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.