Diverse traditions, communities, thinkers, creative writers, activists, phases of history become points of profound convergence and significant divergence forming great organic antinomies when one opens up to the ranges of thought and experience that U.R. Ananthamurthy carried within himself and freely shared with whoever cared to understand them.
In a truly remarkable manner Ananthamurthy lived through all the conflicting, contradictory and paradoxical aspects of human thought and experience. Never for a moment, either consciously or unconsciously, did he separate ideas from experiences, and was always struggling to comprehend the complexities of their dialectical relationship. It was left to those who tried hard to eliminate reductionist ideologies, simplistic binaries and trivialising dualities to comprehend all these through their dialogues with him.
Ananthamurthy entered my ‘being’ as a teacher and a great personal father figure in 1975. Those were the days when he was a star in Karnataka and was at the forefront of the ‘Navya movement’ (the modernist phase) that had unleashed raging debates in the state. The literary arguments of the ‘Navya’ were essentially intense cultural questions tackling irresolvable conflicts between East and West, tradition and modernity, myth and history, caste, social justice and equality, creating diverse groups selecting and rejecting whatever they chose to believe in. In a way these controversies shaped the ideologies and literary sensibilities of writers and activists and, later, literary/political/social movements like ‘Bandaya’ (protest) and Dalit. It was a tremendous phase of antagonisms that are at work in Karnataka to this day and, I suppose, in the other cultures of India.
It was almost singularly Ananthamurthy who fully embraced all kinds of contraries in his creative works and in his essays on literature, culture and society without, ever, dissolving or privileging any one of them.
As a teacher of English literature he would draw from the literary critical traditions of the West (from Aristotle, through the American new critics to F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams) employing them in the most creative way, while explicating The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, the Greeks, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne, Melville and the literary traditions of England, which formed a major part of the curriculum of departments of English all over.
However, he would immediately correlate them with his own Kannada tradition — Pampa, Kumara Vyasa, Kuvempu, Masti, Karanth, Gopalakrishna Adiga and many others. The old English teaching tradition of creating paradigms out of British/Western literature was never at work in him. For instance, the ancient Vachanakaras (Basava and Allama Prabhu in particular) and Gopalakrishna Adiga became great literary/cultural counterpoints to the metaphysical poets, T.S. Eliot and the other modernists of the west. Lawrence, Camus, Kafka, Sartre, André Gide and the rest were understood in close relation to Kannada writers and Ezhuthachan, Kumaran Ashan, Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Premchand, Tagore, Mowni and Sangam poetry, creating a very complex literary/cultural mosaic that was inclusive and deeply analytical.
The traditions of the West were constantly juxtaposed with the plural traditions of non-western cultures giving rise to the birth of concepts like ‘Bhasha literatures’, ‘the ‘frontyard’ and the ‘backyard’ (which also primarily meant upholding Indian languages and cultures, African, Caribbean writers as crucial to resisting the hegemonising patterns created out of Sanskrit and English).
The most fascinating point here is that all these correlations interrogated the narratives of antagonism and hostility between different linguistic cultural and philosophical traditions.
It was in this sense that a novel like Masti’s Chikaveera Rajendra was taught to us as a great text that critiqued the evils of imperialism/colonialism much before post-colonial theory invaded the departments of English in India. Ananthamurthy would always state in categorical terms that Kannada (in his case) and other languages — as far as other writers were concerned — constituted a literary and a political/ethical choice in resisting the dominance of all ‘master discourses’. Reading and evaluating literary works could never overlook the heterogeneous nature of cultures responding to them.
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The fictional cosmos of Ananthamurthy resonates with ambiguities, dualities and a sensitive ambivalence articulating all the impossibilities for an acutely sensitive individual to be an essentialist/exclusivist in any of her/his choices. The dichotomous nature of cultures and civilisations could only leave the individual in a state of dilemma and anguish. But it is in a state of perplexity and chaos that every individual has to make a moral choice in good faith without resorting to comfortable and comforting solutions. The existential trauma, turmoil and angst of sensitive individuals are truly ‘metaphysical’ conflicts that remove all vague and amorphous notions of benevolent human action that are induced by divisive historical conditions. Ananthamurthy’s creative vision could never endorse easy solutions as definitive answers to the crises of history.
A week ago, Ananthamurthy was sharing with Girish Kasaravalli and me all his anxieties about tribals, oral cultures, science and technology, corporate economics of the globalised world, nationalism, fascism, religious dogmatism and the multiple forms of violence that the modern world system (especially through the nation-state) has been successfully producing, erasing all pluralities of life.
Ananthamurthy, as always, spoke without ever valorising the oppressive systems of the past. For us it was yet another engagement with the Buddha, Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ramana, Sri Narayana Guru, Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Lohia, Ivan Illich, Kabir, the Sufis and other mystics of diverse religious traditions who attained a ‘historical reincarnation’ in a writer-thinker who worked through the monstrosities of history to move beyond them without ever ignoring the schizophrenic consciousness that envelops human beings in the worlds they live in. Turning to the spate of violence of the Indian nation-state in our own times, Ananthamurthy would often turn to the adversarial struggles and ideas of Medha Patkar, Shiv Visvanathan and the resistance movements of Latin America. As he was digging deep into himself what emerged before us was a vision of human civilisation loaded with ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘epiphanic’ dimensions impossible to isolate and separate. The moment fully captured the presence and transcendence of the elements of the “real and the symbolic” in Ananthamurthy’s writings, revealing the inevitability of negotiating with both — the burden that every human being has to carry in all her/his existential states.
