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 feels authentic 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.⁵ Similarly, 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 vacanakaras which 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 the sakshi 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.