It was U.R. Ananthamurthy, the master of contradictions, whom scholars Shiv Visvanathan, N. Manu Chakravarthy and K. Satchidanandan paid homage to at the opening session on the final day of Lit for Life. Before a sparse and scattered audience, Satchidanandan began by reading ‘The Wrinkles on Grandpa’s Shoulder’, a poem by the late Kannada writer that epitomised his bittersweet relationship with tradition, one part endorsement, the other part rejection.
“Ananthamurthy is best remembered for his unacceptability, for the problems of culture that he wrestled with, because they still constitute the crisis of our times,” said Manu, pointing first to Ananthamurthy’s irreverence for textual authority, starting with the Vedas, yet his love for their epistemology, an attitude best seen in his seminal work Samskara .
“He was India’s greatest gossip,” offered Shiv, harking back to his personal friendship with Ananthamurthy, full of conversations that began with stories about people that invariably led to philosophical arguments. “He had a reverence for irreverence; his disrespect for text stemmed from his respect for the context within which they were used,” he said.
Manu also raised Ananthamurthy’s belief in desecrating sacred symbols and places, yet opening them up for people, in a sort of resurrection after the violation. “Was this pseudo-secularism, or was he a failed revolutionary? It was the ambivalence in his philosophy that made his creativity,” he said. In this light, Satchidanandan recalled Ananthamurthy’s great love for the illiterate man, for his knowledge of more colloquial languages than the educated man who usually knew just one.
“He saw the world through the lens of language,” said Shiv, “He would often say that a thing could be true only if it could be stated in two languages.” Ananthamurthy thus held a distant suspicion of English, often wondering whether the language could hold the “textures of Indian life”, observed Satchidanandan, yet when asked to formulate an education policy for Karnataka, he advised that English be taught right from the start, so children would no longer fear the language. “Above all, Ananthamurthy was an impossible creature, a stunning irritant,” said Shiv, “he could drive you crazy with his binaries. The problem was not that he had those binaries, though, but that he wanted to be the hyphen between all binaries.”
