A Life in the World: U.R. Ananthamurthy in Conversation with Chandan Gowda

By U. R. Ananthamurthy and Chandan Gowda

A fascinating portrait of the life and ideas of the great Indian writer and public intellectual, U.R. Ananthamurthy. Between 2012 and 2013, Ananthamurthy shared his personal experiences in a series of lively conversations with academic and writer Chandan Gowda, and reflected on issues that would preoccupy him until the end. Besides the vivid accounts of his childhood, friendships, the evolution of his intellectual life, and public involvements, his passionate ideas on tradition, on India's political culture, and on language and writing make the conversations an engaging and valuable document. A Life in the World -- perhaps the first exercise of its kind done with an Indian writer -- will enthral both general readers as well as admirers of Ananthamurthy's works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper India
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789352776238

U. R. Ananthamurthy

U.R. ANANTHAMURTHY (1932-2014) is one of India's greatest literary figures and public intellectuals. His publications include novels, short stories, poetry, translations and essays in literary and cultural criticism. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan and the Jnanpith Award.

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INTRODUCTION

During a workshop in Bangalore, around seventeen years ago, U.R. Ananthamurthy (URA) turned to me with an unexpected suggestion: ‘You must interview me.’ I had not followed up on the invite. I was in the middle of my dissertation fieldwork and the interview needed preparation.

Ten years later, in 2012, URA fell seriously ill. When I called to find out how he was, I hesitantly asked, ‘Can we go over your experiences and your views on Kannada literature? It will be good to record them.’ He agreed readily, ‘Oh, yes! Come and see me.’

One of the most widely admired writers in the state, URA was also a mesmerizing speaker. His openness, ethical seriousness and warmth enlivened the occasion. Unfurling against a large cultural canvas, his words nudged the listeners out of familiar ways of looking. And, he loved conversation, be it in the company of friends or new acquaintances. The value of an extended exercise where he drew out his ideas and reminiscences was always obvious. Deferring the work any longer seemed foolish.

With the financial support of Azim Premji University, I gathered a small film crew to help with the video recordings at URA’s home in Bengaluru. The shoot happened over ten days between April 2012 and May 2013. In the mornings, URA shared his views in Kannada on the major writers and literary movements of twentieth-century Karnataka. And in the evenings, I interviewed him in English on his childhood experiences and his student days, his friendships, his views on matters in literature, culture and politics.

The initial sessions felt tense. URA had to be spared strain. He had even started dialysis at home around the time our work began. But the crew came to feel at ease soon enough. Rarely did URA show fatigue or make the work seem a hassle. He made the dialysis breaks during the shoot seem matter-of-fact.

Originally scheduled to be held over three months, the ten recording sessions took nearly a year to complete since URA travelled out of town in between. And technical glitches in the storage and transfer of the recorded material brought in more delay afterwards. Intent on having the episodes on Kannada literature aired at the earliest, my efforts focused entirely on editing and bringing them to final form. Telecast as eight one-hour weekly episodes on Doordarshan between June and July 2014, Sahitya Sahavasa (In the Company of Literature) pleased URA immensely. Wishing that literary critics would review the episodes, he had asked over the phone, ‘People should be able to tell how I taught in class, no?’

My work on transcribing, editing and annotating the autobiographical conversations could begin only after URA passed away in August 2014. It remains a regret that I didn’t record a few more conversations with him. The telegraphic remarks would then have found elaboration. His views on several other cultural and political figures would also have made their way into these pages.

URA was born to a Madhva Brahmin family in Thirthahalli, Shivamogga District, in 1932. He spent his boyhood years in an agrahara¹ and did his schooling in Thirthahalli and Shivamogga. After completing his BA and MA in English literature at the University of Mysore, URA taught at colleges in Hassan and Shivamogga before becoming a lecturer in Maharaja’s College, Mysore. He then went to the University of Birmingham on a Commonwealth Fellowship. Finishing his PhD in 1966, he returned to teach English at the University of Mysore and worked there until his retirement in 1992. Apart from his dissertation thesis, he wrote little by way of literary criticism in English. He made his home in the world of Kannada literature. The conversations in this book move across the terrain of these experiences.

In a literary career spanning over six decades, URA wrote five novels, six collections of short stories, thirteen volumes of essays, four volumes of poetry, five volumes of translated poetry, a play, and an autobiography.

URA wrote his first novel, Samskara, in 1965 while he was a student in Birmingham. Though his earlier short story collection titled, Yendendu Mugiyada Kathe (The Never-Ending Story, 1955), had invited critical notice, this novel proved to be a landmark in the phase of Kannada literary modernism (Navya) and remains his most widely discussed work.

