I knew Ananthamurthy well before I knew him as a writer. My father’s friend, he often came home, and stayed on for days. During one such stay in the early 1970s, he spent most of his time sitting in one room, writing page after page for several days. Much later I came to know that he was writing his novel, Bharathipura.

I vividly remember an incident from those days. I was 11-12 years old and found it intriguing to see a person writing all day. I would go stand in front of the room, peep from the corner of the door to see what he was doing.

Once, I was caught. At that moment, instead of writing he was looking towards the door and thinking. He suddenly saw me and said, ‘Good that you came when I needed you. Tell me...,’ he continued, asking me a specific detail from the story Alice in Wonderland. Rural boy that I was, I had no clue that there was a story by that name and stood silently. He then asked me what I read. Without knowing how to answer such a question, I blurted out Chandamama. Immediately he started a conversation with me on Chandamama stories and made me narrate a couple that I had recently read.

I mention this episode because years later, when I read Bharathipura, I found in it a reference not only to Alice in Wonderland, but also a couple of Chandamama-like stories, which I secretly cherish as my contribution to that novel! I often wonder if this might be the subconscious reason why I regard Bharathipura as his best writing, an informed choice that I made decades later.

 

I encountered Ananthamurthy as a writer and thinker when I was studying in the 12th standard. I read his extraordinary essay on existentialism published in his first collection of essays, Prajne Mattu Parisara (Consciousness and the Environment, 1971). The essay begins with the story of a young man in Europe who has to make a difficult choice between his duty as a citizen and responsibility towards his mother. He goes on to search for an answer to his dilemma through Marxism, Christian faith, and finally existentialism. Interestingly, the essay is like an open-ended play – where there is a central character and several possibilities of action. It is also something like a long monologue that reminds us of the play, Hamlet.

At that time, a classmate of mine who was facing a problem with his parents also read this essay. We spent hours together applying the essay to his life, embarking on a futile search for concrete solutions to his dilemma. After many days, my friend announced that he had found an answer through that essay. I was curious and asked him, ‘But Ananthamurthy does not offer you an answer there’; to which my friend responded, ‘But he gives you a way of thinking.’ This, it became clear to me later, was essentially what Ananthamurthy did all his life – with his writing, speeches and actions as a writer, popular speaker and public intellectual in Karnataka.

I can give any number of examples for this from his works of fiction. His story ‘Mouni’ (The Silent One, 1966) is a confrontation between Appanna Bhatta and Kuppanna Bhatta, two average Brahmin landowners from a Malnad village, stuck in an entangled property dispute. The former is talkative, practical and therefore more successful in life, while the latter is silent, an introvert and impractical. At the end of the story, the practical one wins the battle in a worldly sense. However, when Kuppanna comes for the final encounter, Appanna remains completely silent, and through his silence ‘defeats’ the former. There is nothing ‘political’ in this story except for a dramatic confrontation between two characters; the story does not even comment on either of them, except that it provides the reader a richly variegated way of thinking which is evocative enough to enable us to read the story in many contexts, ranging from feudal land relations to globalization.

 

Another story, little known outside Kannada, is ‘Clip Joint’ (1964). It is a story about an Indian student in England who goes on a pornographic trip with his colleague, and as one experience leads to the next, it becomes a never-ending search for bodily pleasures. Alongside this physical journey is also a mental journey – the Indian student remembers his grandfather who embarked on tapasya, an experiment in which he progressively renounces bodily pleasures. Here again we have a drama with two characters contrary in nature, but the story privileges neither of these journeys. However, at the end, there is a question – are these two trips not isomorphic?

I first read ‘Clip Joint’ during my college days, and later, when I went to the UK for training in theatre, it came back to me as a plot for a student production that I had to do. But for a variety of reasons, I found myself unable to adapt this story into a play. While I was desperately searching for a way out, I suddenly remembered the classical Sanskrit farce, Bhagavadajjukeeyam, which I felt embodies Ananthamurthy’s ‘Clip Joint’ way of thinking. I finally produced it; in English it was called ‘The Priest and the Prostitute’. I mention this as an instance of how Ananthamurthy has been with me all these years.

