character.
Let me turn to one of his most challenging
statements regarding the caste system in India. Contesting the stereotype that
the destiny of the lower castes rested in their choice to gain upward mobility
by Sanskritising or Brahminising themselves, Ananthamurthy argued that there
was enormous energy and vitality in the lower castes to create spaces of
autonomy and free imagination within their own cosmos. He argued that the caste
system not only did not annihilate the lower castes but, paradoxically enough,
also opened up spaces of contestations and protest and empowered the lower
castes to live with dignity and self-respect.
Even while so arguing,
Ananthamurthy was acutely conscious of the fact that there was enormous
suffering and misery and injustice as far as the living realities of the lower
castes were concerned, especially at the socio-cultural and political levels.
But the truth of the Indian society was that its oppressive reality could never
destroy the inner cosmos of the lower castes. Many progressive radicals saw
Ananthamurthy’s nuanced philosophical position as a shameless defence of the
barbaric caste system. In contrast, one of the finest intellectuals of
Karnataka in the ’80s, D.R. Nagaraj, furthered Ananthamurthy’s views at many
other levels, and always acknowledged a debt to him for adding intellectual
sophistication to his earlier raw radical views on the caste system.
Ananthamurthy extended his views on the caste
system to the issue of language, arguing that the Indian bhashas had to be
saved from the onslaught of English that was always a language of the elites.
His incisive view was that English as a vehicle of knowledge and culture was
very different from what the economic and political centres had converted it
into by appropriating and incorporating it into their structures of power and
authority. In fact, Ananthamurthy was correlating the English of the rich and
powerful with the sweeping power of the corporate world that converted
languages and cultures into mere information systems. The instrumentalist use
of language and culture was what Ananthamurthy wanted India and other parts of
the so-called third world to resist and overcome.
Third, Ananthamurthy saw
the future of Third World societies in the collective wisdom of communities and
societies and not in the reality of the nation state. Like Tagore and Gandhi,
Ananthamurthy too, especially in his last years, conflated nationalism (and the
nation state) with injustice and inequality that constituted the base of
capitalism that could not be erased easily. It was in the ’70s that he prepared
us to understand the power of capital, especially its destructive power, as far
as the Third World context was concerned by drawing from the writings of Ivan
Illich. It was also meant to be an extension of Marxist thought that he wanted
us to recognize as inadequate and limited in several ways.
Ananthamurthy also
introduced the vision of genuine religious cosmology into his arguments,
stating emphatically that a true religious vision should never be dismissed as
fanaticism and that even in the modern world the value of religion can never be
undermined. Ananthamurthy believed that one had to read the Bible and the Koran as great religious texts with an evolved
understanding of the values of justice, equality and peace. During a session
with his research students, he prophesized that Muslims all over the world
would inevitably be pushed towards violence if they continued to be manipulated
by the two superpowers (Soviet Russia and the United States of America). In the
Indian context, he maintained that the Hindu right wing would surely do the
same. Ananthamurthy was unequivocal that it would be disastrous for all
religious communities in particular, and Third World countries in general, to
not wake up to the monstrous power of religious nationalism and global
capitalism. Globalization, nationalism and totalitarianism were for
Ananthamurthy one single indivisible unit and it would be a grievous mistake to
treat them as separate entities.
Ananthamurthy’s last
work, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj in Kannada, bears full testimony to his deep
allegiance to Tagore, Gandhi and other visionaries who clearly saw the evils of
capitalism and nationalism, both of which paraded ideas of unbridled progress,
development and growth with contempt and disregard for values of justice and
equality. Ananthamurthy was always on the wrong side of mainstream history – as
a teacher, a creative writer and a cultural critic – fully conscious of the
risk he was taking while articulating his views on caste, tradition, modernity
and nationalism. That deep inside his being he remained an ‘insider-outsider’
to all public issues, underlines his significance for our times.
Suragi: a tale of lingering fragrance
H.S. RAGHAVENDRA RAO
IN Kannada, Suragi is the name of a quaint and delicate flower which retains its
fragrance even after it has wilted. It is significant that U.R. Ananthamurthy
(URA) chose this title for his autobiography published in 2012. The book,
created in collaboration with J.N. Tejashree, a sensitive poet and a serious
student of literature, is an interesting experiment in the genre.
Suragi contains ten
chapters starting from the reminiscences of a sensitive young boy from the
hilly regions of Karnataka. The autobiography apparently conforms to the
conventional pattern of chronological narration. Different facets of his life
are delineated in different narrative modes. But the chronological narration is
frequently deserted because of the mercurial memory of URA that moves in
different directions all at once and the strategies adopted by Tejashree, the
narrator-collaborator. These temporal flights have however resulted in a
gripping narrative.
Suragi is a creative
combination of personal reminiscences and a subjective documentation of the writer’s
own times. This is one reason why this work assumes cultural significance. Very
few artists get the opportunity of being active participants in moulding the
contemporary cultural scenario like URA. Of course, being a public intellectual
was a deliberate choice that he made, particularly during the later part of his
life. This book is free of self-righteousness even though attempts of
self-justification are occasionally present. Overall, it reflects a healthy
combination of self-search and self-criticism. This review makes a few
observations in capsule form in order to avoid repetition.
Suragi is significant
because it deals with issues that are of importance for India. It delineates
the confrontations of a creative individual with his personal angst and the
problems faced by an emerging modern writer in post-Independence India. It is a
unique experiment even in terms of its structure – a non-linear collage of
narrative modules contributed by URA and the explicatory remarks provided by
Tejashree. It does not become overtly subjective or academically argumentative,
the juxtaposition of lyrical and introspective passages lending it a particular
charm. While representing the complexities of a regional culture very
competently, the problems that it addresses have broader significance.
This book is structured
in two seamlessly interconnected layers of narrative. The first layer consists
of events and experiences from across a long and multifaceted life. The second
is a documentation of the angst and aspirations of the inner being. By and
large, the selection and the narrative modes of the first layer are controlled
by the second. The narration becomes intense and passionate when these two
narratives coalesce. Otherwise, it meanders into a prosaic presentation.
A desire to fulfil one’s cultural responsibilities
and a need to be true to one’s inner compulsions constitute yet another tension
in the book. This comes out when URA talks about friends and acquaintances like
K.V. Subbanna, Shanthaveri Gopala Gowda, Rajeev Taranath, P. Lankesh, George
Fernandes and many others. For instance, a comparative analysis of his remarks
on Gopala Gowda in this book and the fictionalized account of the same person
in his novel Avasthe could provide many valuable insights into this
issue. Suragi does not become
vulgar or scandalous at any point, because the author is aware of the fact that
others do not get an opportunity to present their point of view. URA seems to
feel that personal and intimate details should not find place in an
autobiography, unless they have public significance as well. This awareness
saves Suragi from salacious details and unnecessary controversies. The public
importance of a private moment is decided in many ways. For URA, it is
essentially an act of merging experience with philosophical analysis. For
instance, he composed a short rhythmic utterance linking a maid servant Abbakka
with a sparrow (Gubbakka in Kannada). URA describes this event and makes use of
it to discuss the relation between rhyme and poetry. This book contains quite a
few moments of this kind followed by appropriate commentaries.
URA found ample
opportunity to visit and live in different parts of India and abroad. Most
Kannada writers did not have such exposure. URA has made use of such experiences
in his writings. Suragi contains a few chapters devoted to his sojourns in
England and Kerala. He went to England in 1964, at the age of thirty two, and
obtained a PhD degree from the University of Birmingham. Details about his
experiential and intellectual life in England offer a number of brilliant
insights. His observations are both self-assertive and self-critical depending
on the context. They do not come across as experiences of a single individual.
Rather they acquire universal dimensions applicable to lay persons coming from
an upper caste, lower middle class background. The clash of cultures and its
effect on individual behaviour is brought out effectively. For instance, URA
gets an opportunity to teach a group of students from various ethnic and class
backgrounds. At first, he was shocked by their behaviour and did not know how
to handle the unfamiliar situation. Gradually he came to terms with the
students as well as his colleagues.
Sensitive readers of his stories are familiar
with the shapes acquired by these experiences in an artistic rendering. But
Suragi reveals many facets of such life that are not present in his creative
work. Some of them are personal while others are possibly too intellectually
oriented to be transformed into a story. It is interesting to note that URA
published a longish story written during this period a few months before his
death. The decisions about what to publish were probably a result of his
perceptions about these genres.
The portrayal of his
childhood and adolescence spent in Karnataka are authentic and evocative. But
Suragi has quite a few problems in the depiction of his life between the ages
of thirty and eighty. URA’s life during this period has become an integral part
of the cultural-social history of Karnataka. Here the narrative reminds one of
tightrope walking. This was a period of introspection, self-criticism and
self-justification for artists from the Brahmin community. It was an ordeal by
fire. It was very difficult to differentiate between masks and faces in
general. Quite often literary movements and social movements were at
loggerheads with one another.
For instance, the modernist literary movement was
at its peak when the backward caste movement was gathering momentum during the
regime of Devaraj Urs. The modernist movement contained germs of traditionalism
and regionalism. Ideas inspired by Lohia on the one hand and existentialist
thinkers such as Sartre and Camus on the other created rifts and resulted in
different paths of evolution. It was difficult to distinguish between genuine
opinions and politically correct postures during that period. It was very
challenging to strike a balance between social justice and secularism.
URA was at the receiving
end of stringent criticism for a long time for both his ideas as well as
actions. He had to defend himself every now and then. In such situations
writing often becomes an exercise in self-justification. This happens more
frequently if others do not rush to your support and if those who do are accused
of belonging to your coterie. Readers arrive at their conclusions by reading
the accounts rendered by other participants of the events. These conclusions
are again based on their personal bias. Who knows the truth and who is bothered
about knowing it? Ultimately, one writes about oneself even when writing about
others. In that sense all writing is self-revelatory. Of course, the converse
of this statement is also true. We realize our true selves only in relationship
with others. That is why one should not look for someone else’s biography in
works like Suragi.
Autobiographies have the advantages of hindsight.
Earlier opinions and actions are replaced by those that mirror the
contemporary, often at considerable variance from those of the past. This is
true of political events, social movements and even interpersonal
relationships. For instance, both URA and Lankesh took more than two decades to
understand that Congress politics had many positive aspects which were totally
absent in the political practices of either the Janata Dal or Jan Sangh. In
itself there is nothing wrong in such reappraisal. But then, they started
announcing it from the rooftops as messiahs. There are quite a few such ‘being
wise after the event’ instances in Suragi. It is beyond doubt that many events
of this period are written with lots of hesitation and an adequate dose of
cleverness. In reality, all autobiographies (Atma Kathaanaka) are
half-narrated tales (Ardha Kathaanaka). The un-narrated half is
definitely not unimportant.
The chapter titled, ‘The
Ups and Downs of Creativity’ is one of the seminal parts of this book. URA was
adept in making use of his creativity in many areas such as journalism,
politics, oratory and public life. Consequently, he kept himself active even while
going through troughs of literary creativity. He always thought that living
itself was a creative act. This section contains many valuable insights about
his creative processes as also the act of creation in general. However, this
chapter could have been more elaborate. He could have attempted to delineate an
‘author specific’ poetics. Bendre, one of our eminent poets, has done it
wonderfully. URA was one of the few modernist writers who went beyond the
confines of that movement. It would be very interesting to learn whether this
transcending was confined to his world view or whether it also permeated into
his concept of literature. I have a feeling that he was more creatively
experimental in his poetry rather than in his fiction. It is difficult to find radical
departures in the evolution of form in his fiction. He used poetry to formulate
and state his intellectual and metaphysical positions. Usually, he accomplished
this through anecdotes and metaphors. He was fond of lyrical discourses even in
his fiction. But his later poetry was less lyrical and made use of the prose
style. Suragi could have thrown more light on issues like this.
