In a way the man was crafted like a novel where every
sentence was a nuance, every line a strand from memory. Memory was the
commons from which his ideas emerged. Yet, he added to memory the art of
conversation. He was a remarkable listener and he crafted friendship like
his stories. He had a huge following but never considered it as a mass, a
collections of fans. Each individual, housewife, critic, bureaucrat,
school kid, taxi driver felt a personal link to him, a particular claim, a
memory, a special moment of remembrance. He was a ganglion of all who knew
him. Each story was concrete, personal and particular.
In that he was different from almost any intellectual I
knew. For example, some are obsessed with work but they collect nuggets of
information, not people. Others are admired for what
they write but one does not quite want to meet them.
URA moved like a happy bee pollinating a community. He thrived on the
little moments, morsels enjoyed in anonymity. He had an openness and trust
which allowed people
to quarrel with him and yet he hugged them in welcome
the next day. One could differ with him and yet had to love the man. There
was something so endearing about him. He was a guru but had neither gurukul
nor gharana. He loved the openness of café intellectuals which he
grew on, the give and take of celebrating ideas. He thrived on the yeast
of conversation and he realized politics without the art of difference is
no longer politics.
He was a teacher, an exemplar. He could be firm. I
remember at one Ninasam session, in Heggodu, my attention was wandering. I
was tired after a long lecture, a bit irritated with the questions. He
reprimanded me quietly. ‘Listen, learn and respond, you owe it to them.’
He was an immaculate listener. He could take any question, even a dull one
and turn it into a little work of art to which one wanted to immediately
respond. In a culture where intellectuals are content to score points, he
connected them into a picture. Yet, he could stand alone in an
intellectual fray, admitting that people were angry with him. He was
passionate about his ideas and their demands. Often he would be
indifferent to readers when experimenting with an idea. ‘Then I have to
write myself out.’ He was supple about himself.
URA was born on 21 December 1932 in the kingdom of
Mysore, lived in a forest and as a brahmin boy lived out the logic of
pollution at its most intricate level. He lived in a world where
everything was sacred. A forest in childhood is a sensorium of fears,
sounds, smells, where each night brings its own trail of anxiety. Fear
needs to be domesticated by summoning the Gods, by invoking prayer, and
without these tremors of fear, no story can be born, no myth relived. A
forest also gives a sense of the sacred, providing a train of taboos, of
worlds that one should not touch. Violation of taboos brings the Gods down
on you and the first fights of rationalism and its protests are acts of
sacrilege, of piddling in defiance on temple stones. Oddly, even protest
has its rituals in a brahminic world, where rituals mark all things.
Between taboo, ritual and the sacred, a brahminic world creates its weave,
implicating everyone mercilessly in it. Even critics and rebels are but
different kinds of storytellers showing how deeply society has encoded
them. These childhood years marked him as a sociologist of ritual, where
even protest as drama enacts a variant of society.
Beyond ritual and its fascinations, the play of ideas
was critical to URA. Maybe every act, every debate, is a re-enactment of
the conversations in a college canteen, where an idea is always a commons,
where each debate ploughs a domain till it becomes richer. A few exemplary
teachers and a hunger for ideas and friendship can create an intellectual
community. That richness of memory becomes the creation myth of every
later conversation. Conversation becomes a compost heap which perpetually
renews itself. The ascetic and the aesthetic combine here to create a
style which is unforgettable. One recites the name of every writer and
journalist as if one is savouring each creative act, each a puffball of
memories, works, debates. Kuvempu. Govindaswamy, Ramanujan, Subbanna,
Karnad, Chitre, Kasaravalli, Nagaraj and, as the years go on, a younger
generation feasting on a past, proud of a language that has given them a
world in common.
It was a world where swadeshi and swaraj
combined unconsciously and effortlessly. Swadeshi was the local
school teaching vernacular. Yet swadeshi was never parochial, never
confined to the local. Locality was about rootedness, an embeddedness, of
languages, soil and cuisine which smelt of local in all its variants, the
sensuality of the everyday. Through translation, through interpretation,
swadeshi became swaraj not only through the academic cycles of
storytelling, but through interpretations, re-reading, where every story
becomes a cosmos of reinterpretations. Such worlds revere the storyteller.
URA was a trickster who could put Galileo and Gandhi, Milton and Tagore, Jatra,
Yakshagana and Kabuki together. Retelling is important because
stories have to be retold, to be renewed. Retelling is an act of
trusteeship and the storyteller an indispensable trustee of society. It
reminds one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, The Storyteller, where
a tribe survives as long as their story is told again and again.
This issue then is a tribute to a storyteller, who was
a public intellectual. It is an attempt to analyze his ideas, his life,
his milieu, as tribute and as critique. It asks the following questions.
What does the nature of language mean to a writer? What does it mean to be
a revolutionary in a ritualistic world? How does one carry out a
conversation of ideas which affects every citizen? How does one compost
childhood into the imagination? What is translation? How does one make
democracy more creative and the political more inventive? What is the role
of memory and invention in our culture? What is the relation between
politics and the novel? What does writing as creativity tell us about
other arts? Can listening to music tell you about writing?
This is not a journal of techniques of a how to do it
book. It is a quarrel, a set of conversations with an extraordinary man.
One can see him in the mind’s eye consuming it like another story,
responding like another Scheherazade with another ‘Once there was…’
