A writer and a public intellectual

A review of "The Essential U. R. Ananthamurthy"

Sailen Routray

In Ananthamurthy’s ancestral village in Karnataka, where he spent a significant part of his childhood and adolescence, the house had a front yard. It was essentially a raised platform under a roof made up of the kind of country tiles that were known locally as Mangalore tiles. It was a space occupied by his father and other men. The conversations here dealt with affairs of the world. It was a place suffused with his father’s authority, which drew from his self-taught competence in Kannada, Sanskrit and English. 

The backyard, in contrast, was the preserve of the women of the house, where high languages like English and Sanskrit were absent. It was a space of a promiscuous intermingling of women from all castes, reciprocal exchanges of food, and of gossip and stories, sometimes of a sexual nature. 

In an essay titled ‘Towards the concept of a new nationhood: languages and literatures in India,’ Ananthamurthy extends and generalises this experience to say that ‘Indian literatures in the bhashas have a front yard and a backyard…” The front yard interfaces with other languages, mainly lingua francas, that work as windows and conduits to the larger world, and engages with power and authority. The backyard is the space where the dialects and the local, marginalized tongues flourish, opening up channels to intermingle with the local environment and the realm of the affects. 

Ananthamurthy saw the literature produced in languages like Kannada as a creative tightrope walk between these two spaces of the backyard and the front yard. This is quite evident in his own creative practice as well. His writings work out a renewal of the older structures, of both literary forms and modes of feeling, through a process of dialogic labour in which even the epics work as ‘languages.’ For example, the novel ‘Samskara’ can be read both as an existential novel, and as the critique by a critical insider, of the dehumanizing effects of oppressor castes’ traditions.

However, Ananthamurthy is no naïve social realist. In stories such as ‘Stallion of the sun’ and ‘Akkayaa,’ which come across as autobiographical, the modern self is contrasted with simple, childlike figures, who effortlessly work themselves out of the contradictions in their social context through a radical affirmations of their own vulnerabilities as embodied beings. 

In ‘Ghatashraddha,’ written in the voice (and showing the point of view) of a child who inhabits much the same social milieu that Ananthamurthy himself would have occupied in his early years, the narrator till the end preserves his innocence in the face of much that happens to disabuse him of it. The child lives and studies in a Brahmin household with a young widowed woman and her father, who has taken charge of his education. He sees the brutality that is unleashed on her when it is learnt that she might be pregnant. The child, till the end, identifies with the victim. The overall tone of the narrative, as described by him, is that of disbelief at the unfairness of it all.

In fact, this is perhaps the defining tone of most of his work. It is the stance of a critical insider, who refuses to accept existing social mores of inequality, yet does not accept the trite, standard, borrowed recipes for doing so. This calls for acts of continuous negotiation and struggle. This was true not only of Ananthamurthy’s work, but of his life as well. He got married to a Christian girl, Esther, several years his junior, because they were apparently in love. 

However, the dissimilarities between them became apparent after sometime. These ranged from dietary habits (Ananthamurthy continued to remain a vegetarian, even after marriage) to attitudes towards the extended family. In his autobiography ‘Suragi,’ (ably translated from Kannada into English by S. R. Ramakrishna, and published by Oxford University Press in 2017/18) though, he lovingly describes how his marital relationship evolved over time, to create the space in which both he and Esther could imagine the lives they wanted to lead.   

In both his life and work, U. R. Ananthamurthy contributed to the creation of post-independence literary modernity in India. The ways in which we talk about our experiences of literature in the country, both about its production and consumption, has been indelibly framed by his creative work and critical commentary. One of these relates to the idea of the bhashas. 

When we talk about Indian languages, the colonial trend that continued for some time even after independence, was to refer to them as the vernaculars. This obviously ran into a political problem, as one meaning of ‘vernacular’ is that of the language of home-born slaves. 

Some people also referred to the many languages of India as ‘Indian’ languages. This is of course logical, but it does not work. Is English not an Indian language, or for that matter Persian? Both of these were languages of the ruling, imperial elites, later adopted by significant sections of the local population. But their origins lie outside the geographical boundaries of what we consider as India. The coinage of ‘bhasha literature’ (to refer to literatures produced in languages of Indian origins) that Ananthamurthy used, and was instrumental in popularizing, was one way of addressing this dilemma. 

Ananthamurthy’s work has also been critical in our country in reimagining the role of the writer as a public intellectual. This is despite the fact that he never saw his life’s work as that of a straightforward modernizer. In essays like ‘Why not worship in the nude,’ he argues for the rights of people to worship the mother goddess in the nude, in Chandragutti, a village in Karnataka. At the same time, he has also been a vocal and consistent critique of Hindutva. Between these two positions, he never saw any contradiction.

He saw himself as a Gandhian socialist and sought to rework Gandhian ideas in the idiom of Ram Manohar Lohia’s strand of Indian socialism. This has become an increasingly unpopular position to occupy in the India of the twenty first century. Till the end of his life in 2014, he continued to oppose Hindutva, not from the position of a Nehruvian modernizer, but that of a creative genius heeding the call of his conscience.

His creativity is something that he brought to all his work as a public intellectual. In his review of ‘Suragi,’ published on May 12, 2018, in Scroll.in Souradeep Roy describes how when Ananthamurthy was the president of the Kendriya Sahitya Akademi, he was instrumental in publishing an anthology of Pakistani literature in Urdu. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of independence. This volume carried selections of original works in Urdu and of translated works from Pakistan’s other languages such as Sindhi and Punjabi. Soon, it came to be seen as a seminal intervention in Pakistan, as there existed no other comparable volume in Urdu in the country at that point of time, which provided a national view of Pakistan’s literary field carrying representation from all its bhasha literatures. This book went on to become a textbook. 

Today such an intervention by the Kendriya Sahitya Akademi seems almost unthinkable. Therefore, it is all the more reason why the editors N. Manu Chakravarthy and Chandan Gowda are to be congratulated for producing this much required reader. It comprises of extracts from four of his novels, Samskara, Bharathipura, Avasthe and Bhava. Additionally, it carries five of his poems, six short stories, nine essays and speeches, and two fragments from his memoirs. Some of the speeches and essays seem to have been delivered and written first in English, although this has not been clearly specified by the editors. Overall, this is a meticulously edited and well-produced reader and deserves to be widely read and discussed. 

However, I wish some additional representation of his other types of work, for example, more of his original writings in English could have been included by the editors. This would have provided readers with a window into the ways in which Ananthamurthy’s mind worked in English. It would have also made the volume more comprehensive, if a few more of his critical works and essays in Kannada would have been included. 

Although the larger Indian reading public knows Ananthamurthy primarily as a novelist, short story writer, public intellectual and critic, the editors have included some of his poems in the volume. Poems such as ‘Love and duty’ and ‘Gandhi and Henry VIII’ alert us to the frank openness of his poetic universe that can make history and myth inhabit the same photographic frame. I wish the editors could have shared more of his poems with us. I leave you with the full text of his poem titled ‘Gandhi’s chappals’ (1992) which is all of two stanzas, eight lines – 

          As the chappals that
          Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
          a spinner by occupation, had made and walked in
          began to wear off, 
          the mighty British empire also wore off.

          The chappals that the miser wore on his last day,
          yet to wear out,
          are still there. 

Bibliographic details: N. Manu Chakravarthy and Chandan Gowda (Editors). 2023. The essential U. R. Ananthamurthy. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. 298 +xiv Pages. Rs. 899. [Cover photograph by Sreedhara Murthy]. 

Note: A slightly different version of this review was first published in "The Book Review" [47 (9); pp 26-27] in 2023.