The ‘Inner Life’ was more important than the
‘Public Life’ for URA throughout his life. This truth is made very clear in Suragi
also. But a disproportionate desire for media publicity and an uncontrollable
urge to express his opinion on all topics gained ascendency throughout his
life. The subtle and nuanced realities of his inner self have not been
expressed in detail anywhere in this book. Even those that have found vent are
not sufficiently emphasized. He probably felt that the ‘personal’ which does
not merge with the ‘social’ would not have much significance with the passage
of time. He was not particularly fond of perceiving and presenting truth
through other fictional characters during his last few years. That is why he
did not venture into fiction during this period. Curiously though, he made
cursory attempts of this kind in the poems that he translated.
URA’s intellectual
writing too suffers from a relative absence of musings about his inner life. He
is more interested in documenting his ideas about social, political and
cultural issues. He wrote more about public life than private dilemmas.
Probably, since his achievements in various walks of life are not recorded
properly by his contemporaries, it became necessary for Suragi to delineate
such details. For instance, the yeoman work turned out by him in Kerala as the
vice chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University and its philosophical
background are documented here in detail. But unfortunately, in this context it
becomes self-congratulatory. This is a real impasse. Similarly, he is forced to
explain and substantiate and justify many of his external actions and inner turmoil.
This is also due to the fact that most people who surrounded him were there to
feather their nests. Actually, I have a feeling that URA learnt more from his
enemies and dissenters than his friends and admirers. He had an innate ability
to absorb criticism, mull over and use them for his growth.
A person who believes
that truth is linear, sticks to it and acts upon it faces fewer problems. Even
those who know the plurality of truth and choose to stay mum and inactive
escape serious predicaments. The real conflicts begin when one is aware of the
pluralities of a situation and still want to be an activist. URA was one such
person. This reality created problems for him in action as well as speech. In
addition, like many of us, he too was fond of success and praise. This makes us
incapable of hurting others by being ruthlessly objective. Numerous placatory
sentences are found in Suragi.
I have learnt several lessons from this book. The
first is about the nature of cruelty that could be present in leftist regimes
also. Of course, I am fully aware of the fact that capitalist democracies and
dictatorships too harbour cruelty which is ten times more intense. The mockery
of democracy that prevails in India and the USA is no solution whatsoever. But
communism created dreams of liberation and then gagged all voices of protest.
URA was haunted by these feelings throughout his life. His liking for the
tenets of Marxism did not make him change his disbelief in leftist regimes.
Suragi makes it abundantly clear.
Second, many parts of
Suragi stress the necessity of re-examining the concept of morality and ethics.
Being untrue to one’s own self can also be immoral. Even an ‘ultra-moralist’
like Gandhi was exploitative in many of his practices. There was an autocratic
lack of understanding of others in his interpersonal dealings. Ends were quite
often more important than means for Gandhi. URA is very clear about this in
Suragi as well as his other writings. Third, Suragi tells a number of
unpalatable truths in a muted and detached manner. Most of them are valid both
generally and contextually. He is never hesitant about mentioning small defects
in himself and others including his own family. Even his mother and wife are
not spared from this treatment. Such comments are, however, without hatred or
contempt.
A few words about the structuring and narration of
this book. This is a non-linear and complex work in spite of its chronological
narration. Suragi is the fruit of a
meaningful collaboration of two creative minds. URA moves in various paths, led
by his memories as the mood strikes. Both Tejashree and he have adapted the
method of expanding and explaining some chapters and incidents in detail and
truncating certain other phases, thereby, signalling the relative importance of
things. Some passages are very lyrical and charged with emotion; some others
are linear and prosaic. They are retained only because of logical compulsions.
Actually these tonal variations have nothing to do with the stylistic
competence of the narrators. The method of juxtaposing the current narrations
with selections from the diaries written long ago has helped in tracing URAs
evolution. They also help the reader in viewing the same incident from two
different perspectives separated in time.
A few observations about the mode in which this
book took shape are necessary. It is not a straightforward narration written by
the protagonist. It is not even a continuous text dictated by the protagonist
to a passive scribe. It is a jungle of memories, dreams, pages culled from
diaries, selections from creative and not so creative writings, electronically
recorded material and telephonic conversations. It is easy to lose one’s way in
this kind of abundance. Tejashree has undertaken this adventure with total
commitment and succeeded eminently.
One faces a number of
problems while converting a ‘spoken text’ into a ‘written narrative’. A
verbatim presentation of hundreds of pages of spoken material would have been
monotonous. It is an achievement of the narrator that Suragi has retained the
nuances and subtleties of a written text. Occasionally she has helped URA delve
deep into his memories by asking appropriate questions. She says that the inner
core of the book belongs to URA and that the external format is an outcome of
their combined labour. This is indeed true, and she deserves to be complimented
for her labour of love and diligence. URA has given us the fruits of his probe
into the mysteries of life and society. It is but natural that many probes end
without resolution and many truths are too bitter to admit.
Suragi is undoubtedly
one of the better autobiographies in Kannada. Many of its facets are equally
relevant in a pan-Indian context. One looks forward to a competent translation
of this book into English and other Indian languages.
A writer’s last testament
RAJENDRA CHENNI
Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is a slender work which in a sombre meditative
tone and style, rich in metaphorical resonance, provides a disturbing
reflection on a conjuncture of history that the writer Ananthamurthy finds
menacing. The writing is strikingly different from the energetic, persuasive,
urbane but argumentative style URA is known for. Instead, he seems to be
experimenting with a bricolage of ideas and images, collating them for himself
and the reader to meditate and discover the threads which weave them together.
The bitter conjuncture of history for URA is the rise of Narendra Modi to
power, which ‘perhaps symbolizes the end of the Gandhian era and the victory of
Savarkar’ (p. 32). Though unsure whether the victory is temporary, he is
convinced that it is Savarkar’s victory.
Though URA eschews an
elaborate historical or ideological analysis, he is addressing the issue of
Hindu nationalism which Savarkar conceptualized by creating the neologism
Hindutva.1 His version of Hindutva as nationalism
constructed on the modular European form characterized by one territory, one
culture, one race and one language was found attractive by the native Indian
elite who like Savarkar were uneasy about conflating Hindu religion with Hindu
nationalism. After all Savarkar walks a long mile towards (colonial) modernity
by clarifying that though a major constituent, Hindu religion is emphatically
not the same as Hindu nationalism. His insistence is that anyone who
experiences ‘Sindhustan’ or ‘Hindustan’ as both fatherland and holy land and is
a descendant of the Vedic fathers and thus belongs to the race which also
enjoyed the extraordinary historical luck of inhabiting a clearly bound
territory is a follower of (and believer in) Hindutva.2
In an interesting section he argues that whether
he is an agnostic, atheist or non-Vedic does not matter; nor does his belonging
to a tribe or an untouchable caste matter. But for the highly rhetorical,
emotional style of Savarkar, frequently breaking into poetry and more
importantly, using a substratum of myths, images and tropes which reveal how
his sensibility is grounded in the mainstream Hindu religious framework, one
would think he was conceptualizing Hindu nationalism as a secular, modern
space. This aspect must have greatly appealed to the ‘Young India’ group of
revolutionaries in England and other European countries who believed in the
legitimacy of violence in the nationalist struggle.
The insight that URA
probably shares with other commentators on the Modi phenomenon is that today’s
young India of techies, NRI’s, urban youth and the youth in small towns and
cities also sees Modi’s Hindu nationalism as modern. Narendra Modi also avoids
the non-modern categories of Vedic religion, caste supremacy, tradition and
uses the idiom of development and efficient management. URA sees, correctly
again, the convergence of nationalism (in its modern avatar), development (as the culmination of the anthropocentric,
consumerist and ecologically destructive aspect of western civilization which
Gandhi critiqued so powerfully in Hind Swaraj)
and a political culture antithetical to democratic, liberal traditions in
Modi’s rise to power.
Though the figure of
Modi recurs through the text, URA uses him as a metaphor for the conjuncture of
tendencies which have the potential to disrupt and dislocate Gandhi’s utopian
but radical Hind Swaraj. It is a brilliant stroke to juxtapose Hindutva and
Hind Swaraj – two texts, two approaches to India and two forms of politics
which are for URA irreconcilable binary opposites. It is also a masterly move
to posit Savarkar’s Hindutva in opposition to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj deliberately
ignoring the more openly fascist writings of Golwalkar and others. It is not
this version of the right wing ideology which Narendra Modi now represents, but
the far more powerful, persuasive and contemporary version of the same.
A very interesting aspect of Hindutva or Hind
Swaraj is the manner in which URA shifts the grounds of his arguments from the
political to the ethical. The text, after collating seemingly disparate
statements about the Modi phenomenon, transforms itself into a deep meditation
on evil. This section begins with a repertory/checklist of the distinctive
evils of our times. ‘In our times evil is the mines, the dams, the electricity
plants, hundreds of smart cities, shadeless roads widened by felling trees,
rivers which have lost direction and now serve to wash the toilets of five star
hotels, and the shorn, bald hills once the temples of the tribal people,
markets where no sparrows come and green trees on which no birds sit’ (p. 15).
In the ethical
perspective I mentioned, URA describes this evil as a product of man’s hubris
which threatens human existence. It is a hubris based on the misconception of
the world of nature as an endless, permanent cornucopia satisfying man’s
endless greed (p. 22). This greed now takes the form of corporate greed and
destructive developmental desires. In this analysis of the present evils, it is
the Gandhian register which URA employs. Echoing the harsh critique of machinery
and modern civilization of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, he writes about the
overarching category of ‘development’ which ‘makes the earth anaemic, the sky a
smoke ridden roof through which even the sun cannot peep and poisons the
rivers’ (p. 16).
The Gandhian register is more audible in URA’s
repeated reference to development as the extreme, unhealthy state of middle
class greed which in turn is one of the forms which man’s hubris takes. He
describes globalization as a modern form of ‘hunting by corporate lords’ which
has already destroyed self-reflexivity and introspection. It is a condition of
the sheer inability to see evil as evil.
A longish section of the
work deals with two well known texts about evil. One is the Book of John which URA analyzes as representative of the
Christian exploration of the nature, necessity and the role of evil as well as
its problematic relationship with the will of God. The other text is
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the focus on Raskolnikov’s febrile
obsession with Napoleon and the notion of the superman. In URA’s reading of the
novel, Raskolnikov’s struggles to escape from his intellectual hubris and move
towards the Christian understanding of evil, though ‘he refuses to bend’ (p.
30).
Though I am somewhat
unsure whether this meditation on evil around the two texts effectively relates
to the analysis of Savarkar and Modi, URA’s intention is clearly visible. He is
exploring two antithetical states of mind – the Gandhian and the one associated
with Savarkar. The Gandhian frame eschews the loud, passionate rhetoric of
Savarkar and speaks in an intimate dialogic manner, dreams of an India,
universal but local, decentralized in the form of the panchayat. The
Savarkarite ‘rejects the India of many religions and languages and limits it to
only those who see it as punyabhumi – holy land (p. 58).
There is a long section in the work which offers
a precise summary and commentary on Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? The
section also introduces the background to Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, including
Savarkar and Young India revolutionaries in England whom Gandhi met and who the
editor of Hind Swaraj mentions without naming them. As Anthony Parel points
out, Savarkar is one of the interlocutors of Gandhi’s work. This may not be so
obvious because in the work, the Reader who begins as a resolute supporter of
Young India very quickly gets persuaded by the Editor so that thereafter the
Editor Gandhi seems to turn away from the interlocutor. His strategy seems to
be of demolishing Savarkar’s Hindutva by ignoring it.
The act of ignoring is
deliberate and consciously planned. Gandhi’s great insight was to see with
clairvoyance that the edifice of Savarkar’s Hindu nationalism stood on the
acceptance of modernity and the modular form of European nationalism. It was a
classic case of the colonized internalizing the discourses of the colonizer. I
have not read Savarkar’s work in the Marathi original, but clearly the English
translation unselfconsciously transposes ‘nation’ and ‘church’ frequently, revealing
the discursive complicity of Savarkar’s writing with the colonial discourses.
