I first met him in 1980, in Mysore. He was a professor at the university and taught English Literature. Having read V.S. Naipaul’s account about him and heard about his activities during the Emergency from a Kannada writer friend, I had always wanted to meet him. In those years, Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah’s literary centre, Dhvanyaloka, used to attract scholars and writers from different parts of the country. I had gone there for a seminar when, during an afternoon session, I saw him. The Kannada Dalit writer, Devanoor Mahadeva and English novelist, R.K. Narayan were present too.

I recall Ananthamurthy making a brief comment on how he preferred Kannada writing over the Indo-English – as it was called those days – and why he admired Dalit writers, but would not himself like to write like them. He knew he was a modernist and belonged to the Navya school of Kannada literature. While he had no difficulty in bearing a close literary kinship to D.H. Lawrence and Albert Camus, he wrote out of an ethos that spoke of his Udupi childhood. He drew sustainance from K.V. Puttappa and Gopalkrishna Adiga. While attached to the politics of Lohia, he knew that he did not have to hide his identity as a Brahmin.

Here was a writer with wide horizons but whose cultural roots were intact, whose political commitment was progressive but respect for freedom of the individual uncompromised. He was, therefore, unusual for the time – simultaneously traditional and modern, at once critical and compassionate to both tradition and modernity. His brief comment that afternoon in the winter of 1980 convinced me that I was going to like and admire him for a long time.

During this first and fleeting meeting, I was a mere greenhorn, and there was no chance of him ever registering my presence at the Dhvanyaloka discussion. When I met him again – this time in Thiruvananthapuram at another literary seminar – it came as a bit of a surprise when he told me that he knew I was a student of Shantinath Desai, a highly respected contemporary of his in Kannada literature. URA steered the conversation towards a comparison between Gandhi and Aurobindo, sympathetic to both but preferential to Gandhi. This too came as a surprise; my doctoral work was on Sri Aurobindo and I did not imagine that he would have known about this. Those were times when academic hierarchies were taken rather seriously and it was ‘natural’ for professors to be intolerant of dissenting younger colleagues.

Playing safe for the first few minutes of the conversation, I stuck to inanities. But, within minutes, I realized that this professor was serious about the conversation and was inviting me to express my convictions, my understanding, my response. Despite the differences in our views, the empathy with which he listened to what I said struck me as very unusual. Also that he thought of himself not as a scholar, not as an academic, not even a literary artist, but as a thinker, as a kind of public intellectual. This put me at ease in talking to him and our conversation became more natural.

 

Since then we met in numerous places and had short and long conversations. Increasingly, they became easy and enriching as we rarely talked of ‘isms’, books and authors. Invariably we spoke of movements, contexts, cultures and nations. Lohia, Gandhi, Marx, Ambedkar, Tagore, J. Krishnamurti, Aurobindo and Coomaraswamy cropped up as familiar stops during these conversations. In these conversations, we would refer to what was traditional and what was modern as if we had easy access to both and could be equally critical and conformist to both, as if we were free to do this without seeming to contradict ourselves. It was this freedom ‘to be at once there and not there, to contain paradoxes within oneself’ that he chased through his entire life. For me, U.R. Ananthamurthy remains an extraordinary example of a never ending quest for the right to be at home in alienation, becoming an alien at home. I felt close to him because of this. He felt comfortable conversing with me because he understood I was not going to typecast him in any literary ‘ism’.

During the eighties, I had launched a journal for literary translation. Since it was visualized as a bridge between languages, it was titled Setu. It appeared in English as well as Gujarati. I wanted to introduce Ananthamurthy to Gujarati readers, and so decided that his Ghatashraddha would be translated into Gujarati for publication in Setu. Ajit Kulkarni, a physicist at the Baroda Planetarium, undertook to translate it. The ethos of Ghatashraddha is that of a traditional pathshala of the forties. The Gujarat of the eighties had no clue of that ethos; nor was a really appropriate strain of language available to bring it alive in Gujarati. Ajit Kulkarni’s only option was to make up for the ‘lack’ by generously using Sanskrit terms. This he did well and the translation managed to create a work fairly close to the original Ghatashraddha. Most of all, the experience of love seen at a tender age, without fully knowing what it is, came through quite well. Readers in Gujarati responded to Ananthamurthy’s fiction as warmly as they would respond to L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between, a similar story from a slightly earlier era and a different culture.

