In memoriam

U.R. Ananthamurthy 1932-2014

JUST a few months ago, in the fever leading to the recent elections, at a public interaction in New Delhi, Ananthamurthy charmed his audience consisting of jaded and hostile journalists. A diehard secular editor not known to indulge in hyperbole or hype described him to me as a ‘rock-star’. Let’s keep in mind: Ananthamurthy was an octogenarian on dialysis at that time, and if he came across as a rock-star, there was obviously something deeply charismatic about his persona and the vigour with which he engaged his audience in thinking beyond politics.

And yet, despite his exuberance as a public intellectual, it is sometimes forgotten that Ananthamurthy valued silence. It was in this silence – a writer’s silence, not a seer’s dhyana – that he could restore his intimate connection with language. It was through the supple and sensuous force of his words that Ananthamurthy could make us see our complicities in the media and rampant urbanization, along with our submission to an increasingly bankrupt idea of ‘development’ and even more abysmal surrender to majoritarianism masquerading as democracy.

Resisting the ceaseless attacks on his positions, it was the backstage silence of Ananthamurthy’s performative life that came to his rescue. This silence was his adrenalin, his own way of remaining true to himself, his touchstone for alchemizing the power of words against mindless mediatization. In contrast, our silence in the immediate aftermath of his death leaves us numbed, compelling us to acknowledge our loss for words.

I felt the same when that great translator and poet, also from Karnataka, A.K. Ramanujan, translator of two of Ananthamurthy’s masterpieces – Samskara and Suryana Kudure – died. I found myself saying then, as I find myself saying now: the death of writers of the stature of Ramanujan and Ananthamurthy is not just a personal or social or regional or even national loss. It is a loss for words themselves, for the language that keeps us alive, and whose underlying vision sustains us through the brutality of our times.

Among his memorable narratives, it is the vision of one key moment from Bharathipura that continues to inspire me. The foreign-returned Jagannatha returns to his temple town where he is driven by secular zeal to enforce the entry of untouchables into the local temple. In an iconoclastic gesture, he snatches the saligrama from the household temple and takes it out into the courtyard where he orders his untouchable labourers to touch the sacred stone. They have no other choice but to do so. He is left holding on to the saligrama wondering what he has achieved, and throws it into the darkness.

For me this is a scene worthy of the climax of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora – the subcontinent’s narrative, as Ananthamurthy once claimed – where the protagonist strips himself of his pseudo-Brahmanic clutter and realizes that he has to begin defining himself as a human being from ‘nothing’. I had first inscribed the saligrama episode from Bharathipura in my monograph on The Question of Faith, where it seemed to me that it perfectly captured the ambivalence underlying Ananthamurthy’s secular vision, which remains open to the enigmas of faith even as it is deeply critical of fundamentalist strictures and communal perversions.

Ananthamurthy was most at home in this world of ambivalence, which is not the path of compromise or of passive surrender. Rather, it is that space from which one dares to ask complex questions that trouble the binaries of modernism and anti-modernism, the global and the local, the city and the village, home and the world. I think it is this ambivalence that got Ananthamurthy into trouble with bigots. He was not prepared to hate his enemies; he wanted a dialogue with them. I do believe that he was even ready to love them. The question remains: Are his enemies prepared to love him?

To work against hatred and sectarian dogmas and to dare to replace the mantra of development with sarvodaya: these are some of the precious lessons of Ananthamurthy’s legacy which compel us to redefine the significance of India’s most-maligned public figure – Mahatma Gandhi. Beyond polarities and narrow insularities, Ananthamurthy would want us to think with critical openness and embrace the world with our feet on the ground.

Rustom Bharucha

Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, Delhi

 

* Rustom Bharucha is the author of several books, including Terror and Performance, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2014.

 

An engagement in tribute

No, I can’t be an absolutist, for I am a novelist and not a poet.