 

The two best examples of this kind of dramatic positioning of a way of thinking are Ananthamurthy’s celebrated story ‘Sooryana Kudure’ (The Stallion of the Sun, 1995), and his novel Bharathipura (1973). ‘Sooryana Kudure’ is the classic instance of a confrontation between two key characters – Ananthu, the protagonist, and Hade Venkata, a childhood acquaintance from his ancestral village. Initially, Ananthu suspects the other, even thinking that the other is ‘useless’. Then the educated protagonist probes his idiot friend with sharp comments as well as through a series of monologues with himself. Hade Venkata’s answer to all this is mostly in the form of silence, by completely ‘ignoring’ the presence of the other. At a climactic moment of the story, Hade Venkata takes Ananthu to his home and gives him an elaborate oil bath (abhyanjana), which eventually takes the form of a ritualistic ceremony. The process begins to resemble something that Ananthamurthy himself has elsewhere termed, raavu bidisuva kriye, an act of exorcising the devil. We do not know who the devil is, nor who cures whom, but the reader definitely begins to confront what could be seen as a ‘clash of civilizations’.

Unlike many readers who think that ‘Sooryana Kudure’ and Samskara (1965) epitomise the best of Ananthamurthy’s literary output, I for one think that Bharathipura is the best representation of the Ananthamurthy method. Samskara is attractive, enchanting and captures the reader with a wonderful metaphor presented in a clear and crystalline structure. With a background in theatre history, I often see Samskara as a medieval Christian morality play in the garb of a contemporary tale. History books inform us that a common feature of the settings in which such morality plays were staged, there was heaven at one end, hell on the other and all other locations lay in between.

 

In Samskara, Praneshacharya’s house is at one end of the village, Narayanappa resides at the other end; this might signify heaven and hell. The agrahara brahmanas of various hues – the serious, the comic, the hungry, the lecherous, the pious, the greedy and so on – lie in between. Praneshacharya’s search to unravel the shastric conundrum of how to perform the final rites of an outcaste appears almost like the agony of a medieval Christian saint. Therefore, when a brahmin friend once told me that the predicament of Samskara does not constitute a problem for a traditionalist, because once he realizes that the shastra does not offer a solution, he would resort to apaddharma, which recommends context specific solutions. I tend to agree with him (but also advised him to read this novel as a metaphor, and not a ‘realistic’ social science document).

However, after reading Samskara if one enters Bharathipura, everything in the landscape, timescape and the mindscape changes. From the serene, but plague ridden agrahara of yonder times, one is thrown into a busy street of a contemporary Indian small town, where everything seems erratically out of sync – from traffic to human behaviour. The characters in this novel are also ‘sketchy’ compared to the earlier novel; their caste identities have receded to the background (but still strongly present), and many other identities (such as merchants, administrators, politicians and so on) have been made stronger. Therefore, it is impossible to draw a clean and clear character sketch of any of these people. Jagannatha, the protagonist is no different. He is many ideas rolled into one: the Lohiaite socialist of the ’70s, the environmentalist of the ’80s and even the ‘decolonizer of the mind’ of the ’90s. With such diversities residing together in its characters, plot and structure, some Kannada critics argue that Bharathipura is incomplete and patchy; I, however, feel that the incompleteness is its biggest strength.

 

Unlike the crystalline metaphor of Samskara, Bharathipura is a ‘broken and scattered metaphor’ and, therefore, can show more than what it reflects. Its incompleteness is rather an invitation to the reader to struggle and play with it. It is like pieces from several jigsaw puzzles thrown together, which do not combine to make a picture. Therefore, I have always felt that while Samskara is beautiful, Bharathipura is evocative, richer in its resonance, and that the Ananthamurthy method that I referred to earlier takes on a much more complex formulation in this novel. Instead of two key characters confronting each other, we have here a multitude of confrontations, multiple ways of thinking and, thus, multiple possibilities of reading the work. Bharathipura, therefore, represents to me the high point of Ananthamurthy’s method.

