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Business News/ Opinion / U.R. Ananthamurthy: interpreter of maladies
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U.R. Ananthamurthy: interpreter of maladies

Ananthamurthy irritated his critics because he wasn't a mealy-mouthed politician who measured his words

Photo: AFP Premium
Photo: AFP

The reactions to the death of U.R. Ananthamurthy reveal less about what the great Kannada writer stood for and more about what his country had become in his final days. A few activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in his home state Karnataka burst firecrackers, as if his departure meant that they had finally scored a point against that argumentative Indian. Lacking taste or being uncouth should not be a crime, and so it was wrong on the part of the state to charge the individuals. Those who celebrated his death showed that India has its equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church, the bizarre American cult which rejoices the deaths of American soldiers or public figures to draw attention to its pathetic little doctrine.

Many who hadn’t heard of Ananthamurthy or of Kannada literature had an opinion about him simply because in the weeks before the Lok Sabha elections, Ananthamurthy had said that if Narendra Modi were to get elected prime minister, he would leave the country. Many of Modi’s supporters mocked him, suggesting he leave, even offering to pay his one-way airfare, presaging that for Modi’s fans at least, there was no room for dissidents in a Modi-ruled India. As Ananthamurthy died, Modi offered his condolences, but the memo hadn’t reached this lot.

This was more than mere schadenfreude. Its noise reverberated through the echo chamber of the Internet, which amplified the volume of these electronic hooligans. Ananthamurthy irritated them because he wasn’t a mealy-mouthed politician who measured his words. As the writer Suketu Mehta, who was his student and later friend, told me: “More people listened to him because he let out angels and demons. He loved a good argument."

To be sure, Ananthamurthy wasn’t always right, and not every opinion he had was necessarily consistent with his other positions. But the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described foolish consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds, and Ananthamurthy’s mind was anything but little. He was human too, which meant he wasn’t perfect. And as he was to reveal in his great novel, Samskara, nobody is perfect.

In Samskara, the people of a Brahmin-dominated village called Durvasapura strongly believed in rituals and orthodoxy. Praneshacharya was the village’s wise man to whom the community turned. Seeking to remain virtuous and pious, he had vowed celibacy and had married a disabled woman. Another Brahmin called Naranappa too lived in the same village, but he ignored rituals and offended the orthodox by eating meat, including the temple’s sacred fish, and keeping the company of Chandri, whom those Brahmins would describe as a woman of easy virtue. Exasperated villagers wanted Naranappa to be evicted from the village, but Praneshacharya thought he could help Naranappa redeem himself.

One day Naranappa died, and the villagers refused to perform his last rites; they didn’t want their perceived purity to be contaminated by his sins. But rituals said Naranappa had to be cremated quickly. Who would take the lead?

It fell upon Praneshacharya to decide how to dispose of Naranappa’s body, and he sought the answer in scriptures. But the scriptures offered broad principles, not a “how-to" tool-kit for life. The Brahmins of the village had elevated those principles into an inflexible moral code.

Praneshacharya sought the answer from the god in his temple. But idols are made of stone—they don’t think, and nor do they speak. They certainly provide comfort to many, but they are inanimate manifestations of an idea.

On his return home, Praneshacharya was none the wiser and he met Chandri. The inevitable happened—remember, humans aren’t perfect—and Praneshacharya broke his vow of celibacy. Chandri returned to her home where she found Naranappa’s body decaying. Defying all norms, she got him cremated quietly and left Durvasapura, leaving Praneshacharya with the dilemma—should he reveal to the Brahmins what had happened? Praneshacharya left, hoping to be liberated from his actions, but actions have consequences, and to face those, Praneshacharya chose to return to Durvasapura, with its moral ambiguities unresolved, because life is like that.

For Ananthamurthy’s critics, there are only binary options—true or false, right or wrong, good or evil, dark or light. But reality is nuanced; it wriggles free from such cartoonish divisions. There is a Praneshacharya and Naranappa in everyone—the one who aspires to live by high standards but falters; and the one who lives by his own rules without causing any physical harm to anyone else, and yet whose conduct offends the sensibilities of the majority.

Such “moral majorities" are often neither moral, nor the majority; the morality they represent is what George Bernard Shaw would ridicule as middle-class morality. As the German novelist Elias Canetti showed in Crowds and Power, and as indeed Ghanshyam Desai’s Gujarati short story, Tolu, revealed, there is nothing redeeming about a crowd running amok. In its own way, Samskara reminded us what our world is like, and Ananthamurthy was the interpreter of our maladies.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.

Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi

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Published: 27 Aug 2014, 05:56 PM IST
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