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Insiders, outsiders and UR Ananthamurthy

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Rahul Jayaram
Rahul JayaramOct 04, 2014 | 12:51

Insiders, outsiders and UR Ananthamurthy

In April 1981, two novelists from very different backgrounds, compared notes in the English department at the University of Mysore. One of them had written on the trials and tribulations of tribal life in Africa, the other on the turmoil in the Brahmin community of south India. Both writers had wrestled with a comparable subject: How do writers belonging to a colonial milieu make sense of Western influence on their community?

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What exactly was disrupting the "traditional" communitarian system? What were the cracks inside the "traditional" way of life? Could the individual in the middle of this muddle formulate an identity that weaved international influences with a local one? The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and the now recently deceased Indian writer Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy were discussing the innards of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. At one moment, while speaking of the revolution that tore through Africa in the early 20th century and the convulsions it brought on Nigerian society, Achebe declares:

“Revolution does not mean only good; it just means change. There is a lot more bad than good. The second generation has witnessed corruption in full force. And we have not really recovered from the injection of that corrupting element into the body politic of our people. What happened was that people were wrenched from their history and put into somebody else’s history where they became a kind of footnote. Their initiative is no longer at their hands and this leads to corruption and irresponsibility. This is the way I read the alternate judgment of Western invasion of our civilisation.” 

The idea of the individual participating in a history that alienates him vexed both writers. Ananthamurthy responded to Achebe like a distinguished musician participating in a jugalbandi:

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“I ask you this question to lead you to a particular problem which I face as a writer, too. When we look at India of the 19th century, we see some intellectuals like Raja Ram Mohan Roy strongly feeling the need for English education. He believed that without English there would be no progress of India and many of us believe so even today, in the way we respond to the West. But we also find India, in its own way, was undergoing a change. So many, like Buddha and Basava in ancient India and medieval India, had revolted against the rigidities of Indian orthodoxy.

Yet Roy wanted the West to save India. This created a cloud in our minds; and we have never been free from a certain kind of complex. For instance, when I read Naipaul in England, where I was a student, I was angry with him. But when I came back to India and saw our corruption and messiness, I felt that Naipaul was right in many ways. When we forget the British and the West, we begin to have our own quarrels with India. To depict the complexities of such a situation, you need a narrator who is both a critical insider and an outsider…”

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Achebe famously wrote in and defended the use of English. Ananthamurthy, fluent in English and Kannada, chose the latter. Both choices were political. If English was empowering for Achebe to converse with a wide colonized African audience, it was the native tongue that inspired Ananthamurthy. “Somebody else’s history” (ie your own) could be expressed in the language of the coloniser and the colonised.

In addressing issues of Indian identity, the mayhem in the upper caste way of life, the rigidities of varna, Ananthamurthy parallels not only Achebe but also his contemporaries in other Indian languages.

MT Vasudevan Nair’s literary observances on the decline and fall of Nair society in Kerala, OV Vijayan’s literary ethnographies of life around Palghat district in Malayalam, D Jayakantan’s aggressive assertions on the tumult in Tamil society, all carry echoes of the notes of discord we hear in Ananthamurthy’s work. These instances underscore a genuine dynamism in the storytelling of our Indian language writers.

It’s a beauty and irony of literature that locally embedded writers can find their doppelgangers in cultures very far away. Achebe and Ananthamurthy agree more than they differ on the influence of the West on Africa or India. Colonisation and its aftermath become experiences provoking self-examination for their characters and the communities they are from.

It’s another beauty and irony of literature that storytellers from the same geographies and histories can differ and how. The world of RK Narayan, set more or less in the same regions and eras where Ananthamurthy’s Vaishnavites and Shaivites pujaris experience their inner and outer struggles, has a distinctly different emotion and rhythm. Issues of Westernisation, modernisation, Indian independence and the caste system, find a relatively milder filtering out in Narayan’s opus.

Malgudi is physically close but emotionally far from Ananthamurthy country. Of course, Narayan wrote in English.

Or consider SL Bhyrappa, the other oak in the world of Kannada letters. Bhyrappa’s literary predilections have led him to retell the Mahabharata (Parva), or like Ananthamurthy portray in deep detail the shattering of the Brahmin way of life (Vamsavriksha – like Ananthamurthy’s Samskara was made into an award-winning film starring Girish Karnad.)

Achebe and Ananthamurthy converged in their concerns and differed in the language they used. Bhyrappa and Ananthamurthy believed in the power and promotion of Indian languages like Kannada. But Ananthamurthy espouses an inclusive Gandhian and Nehruvian idea of India while Bhyrappa has upheld the anti-cow slaughter ban and can appear as an apologist for upper caste unity. A society’s response to crisis often reflects in its literature with writers and artists attacking a problem from varying ends of the spectrum.

A writer can concur with a counterpart very far away and bitterly demur to his literary kith and kin.

In later years, while underlining the predicament of the Indian writer, Ananthamurthy famously quipped: “Neither can we [the Indian writers] go back to the past, nor can we imitate the West.”

The contemporary Indian writer could neither ape the epics that shaped India’s cultural consciousness nor uncritically imbibe the frameworks of Western discourse. It’s odd for Ananthamurthy to have said so.

For he kept going back to the past and kept imitating the West to produce a creative confluence in Kannada writing that makes it a local and universal literature at one go.     

Last updated: August 22, 2016 | 10:28
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