U R Anathamurthy: Colossus who articulated our dilemmas

U R Ananthamurthy, the celebrated Kannada writer who passed away on Friday, completed his last book just before he was admitted to hospital two weeks ago. Despite his frail health and advanced age---he was 82--- he remained a raging public intellectual and a passionate writer till the very end.

Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy studied in a Sanskrit pathashala, and grew up in an orthodox Brahmin mileu. He spoke impeccable English, obtained a PhD from England, and taught English literature throughout his career, but just wouldn’t write in that language. Inspired by the philosophies of Gandhi and Lohia, he believed the Indian writer should express himself in an Indian language, and reach out in a democratic rather than elitist manner. At the same time, he was a crusader against populist writing, and was happy with a small readership for his evocative fiction. His formidable literary rival S L Bhyrappa, whom he denounced as rightist, sells in fantastic numbers, often going into a new edition every day, but Ananthamurthy’s politics never veered in that direction.

Although he wrote poetry, non-fiction and criticism, his novel Samskara perhaps remains his most famous work. It explores how caste dogma and religious scholarship play out in the face of the death of a Brahmin apostate. The book was later made into a pioneering film that inspired many Indian languages to look beyond their escapist excesses. Samskara also intrigued some of the world’s most incisive minds. Erich Fromm, the German psychoanalyst, and V S Naipaul, the Nobel laureate, found in it fascinating revelations about the Indian mind.

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, and honoured with some of India’s biggest awards including the Jnanpith, Ananthamurthy has examined and reexamined the country's biggest dilemmas since Independence. He asks many questions: Are Brahmin and Shudra irreconcilable categories? Is English-medium education impoverishing our emotional lives? How can we retain our self-respect in a post-colonial, globalised age? Are city-slickers destroying our future in the name of development? On many of these questions, Ananthamurthy’s arguments have infuriated the ‘aspirational’ middle-class. Lovers of Indian literature believe he had few peers as a teller of sensitive stories. With his passing, India has lost a literary colossus and provocateur, and a supporter of many causes.