– U.R. Ananthamurthy

IN the weeks that have followed the demise of the (Kannada) litterateur and public intellectual, U.R. Ananthamurthy (hereinafter, URA – the acronym, I must add, has its own ring of self-deprecation and parody which did not elude Ananthamurthy, but that can pass!), I have pondered the question what do I make of him and his contribution. In many ways, it was also a form of ‘shadow boxing’, with myself as indeed with URA about whether to pen a note in the latter’s memory at all.

Shadow boxing, as is well known, is quite intensive activity with blows directed at a ‘person’, but few are landed because the latter is not quite standing where one thinks he/she is. This was never truer, as we shall see, than in the case of URA. As I read through the many paeans and praises alluding to the work of URA, my own sense of misgivings gave way and I resolved to write in the memory of an enigmatic figure, in particular to call attention to a dimension that had not been sufficiently attended to in the many commentaries and personal references that have followed in the wake of URA’s demise. The sense of ‘shadow boxing’ has persisted, though; and, even as it was accentuated by the deep ritualism of his final going, I have tried to make sense of it in the only way I can – through the lens of the discipline I represent, namely, social science.

I must confess that I did not know URA personally – having made his acquaintance, and an endearing one at that, during his brief sojourn many years ago at the university where I teach, but hardly venturing to renew the same (given my own reclusive proclivities). What follows, therefore, is a summary appraisal of a figure who, while himself being a practitioner of the art of ‘writing’ and given over to a culture of public intervention, was essentially working off a muted and incipient social science of India.

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I have invoked above the idea of ‘shadow boxing’ in my own coming to terms with URA. But why this imagery at all, one might ask? In order to answer this question, I need to allow myself a certain personal reflection – something which is hardly permitted in the public culture of academic social science (although the tide is now refreshingly changing) – while being true to the reflexivity that URA often epitomised in his prose writings. As one somewhat distanced from the Kannada cultural scene (and circuit) – not quite intentional, and yet a self-positioning that has intensified in recent years – I realized (and I think I did so early on) that it is not easy to tack the richness and potential of literary works (including URA’s) to the concerns of academic social science; and that while it did – or could – work in polemical contexts (as epitomized, say, by the practice of the kind instantiated by the self-confessed ‘social science nomad’ Shiv Visvanathan), a sustained practice of social science teaching and research would require incorporating practices of thought that are inimical to the cultures of literary craftsmanship and inquiry.

Over the years, yes, I have had to rethink this antinomy, even rendering it somewhat as a fractious practice of inquiry at once sustaining of both literary work and social science imagination, so that even as the initial binary between literature and social science research had been overcome, I have yet to completely transcend the terms of the division. My more literarily-inclined friends and colleagues tell me that I still do not quite ‘get it’ about literature; whereas those of my own ilk (the sociology and social science fraternity) egg me on to reassert the terms of division. I guess I have to get my own measure of this antinomy between literature and social science, and it is in this context that the work of URA comes to my attention.

My own practice of social science has been sustained by ‘philosophy’ (broadly conceived), so that even as I resist its (social science) reduction to ‘methods’, I also partake of its potential as a methodology of inquiry. I have written extensively about this elsewhere in various contexts, and will therefore not elaborate. But the image of ‘shadow boxing’ with URA still needs further contextualization. Let me try to set this up theoretically and in context, in the process thematising further the antinomy between literature and social science research that I have been alluding.

It is important to recall that for all his literary prowess and imagination, URA had cut his academic teeth in English literature departments, having gained a doctoral degree in the formidable and endearing critical environs of Birmingham, England. A Marxist ‘modernism’ in URA had already taken root, which further reinforced by a Lohiate influence had turned him into (in his own words) a ‘critical insider’. I am inclined to think that over the years URA rethought his Lohiate moorings, so that even as he continued to obtain as a ‘critical insider’, he was also both publicly and privately resisting the paradoxes built into the long history of the Lohiate embedding (I am afraid I will have to constrict this space of inscription, for reasons both of space and my own fuzziness about the question, although see for some intimations, quite removed from URA though, my ‘Thinking With and Against Lohia: Beyond Discursive Commentary’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 September 2011, pp. 66-72).