It is this complicity which Gandhi attacks as the true enemy of Swaraj.
In the following famous
passage Gandhi is certainly speaking to the invisible interlocutor: ‘In effect
it means this – that we want English rule without the Englishman. You want the
tiger’s nature, but not the tiger; that is to say, you would make India
English, and, when it becomes English, it will be called not Hindustan but
Englistan. That is not the Swaraj that I want.’3
Though it would be
stretching it too far to imagine ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Englistan’ as Gandhi’s play
on ‘Sindhustan’ and ‘Hindustan’ in Savarkar’s work, the cutting edge remark is
intended for Savarkar’s nationalism. Gandhi rightly understood that despite Savarkar’s
waxing lyrical over Sindhustan, his conceptualization of nationalism was
derivative of the Euro-centric model. Gandhi’s insight has been proved right
and elaborated by modern scholarship which has traced continuities between ‘the
one language, one culture and one nation’ description by Herder, Shiller and
others and the Hindu nationalist duplication of the same construction.
Another striking
derivative category used by Savarkar is ‘race’ – an essentialist category
belonging to the colonial production of knowledge which, for long, enjoyed the
status of a scientifically valid category. Savarkar, by conflating race and
nation attributes a primordial identity status to nationalism because it is
race which almost automatically ensures your nationalism whereas a reverential
altitude towards fatherland and holy land needs to be cultivated.
In complete contrast to the derivative
Eurocentric idea of nationalism, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj marginalizes the term
itself. This is so because Gandhi shifts the grounds of argument by
foregrounding the category ‘civilization’. Imperial England is an example of
‘modern’ civilization (western civilization) and for Indians to enshrine the
Englishman in the heart would mean exchanging an aggressive but failed
civilization for an ancient civilization which can sustain both the individual
and the world.4 In Hind Swaraj India is not a nation; it is a
civilization in which many languages and religions have coexisted. For Gandhi
who liked to describe himself as a sanatani Hindu, no religion
including Hindu religion, was perfect. While Savarkar makes much of the unique
geographical features of Hindustan, Gandhi is in fact the modern individual
negotiating with images of urban squalor, machinery, the railways and the law
courts. Savarkar’s pastoral lyricism about Hindustan contrasts with Gandhi’s
anti-urban, anti-industrial (almost Luddite) realism. Gandhi would sit well in
the company of Blake, Wordsworth, William Morris and John Ruskin, in fact with
many representatives of the anti-West or non-West in the western tradition.
Savarkar the fiery nationalist is in the company of the colonizing West.
Ananthamurthy dwells on this paradox.
Another perspective from which Gandhi and
Savarkar are anlayzed in the work is related to their contrasting views
regarding the state. URA argues that Gandhi’s thinking was shaped by two of his
gurus who, philosophically speaking, were anarchists – Tolstoy and Thoreau.
Like them Gandhi also distrusted an interventionist state. His conception of
the village as the little, independent republic could exist and survive only if
the state was minimalist and non-interventionist. If Marx saw the withering
away of the state as an inevitable result of the dialectic of history, Gandhi
thought of its withering away as an ethical imperative. In this he was
absolutely alone because everyone else, including his heir Nehru, wanted a
strong, centralized state albeit to achieve material progress and even to
realise the socialist vision of equality.
URA’s work has
interesting sections on Tagore and his novel Gora (which URA described on
many occasions as the archetypal Indian novel). In contrast to Gandhi’s
rejection of a strong state, Savarkar conceptualized a strong Hindu nation,
using an imagination fully tinted by the hyper-masculinist notions which were
also the mainstay of imperialism. This is hardly surprising given the fact that
Indian right wing ideologues were admirers of the powerful fascist states, both
Nazi Germany and paradoxically, Israel. URA quotes at length from Nathuram
Godse’s defence to demonstrate the fury with which the likes of Godse reacted
to Gandhi’s ‘weak nationalism’ and pacifism.
URA analyzes the
dichotomy between a powerful state and anarchy by using his notions of ‘The
Fear of the King’ and the ‘Fear of King’s Absence’. (URA had used the set of
terms effectively in his earlier writings). He argues that the Savarkarite
vision of nationalism inevitably gravitates towards a strong centralized state.
In his subtle analysis, the notion of Hindutva reveals a masked repugnance
towards heterogeneity and pluralism – two ineradicable features of Indian
society. Though Savarkar in his Hindutva says emphatically that the religion of
the majority has no privileged position and is willing to accord an equal status
to the minor religions, he disqualifies Islam and Christianity from being part
of Hindutva because they worship a holy land different from the fatherland.
Gandhi, as mentioned earlier, hardly ever speaks of the nation. He is therefore
free from any attempt to exclude any religion from Indian civilization.
Even while admitting that Savarkar’s concept of
nationalism had little of the violence and cruelty of the fascist and Nazi
models, URA argues that it was very vulnerable to such possibilities because of
its consent to a strong state. There is every possibility that the present
political trend in India is to create a coercive state which can be used to
‘purge’ the minorities and give away to global capital the resources which
belong to the tribals and peasants. This is the basis of URA’s apprehension
about Narendra Modi’s rise to power. The fear now is of the presence of the
king, not of his absence.
Hindutva or Hind Swaraj
reads like the last testament of a writer who was an iconic and visible public
intellectual. URA explains to the readers that the work is ‘a response to the
optimism which seems to have arisen in the media and the people after the
election of Narendra Modi by a majority and my own misgivings’ (p. 1).
This opening sentence may mislead the hasty
reader to conclude that the work is the response of a writer hounded by right
wing supporters even in his condition of terminal illness for saying that he
would not want to live under Modi’s regime. Nothing could be farther from the
truth of the text. The finest parts of the text are about what man has
discovered in his labour, in the learning and use of skills to live with
nature. I wish URA had written far more elaborately about this. In his myriad
and apparently endless search for possibilities of a truly non-western,
non-orientalist knowledge and experience, he tried in his later writings to
seek them in ‘tradition’. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in concretely
realizing this in his fiction and ensuring that this tradition would not be the
same old brahminical tradition.
In brief but important
sections of this work (pp. 11-12), URA talks about the knowledge of the world
acquired by man in the process of living and making things. This knowledge is
acquired by the body-soul in the physical act of labour. Here URA introduces
the contours of a knowledge which emerges from lived experience, or to be more
precise in the act of labour. The reader may initially be puzzled by this
section and wonder what it has to do with Hindutva. URA’s intention is that it
has everything to do with it. It is in the separation of man from his labour,
in the separation of knowledge from experience that a unique paradigm emerges.
This relates to a world view which supports the utilitarian and exploitative
approach to the world. This world view also supports a compartmentalization of
the aesthetic, the political and the ethical. This world view is at the heart
of nationalism. URA is emphatic in his indictment of all political parties
which support such a fragmented world view. He points out that the healthy
scepticism of nationalism by both Gandhi and Tagore was not endorsed by any
Indian political party, including the Congress. URA is scathing in his
criticism of the Congress which was complicit in the killing of the Sikhs in
the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
It is necessary to place this last work of URA in
the context of the critique of nationalism and globalization which has emerged
in Kannada, dominating debates in Kannada civil society and literary circles
for nearly two decades. The long tradition of Kannada writers who are also
activists and participants in people’s movements, has ensured an articulate
resistance to communal forces. URA himself was a leading voice of protest
against right wing ideologies and globalization, all along believing that
neoliberal politics and communalism converge in unexpected ways and that a
certain kind of nationalism can, in its modern form, emerge as a serious threat
to democracy. URA’s last testament is therefore part of an ongoing dialogue in
Kannada society. Sadly, U.R. Ananthamurthy will now only be a silent
participant.
* Hindutva Athawa Hind Swaraj (Hindutva or Hind Swaraj) is the last book that
U.R. Ananthamurthy wrote. Though it was written during illness and amidst
continuous harassment by the right wing groups, he worked on several versions
of the text and had finalized the work before he passed away. It has now been
published by Abhinava, Bangalore, 2014.
** In the essay I have
used my own translations of certain passages. The page numbers refer to those
in the original Kannada book.
Footnotes:
1. V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923) rpt. Bharatiya Sahitya Sadan, New Delhi.
Also available on several internet sites.
2. Ibid.
3. Anthony Parel (ed.), Gandhi: ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2009, p.
27.
4. See Anthony Parel’s
introduction, ibid.
A writer’s horizon
CHANDAN GOWDA
HIS earliest essays make
obvious that URA saw himself as a Kannada writer whose literary predicament was
akin to those of writers in other Indian languages. And that his concerns were
civilizational.
Written in 1968, URA’s
well known essay, ‘Consciousness and Material Reality’, contrasts Hegelian
idealism with Marxist materialism and concludes that neither was fully adequate
for understanding a writer’s task. Nor was ‘a golden mean’ between the two possible:
both were distant from the truths of experience (anubhava).1 He also felt that existentialist concerns ought not to lose sight
of the wider social relations even as he remained wary of the Indian
philosophical attitudes that all too easily forgot the body.
When it is unnecessary
to prove whether idealism or materialism is greater, participating in the
social totality, being a free agent, and creating something entirely new become
meaningful dilemmas for a writer. In an essay, ‘The Future of the Kannada
Novel’, he wrote: ‘Only a writer who can grasp the changing external realities
and the consequent struggles for the human mind in his times can create newness
in the world of our novel.’2 It is this early conviction of his which
explains, perhaps, why his writings are ever-wakeful to both the inner lives of
individuals and the historical forces around them.
At a conference on
modern Kannada literature in Mysore in the early 1970s, URA said: ‘It is common
to raise the issue of western influence on modern Kannada writing. As a writer
who has been influenced by the West, I wish to share a few of my ideas on this
matter.’ He continued: ‘An individual influenced by English literature makes a
moral decision when he decides to write in Kannada. The moral decision succeeds
in some sense when he is able to make themes/subjects (vicara) outside
of Kannada’s experience part of it.’3 He sought legitimacy for
a mode of creativity that seamlessly wove in outside/foreign elements into a
culture and enhanced the latter’s horizons of experience.
He saw this creative
mode at work in how the 12th century vacana poets brought in the
idea of bayalu (a void; a state of emptiness gained after
liberation; a state that transcends being) from the Upanishads to speak
intimately to their own social milieu. He went on to argue that Kannada had
related in this manner with Sanskrit in the past; it had to similarly engage
with English now.
This speech reveals URA’s existential struggle in
understanding who can be a legitimate writer in Kannada. In engaging with this
issue, he offers an open-ended view of tradition as an entity that can
accommodate newness from sources outside it. He observed that tradition has
always worked this way, that it has the potential for opening itself up to new experiences.
And the sources of provocation can lie anywhere.
URA’s speech affirmed:
‘The magic of literature lies in its ability to make visible new facets of
experience, to convey a distinct experience and gesture towards what might lie
outside it, and to reach out to the inarticulate and formless spaces and rein
them into the language of one’s experience.’4
The work of bringing in
newness without making it seem like an outside influence requires not only
consummate artistic skill and imagination, but depths of rooted experience
alongside. In URA’s view, the rearrangement of a cultural universe that appears to emerge from spaces internal to it and feelsauthentic constitutes a legitimate creative act. Such an act of
mediation in the process of authentic story making brings with it alternate
notions of creative freedom and narrative accountability.
This method can be seen at work in his first
novel, Samskara. Praneshacharya realizes that his a priori commitment to Madhva philosophy had meant that his intellectual
quest during his student days was not a quest at all. Since URA has
acknowledged his deep attraction to Jiddu Krishnamurti while he was at work on
this novel, it is entirely conceivable that the latter’s caution that ‘if you
seek, thou shall not find’ is behind Praneshacharya’s realization.5Similarly, Praneshacharya’s awakening to the pleasures of the
body, which his single-minded devotion to God had made him indifferent towards,
probably owed significantly to Ananthamurthy’s favourite novelist, D.H.
