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. The Ardhakathanika, 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 the saligrama 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.