For all his ‘public’ posturing, yet, URA was coming to his own personal resolution of the predicaments that underwrite the Indian creative writer, some aspects of which he recalled in his literary output through the years and in the prose writings spanning the 1980s and 1990s. [I would particularly recommend to English readers the ‘U.R. Ananthamurthy Omnibus’ (Arvind Kumar Publishers, Gurgaon, 2009) very impressively and thoughtfully put together by his acolyte and student N. Manu Chakravarthy, for glimpses of what I am postulating here. URA himself has a reflection, ‘Five Decades of My Writing’, prefacing the compilation.]

I will come back to this point later in my tribute; allow me to communicate my sense of ‘shadow boxing’ with URA, while also foregrounding the possibilities of a confluence between ‘literature’ and ‘social science’. [Mark the word ‘confluence’ – it has a remarkable and curious history and trajectory in Indian social science, and specifically in the discipline I belong, sociology, marked as the latter has been by protestations about ‘text’ and ‘context’, book-view’ and ‘field-view’, indology and anthropology. I am afraid this would take us too far afield, but do attend to the arguments that follow.]

URA’s co-traveller and contemporary, the redoubtable Ashis Nandy has an interesting binary instituted between two modes of cultural practice in India, accentuated both by the fact of the colonial encounter with modernity and the postcolonial experience of nationhood and belonging, and which he alludes to as ‘critical traditionality/traditionalism’ and ‘critical modernism’. Broadly, and quickly, the term ‘critical traditionality’ (‘critical traditionalism’) is Nandy’s own, fashioned to describe a criticism of modernity from outside modernity (emphasis added) but which is also willing to oppose some traditions vehemently (to the extent of including within its frame elements of modernity as critical vectors). This is juxtaposed against ‘critical modernism’, which for Nandy represents a form of criticism of modernity from inside modernity (emphasis added) but which is often characterized by an unabashed defence of tradition.

The terms of his choice of modality is clear (namely, ‘critical traditionalism’), but as Nandy’s work demonstrates through the range of his corpus the decision can (or ought to) remain a constrained one. I must underscore the constraint, because in transposing this framework across to the space of URA, one is forced to rethink the very problem (central to the binary instituted by Nandy himself) of what constitutes the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of being critical of modernity. Nandy’s polemical zest sees him through the problem; but I think URA’s work – indeed the aesthetic sensibility constitutive of his work, both his literary output and prose writings – engages it head-on. For the latter (that is, URA) clearly – and I think this is the face of a possible confluence between literary sensibility and social science imagination – the central and crucial problem is one of opening up to the full ramifications (including the ambivalences and predicaments) of being a ‘critical insider’ with quite no outside to refer and/or totalize (if only to repudiate).

[In the section to follow, I will amplify this problem by calling attention from within URA to a central problematic in Indian social science, namely, the sociology of caste, while also making some conceptual (read, ‘social scientific’) sense of URA’s own (what I called earlier on as) ‘personal resolution’ of the predicaments that underwrite the Indian creative writer.] All the same, my ‘shadow boxing’ with URA will also assume a particular connotation in this light, even as the putative antinomy between literature and social science research is recast or comes to acquire a new resonance within the ambit of a social science in/of India.

URA’s ‘critical insider’ in the way we have summarily rendered (namely, of not quite having an outside to refer and/or totalize), I must hasten to point out, is not to be taken too strictly – for often in his writings there is a tendency to absolutize an ‘Other’ (whether it be modernity, or even rationality (or rationalism), as indeed the West). But on a more nuanced note, URA’s ‘insider’ position is a delicate and supple one, made possible primarily by his literary proclivities and cultural sensibilities. One measure of this is his layered essay presented at the conference on Indian literature, Festival of India, University of Chicago, 17-20 April 1996 and provocatively titled ‘Why Not Worship in the Nude? Reflections of a Novelist in his Time’ (it obtains in the Omnibus collection called attention to earlier). The specific details of this essay need not concern us – although the problems and possibilities of both Indian social science and cultural criticism are all represented here – but let me all the same mark out in URA’s own words the essential dynamics of his ‘insider’ position.