The selfhood of Praneshacharya, an austere, self-denying scholar, and arbiter of Madhva morality, is destabilized with the death of a heterodox fellow Brahmin. Did the latter’s rebellious deeds make him ineligible for traditional funeral rites? In the course of the probe, Praneshacharya finds himself on the path of self-awakening, away from the confining community milieu. Samskara holds out the philosophical attractions of individual scepticism, of a search for truth outside of established morality, of the value of affirming the sensual pleasures of the body. Lohia’s ideas of caste equality, D.H. Lawrence’s indictment of the life-denying attitude of Christian morality, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s insistence that truth be sought outside of prior knowledge, the concerns of French existentialism, all of these appear to have mattered for this novel. The novel’s eponymous film adaptation in 1970 pioneered the new wave in Kannada cinema. In subsequent years, six of URA’s other fictional works were adapted for the screen and one turned into a television series.

URA’s second novel, Bharathipura (1974), wrestled with the philosophical difficulties of liberal social reform in India and expressed scepticism towards the modern imagination of caste equality and the rational reform of superstition. Abandoning his studies in England, Jagannatha, the chief protagonist, returns to his village in search of creativity and self-realization. Unable to accept caste untouchability and the ‘irrational’ beliefs about local deities that he finds there, he sets about reforming these practices. His activist efforts, which derive from the ideals of Western liberalism, however, are constantly frustrated. The grounds of reformist critique and political creativity, the novel tacitly suggests, are better evolved from an engagement with the moral thought internal to cultural worlds.

Bharathipura is an important novel in URA’s oeuvre as it departs from Samskara’s acerbic view of tradition as a stultifying force in the lives of individuals and communities. His effort to show the limitations of Western liberal and Marxist thought for evolving a critique of Indian society, which anticipated several themes that came to prominence in post-colonial discussions in academia two decades later, remained a concern until the end.

Based on the life of Shantaveri Gopala Gowda, the socialist leader and his early mentor in Thirthahalli, URA’s third novel, Avasthe (The Predicament, 1978), engages with the difficult fate of political idealism within electoral democracy. The existential challenges that non-rational and religious experiences pose for rational individuals is a parallel concern. URA’s next novel, Bhava (1994), approaches tradition as a source of self-understanding, sidestepping altogether the issue of modernity.

URA’s short stories exhibit a heterogenous range. In ‘Mouni’ (‘The Silent One’, 1966), an areca nut farmer silently protests against an erratic economic system that has defeated him. In ‘Kamaroopi’ (1995), a chance airport encounter with a wheeler-dealer becomes an occasion for confronting the ineluctability of deviousness in the building of political empires. ‘Jaratkaru’ (1995) offers an ironic glance at the less-than-noble calculations underlying the reproduction of samsara.² The dominance of modern knowledges over non-modern ones is revealed with great intensity in ‘Suryana Kudure’ (‘Stallion of the Sun’, 1995). Indian art and Ayurveda are entangled with the global arms trade and surveillance networks in the late short story, ‘Yettanindettana Sambanda?’ (‘Unfathomable Relations’, 2009), which mulls over the constitutive ties between violence and civilization.

The bulk of URA’s written work over the last decade of his life consisted of op-ed essays on a variety of political and cultural issues in Kannada newspapers. He also translated the poetry of Bertolt Brecht, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and William Wordsworth.

Being a writer and a critic with democratic commitments saw an ambivalence inhabit URA’s works. He was consistent, for instance, in his support for affirmative action for Dalits, lower castes and tribals, and for their freedom to choose professions. Belonging to a caste though, he also noted, meant inheriting distinct skills and creative potential, the disappearance of which in modern times must be seen as a diminishment of pluralism. Another instance: formal literacy is necessary for work and life in contemporary society, but the so-called illiterates are also the custodians of valuable knowledges and linguistic creativity. While several of his writer and activist fellow travellers were critical of this ambivalent attitude, keeping such an ambivalence in creative tension, though, helped keep space for multiple political possibilities without foreclosing the future.

URA was a public intellectual in a capacious sense. As a teacher, writer, critic, activist and administrator, he engaged with a vast number of individuals within and outside Karnataka during his lifetime. His non-fiction writings over the decades, which run into more than a dozen books, bear ample testimony to his political idealism. The concerns are various: the significance of Indian languages, the importance of decentralization, the value of common neighbourhood schools, the dangers of religious fundamentalism, the tragic costs of development, to name a few. His robust embrace of the creative and political significance of Indian-language (bhasha) writing earned him regard among the community of bhasha writers. Apart from the circle of writers and artists, political leaders and activists in the farmers’ and Dalit movements were among his close friends. He frequently lent support to local democratic causes. In one instance, he even led a successful campaign to stop mining activities in Kudremukh in Chikmagalur district, in 2001.

URA was unequivocal in his disapproval of the violence of both left- and right-wing groups. In the last years of his life, right-wing Hindu groups frequently targeted him for his democratic views. At the time of his death, he was at work on what he called ‘a political tract’ titled, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj? Viewing the confrontation of Gandhi’s idea of Hind Swaraj and Savarkar’s model of Hindutva as the central tension in contemporary India, this book expresses concern about the rise of fascism and the manic obsession for ‘development’ in the country.

