Writer U.R. Ananthamurthy, who passed away recently, had never come around to publishing the doctoral thesis he submitted to the University of Birmingham in 1966 till his last days. Though he agreed to publish it and also wrote a foreword recently, he did not live long enough to see it in print.
The thesis — Politics and Fiction in the 1930s: Studies in Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward — is being published by Abhinava Prakashana and is expected to hit the stands in October.
In the foreword, Ananthamurthy has recounted how he had actually intended to study D.H. Lawrence, and it was the novelist and his guide Malcolm Bradbury who suggested that instead he study Edward Upward. Upward had written Kafkaesque stories in the 1930s but later gave up writing as he thought that his middle class sensibilities could not reflect the realities of the times when Nazism had begun to grow in Germany.
The doctoral thesis was significant as Edward Upward renewed his interest in creative writing and returned to his desk after the thesis and an interaction with U.R. Ananthamurthy.
The period of 1963-66, when he was in the University of Birmingham, was very productive for the writer, as he wrote his critically acclaimed works ‘Samskara’, ‘Clip Joint’ and ‘Mouni’ during that time. This may have also led him to not publish his thesis.
Ananthamurthy had earlier said he did not publish his thesis as he ‘found it very difficult to be truly bilingual, particularly when one uses language at a high level of concentration of meaning’. He had chosen Kannada as his medium and had decided not to spend any more time on being an English writer, as he had earlier said.
Still relevantN. Manu Chakravarathy, a student of Ananthamurthy, said, “Though the thesis is a study of the writers of 1930s’ Europe, it is still relevant as it deals with the rising dangers of right-wing fascism and the fanaticism of the left wing, at the same time. It is also a critique of the nation state and extreme nationalism that cannot thrive without an enemy.”