Commencing his muse in the writing just mentioned (I am afraid I have to skip the contingent details for reasons of space primarily), URA has telling observed: ‘The reality for a novelist in India… is so complex as to disallow the comforts of either status-quoist acceptance or of revolutionary ruthlessness.’ Before proceeding any further, I must confess this is a stunning thought, emblematic, the very least, of my social science position as well. Intriguingly yet, URA nuances this further, for in the wake of a self-reflection issuing off the surface of his novels, he emphatically states: ‘In my political action – whatever little a full-time teacher like me can do – I have not wavered all these thirty years. I remain a democratic socialist. But with regard to cultural questions, I am increasingly and agonizingly growing ambivalent’ (emphasis added).

Doubtless, I am both perplexed and sympathetic, another shade of my ‘shadow boxing’ with URA as cultural raconteur. Isn’t a division being instituted into the heart of the social – indeed, the socio-political – which issues off a putatively ascribed ‘cultural’? Is this division sustainable? What is the ‘cultural’ as separate from the ‘social’ and the ‘political’? Indeed, what of the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ – are they so subsumable? Is the subsumption a particular historical predicate, a distinct cultural possibility under conditions of modernity? How do we straddle the conflictual terrains of the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’ in both historical and conceptual terms? And indeed: what is the ‘political’ in all this flurry of questions and possibilities, which, incidentally, not all my social science colleagues will empathize with even as they remain or obtain as starkly and avowedly ‘political’.

[I hope too that my Marxist fellow-travellers will not remind me also of the ‘economic’ in all this, for indeed that is a realm we repudiate at our own peril, in literature as in social science, but hopefully I can get back to this in the next section.] I am, of course, not implying that there can be answer to such (and other) questions in the abstract. But what I am forcing attention to, in the wake of URA and his ‘ambivalence’, are distinct possibilities for social science in India to consider in historical and conceptual terms.

URA, to be sure, is derisive – and rightly so – of an ‘anthropological sympathy or curiosity for your own culture, when it hurts you’, even as he seeks in the manifolds of tradition and contention (recall the essay from which I am extricating issues off the annual ritual in a corner of Karnataka involving the public offer of worship in the nude by men and women of all ages and which had drawn the ire of political activists of various ideological persuasions) an ‘understanding’ that mediates between incommensurate (and incommensurable) positions. Indeed, URA’s ‘critical insider’ position is but an incomplete foreclosure, for, as he has wryly remarked: ‘Yes – all of us are modernisers in one way or the other, but with an uneasy conscience, if we are sensitive.’ What does this positionality – certainly of the cultural raconteur, but, as I am urging, also available (or, the very least, taken as available) to the social scientist – imply for our modes of engaging with caste, indeed for the sociology of caste? Needless to say, I take it that the question is as pertinent to the ‘literatures’ of India as to a social science in (and of) India. The following section lays this out from within and beyond URA, somewhat perfunctorily though because it is a difficult question both for literature and for social science.

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URA’s novelistic world encountered caste in all its meandering ways, and there is much to be gleaned by way of social science about the sociology of caste that emanates from his literary depictions. Yes, he was a ‘moderniser’ about caste – consistent with the ways of modern social science – albeit with an ‘uneasy conscience’, which of course did not compromise his ‘public’ intellectuality and/or the force of his political interventions. But what further nuance can we implicate from his literary and cultural edifice?

I must confess, in the spirit of URA’s ‘modernism’ maybe, that I am very diffident about the question of caste, even as I inherit and partake of the modern sociological mode of engaging the question primarily as a system of social and economic inequality. Without doubt, my diffidence has nothing to do with the ‘agonizing’ ambivalence with ‘regard to cultural questions’ that URA alludes and which we called attention to in the foregoing section just before unleashing our flurry of questions about the social, political and cultural (apart from the passing mention of the ‘economic’).