Lawrence’s indictment of Christian morality as a life-denying force. And
clearly, Lohia’s ideas on caste quality can be seen to have mattered for how
Samskara represents relations between castes. Yet, it is significant that
establishing these influences – while knowing that an influence works in
mysterious ways – does not make the novel seem any less locally rooted or an
inauthentic cultural experience. And that exercise indeed ceases to matter in the
end.
URA’s method of managing
the inside and the outside domains of tradition in his fiction is transposed to
the plane of a civilizational encounter in his second novel, Bharathipura. Educated in England, Jagannatha, the novel’s protagonist,
returns to India only to find himself deeply disturbed by the illiberal
practices of caste and religious superstition. His various attempts at social
reform misfire because his understanding of the problems and solutions is
grounded in western rationalism and liberalism, which offer reason and the
abstract ideals of freedom and equality from the outside. The novel can be seen to suggest that to be meaningful and
effective, the task of social reform, whatever its normative sources, has to
creatively work through a local cultural ethos.6
How creativity should work through tradition was
for URA a constant and deep preoccupation. He offered a graphic analogy to
illustrate this relationship: ‘Someone says, "This hookah has been in our
family for nearly three hundred years". "Three hundred years! This
same hookah!" "Yes, but when the bowl became very old and worn out,
we changed it. And then, the pipe became too rough and rigid, so we changed it
too. But we still have the same hookah".’7
URA struggled to convey
how creative acts relate to tradition through a process of sadharanikarana (‘our own theory of universalization’) which
makes someone feel that a work of art is both one’s own experience and that of
a tradition.8
Global asymmetries of
power and dominance in knowledge creation are very real as are chauvinistic
sentiments at home. How an Indian language writer relates with the outside
world is a complicated matter. Cautioning against both an inward looking
revivalism and a mimicry of the West, URA suggests that a Kannada writer must
view a drought in Bijapur, a literary experiment in France, space technology,
and the poetry of Kabir and the vacanakaraswhich have the power to stir even the Indians
dressed in western suits, as contemporary. S/he should make the language of the
ancient poets, the speech of the villagers, and a new theoretical discussion
from abroad, work as a language for the contemporary context.9 This literary imperative burdens the Indian writer with a great
political responsibility to avoid the binary traps of East-West,
tradition-modernity, and rural-urban while engaging the present.
Ananthamurthy’s stance on how the outside has to
be negotiated with the inside can be seen at work in his non-fiction too. In a
2012 lecture on Dalit literature, he remarked: ‘It is possible for the Master
to hit the servant as he doesn’t consider him human. The servant feels angry at
being hit: "You and I are both human – how can you hit me?".’ URA
felt comfortable about theorizing the violence of caste relations, using Hegel’s
discussion of the master’s denial of recognition to the slave, which results in
a mutually dissatisfying relationship between them.10
The political imperative
of exposing the corrosive power of the outside assumed greater priority in his
later concerns. Many of URA’s short stories acquire their power by not dissolving the boundaries of the inside and the outside and
keeping them in a state of mutual provocation. In ‘Stallion of the Sun’, a
modern intellectual runs into an old astrologer friend who opens up his mind to
a new cosmology. In ‘Drought’, a left-secular IAS officer is continually amazed
by the grounded intelligence of a local fixer. In stories like these and in
numerous essays and speeches, URA expressed consistent concern about knowledges
that were fast becoming marginal in the modern world.
His cautious stance towards the power of western
knowledges had never really meant a total skepticism of the West. The ‘other
West’, which included the voices of dissent towards modern civilization within
the West, was deeply attractive for him. (He admired Simone Weil.) And great
writing from any part of the world was always good to engage with. His was a
capacious humanism.
His last two short
stories, ‘Unfathomable Relations’ (2009) and ‘Pachhe Resort’ (2010), which
confront the deep entanglements of Indian culture with the global economy,
shift his concerns with how the inside engaged the outside to a different plane
altogether. Structural evil, which was global in scope, is a primary concern in
these stories.
‘Unfathomable Relations’
narrates a conversation between a French arms dealer, his philanthropic minded
wife who wishes to support Indian art and medicine, an Indian Foreign Service
officer and his wife, a trained Bharatnatyam dancer. The story soon clarifies
that idealism has shriveled and compromise is everywhere. Indian art and
Ayurveda are entangled with the armaments trade and surveillance networks
Indeed, the story asks if violence was ever absent in civilization.
In ‘Pachhe Resort’, a
mining businessmen seeks ways of promoting ‘clean mining’ with minimal
environmental damage while his son is in the business of eco-tourism and
spirituality workshops for corporate executives. Tradition seems effete in
relation to their new economic priorities and their diminished sense of ethics.
Although URA always took
a position on matters of social and political relevance, his engagements with
the public became more frequent, and resonated more widely, in the final
fifteen years of his life. In this phase, he wrote little by way of fiction,
but contributed numerous op-eds to newspapers and magazines. (He also
translated the poetry of Rilke, Wordsworth, Yeats and Brecht.) This set of
writings, which have been collected in over a dozen volumes, allowed him to share
his views with a large community of readers.
Taking a tip from the subtitle of Stephen
Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, if we wish to study ‘How URA Became
URA’, this last phase would be very crucial to examine. In this phase he became
a major voice of reasoned and timely criticism, and helped evolve opinion on
the major issues of the day with great style and depth of conviction. He worked
with a large normative canvas, drawing upon figures like Gandhi, Tagore, Lohia,
among others, and strove to appeal to the shared moral intuition of Kannada
society and foster critical sensibilities in the present. While not everyone
may have found his humanistic views critical enough, or consistent enough, it
cannot be denied that he continued the great tradition of literary figures who
worked as thesakshi prajne of society.
It is striking that so many of URA’s writings
struggle to understand the distinctiveness of India. Even his last book, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj, expresses incredulity about how Indian society
makes space for contrary ethical attitudes. In the book, he points to the
recurring philosophical distrust towards the value of temporal power in India.
Basavanna, the 12th century vacana poet and founder of Virasaivism in
Karnataka, said that the flesh of a dead rabbit could at least be eaten while a
king’s corpse was not even worth an areca nut. And, Purandaradasa, a saint-poet
from the 16th century, remarked that even the noblest power was worthless. Yet,
at the same time, the popular hold of songs in praise of valourous heroes who
killed large numbers of people in war, remains strong.11
He found it mysterious
that an ascetic who had given up everything could transcend the bounds of
language, religion, caste, and appeal to the whole country. For him Gandhi’s
emergence as a leader was ‘mysterious’, because most great leaders until then
had come from either Bengal or Maharashtra.12
An older essay, ‘In
Search of Identity’, narrates a gripping anecdote. A painter travelling in
North India wishes to photograph a kumkum smeared stone idol in a
farmer’s home. He brings it outside to take a picture and then wonders if his
camera had polluted it. But the farmer asks him not to worry since another
stone could easily substitute for it. URA doubts whether the modern Indian can
understand how the farmer’s mind worked.13
In a speech delivered a
few years ago in Kozhikode, ‘An Indian Writer Called Basheer’, URA explains
what made the great Malayalam writer, Basheer, an Indian writer by comparing
him to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the 19th century saint philosopher from Bengal.14 Paramahamsa narrated his stories in street, or kaccha, Bangla, and not in literary Bangla. The chief quality of his
stories, which blended truth with compassion, is the element of commonness (saamaanyattva)
in their language. Basheer, too, wrote in everyday Malayalam. For URA,
Basheer’s writings about Kerala’s Muslim society, where practices from diverse
traditions thickly cohere, are rooted in a deep humanism derived from Sufi
philosophy and Advaitic thought.
Noting that literature could help humans overcome
their murderous instincts, URA claims that Basheer’s stories embodied this
virtue. He says: ‘Basheer’s work brought together the depths of his religious
and spiritual experiences, his humanistic mind and a sublime sense of humour.
Only saints are capable of such a sense of humour. Parmahamsa discussed his
spiritual ideas through similarly humourous stories.’15 These shared qualities made them both Indian. For URA, it seems,
Indianness (Bharatiyeete) was a poetic vision (kavya drishti)
found in saints and writers, available for everyone to experience.
* All quotes from the
original Kannada are translated by the author of this essay.
Footnotes:
1. U.R. Ananthamurthy, Prajne Mattu Parisara (Consciousness and Material Reality). Akshara
Prakashana, Heggodu, [1968] 1971, pp. 5-11.
2. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘The Future of the Kannada Novel,’ in Prajne Mattu Parisara (Consciousness and Material Reality). Akshara Prakashana, Heggodu
[1968] 1971, p. 46
3. U.R. Ananthamurthy, Sannivesha (Context). Akshara Prakashana, Heggodu, 1974,
pp. 5-6.
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. U.R. Ananthamurthy, ‘Mata, Dharma, Ityadi’ (Religion, Dharma, Et Cetera), Valmikiya Nevadalli (Valmiki as Pretext). Abhinava Prakashana,
Bengaluru, 2006, pp. 116-117.
6. Bruno Latour has used Bharathipura to illustrate his argument against the epistemic
fallacy of modern reformers who impute belief to the actions of the non-moderns
and proceed to rid them of it with iconoclastic gestures. See Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Duke University Press, Durham, 2010, pp.
25-29, 41-44; Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays
on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 266-292.
7. U.R. Ananthamurthy, Hindutva Athava Hind Swaraj? (Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?). Abhinava Prakashana,
Bengaluru, 2014, p. 97.
8. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘Tradition and Creativity’, in N. Manu Chakravarthy (ed.), The UR Ananthamurthy Omnibus. Arvind Kumar Publishers, New Delhi, [1990]
2007, pp. 341-373.
9. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
op. cit., fn 3, 1972. p. 8.
10. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘Dalita Sahitya’, in Chandan Gowda (ed.), Sahitya Sahavasa (In the Company of Literature). Aharnishi Prakashana, Shimoga, forthcoming, 2015.
11. U.R. Ananathamurthy,
op. cit., fn 7, p. 5.
12. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘Spirituality United Gandhi and Ambedkar’, (interview with Chandan Gowda), Outlook, 8 September 2014.
13. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘In Search of Identity: A Kannada Writer’s Viewpoint’, in Sudhir Kakar (ed.), Identity and Adulthood. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, [1976]
1979.
14. U.R. Ananthamurthy,
‘An Indian Writer Called Basheer’, Sadhya Mattu Shashvata (The Immediate and the Eternal). Ankitha Prakashana, Bengaluru,
2008, pp. 201-213.
15. Ibid., pp. 212-213.
The nation state of India: a storyteller’s narrative
G. RAJASHEKHAR
U.R. Ananthamurthy, who
recently passed away, was essentially a novelist and short story writer, even
though he also wrote poetry, essays and criticism, besides translating several
works. The book he wrote during the last few days of his life, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj? (Abhinava, Bengaluru, 2014), carries the stamp
of a storyteller, though it is more an extended essay on modern India. Here
Ananthamurthy examines the idea of the Indian nation as perceived by Gandhiji
and Savarkar not only as two streams of political thought of our times, but
also as two distinct metaphors for human tendencies and aspirations at all times.
It was a work he persisted with even as his health deteriorated, determination
alone keeping his strength up. The book was published posthumously.
In retrospect it appears
that an incident which occurred a few months before his death provided a
context and provocation for him to take on this project. Ananthamurthy had
declared in one of the public functions in the days preceding the general
elections of 2014 that ‘he would not want to live in an India that chooses
Narendra Modi as its prime minister.’ Some Kannada newspapers carried his
statement on their front pages. Don’t be misled into believing that a very
‘literary atmosphere’ prevails in Karnataka where statements of writers are
routinely carried on front pages of newspapers. The newspapers not only twisted
and sensationalized his statement, but also carried a series of readers’
responses that spewed venom on him for days on end. Not all of them were
tabloids; some were among the most respected newspapers of Karnataka.
The hate campaign only
intensified after the election results were declared. An anonymous Modi admirer
sending Ananthamurthy a one-way ticket to Pakistan also became big news in
these papers. Interestingly, the ‘would not want to’ in his statement had
become a more definitive ‘will not’ by the time it was carried in print. Well
known economist Amartya Sen, who went by this mistranslation in English
newspapers, advised Ananthamurthy to ‘stay in India and fight Modi’s politics’.
Being a mere vernacular Kannada writer, Ananthamurthy did indeed need
unsolicited advice from a cosmopolitan intellectual like Amartya Sen! There was
an inescapable irony in that episode. It was the literal meaning of an
utterance of Ananthamurthy – a poet who chased after nuances of words and the
silences between them all his life – that got foregrounded, twisted and
publicized at the fag end of his life. How traumatic all this must have been
for him!
Ananthamurthy always
participated in public debates with great enthusiasm, more so when they centred
around him. But he was disheartened by this controversy which was so full of
intolerance and hatred. What made him distraught was the fact that all the ire
was inspired by a political ideology and was not just directed against him as
an individual.
What does it mean for a writer, any individual
for that matter, to be a ‘citizen’ of this country? Can we keep a few ‘others’
out, assuming that a certain language, a certain religion and a certain notion
of nation alone are ‘ours’, just as we assume that the money in our pockets,
our house and our bank account are ‘ours’? Is ‘nation’ an imagined community
that goes beyond such definitions? Or is it an enforced community that
suppresses these very questions? The title of Ananthamurthy’s book encompasses
all these questions. He brings the views of two political activists and
thinkers of modern India, Gandhiji and Savarkar, face-to-face to debate the
kind of democracy India should shape itself into. Being fundamentally a poet
and a storyteller and not a sociologist, Ananthamurthy contemplates what it is
to be an Indian citizen as a man from a village in Malnad, as a Kannadiga, as a
man with a family and a human being. It is beyond him to imagine what it is to
be an Indian citizen further than these identities. Two of his poems can be
closely read to understand the mind that shaped this work.
Ananthamurthy wrote the
poem ‘Advanigondu Kivimathu’ (An advice to Advani) in 1991. It was the
time of Ram Janmabhoomi agitation led by Advani. It addresses Advani who had
made the identity politics that equated ‘I am an Indian’ with ‘I am a Hindu’
into an agenda. The narrator of the poem appears to be telling Advani that he
carries several identities beyond that of a ‘Hindu’, all equally authentic.
If asked ‘Who are you?’
in London
‘I am an Indian.’
To mark, ‘Sorry, not a
Paki.’
A Kannadiga in Delhi,
A man from Malnad in
Bengaluru,
From Theerthahalli in
Shimoga,
From my native village
Melige in Theerthahalli,
In Melige, of course,
Of a certain caste and
so-and-so’s son.
Forgive me,
I think I am all these
with no effort.
My grandmother breathed
her last
Like her grandmother
Drinking ‘Ganga’ from
The tiny brass vessel in
God’s enclosure.
There is still some
‘Ganga’ left
In the same corroded
vessel.
My grandmother did not
have to
Give her address like
me.
Neither did Yajnavalkya.
Salutations to
ancestors.
The narrator here is saying that his identity is
‘Indian’ when he is in England, ‘south Indian’ when in India, ‘Kannadiga’ in
South India, ‘man from Malnad’ in Karnataka, ‘man from Theerthahalli’ in
Malnad, ‘man from Melige’ in Theerthahalli and of a specific caste and
parentage within the native village of Melige. Thus, the identity grows
increasingly specific as the geographic reference narrows down. For the
narrator, the village in which he grew up is a tangible reality while the
country is an abstract idea. The village is his own, the country an identity.
His short poem ‘Ooru-Desha’
(Village-Country) presents this more directly.
To live, to die, a
village
To win, to lose, a
country
To walk the bylanes, a
village
To know the highways, a
country
To know, to be, a
village
To aim, to aspire, a
country
To sob, a village; to
count, a country
To chat, a village; to
venerate, a country
One for love
Another for pride
To live, a village
To imagine, a country
One, a story
Another, history
For a poet and a
storyteller, his village, his locality, his family and the joys and sorrows of
his people are more real than the symbols of a nationalist identity. His
village and his life at home are the body and breath of his poems and stories.
The idea of a nation is not part of his lived experience. It is not a ‘story’,
but ‘history’.
All modern nations – including democracies – are
based on force or the manufacturing of people’s consent. Ananthamurthy treats
this propensity of a nation with suspicion, not only in the context of this
work but in all his short stories and novels. His position is that of a skeptic
on science, development and rationality that progressive thinkers argue are
essential to society. One could, as an illustration, examine an episode from
his novel Bharathipura(1973) that explores the ‘possibilities and
limitations of social revolution.’
The protagonist
Jagannatha is a Brahmin, and a leftist who has been educated in England. In an
attempt to demonstrate that all people are equal, he asks the Dalits of his
village to touch the holy saligrama stone that is worshipped in the gods’ enclosure
in his house. He requests, preaches and pressures them to do so. When they do
not yield, he uses force to make them touch the saligrama. The Dalits do it,
but only out of fear. Jagannatha is then confused about the meaning of this
exercise. A leftist with unquestioning allegiance to a text or a party may
never face such dilemmas. He may not see it as force. Can values of democracy,
equality and brotherhood be established through force? Is it desirable to do
so? Perhaps only writers can ask these questions with a moral urgency in these
times. I can cite many instances from Ananthamurthy’s work where he takes this
ambivalent position at the risk of being dubbed anti-progress and status
quoist. In the Kannada context, he very often invited the tag of being
‘regressive’.
What kind of nation do we need today?
Ananthamurthy examines this question in ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’ not through
the tools of the discipline of sociology, but from the perspective of a
creative writer. It is because he is a storyteller that he can write about
those who died in the Gujarat carnage thus: ‘There were no last rites performed
for those who died in the Gujarat communal riots. It does not appear like they
are haunting anybody as ghosts either. Like our leader Modi said with great
aplomb, the poor humans did indeed die like dogs that come under the wheels of
speeding cars’ (p. 35).
The writer may not be
accurate in his understanding of the beliefs of Muslims towards their dead or
their rituals, but what is he driving at when saying this? That none remember
the ill-fated Muslims who died in the riots barring their closest relatives. To
Ananthamurthy, this is as appalling as the deaths. Party-loyalist leftists
always believe that ultimate victory is bound to be theirs. But Ananthamurthy,
as a writer, can examine the alternative routes to emancipation.
Placing Gandhiji
face-to-face with Savarkar, he writes: ‘There are two important nuggets in our
past: the sorrow of Dharmaraya after the victory in the war and the sorrow and
compassion of Thathagatha Buddha that liberated him and has kept him relevant
to this day. Savarkar’s idea of India inspires us to slay the enemy. It does
not give us calm and composure. The story of Srirama Pattabhishekha is a glorious
Purana, a matter of pride. But what we need for our emancipation are the
Upanishads and Buddha’ (p. 45).
Anathamurthy is not to be mistaken for an
apolitical person who kept his distance with realpolitik because he was a poet
and a novelist. He was widely read in modern political ideologies and was
acquainted with the nation states as they exist today through reading and
travel. Girish Karnad was right when he said recently that Ananthamurthy was
not an original thinker. This was not said to denigrate him. Ananthamurthy’s
world view is essentially eclectic and syncretic in nature. He is a good
translator besides being a poet, essayist and novelist. The list of poets he
translated – Rilke, Blake, Yeats, Brecht, Lao-Tzu – is proof enough that synthesis
and curation were two distinct markers of his creative talent. This is evident
even in ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’
Ananthamurthy did not
expect perfection either as a political thinker or a creative writer. Political
leaders with visions of a perfect society gradually turn dictators. Those who
expect a perfect religion, where there are no sinners, turn fundamentalists. If
despotism is political dictatorship, fundamentalism is religious dictatorship.
As a writer, for Ananthamurthy the entire world exists in a state of impurity
and imperfection. Nobody can make mistakes or hold inappropriate views in a
perfect political and religious regime. Ananthamurthy asks how anyone can be
alive, making no mistakes and without a single bad habit. There is no ambiguity
in the choice Ananthamurthy makes between the worldviews of Savarkar and
Gandhiji.
The long essay implies
that it is impossible to choose the path of Gandhiji without completely
rejecting the path of Savarkar. But he also says that he could not live in
Gandhiji’s ashram that had no room for any addictions (p. 60). The
world of a writer is never perfect. It always enters our world of experience
dented and impure. A story cannot come alive in a perfect society or a
perfectly happy family. Good and evil are like light and shade, one a
continuation of the other and not its opposite. The truth is always akin to the
lie. Not just that, it is always only the liar who knows what the truth is.
In his work Ananthamurthy portrays the worldviews
of Gandhiji and Savarkar as night and day, light and shade, continuation,
reflection, twinned and counterfoil for each other. Gandhiji’s birth and death
are twin creations of modern India. Yes, Gandhiji was the father of the nation,
but his assassin Godse was no less popular. Godse’s statement during his trial
is like the pronouncement of a manifesto for the modern Indian nation. It was
not without reason that the Indian government banned the circulation of the
statement that carried a rhetoric powerful enough make the strongest of
skeptics forget himself. Ananthamurthy borrowed from his intimate friend Ashis
Nandy the argument on how the contradictions in the streams of thoughts of
Savarkar and Gandhiji fed off each other and had a strange coexistence. He, in
fact, acknowledges this debt in the book (p. 30).
‘Hindutva or Hind
Swaraj?’ can also be read as Ananthamurthy’s search for his own self. What is
it to be a ‘citizen’ of post-Independence India? This is for him a moral
question. The book, which appears to be the last personal testament of
Ananthamurthy, echoes the voice of many prominent Kannada writers. Kannada’s
first important short story writer, Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, novelist and poet
Kuvempu and poet Gopalakrishna Adiga have been discussed in this book. The
nation state and organized religion were never a major theme or an ideal for
modern Kannada writers.
The lone exception to this is perhaps S.L.
Bhairappa’s Aavarana (Sahitya Bhandara, Hubballi) published in 2007.
The novel serves up notions of state, religion and history from a Hindutva
perspective through the story of an inter-religious marriage and a troubled
conjugal relationship. Bhairappa presents the individual as a citizen, the
follower of a religious faith and one who abides by the norms set by society.
He has an existence only as part of a community. But Ananthamurthy sees the
individual as lonely and helpless. But the same individual can turn into a
beast when he acquires an identity as part of a nation state, a community, a
religion or a language group. That is why Ananthamurthy views all communitarian
identities – of the left, right, based on language or religion – with
suspicion.
This suspicion is an
important driving force behind ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’ too. He writes: ‘The
British who adopted a policy of divide and rule turned us into a country of
mutually suspicious communities. But what operates at a personal level, as
people bound by family ties, is a moral consciousness of trust. A community has
no soul or its own brain. Hindus and Muslims turned into communities that
lived, dined and played separately’ (p. 36).
Does an individual in
becoming the citizen of a nation state become part of a community of beasts? If
so, how many types of violence would a person have to indulge in, or at least
give consent to, in order to become a citizen of India in the present time? Is
Indian democracy all about the majority subjugating the rest? Ananthamurthy’s
essay asks these questions with the urgency of an individual searching his
soul. But for Savarkar these are not moral questions. For him India is not a
construct that took shape at a certain historical time. Rather, India is for
him an eternal and metaphysical entity. While a nation appears to Savarkar like
a weapon-wielding goddess of power, to Gandhiji it appears like a possibility
of violence and subjugation. That is why Gandhiji was opposed to the idea of a
‘strong’ nation with armed forces and tools of modern production. He rejected
the idea that India should emerge as a powerful nation in this sense. His
association and dialogues with Rabindranath Tagore inspired him to review his
idea of nationality. Ananthamurthy’s idea that the notion of a nation, particularly
of India, gives legitimacy to violence and oppression too is influenced by
Tagore. He refers to Tagore’s story Gora (1909) in the essay (p.