In arriving at the themes and questions for these conversations, I had in mind a broad document of URA’s ideas and experiences. Therefore, in the sixty minutes that we had for each session, I kept the questions focused on matters I knew he cared about, without intervening very much. In a preliminary meeting, I ran the session themes by URA, but the questions themselves evolved over the weeks that followed. He didn’t ask to see them. His responses were spontaneous.

URA preferred narration to explicit analysis, and he spoke with a flow. I have sought to retain a sense for these qualities, which require a careful listening. He did not retract anything he said during the sessions or suggest that his responses be revised. His views did not shift. Only once did I see a deviation in this regard, when his previous dismissive stance towards Indian writing in English mellowed. He never declined to engage with a question. Though, at times, the engagement seemed surprisingly brief or not to have addressed the question directly.

This book offers a sense of his intellectual passions: the notion of a critical insider, the idea of tradition as creative continuity, the indispensability of Indian languages for thinking about India, among several others. The depth of his involvement with the social and political world of his times can also be glimpsed. And his reminiscences of the individuals he knew extend a pleasure of another order altogether.

URA was a civilizational thinker. In arguing that children from well-off and not-so-well-off backgrounds study together in common schools, he points at two losses were that not to happen: first, an episode like the one where Krishna and Sudama, who had studied in the same ashrama, enriched each other will not be seen again and, second, the cruelties of caste will not diminish. In another instance: noting that Karnataka, unlike Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, didn’t oppose the Mandal commission violently, he says that the thirteenth-century Lingayat movement ‘taught us that caste is an illusion’ and that ‘the great Vachana poets had made us ready for reservation’. In a third instance: the desire of Shambuka, a Shudra ascetic in the Ramayana’s Uttara Kanda, to do penance transgressed the caste order, showing that caste was an inscrutable and untenable practice: ‘caste is not something eternal and permanent, but a name given to something we don’t know’.

The analogies, metaphors and memories seen in URA bring in a civilizational depth and continuity to modern-day discussions. In illuminating a moral predicament, they seek to resonate with living normative instincts. The attempt is an artistic one: it composes a picture of the world without the burden of historicism. It resembles a style of thought URA identified in Gandhi, i.e., swadeshi chintane,³ which he explained involved having ‘confidence in your own voice, in your own experience, in ideas based on your own experience’, without being ‘overwhelmed by Western modes of thought’. It was a ‘kind of imagination’ that moved ‘across centuries’.

URA’s relish for metaphors in his own thinking and in that of others becomes amply clear in these pages. Metaphors, for him, bear the imaginative potential of a culture. They are also essential for the life of politics. Ram Manohar Lohia had compared the work of politics, URA recalled to me once, to that of keeping the floor clean. It meant continual effort. There was no point, the metaphor also suggested, in dreaming of a utopia where politics was no longer necessary. Lohia’s metaphoric dismissal of the visions of utopia where politics had ended also had implications for imagining the political activist’s orientation to her work in the present without letting an anxiety about the future overwhelm it.

Secure about his moorings in Indian society, URA didn’t nurture resentment towards the cultural domination of the West. On the contrary, he felt that a Third World writer’s predicament was an enabling one as it brought an awareness of the literary achievements of countries outside his or her own. Being confident about the creative potential of one’s own culture while remaining open to engaging with intellectual conversations from elsewhere also suggests an overcoming of the bitterness of colonial violence. After India, URA remarked, England was the country he loved the most. When I asked him about his encounter with the literary West in England, he misheard in the question Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s complaint about the alienating effects of teaching Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Daffodils’, in Kenya, where the flower wasn’t locally known, and was defensive: ‘Not much difference. As a matter of fact, I waited for the daffodils to appear in England. I would look for them.’

Many of URA’s comparative observations convey a sense of his civilizational confidence. The novels of the Kannada writer, Kuvempu, he notes, offered him a valuable vantage point for understanding ‘the meaning of the quotidian, the everyday life in Joyce’s Ulysses’. Further, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy may be more relevant than the medieval Kannada poet Pampa for his engagement with certain intellectual problems, for an ‘enrichment of the soul’.

With the help of a series of binaries such as marga (classical/mainstream) and desi (folk/marginal), URA sought to identify tensions of domination within a culture and between cultures, and ask that space be made for diverse literary expressions. But that recognition did not bring with it an a priori aesthetic or a normative preference towards either of the binary elements, or harbour doubt towards the creative potential of either of them. Nor did it seek a final resolution between the two in any higher unity.

While his encounter with socialist and Marxist discussions in Shivamogga and Birmingham ensured that the hard facts of economic and historic realities were always kept in view, URA was keen on not letting them eclipse the attention to the inner self, whose