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.