60). The novel appears to expose not only the oppressive nature of Savarkar’s
ideology, but also the deception inherent in it.
Ananthamurthy asks whether we are only witnesses
to the violence as citizens of India or also its beneficiaries. The model of
‘economic development’ heartily embraced by people and political parties of the
left, right and centre contains violence and oppression within itself. In
‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’, Ananthamurthy calls this model of economic development
the ‘evil’ of our times. He writes with the intensity of a poet: ‘I am trying
to see the myriad forms of evil that surround us and reside within us. The evil
of our times are mines, dams, thermal power plants, hundreds of smart cities,
shade-less wide roads that have swallowed up avenues of trees, rivers that have
lost their way and ended up washing the toilets in five-star hotels, hills that
were once temples to tribal people rendered barren by mining, bazaars without
sparrows and artificial green trees that no birds perch on…’ (p. 15).
This model of development that Ananthamurthy
describes as evil has not only destroyed nature but also rendered poor farmers
and forest dwellers bankrupt. They have been driven out of their homes and
communities, and livelihoods of artisans have been destroyed. Modern India has
seen the emergence of a new category of people called ‘development refugees’.
All citizens of this country are equal before law. But how many varieties of
citizenry do we have? There are those who have ‘vanished’ (like in Kashmir),
those who do not know which country they belong to and are suspicious of their
neighbours (as in Assam or any other state where there are Bengali-speaking
Muslims or even other Muslims), development refugees, those homeless in their
own land (Muslims living in refugee camps following a riot) and half citizens
(dalits, slum dwellers, beggars, handicapped people, orphans and so on) who
live on the fringe of society. Who even decides where the fringe begins?
These are only a few
categories of citizenry that can be named. Neither the state machinery nor the
civil society allows them in their vicinity. Our left parties and their trade
unions that speak endlessly about the oppressed classes also go nowhere near
them. It is not only in India that there are so many categories of people who
do not qualify to be called ‘citizens’ and carry no markers of identity. There
are many such communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. For
instance, Hindus, Shias, Ahmadiyas and Christians in Pakistan; Hindus in
Bangladesh; Tamils in Sri Lanka and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. All these
countries were colonies which eventually emerged as nations. If Ananthamurthy
had lived longer, he would have constructed wider narratives on death and
destruction caused in the process of communities reshaping themselves as nation
states. It takes a talent like Ananthamurthy to narrate the great tragedy of
this process in the Indian subcontinent.
Ananthamurthy had spoken
to me on the phone about the essay he was writing a few months before his
death. He had told me that he perceived the entire subcontinent as his country
and that his essay would discuss the crisis faced by Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri
Lanka and Myanmar as well. The published work talks only about India. But he
would surely have expanded its scope to encompass the subcontinent if only he
had the time.
He had also told me about the last fast of
Gandhiji that had drawn his attention. The pain, loneliness and regret that
Gandhiji felt during that last fast had deeply touched Ananthamurthy. Gandhiji
was not in the national capital during the celebrations of Independence Day. He
was not in a frame of mind for celebration on that day. Ananthamurthy discusses
this (p. 72) as well as the last fast of Gandhiji (pp. 67, 72) in the book. It
was the first-ever hunger strike of independent India. When asked whom he
addressed through his fast, Gandhiji had replied: ‘All citizens of India and
Pakistan.’
The last fast of
Gandhiji had as its backdrop the violence of Partition. Gandhiji started his
fast unto death on 13 January 1948, in Delhi. Everyone was opposed to it in the
Congress party, including Nehru and Patel. The entire North India was under the
cloud of communal tensions. The city of Delhi was filled with Hindu and Sikh
refugees from Punjab. Hindu fundamentalists were provoking the common people to
take revenge for the violence committed by Muslim fundamentalists in Punjab.
Local Muslims became victims of this provocation. In such a situation, Gandhiji
had embarked on the fast to remind a nation and its people of their duties.
The conditions he had laid to end his fast appear
like moral codes for all times:
1. Eviction of Muslims
from Delhi should be immediately stopped.
2. The urs at the dargah of Khwaja Kutubuddin, postponed to maintain law
and order, should be held immediately.
3. Mosques turned into
gurdwaras and temples should be returned to the Muslim community immediately.
4. Muslims of Delhi
should get protection within their homes.
5. The undeclared
excommunication of Muslim citizens should end.
6. The sum of Rs 55
crore that India was to pay Pakistan following the Partition as per an
agreement, which was held back by the Indian government because of the attack
on Kashmir, should be paid immediately.
It was only after all
political leaders, social activists, RSS leaders, the leaders of Hindu
Mahasabha and others agreed to these conditions that Gandhiji ended his fast on
18 January. He was assassinated on 30 January.
The country has today forgotten
the dharma and raja dharma upheld by Gandhiji’s last satyagraha. Gandhiji was not laying down a moral code that was beyond a
government or its citizenry. The conditions he had laid down were the bare
minimum duties of any government and people with a sense of dignity. But to
this day, Gandhiji is vilified for asking India to pay Rs 55 crore to Pakistan
and the rest is forgotten. Ananthamurthy should have written more on this
satyagraha considering the central theme of his essay and the sense of despair
with which he wrote it. Ananthamurthy felt battered by such episodes towards
the end of his life. He often said that the courageous struggles of people like
Medha Patkar, Aruna Roy and Teesta Setalvad, against all odds, were an
inspiration to him (p. 14). But the biggest inspiration for Ananthamurthy was
Gandhiji. Writing about Gandhiji’s life and ideas in the present time, when
Savarkar’s ideology appears to have gained an upper hand, was the ‘duty of
despondency’ (as Ram Manohar Lohia would have put it).
‘Hindutva or Hind
Swaraj?’ appears to have been written, in turn by an emotional poet and a
realist prose writer who constantly views his own experiences with skepticism.
Savarkar’s Hindutva is a political ideology, a programme to bring people
together under the banner of religion in an attempt to take control of state
power. Religion for Savarkar is no more than an instrument. But Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj has no design to usurp state power. Democracy is
an integral part of the notion of Hind Swaraj. Gandhiji called himself a sanatani. But the religion he had deep faith in was neither indebted to
nor enamoured by state power.
Ananthamurthy compares Savarkar’s instrumentalist
and utilitarian attitude towards religion to Gandhiji’s religious faith as a poet
and a storyteller. Muslims and Christians are not full-fledged citizens of
India like Hindus in Savarkar’s ideology. He argues that for Hindus India is
both janmabhoomi(motherland) and punyabhoomi (holy land). For non-Hindus, it is only a place
of birth. Their holy lands lie outside India. For instance, Mecca, the holy
land for Muslims, is in Saudi Arabia. Jerusalem, the holy land for Christians,
is currently in Israel. But for Gandhiji, the Upanishadic pronouncement ‘Ishavasyamidam
Sarvam…’ (this entire universe is pervaded by the Lord Hari) was part of
his faith and practice.
Ananthamurthy describes
the nature of Gandhiji’s religious faith by narrating an incident from the life
of Ramana Maharshi. A foreigner writes to Ramana Maharshi wishing to embrace
Hinduism and expressing his desire to visit the ‘punyabhoomi’ of Hindus. He
replied to the man asking how only some specific places on earth can be
punyabhoomi when the whole universe is the Lord’s creation (p. 57). While
Savarkar saw India as the punyabhoomi of the Hindus, for Gandhiji, even the
holiest of holy places, Kashi, appeared like a garbage pile. Even the
Vishwanath temple did not appear holy to him. During his time there was no
entry for Dalits in this temple. Gandhiji never entered any temple that imposed
such a restriction (p. 57). He refused to enter the Jagannath temple when
visiting Puri. As an illustration of the nature of Gandhiji’s religious faith,
Ananthamurthy recalls that he had gone on a day-long fast as repentance on
learning that his wife Kasturba had secretly visited the temple. While the
practice of Savarkar’s Hindutva involved taking over state power, the practice
of Gandhiji’s Hindu dharma lay in following the path of truth and justice. Much
like the dharma of our Vachanakara Basavanna, who said ‘Dayave dharmada
moolavayya…’ (Compassion is the root of religion.)
Ananthamurthy narrates the disastrous
consequences of India’s choice of the developmental model – in contrast to the
Gandhian ideals expressed in ‘Hind Swaraj’ – through poetic metaphors. He says
that this model of development sees the earth as ‘Akshaya Patre’
(cornucopia). Not just capitalist countries, but even the so-called socialist
countries like China see the earth and its resources as inexhaustible and meant
only for the consumption of humans. It is also true that there are no
differences of opinion between leftists and fundamentalists on the question of
the developmental model.
In the flow of his argument Ananthamurthy says:
‘In Marx’s imagination, the production process can be accelerated to a point
where the state withers away because the earth is a cornucopia of resources’
(p. 22). But Marx saw the human being as part of nature. Even workers need
clean air and light. In his Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts,
Marx argues that environmental pollution becomes the foundation of life in a
capitalist system. Engels had clearly stated that conquest of nature need not
be celebrated as a great victory and that nature will take its own revenge for
every such conquest. He warned of the natural and social consequences of all
our actions while writing about the discovery of America by Columbus and the
start of the slave trade. His work, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, in particular, is centred around the
destruction of nature as a consequence of industrialization.
When his close friend,
the journalist Ramzan Dargah, brought this to his attention, Ananthamurthy
apparently admitted to an error of judgement. He asked Ramzan Dargah to write a
note, which he had promised to append as a postscript to the essay.
Ananthamurthy ends with the sentence: ‘The earth will begin to speak when
production reaches a point of nausea after endless gobbling up of resources.’
This feeling of nausea after gluttony is already a reality in America and
Western Europe. But can India ever reach that state? India, unlike America, is
not an imperialist power. It cannot even be a colonial power. That is why these
words of Ananthamurthy sound like the burp of a hungry man. But it is not in
his nature to speak like a prophet. Though he often writes with the passion of
a poet, the dominant tone of ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’ is finally that of a
skeptic.
Ananthamurthy has often
called himself a ‘critical insider’. Such a writer cannot write about the
phenomena of his own time with the indulgence and sentimentality of a poet. It
is abundantly clear, in every page of the book, that he rejects Savarkar’s
ideas outright. He believes that this philosophy can enamour people at certain
points in history which only intensifies its potential for evil. Gandhiji’s
ideas do not have the same mass appeal. This is, in fact, one of the reasons
for Ananthamurthy’s enormous respect for Gandhiji.
Besides Gandhiji, Ananthamurthy presents Lohia,
Nehru, Ambedkar, Marx and Indian Marxists as potential choices before India
against Savarkar. He does not accept Gandhiji with the same unambiguous
certainty with which he rejects Savarkar. He does not forget the fact that
Gandhian ideology is being relegated further and further to the background day
by day. Gandhiji is for him a pole star. An ideal, yes, but beyond reach. He
has written this essay as if groping to find a path in the darkness of our
times when no alterative politics is visible.
Ananthamurthy, the
socialist, had to operate in troubled times when right-wing politics had gained
an upper hand and the left had lost its lustre. The despair that made him
declare he would not want to live in an India where Narendra Modi was
victorious is also what made him write ‘Hindutva or Hind Swaraj?’
* Translated from
Kannada by Bageshree S.
** G. Rajashekhar is the
author of Kagodu Satyagraha, a recounting of the peasant movement in a
village in Karnataka.
State of nature (Prakriti)
U.R. ANANTHAMURTHY
TALKING as if words were
exploding out of his mouth like popcorn from a frying pan, what will it get
him? Narayana, standing on one leg and learning against a pillar, a sour look
on his downcast face, was shaking as if a demon possessed him. Sankappayya was
contorted with anger.