I am also very wary of, even as I deeply appreciate, URA’s sense of reflexive disclosure that ‘(w)hat we feel and what we think are often in conflict’ and, what is more, as he affirms (in a sort of personal admission about his early first novel Samskara, which undoubtedly encountered facets of the world of caste): ‘Twenty years ago when I wrote my first novel Samskara, my conscious motivation was more rationalist than what it is today, and I acted culturally and politically from that stand-point. But even then, I was moved by the mystical elements in my religious world, which entered into my writing despite myself’ (emphasis added).

[With reference to his second novel ‘Bharathipura’, which again engages caste and written ‘at a time which also saw the rise of activism among the scheduled caste radicals and rationalists in Karnataka’, he further states: ‘I was putting my own rationalism and political radicalism to test in the novel. The form and content of the novel, with its blend of allegory and realism, didn’t seem to work as satisfactorily as in Samskara. I was biting more than I could chew – which I don’t regret’.]

In my scheme, caste is a ‘sociology’ subsumptive of the economic, social, political and cultural (and what have you); but it is, and this is important in a foundational sense, a form of reductionism to view it entirely (or exclusively) as a system of exclusion and inequality. Of course, such a reductionism is warranted in political terms – it perhaps is also sociologically consequential – but we need a ‘history’, all the same, to uncover the dimensions of its sociality as indeed its exclusionary propensities. A frequent refrain from my end of social science has been a call for a ‘genealogy’ of caste, indeed of our ways of thinking about caste that have come with colonial modernity, but which must also implicate a wider and longer historical horizon than that of any such singular (or cathectic) modernity.

In a profoundly polemical sense, caste is ‘post-coloniality’ writ large, a form of agency which is hybrid and non-totalizing, and yet effectively reproducing the modes of its particularity and/or singularity. In political and historical terms, it certainly needs to be transcended; in sheer sociological and cognitive terms, we still have to grasp the modalities of its resilience and reproducibility. [In getting the measure of these remarks, lest I be misunderstood and/or misrepresented, the reader is urged to approach my ‘The Cognitive and the Historical: Responding to Sen’ (Economic and Political Weekly, April 14, 2007, pp. 1387-390) which engages the ‘antinomy’ I am alluding here, albeit not from within a sociology of caste.]

But let me return to URA in a final gesture of acknowledgement (I guess I cannot but continue the ‘shadow boxing’). What does it mean to engage with a sociology of caste from outside of the ‘modern’ set of assumptions and judgments which configure (or prefigure) it (namely, caste)? I think this is a meaningful and substantial question for a social science in/of India to consider. I take it also that the departure from ‘rationalism and political radicalism’ which URA was trying to record in his novelistic forays – as indeed the allures of ‘the mystical elements in my religious world’ that he speaks about can be inflected along the lines we have been reframing as part of a renewed sociology of caste. Of course, the ambivalence with ‘regard to cultural questions’ may yet be read, ultimately, as a trope for a ‘Brahmin’ world-view, paradoxically to which he (was) returned in a final moment of embrace. The ‘modernism’ of his sociology of caste which took him ‘away’ from caste brought him back (so to say) to caste. But I guess the final word must remain with URA: ‘If I write further, I may begin to say more than I mean. I wouldn’t have been a fiction writer if it were not for the impact of the skepticism of the modern civilization on me. And also, I must add, the kind of fiction writer I am is due to my quarrel with modern civilization.’ [Of course, this inflects the problem differently from what I have been urging so far. But I will take this up elsewhere.]

Even as those words resonate in my ears, let me end this engagement with some lines from Robert Frost. In a self-recollection, Frost writes (I am afraid the reference eludes me): ‘I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old.’ I guess this can be reversed (or switched) for URA, his life, his work: I never dared to be conservative when young, for fear it would make me radical when old. My shadow boxing with URA will continue, and ‘shadow boxing’, as I recalled at the very outset, is quite an intensive activity.

Sasheej Hegde

Teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad