A RENDEZVOUS WITH U.R.ANANTHAMURTHY

My rendezvous with  U. R .Ananthamurthy  began long back, may be three decades back, around 1980, when I  borrowed his novel  Samskara ( beautifully translated into English from Kannada by A. K . Ramanujan) from our University library and thumbed through a part of it quite casually. The dilemma of an agrahara over the conducting of the funeral rites of a Brahmin, Narayanappa, who led a bohemian life and flouted all the rules of Brahmanism without any exception and the sincere effort of the head of the agrahara, Pranesacharya, to resolve the impasse challenged and fascinated the wits of a young reader but the way that the protagonist stranded in the quest of his self in the second part didn’t enthused the amateur bibliophile. But the fix of Pranesacharya haunted me for a long time and it took many years for me to understand that the very dilemma was a trick employed by the writer to launch his protagonist into a scathing introspection, the issue of the funeral rites is constantly evaded till its significance is lost and the very insignificant disposal of the body of Narayanappa by his Muslim friends unceremoniously simply asserts the same. That the understanding that   the Samskara  does not  confined to the  simple funeral rites of an individual but the complex and multi-layered existential cognizance of a man demands certain maturity on the part of the reader.  The encounter with a novel with an open ending and epiphany is something like a revelation to a juvenile reader at that time.

Meanwhile I read an English translation of U R Ananthamurthy’s novella Ghatasradda in the Sahitya Akademi journal,  Indian Literature. Unlike Samskara, it is a straight narrative related from the point of view of a little boy about a young widow who gets pregnant after being seduced by a teacher and the way that her father excommunicates her by performing her funeral rites. Strikingly both the works deal with funeral rites and Brahmanism.  They reminded me of Herman Hesse’s  Siddartha which the writer proclaimed that is a result of his effort to de-Orientalize  himself. A Kannada friend once told me that Samskara and Ghatasradda  are put to lot of criticism in Kannada literature and some critics asserted that Brahmanism didn’t leave Anathamurthy though he left Brahmanism.

I learnt something more about Ananthamurthy through Pattabhi (Thikkavarapu Pattabhirami Reddy), a path breaking poet of Telugu Literature, and the Director and Producer of the movie Samskara whom I met around a decade back. Like Pattabhi, Anathamurthy  was also very much influenced by Dr.Ram Manohar  Lohya and a close associate of socialist leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan, Madhu Limaye and Shanthaveri Gopala Gowda.  He revolted against the traditional things like Pattabhi. He married a Christian, Esther, who was the woman behind his success. He opposed the Emergency promulgated by Indira Gandhi and when Snehalatha Reddy, the wife of Pattabhi passed away after spending eight months in the prison during the emergency, Ananthamurthy condemned Emergency vehemently. Then he almost became a political activist and began to comment and criticize everything took place in the society and sometimes became very much controversial also. He took part in the elections also and contested for the Lok Sabha though he knew that he would be defeated. He disapproved a novel called Avarane  of S L Byrappa, a popular Kannada novelist who advanced Hindu Fundamentalist agenda by distorting the Historical facts in his novel by saying that Byrappa does not know how to write novels. He declared that there was a reference in The Mahabharata that the Brahmins ate beef which was summarily opposed by many Hindu religious leaders. His friends consider that they are well thought out calculated and sculpted political interventions designed to cause ripples of controversy and debate where as his detractors consider them mere sensationalism. But these controversies are quite intriguing as a writer like him resorting to some contemporaneous, parochial and political activism instead of going deeper from the surface and grappling with more concrete and fundamental issues. And at the same time a writer should not become more theoretical and cerebral as he should also take the responsibility  of correcting and guiding the contemporary times also. The way that a writer manages to stand at a right place in between these divergent stands determines the greatness of a writer.

I had the opportunity of meeting Anathamurthy in a Writer’s Meet held in Shillong in September 2010. He participated in a panel session and delivered a lecture on Negotiating India and Bharath in which he pointed out that there is every need to focus more attention on the mother tongue and a great writer would emerge from one’s own mother tongue alone. He was a charming person, great conversationalist and a very good speaker. He endeared every person with whom he came into contact with his polite and humble nature. He could easily make friendship with the people of all ages as he treats everybody as his equal. Those three days with him were one of the most memorable days in my life and I do always cherish them. After going to Bangalore, in an e-mail, he wrote, “You are a friend for life now. When you want me there call me; I will happily come.” I invited him to a Writers Meet held in our University in 2012 but he could not make it due to his ill health.

I tried to procure a CD of   Samskara but in vain.  In her commemorative article on Anathamurthy, Nandana Reddy, the daughter of Pattabhi and Snehalatha pointed out that the film version had a departure from the novel in the later half. In the novel the corpse of Narayanappa is disposed of unceremoniously by his Muslim friends in the middle of the story. But Pattabhi felt that the film would lose its interest if the dead body is disposed of half way through the film as in the novel. He observed that literary devices like dramatic irony could be made use of to keep interest in the novel. But to make the film more absorbed and interesting he started the film with the conflict of to burn or not to burn the body of Narayanappa. But the conflict is resolved in the very end when Praneshacharya returns back to the village to do the cremation himself.  After discussing the same with Anathamurthy Pattabhi made that change to sustain the tempo of the film. In the beginning I was not happy to know that such a deviation took place in the film version but after a close thinking I realized that it was not merely a deviation but also a kind of progression.

Anathamurthy left the world in his inimitable way. It is surprising to know that his last rites were performed to religious convention. His friends once again reiterated that his fascination for the spiritual was deeply imbedded and his inner strength came from this though he broke all traditions. Thus his departure does not leave the people without spurring them to think of many questions about the predicaments of a human being for which the answers are always eluding. A rendezvous with a charismatic writer like U R Anathamurthy never concludes. It continues.

                                                      -MADHURANTHAKAM NARENDRA

 (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, writing in both Telugu and English)