Soft Power: UR Ananthamurthy's last folly

Not infrequently we come across bad books written by good writers. An example is the recently published Hindutva or Hind Swaraj by UR Ananthamurthy. Ananthamurthy passed away on August 22, 2014, not long after Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. This historic event caused Ananthamurthy much distress and some consternation. What had happened to the India he knew? Why had he been proven so wrong by contemporary history?

Such questions arose because he had famously declared the previous year, “I won’t live in a country ruled by Narendra Modi.” When that eventuality actually came to pass, his detractors, also strong supporters of the RSS-BJP, bought him a one-way ticket to Pakistan. He retracted, saying he’d been overcome by emotion; where would he live except India? But he added a nuance to the fiasco by confirming to a news channel, “I stand by my sentence with a modification: I don’t want to live in a world where Modi is Prime Minister.”

Sadly, his statement came true because he passed away just three months after Modi assumed office. Ananthamurthy, a diabetic and heart patient who had been on dialysis for years, perhaps knew his days were limited. But that did not prevent him from penning a conversation with himself on the state of the nation, particularly the dangers of the Modi Sarkar. Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is the slim book that is the result of these musings: a beleaguered writer’s last will and testament?

Given the circumstances of its composition, not to mention the lavish praise of the Left-Liberal lobby, I was both well-disposed, but somewhat skeptical of this book. I was disappointed to be proven right: Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is hastily conceived, poorly written, and not too well translated. Ananthamurthy himself calls it a series of aphorisms. In an Introduction which is cleverer than the book, Shiv Viswanathan tries to salvage it by calling it a ‘manifesto’. Unfortunately, the book is very far from being either.     

Little more than a patchwork of avowals and assertions that border on the banal and incoherent, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is a medley of gripes and warnings over the evils of development, statism, neo-liberalism, globalisation, and Hindu majoritarianism. Tired, old rhetoric, leavened occasionally by a smattering of bon mots from Dostoevsky, Tagore, Jung, and Hindu mythology.

There are two aspects of Ananthamurthy’s rhetoric that make it somewhat interesting. The first is his re-reading of not just Sarvarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva but Nathuram Godse’s last speech. Both of these he contrasts with Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. The second interesting aspect is the book’s extensive references to Hindu texts and ideas. Almost, the Hindu counter-text is more persuasive that the official anti-Hindutva tirade.

With typical ignorance and arrogance, the blurb on the publisher’s website misidentifies VD Savarkar as the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Keerti Ramachandra and Vivek Shanbhag, the latter Ananthamurthy’s son-in-law and a well-known Kannada writer himself, offer an odd and inept gloss to the text. For instance, the very first footnote explains satvik as “more analytical, sober, gentle”. More analytical than whom or what?

The most troubling part of the book is its failure to assume the higher moral ground, so characteristic of its hero, Mahatma Gandhi. Ananthamurthy’s own alliance with political parties, especially HD Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (S), was well-known. Arguably, many of the extra-literary positions and benefits that he enjoyed, stemmed from that association. Ananthmurthy understood both the profits and the paybacks of such political patronage: he won every major literary prize and occupied the highest academic and cultural positions in the land.

No wonder, he made the denunciation of the RSS-BJP his latter-day mission. In the process, he also criticised writers such as SL Bhyrappa. He dismissed the latter for not knowing “how to write novels”. It is another matter that a single novel of Bhyrappa’s probably sold more than all of Ananthamurthy’s put together. Ananthamurthy, interestingly, was a great admirer of Atal Behari Vajpeyi, accompanying the first BJP Prime Minister to Bangladesh in 1999. Later, his own party, JD (S), entered into a perfidious electoral alliance with the BJP in Karnataka. Such contradictions erode both Ananthamurthy’s and his book’s political credibility.

As a Commonwealth fellow at Birmingham, Ananthamurthy began his PhD in English with Malcolm Bradbury and completed it with David Lodge. It was Bradbury’s dare that made him write Samskara in “four furious days”.

This novel, which triggered the ‘Navya’ movement in Kannada literature, was his most famous and successful, translated into English by AK Ramanujan, and made into a film by Pattabhi Rama Reddy.

In it, Ananthamurthy critiqued Hindu traditions and culture, especially decadent Brahminism, which was on its last legs as he was growing up. Naranappa’s rotting corpse, Praneshacharya’s crisis of faith, and the bubonic plague that afflicts the agrahara symbolise this dying world. Praneshacharya, like the Knight in Bergman’s Seventh Seal, is a modern, existentialist protagonist in search of his identity. How does he find his redemption?

Through Naranappa’s low-caste mistress, Chandri, who gives him pity-love in the forest. Sexual liberation, however, is not synonymous with spiritual salvation.

The paradox of Ananthamurthy was that he loved the old spiritual and scriptural India where Sanskrit and the Praktrit coexisted and cooperated. He once remarked astutely, “You may leave Brahminism, but Brahminism does not leave you”. He was also a proud Kannadiga, champion of Indian mother tongues, though very much a cosmopolitan. Charming, affable, erudite, Ananthamurthy could be generous and encouraging to younger colleagues or writer-critics. He was also a sensitive critic and cultural commentator. 

Ultimately, it was in his politics that he failed. A socialist from his high school days, he never found suitable role models other than Lohia and JP, whom he never met. He had struggled against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and though he supported the Congress against a Modi-led BJP, he candidly admitted, “Rahul Gandhi, with his liberal European mindset and a half-baked cosmopolitanism, speaking some Hindi but better English could not weather the storm of Hindutva”. Ananthamurthy was certainly not the first — nor the last — writer-intellectual overtaken by events.

Having read and commented on his work, besides knowing him for nearly two decades, I was saddened by his passing. Prime Minister Modi issued a polite condolence message, but the more extreme Hindu nationalists in Karnataka burst crackers. This divergence among his political opponents, perhaps, best illustrates the fatal flaw in his last book: Hindutva and Hind Swaraj are not binaries. They encompass many shades of views and positions, all of which go to making us a great nation. This is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled on October 25, 2016, when they confirmed that Hindutva is a way of life, not a religion.