Great, the boy has
finally grown up. Who else would have the nerve to talk back to the man who
gave him birth? How fashionable he looks, hair combed back, fancy scarf around
the neck, like a city loafer; probably has a packet of bidis and a box of matches in his pocket, too.
Sankappayya went on
snickering and slicing the areca nut.
Sitamma peeked out of
the kitchen, and seeing her husband and son confronting one another, she went
back to grating coconut. After putting the sandigeout in the courtyard to
dry in the sun, Lakshmi came out on the verandah and stood there. Unable to
look into her father’s eyes as he wiped the sweat away with a kerchief, while
her brother stood there on one leg in that strange posture, she felt a little
uneasy. She went into the kitchen and asked, ‘What’s going on, Mother?’ Sitamma
only said ‘Shh!’ and Lakshmi fell silent.
Shanta came running up,
the hem of her skirt in her hand. Not understanding why her father and brother
were confronting one another but enjoying the show, she put her chin on
Sankappayya’s shoulder and brought her lips near his ear. ‘Can I get you some
lime for your betel nut?’ She looked mischievously at her brother. How vain he
is, with the notebook and pen in his pocket. Once a week, flashlight in hand,
he goes to town to see a film and never takes me. Yet, if Appa so much as looks
at him, he almost starts to cry. But she didn’t say anything. She was afraid he
might hit her when Father wasn’t looking.
Shanta, untying
Sankappayya’s knotted tuft of hair, quipped, ‘Uttara’s brave only in front of
the kitchen fire,’1 in response to the conversation between mother
and son that could now be heard from where she was sitting with her father on
the verandah. She laughed, but glancing at her father’s face she felt confused.
*
Mother, I’m telling you,
that 20,000 rupee debt Father incurred is something he has to answer for
himself. I wasn’t born to rot in this hole. Your brother has asked me to join
him in running a restaurant in Shimoga. I tell you, I’m ready to leave home
this minute, just in the clothes I’m wearing. My relationship with father is
finished.
Sankappayya stood up,
brushing aside Shanta’s hand as she playfully twisted his mustache. Shanta, who
was already feeling confused, didn’t know what else to do and began biting her
nails.
Nani, why should you be
angry with me? You know he doesn’t listen to what I have to say either.
Thousands were poured into that useless orange grove madness. The whole village
told him not to do it – did he listen? ‘The rest of the world can go to hell’ –
that’s how he feels, and he can’t see beyond his own nose. Six years, and not
one crop harvested.
Oranges will never grow
in that cursed piece of land, isn’t that what the village officer himself said
to Father, over and over again? As if talking to a parrot.
In this cursed hole,
it’s the same story every day. I’m sick and tired of struggling. Today, a tiger
picks off a cow; tomorrow, a leopard picks off a dog. I can’t keep count any
more. Kogga was saying it now seems that a wild elephant is stomping around
somewhere. As if that weren’t enough, blight has hit the areca nut crop, and
malaria has struck again. Tell me, son, why live and die here if you can’t see
a single paise coming into your pocket?
Isn’t that the truth,
Mother. Why doesn’t he listen to Shanbhog, at least? He’s the village officer
and he given his son his consent to open the restaurant with me. At least that
boy is lucky.
No doubt, but what sin I
committed in a past life, to wind up marrying him, I don’t know. What you
gained by being born in my womb I don’t know. The golden necklace with four
strands that my father gave me, along with the earrings and the gold belt –
have I been able to keep them? No, it’s all gone to the bank for that orange
grove madness. If I still had them, I would have given them to you, and told
you to do what you want and be happy.
You know, Mother, it’s
not as simple as he thinks. This is hereditary property we’re talking about. I
have rights too. Do you understand what I’m saying? Father needs to understand
this, and then talk to me.
Shanta wondered why
Father didn’t go and slap her brother’s face. She stared in disbelief at her
father with her big eyes.
As if these weren’t
blessings enough, it wasn’t six months after her marriage that Lakshmi lost her
husband and came back home with her forehead bare.2 I had told him not to tie my daughter to the neck of Devayya’s
son. But does either of us have a voice in this house? When he heard that his
son-in-law died, did he shed a single tear? Without a word he went straight to
his cursed orange grove. Let me tell you, his sin couldn’t be washed away even
in seven lifetimes. What’s the point of this farming of his when it brings the
family no happiness? Why he gives his children such grief, God only knows.
Why are you crying, Mother?
Untying the string of
dried ranja flowers from her hair, Shanta looked curiously at her father’s
contorted face. Like a man possessed, Sankappayya angrily lunged at Kariya, the
servant standing outside the gate with his arms folded across his chest. ‘Get
to work!’ he shouted, and began pacing back and forth. Then he stood still as
if trying to remember something.
My stomach churns, Nani,
when I start to think about Lakshmi. Doesn’t she want to live happily like
other women? Her father may think it is enough for her to have his face to look
at. Listen, son, I want to go with you wherever you are. I can’t live here like
dirt beneath his feet. I want to get out of this hole, and live happily with my
son – if only for a day or two.
I’ll take care of it,
Mother. He can’t lord it over me any more. Kittanna and your brother and I will
open a restaurant in Shimoga. Done. Let the sky fall down; I won’t be afraid.
Sankappayya appeared
before them with such sudden force that Narayana’s voice caught in his throat.
Shanta laughed at her brother as he began to retreat, step by step, deeper into
the kitchen in embarrassment. Sitamma, looking at the figure of her husband
standing there, lowered her head and returned to grating the coconut, now a
mere shell. His whole body irritated by the scraping sound, Sankappayya felt
like bashing in his wife’s head, and only gained control of his anger by
clenching the rod of the milk-churn.
‘Narayana, enough!’ he
said, raising his voice. ‘If I don’t give you money to open a restaurant, what
are you going to do about it?’ With that, he took the rod and rammed it to the
bottom of the churn. Narayana swallowed the thought that he would go to court
to get his share if necessary, and lowered his head.
Sankappayya turned to
his wife, who was thinking: when he starts screaming, it’s as if the very tiles
are going to fly off the roof. And he said in a softer but still angry voice,
‘Was it Lakshmi herself that told you what bliss it is to live with her father,
or was that your own nonsense? Speak up!’
Looking at Sitamma’s
ugly, crimson face while she grated the empty coconut shell, he felt disgusted.
How hideous she is, he thought. And yet – wasn’t she his wedded wife? He had
never even looked at another woman in his life. Still, she had joined sides
with her son and now was standing against him. ‘Pshaw!’ he mumbled in disgust
as he went back to the verandah. Drying his armpits with the cloth he carried,
he said in a very soft voice, ‘Where is Lakshmi, Shanta?’
*
As he passed through the
shrine room, he said out loud, ‘Absolutely not, impossible! They can stand on
their heads if they want. As the elder of the family, the one who performs the
Vow to the Cosmic Serpent, to the Golden Goddess, to the Elephant-headed God,
I’m not about to listen to this puny boy or this money-hungry wife, and give
away the deed to the garden and rice fields that my family has worked for
generations in a desperate struggle with the hills. And for what? To sell food
in a restaurant – for a Brahman to sell food in Shimoga, of all things! We’ll
see who wins this one.’
He stuck the sickle in
the belt at his waist as he went out. When Shanta, who was gathering ranja
flowers, threw a look at him as if to say, ‘Appa, shall I come with you?’ in
his soul he felt a sudden rush of happiness. Yet he said to himself, ‘Even if
none of my flesh and blood were here, I would stay on here. On that I’d swear
an oath and submit to an ordeal if necessary. That boy is nothing but a sissy,
wandering around town smoking bidis. I can cut firewood, three cartloads full,
even now. This son will never bring the family honor, will he? I’m going to
drag him out of there by the scruff of his neck if he doesn’t hold his tongue.
I won’t put up with it any more.’
He walked quickly,
climbing the hill behind the house, and saw Lakshmi gathering matti leaves to
make shampoo. What did he really want to ask her? Did he want to ask, ‘Was it
my fault, Lakshmi, that you had to come back to your father’s house as a
longhaired3 widow?’ Or did he want to say, ‘So what if your
husband did die? Don’t you have a father who will see to it that you’ll never
want for anything?’ He looked at her bare forehead, searching for words. He
felt happy when she asked, ‘Where are you off to, Father, in this heat?’
Yesterday, she and Shanta had insisted he take a massage bath and had massaged
his body with oil. They had him sit in the tub, and they poured water on him. After
the bath, they made the bed and put two rugs on him and said, ‘You have to
sweat a lot, Father.’ And as Lakshmi had sat by his side, what had he wanted to
say? How could he tell her the things he never felt like saying to his wife, or
his son, or his relatives? ‘Lakshmi, this time if the areca price goes up, and
I make 5,000 to 6,000 rupees, and get some oranges, too, I’ll pay off the debts
and fix up the house.’ Absent-mindedly, Lakshmi, who had been listening to her
father, interrupted: ‘Father, why don’t you tell that to Mother, and brother as
well?’ Sankappayya then thought to himself, ‘No, that isn’t what I wanted to
say.’ It was always like this – if he started to talk, what he felt was one
thing, what he said was another. Some tightness inside him never let what was
in the heart come into the mouth. ‘I’m coming to eat. Soak the matti leaves,
and you and Shanta can bathe. I’ll open the mountain cistern for you,’ he said,
and turned away. Lakshmi said, ‘No, don’t Father.’ ‘What has gotten into you that
you don’t want to wash your hair?’ he scolded, and went off without waiting for
an answer.
*
What if he were to take
from his trunk the silver medal that the district commissioner sahib had given
him eight years ago to honour him as the best farmer of Malnad, and to say,
‘Lakshmi, this is for you to keep’? The girl might feel happy. It would be good
if Shanta were with me now, he thought. She would be scampering about here and
there, picking some wild fruit or other, chattering on and on. Even this child understands,
not to speak of Lakshmi. This work isn’t something one does out of greed for
money. It, too, is a kind of spiritual discipline, no different from holding
back the wild sense organs and demanding they keep still. An act of asceticism.
What do you gain running around with your dhoti loose. This is work, not like
that sissy’s running a restaurant. That spineless boy has got to understand the
difference here. I’ll put the money I get from my areca nut sales into the
orange grove, and then we’ll see whether or not the land yields oranges. The
men of Kodagu aren’t the only ones who can raise oranges. I’ve only got to keep
struggling a while – three, maybe four years. With the money left over after I
clear my debts, I’ll put in a kerosene oil pump for the pond at the back of the
house, like Krishna Bhatta’s, and I’ll raise whatever can grow in the fallow
land to the left of the house.
He stood near the pond,
trying to imagine what Lakshmi would say about his plans. (He suddenly
remembered her bare forehead as he was letting out the cistern water for her
bath.) As long as I’m hale and hearty, what if her husband is dead, or anyone
else, why should she be miserable? And he remembered how Lakshmi had finished
stringing the ranja flowers Shanta had brought, which the widowed girl herself
could never wear again, and how she had wiped tears from her eyes. Sankappayya
stood a moment, taken aback, as he let out the water. It may be a natural
desire; but why shouldn’t she, too, struggle and exercise self-control, as I
do, he thought as he turned toward his garden. We’ll see whether or not I can
get oranges out of my garden. They think they can make easy money running a
restaurant, but do they have the guts to take me on?
As he entered the sacred
grove, he unwound the cloth he wore around his head, and said to himself, ‘From
now on I will only eat food cooked by Lakshmi. My wife and son can go to hell.