Now, to extend this method from Ananthamurthy’s fiction into his essays, and even to the foundation of his activism as a public intellectual in Karnataka, I take the example of his controversial essay, ‘Bettale Pooje Yaake Koodadu?’ (Why not Worship in the Nude? Written in 1986, published in Kannada in 1996). The essay starts off as a response to the incidents surrounding the ritualistic ‘nude worship’ that took place as part of a tradition in his home district, Shimoga. In 1984, some social activists went there to protest and stop the practice, accompanied by a band of press photographers to record it. But since the worshippers outnumbered the protestors, a complete reversal took place. The worshippers not only performed the ritual but also attacked the protestors and photographers, forcing some of them to march with them half nude.

The first part of the essay dramatically narrates a meeting that URA’s journal Rujuvatu had organized in Mysore to discuss the implications of this incident. Like many of his stories and novels, different sets of ‘characters’ representing anthropologists, feminists, civil society workers and writers (including the author himself) confront each other at that meeting, arguing vehemently for and against the practice. The author then moves into a self-reflective mode that leaves the debate far behind; it notes how many of his past works have come out of just such a confrontation of ideas. The essay eventually concludes that most of his contemporary writers in Kannada too share this method, though in different ways. Bypassing the controversy surrounding that essay, I propose to read it as a meta-metaphor that attempts to understand the mystery of its own metaphor making.

 

Most of Ananthamurthy’s public interventions mirror the method of this essay. Some readers found the contrasted reading problematic; some accused him of opportunism; others grumbled about betraying the idea that he himself had set up, each time he took a controversial stand on an issue. During the pro-Kannada Gokak Movement of the late 1970s, he articulated a pro-English sentiment, and became unpopular, even being branded anti-Kannada. In the controversy over nude worship, his articulations on behalf of the worshipping community were viewed as anti-modernist. He was called dwandwamurthy (idol of contradictions) and, throughout his public life, the right hated him while the left never believed him. Many brahmins accused him for being popularly anti-brahminical, while many dalits viewed him with suspicion as a brahmin in disguise. But Ananthamurthy was unmoved by any of these labels, and continued to make controversial statements.

 

I want to suggest that he was not making controversial statements; rather, he followed his method of understanding one position always in juxtaposition to its opposite side. The reason for this, I feel, is that he was at the core of his personality a ‘writer’, probably viewing life as a metaphor, and treating contradictions as a way of advancing thinking. In my experience as a theatre director, I often see actors mistaking posturing for acting. I guess Ananthamurthy resisted this trap at a sociopolitical level, of proclamations of activism being mistaken for action.

Ananthamurthy was never my teacher, but I learnt many lessons from him while watching him function as the director of the Ninasam Culture Course that my organization conducted every October for the last 25 years. While it was indeed very rare for him to give long and comprehensive lectures in those sessions, he was nevertheless present in all the sessions from morning to night, responding wherever he was excited. In those short but charged interventions, he made remarkable connections between theatre and literature, between music and politics, between theory and practice, between life and the arts. He was essentially a ‘conversationalist’ and therefore always eager to engage with the other, especially when the other was an opponent.

I remember many instances when young people asked him unrelated questions after a speech. He would never snub or brush them away, but rather correct the question itself. Typically, he would say ‘...instead of asking this question that way, it will be more significant if you ask it this way’, and then proceed to answer it. As I watched him do this, the expression on his face made it appear as if he was not merely in dialogue with the other, but also with himself. That is exactly what his characters did in his essays, stories and novels. There are many writers and thinkers I admire, but it is indeed hard to find another person with such a culture of conversation.

 

A few weeks ago I finished reading Ananthamurthy’s last book, Hindutva athavaa Hind Swaraj (Hindutva or Hind Swaraj, 2014). Prompted by Ananthamurthy’s anti-Modi statements in the recent years, many think that this book provides an intellectual justification of his anti-Modi stance. But for me the central concern of this treatise is different. In this long essay, Ananthamurthy engages in an extended monologue on the crisis in Indian politics post-2002. He traces the crisis back to the times of Savarkar and Gandhi, and eventually poses a question on how to remain democratic even as one resists majoritarianism. Like in his writings, he does not give us ‘his’ answer to the question but transfers the legacy of thinking to the reader.

My journey with Ananthamurthy continues. He is physically no more, but there are times when I feel I am still at that door, peeping and watching him creating a world through his words.

 

* I am indebted to Deepa Ganesh and Vivek Shanbhag for their help in preparing this essay. And, thanks to Shiv Visvanathan for making me write it.