 

Before Ghatashraddha appeared in Gujarati, the literary class in Gujarat had read about U.R. Anathamurthy in the pages of Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. They had also heard about him through three of his literary friends who worked in Gujarat – M.G. Krishnamoorthy and A. K. Ramanujan – both had worked briefly at the Baroda University during the early sixties – and Kurtakoti, who taught at Vidyanagar till he retired in the eighties. By then, A.K. Ramanujan’s outstanding translation of Samskara had already carried Anathamurthy’s name outside Kannada to other languages in India, and other English speaking countries.

In the field of post-colonial studies – described during the eighties as Commonwealth literature – there was, at the time, an active debate on the authenticity of literary production in English, which for most African and Asian writers was a second language, not their mother tongue. And with critics like Meenakshi Mukherjee and Helen Tiffin, Samskara, became the most prominent example of ‘authentic’ Indian literature. Of course, they would simultaneously argue that the ‘twice born’ Indian English writing or the African English writing had an authenticity of its own, but works like Samskara exemplified an authenticity drawing upon an ability to be natural at once in two cultures.

 

This debate cropped up everywhere in discussions about Indian writing in English. And throughout the seventies and eighties, it engaged writers in Indian languages who felt that their writing had not received the kind of attention like the works of Tagore or Premchand in an earlier time. Indians writing in English were being discussed by Indians, who felt that it was necessary to make a common cause with writers from other former colonies as a strong rejoinder to the colonial cultural impact. They were also being discussed in the UK as literature in England was passing through a lean phase, and good books had started coming out of the colonies. In all these discussions, works like Samskara – not written in but available in English through an AKR translation and with OUP as its publisher – figured prominently as examples of authentic Indian language literature. Through these debates, Anathamurthy became a familiar name in literary circles throughout the English speaking world.

Within India, the post-Nehru era, the post-Emergency time, the rise of a new generation with high aspirations, with rapid urbanization pulling India away from the cultural memory of rural lore, the spread of English hurting the life fountains within Indian languages, the related emergence of spirituality cults, adjustment politics and memory fragmentation, collectively made Samskara increasingly meaningful. In one of our conversations, I mentioned to Ananthamurthy that his short novel almost stood like an eloquent critique of India of the day. He responded by saying that he feared it probably did. Little did the readers of Samskara outside Karnataka know that there was an Anathamurthy who wrote poems and short stories as well. Bharatipura and Avasthe, novels larger in span and more complex in its weave, too, were translated into English, but failed to receive the same attention. Ananthamurthy continued to remain outside Karnataka as the writer of Samskara, just as Srilal Shukla continued to be identified as the Raag Darbari writer outside the Hindi world. But, to his pan-Indian reputation, two more strands were added towards the end of the eighties – of being an excellent institution builder and as a cultural activist.

 

Towards the end of that decade, he was chosen to head the Mahatma Gandhi University at Kottayam in Kerala as its vice chancellor. When he concluded his term, he was asked to head the National Book Trust as its chairman; and probably, even before he completed his tenure at the NBT, Ananthamurthy was elected to preside over the Sahitya Akademi. Throughout the nineties, URA became a familiar presence in Delhi, gently guiding those innumerable discussions that the Sahitya Akademi organized during his time and firmly pushing the NBT and the Sahitya Akademi to more relevant areas of literary discourse. Before his time, these institutions were a little too burdened by a general atmosphere of respect and respectability. He loosened the straitjacket and infused an air of free discussion, dissent and open inquiry. He managed to lower the average age of participants in the Akademi’s seminars from strictly a 50 plus to a generally 30 and 40. Youth was given a chance, their voice was given a hospitable place.

He did this all knowingly, leading the institutions from the front, but without ever allowing a coterie to take control. What added to the glory of URA’s heading these national institutions was his graceful respect for dissent and his charismatic personality, an unrivalled combine. He brought it to other institutions he headed or advised, whether it was the Film Institute in Pune or the CSDS in Delhi. URA’s way of working with institutions was unique.

 

But, probably, the one institution that most consumed him was Ninasam at Heggodu with which he remained involved ever since Subbana, his friend from his young days, started it in the stunningly beautiful environs of Shimoga. A Ninasam Culture Course, its annual fete, without the towering presence of Ananthamurthy is difficult to imagine. He brought to Heggodu all that was his – learning, questioning, literary acumen, political philosophy, activism, generosity, grace, anxieties, everything that made URA what he was when left to himself.