I am still strong. This time, if the price of areca nut goes up, everything
will be all right. But what if the boy listens to her brother and takes me to
court, what will I do then? Nobody in our family has ever gone to court.’ His
pace slowed. ‘Dear God, the son born from my loins, the wife I wed, united
against me.’ He picked off the leeches from his feet, and sighed. ‘I don’t care
what happens, I won’t give in. If necessary I will ask Lakshmi if what I’m
doing is right. If she supports me, we’ll see if they can stick out their
tongues at me. I’d cut them to pieces without a moment’s hesitation.’
*
He stood beside the deep
chasm in the middle of the forest, and peered into the depths. When he was
young, his father would bring him there, and say, ‘Earth, sometimes, cannot
bear the burden of her hills. Then she sinks, and these chasms are created.’
‘If Shanta were with me,’ he thought, ‘it would be good. "You mean even
the earth sometimes trembles, Appa?" she would ask, in wonder, and open
her eyes wide and look at me. My soul would then feel cool.’
Sankappayya’s eyes,
which had peered into the bottom of the pit, became small and then opened wide
and then slowly closed. The sight he had just seen took possession of his body
entirely, and he began to tremble. Then he opened his eyes again, looked
straight down, fearlessly. Like burning coal was the look of the tiger that was
lying at the bottom of the chasm. Yes, just like him it opened its eyes,
impassively. It’s true. As if possessed he stood there. Why he didn’t feel like
screaming or turning tail was a wonder, a real wonder. What is it he is feeling
now, that he doesn’t want to share with anyone, not even with Lakshmi? What is
it that came coursing through his whole body, coursing with a roar through his
whole body? The only thing that became clear to him was the thought that if one
must live, one should live like the tiger. He said this out loud, was surprised
he did so, and began to walk.
*
He started awake,
sweating profusely.
Rice field.
Jackfruit tree.
A thorn stepped on.
Standing before him was
Shanbhog. But he didn’t tell him he saw a tiger in the chasm.
‘Say, Sankappayya, are
you heading toward the garden?’ Sankappayya only nodded. As Shanbhog opened his
snuff box, he thought it a prelude to further conversation, and stopped
absent-mindedly.
‘Why should we stand in
the way of the youngsters? Look, Sankappayya, what I want to talk to you about
is ... isn’t it all out of our hands? Take for example Lakshmi, did you ever
dream that such a thing would ever happen to Lakshmi?’
Ah, Shanbhog. Why should
what happened to Lakshmi be of any concern to you? Sankappayya’s brow knitted.
‘The writing of fate
can’t be wiped out. That’s why I say it’s futile, all this struggling and
wanting things to happen in a particular manner, and pounding your head against
a wall about it. Take for instance the orange grove. I tell you, your
brother-in-law, my son Kittanna, and your son want to open a restaurant There’s
no profit in this farming, I tell you – why beat your head against a hill.
There’s more cash in a restaurant, I tell you….’
‘Mind your own business,
Shanbhog, and stop shooting off your mouth.’
‘Look at this Brahman’s
coarseness,’ thought Shanbhog, his face distorted in an artificial smile. But
as he looked at Sankappayya’s eyes, he felt uneasy. Before Shanbhog could
recover his composure, Sankappayya left, meditating on the eyes of the tiger
that flamed like torches.
As Sankappayya marched
off like a soldier, he suddenly wanted to gather red hibiscus flowers by the
basketful and worship the goddess Durga. All by himself, on the verandah, he
will draw the sacred circle with red powder. In the middle of the circle, he
will install the Great Mother. By the time the east turns red, he will have
taken the holy bath, and be wearing the red silk lower garment for worship. His
forehead will be smeared with sacred ash. With his neck adorned with a necklace
of rudraksha beads, he will be chanting the mantras. He will worship the Goddess, so that the forest
trembles, and the earth on which you sit trembles. The sinners, sissies,
cowards, evil doers will tremble in their hearts. The holy sound of the Vedas
will fill the air, and spread all-pervading. And then, riding her tiger, the
great Mother Goddess will become visible in actual form. She will embrace him,
fondling his whole body. ‘Body, bone, flesh, nerves, I am absorbed into Her.’
‘Shanta should be
sitting by my side, wearing the red silk skirt,’ he thought, ‘grinding the
sandalwood paste while the oil lamp bums.
‘What does it matter if
Lakshmi is a longhaired widow. She should be wearing the yellow cloth of the
deity, and sitting by my side in deep meditation.
‘I myself will be
worshipping with total absorption, like sugarcane being squeezed in the press.
And as I do, on Lakshmi’s forehead there will be a red vermilion dot like a
drop of blood, it will smile upon her forehead. It will smile, the entire
orange garden will bear red, red fruit. The forest, hill, and valley will
become spellbound by mantras, and will fall at my feet The eunuchs and the sissies will be cut to
pieces, and their blood will come pouring out. And if in the course of the
service that wife of mine dares interrupt, I will rip off her wedding necklace
and throw her out of the house,’ he thought. And suddenly he felt giddy.
He saw his garden. It
looked like a widow with a shaven head. ‘My areca nut trees, their green
foliage once swaying in the wind … why are they all lying about uprooted? Why
are the banana trees scattered topsy-turvy like this? And the areca flowers,
the betel-leaf creepers, why have they been trampled under foot?’ And he cried
out loud, ‘Oh God, Mother!’
‘Hey, Kariya! Are you
dead or what?’ he started to scream. There was no answer. ‘Dear God, everything
has been destroyed by that wild elephant.’ Stumbling over the areca trees, he
ran off.
Kariya was snoring,
drunk, on the verandah. Near his head, broken eggs and pieces of bread. All
over the verandah jackfruit remains and seeds. The sickle thrown into a corner,
after he had lost his senses. From the snoring man’s mouth saliva dripped,
telling a tale of sweet dreams.
A water buffalo came
lumbering up drawn by the smell of the jackfruit leavings. When the mud on its
body rubbed off on him, Sankappayya came to his senses. As his hand went to the
sickle at his waist, he felt giddier, and his vision darkened. He struggled to
regain his calm for just a moment, but felt sick from the smell of toddy, and
turned and left.
*
In the hot noonday sun,
burning straight down on the top of the head, stupor. On hills like dissected
limbs.
Where mango tree,
jackfruit tree, the blackberry grew here and there in intervals, where cane
grew in clusters; in sharp shadows, in the sky filled with fire, indifference
and satiety.
Now and then a crow
thirsting.
Woodpecker searching for
water in a tree. Beyond that, only some bees buzzing. In the muddy ponds, the
water buffaloes lying, lowing.
‘Is this all
unconnected?’ Sankappayya thought, disoriented. ‘Not the time to be awake and
worrying. This is a time to be asleep, and forget oneself. Only if the bones
didn’t quarrel with the flesh, and the nerves didn’t quarrel with the heart and
with the liver would there be fulfillment Where there is absolute inactivity,
fulfillment
‘If the elephant goes on
a rampage, let him. Let earth’s mouth gape wide and mock me. I will strangle
them both, wife and son,’ he thought.
But something went wrong
– one thought kept coming to him again and again. If Lakshmi asked, ‘Why are
you acting like this, Father?’ he thought he would say, ‘The elephant entered
the garden and everything went wrong.’ In the forest, where not a single being
was to be found, he stood alone and said aloud, ‘Oh Lakshmi, an elephant came
in, and all my work was destroyed.’
On the way, he picked
some cashew fruits thinking Lakshmi would like them. He picked some more fruit,
wild white raspberries for Shanta. He thought, ‘If that Shanbhog, or his son
Kitta, or his ugly-faced wife, or his own sissy son were to come and give me
any advice – "Have you finally learned your lesson, now that the elephant
has destroyed the garden? Will you ever pay off your debts, will you ever get
fruit out of that orange grove?" – I would smash in their teeth.
‘It’s only because I am
walking so fast that my legs are growing weak. Only the hot sun,’ he thought as
his eyes grew cloudy. ‘If Krishna Bhatta comes and bothers me for the debts, I
will spit in his face,’ he thought, and he tightly gripped the sickle at his
waist.
Swallowing spittle to
wet his throat, he thought he would call to his wife and say, ‘I won’t drink
any water you touch. Get out of the house! Lakshmi and Shanta are here, they
will cook my rice.’ As he was thinking this, he realized he had lost his way.
He had come to the foothills and became confused. He began to wonder, ‘The path
that I have walked all these days, how could I lose it?’ And he looked at the
height that his weak legs could not climb.
He wanted to say out
loud, ‘I have lost my way.’ ‘I have lost my way,’ he whispered through his
parched throat, looking at the cluster of bamboo to his left, and the bush
beyond it. He held his hand up to his eyes and wondered what was over there,
where the grass had grown almost as tall as a person. And trying to swallow
spittle to wet his throat, he went a few steps further.
He felt as if he had
tripped over a step. He covered his eyes with his cloth.
*
Lakshmi lay blissfully,
embracing Shambog’s son Kitta in the shade.
*
‘Have I lost my way?’
Like a light that begins
to grow in an earthen lamp, the red-pointed utterance lighted up in the
darkness of his mind. Its light began to spread into all the nooks and crannies
of his mind. Monkeys on the treetops bared their teeth.
‘Did I lose my way?’
‘No,’ he said, as he
stood again on the edge of the chasm, clenched his teeth and looked at the
emptiness in the bowels of the chasm. ‘Shall I turn left and go to Krishna
Bhatta’s house, or shall I go straight to my house?’ The sharp red sentence was
spreading. As he heard footsteps, he remembered the monkey baring its teeth,
and turned and looked. Shanbhog was there.
‘Did you hear,
Sankappayya?’
‘Huh?’
‘There was a tiger, it
seems, sleeping listlessly in the chasm without a care in the world. The Kogga
came up from behind, it seems, and shot at it.’
Like a tree standing
calm in every leaf after a storm, Sankappayya stood there. Then he went
straight to the house of Krishna Bhatta.
*
One evening, some six
months later, seeing Sankappayya drag his feet along on the edge of the rice
field, the city merchant Ahmed Bari greeted him, ‘Salaam.’ Casually starting a
conversation he said, ‘I hear you are alone, farming only a rice field, and
that you sold your garden and house to Krishna Bhatta and sent all your family to
Shimoga. Is it true?’ he said, lighting a bidi. Sankappayya didn’t speak, but nodded his head.
He also nodded his head when he was asked whether he had seen how the orange
grove had at last blossomed. ‘Krishna Bhatta wanted me to pay 850 rupees, but I
said, not more than 700, and I succeeded in bringing him down at last. Do you
think I’ll wind up taking a loss?’
‘Probably not.’
‘What a pity, aren’t you
bored, living alone?’ asked Bari, and turning his back to the wind carefully
lighted up the bidi again.
‘Why should I feel
bored,’ said Sankappayya, and went back to his shack.
He didn’t want to eat.
Who wants to light up an ash-filled oven, and cook rice? The earthen lamp went
out when the wind blew, and he went out to the verandah. Because it was new
moon, there was no light. Till midnight, he wandered around the verandah. He
took the cloth from his waistband, tied it around his head, came back to the
platform made of the wood of the jackfruit tree, and put one of his feet there,
feeling weary. When everyone had been ready to go, Shanta had stood near the well,
putting her hand on the rim. She had looked at me, he thought, as if to say, I
want to stay with you, Appa. I shouldn’t have scolded her. If she were with me
now, she would be leaning against me and twisting my gray mustache. And as she
breathed upon my neck, I could have stroked her soft black hair.
Sankappayya’s legs
ached. He sighed, ‘Ah, Mother,’ and wiped his eyes with his cloth. An old cow
belonging to who knows what house came up and sniffed him, and he scratched its
neck.
* Translated by the
author in collaboration with Sheldon Pollock.
** I am deeply grateful
to Narayan Hegde for a number of helpful comments. All remaining errors are my
own (SP).
Footnotes:
1. Uttara is a braggart
in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata (4.34).
2. Hindu wives wear a
dot of vermilion on the forehead as an auspicious mark.
3. Hindu widows are
often forced to shave their heads. Lakshmi is permitted by her father to wear
her hair long.