During the early years of the nineties, a curious essay titled ‘Why Worship in the Nude?’ circulated in India. It was written in the wake of a pitched protest against the practice of women being required to worship in the nude at a folk-pilgrimage site. The protest had mobilized enlightened opinion against what looked like a ‘primitive’ practice, obviously detrimental to women’s dignity. On the other side were defenders of the practice who wanted to retain the autonomy of their faith and opposed any interference in the Hindu ways of worship and middle class morality. Anathamurthy wrote a detailed critique of this phenomenon and the protest. I believe it to be as thoughtful as his novel, Bharatipura. He found it necessary to defend both views and at the same time be critical of both for reasons stated with extreme precision of word and tone. If anyone felt, going by Samskara alone, that URA was like Albert Camus, reading this essay would make him look more like Sartre, a philosopher of ‘the human condition’.

 

After he moved out of Mysore, first to Kottayam and then for intermittent stays in Delhi, he was probably hoping to move to his village, but ended up in Bangalore. He spent nearly two decades there as the conscience keeper of Karnataka. At the same time he also played at being the crusader for the city and Kannada. Thus resulted his public stand on the question of the Kannada language and the name of the city, now called Bengaluru as advocated by him. These decades also saw an unusual increase in his writing.

I met him several times in Bangalore, of which two were very special. The first time was just when he had decided to move there and I had decided to quit teaching at the Baroda University for taking up the work of revitalizing folklore in the languages of the Adivasis. This was in a semi-formal meeting of the Sahitya Akademi with him, K. Satchidanandan and Chandrashekhara Kambar present. I presented some slides on tribal communities using a portable slide projector I had borrowed from the architect Karan Grover. URA watched the slides and agreed that I bring out a series of books based on the work. However, he looked worried, and genuinely so, about my finances. He asked if the risk of going hungry did not bother me; if I had carefully thought about my plans. I had, and knew the implications well. So despite his concern and worry, I took the next step. On his part, he made a provision for a small stipend without my asking for it. In the years that followed, I heard from numerous friends that he was over-generous in his compliments about the work I was doing. I had based my After Amnesia on the key terms ‘marga’ and ‘desi’, terms that URA too had made familiar in his lectures. This time, he knew that I had probably gone a bit too far into the desi.

 

The last time I met him in Bangalore – though we did meet in between in other cities – was after a gap of eighteen years. By now I was neck deep into the People’s Linguistic Survey and had gone to Bangalore in relation to some work with it. With the help of Vivek Shanbhag – a writer I genuinely admire and who happens to be related to Anathamurthy – I made it to the Ananthamurthy house. He told me that URA was on dialysis several times a week. The day I was there was not one of those, and we could have a long conversation. His wife Esther, his daughter and Vivek were all in the room. I was aware that they did not want him to feel too exhausted by my visit. They knew that they were in vigil over a genius. In my heart I prayed for his health. He asked me about the language survey and after hearing me, he said that this was the kind of work that one must do. Sporting his peculiar smile, a smile that was only his – at once shy and wise – he said, ‘Eh, Devy, you have done it.’ For me this was like a long awaited endorsement of the path I had chosen in life. I left the URA house with Vivek. One knew that to expect time to stop was foolish, to expect it to hold Anathamurthy for long was greedy. I was at that moment shamelessly both.

 

In between these meetings in Bangalore, I met him once in Ahmedabad. He had come for the convocation of the university established by Mahatma Gandhi, the Gujarat Vidyapeeth. His host was the eminent Gandhian, and an equally eminent writer, Narayan Desai. Narayanbhai invited some of us to come for an evening meeting. Seeing the two together, it was not unnatural for one to think of a meeting, in some older time, between Tagore and Gandhi. However, that was another age. This was Gujarat in the first decade of the 21st century. The contexts had changed; so had the meanings of words like faith and commitment, freedom and expression.

Both Narayanbhai and Ananthamurthy, in their hearts, had been deeply agonized by the rapid shift in the social discourse, worried about the rise of intolerance and let down by the silence of the literary community. They said so. A few months before Ananthamurthy passed on, he made this feeling known to the world in no uncertain terms. Then he left us, leaving behind a void. If Mahasweta Devi and Narayanbhai Desai are by now unable to do what they did earlier as our conscience keepers, and if U.R. Anathamurthy too is no longer with us, I wonder, and worry, from where and how public intellectuals will arise in India to defend diversity, dissidence and the voice of the people, from where and how writers will arise who are world class because they are a school by themselves. I do not know. To know them, to have known them, has made, at least for me, life worth living.