U. R. Anantha Murthy · Being a Writer in India

Being a Writer in India

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U. R. Anantha Murthy · Being a Writer in India In those days of my childhood there were still tigers. My earliest memory is of cows in the shed – each one of which had a name – trembling in an intense silence broken only by the involuntary movements of the bamboo bells round their necks. They would hear the roar before we did, in the star-studded silence of the night. My mother would venture out in the dark to see if the door of the cow-shed was firmly closed, and then fasten all the creaking doors of the house against the darkness which seemed to emanate from the thick, impenetrable forest that surrounded our house. We would lie still clutching our mother, and wait listening to a distant roar which threatened to grow, and get nearer. My father was away on some work of the village, for he had his duties as a shanubhogue 1 which took him to a distant town that I had never seen. But my dear grandfather, my constant companion, was there, who sat beside us and silently prayed hoping to draw a magic spell around the house which the tiger, on whom the Goddess Kali rode, would find difficult to cross. It was he who taught me many such mantras, reciting which I would be safe from lightning, thunder, the creepy snakes and the wild beasts of the forest. I wouldn’t remember when I fell asleep and the next morning we talked only of the night before. The servants who worked on the paddy fields knew better than us Brahmins, and they told us many stories of their encounters with tigers. These stories were fantastic and reassuring, for the four-legged tigers seemed equally afraid of the twolegged humans, and they never meant to harm you if only you kept out of their way, and if you honoured the Gods with the yearly offerings. The woman, Abbakka, who told me fantastic stories as she suckled her twins under a pomegranate tree was my favourite. She came clutching her twins and gossiped endlessly with my mother. They exchanged their womanly sorrows in strict confidence despite their differences in caste and social position. And this was 1 village accountant

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in the backyard. What was spoken in the backyard was always different from what was spoken in the frontyard, and my favourite place was the backyard, the domain of women. Abbakka was mysterious for me. I had seen her some evenings in her shiningly polished, mud-floored, thatched house, with her dark hair flowing down, and her forehead smeared with the red kumkum, and her hands brandishing bunches of areca flowers. She was then possessed and transformed into an angry Goddess and danced hypnotically. Her half-closed eyes seemed to see nothing of this world, and when she glanced at a supplicant the gaze made you tremble. People fell at her feet, received her angry rebukes unmurmuringly, and begged for her advice and guidance, over unfaithful husbands, disobedient daughters-in-law, errant children and cattle that did not return after dusk. If some complained of sickness, the Goddess demanded a chicken to be served in a ritual meal as well as advised medication. Was this the same Abbakka whom I knew? I would wonder. Was the pomegranate tree in my backyard under which Abbakka sat and suckled her twins the same one of the story my grandfather told me as I dozed off to sleep, the tree under which a demon lived and jealously guarded the fruits, and the fruits were yearned after by a lovely princess in full pregnancy during an off-season, and the chivalrous prince came all the way crossing the formidable seven seas, and then did he meet a kind faced woman of magical powers? and was this woman Abbakka? and was the prince me? … Thus reality and fantasy mixed as I fell off to sleep … Every morning my grandfather went out with a sickle and cut the shrubs and roots of trees that surrounded the house. The jungle was a presence that threatened the little space for the eye in front of our house, for, if my grandfather didn’t every day discipline its encroachments, the jungle would stealthily crawl into the house. And it did, when it rained ceaselessly during monsoons. The forest was real and mysterious as well, for it had tigers, and the legendary five-hooded cobra which nobody had seen but only heard its whistle, and the undying holy men of the Puranas around whom anthills had grown. Such was their penance and the stillness


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of stance that birds sometimes nested in their hair. The Pandavas and Rama of the great epics had also wandered there. ‘This is the lake where the Pandavas bathed,’ grandfather would say. ‘And this wild leaf served as a wick for Sita’s lamp, and this wild flower adorned her hair, as she wandered in the forest with her exiled husband, Rama.’ Not only fantasy and reality mingled for me in the forest, but sorrow and ecstasy also came to me from the forest. Men making a creaking sound with their oiled sandals had come in the dead of the night through its narrow clearings, and had loudly knocked on our door, and told us that my maternal uncle who had gone to his bride’s house for his first Deepavali 2 was dead. I woke up hearing my grandfather say, ‘Narayana,’ calling out God’s name. I remember it was a night of Karthika, the season of autumn, and the stars outside glittered in a clear sky. The men who brought the news of death entered into the womb of the forest. The next Deepavali nobody took the ritual bath in the early hours of the dawn from an adorned pot except me, for the elders were mourning and also quarrelling over my grandfather’s part in getting my uncle married to an ill-starred girl. After the elaborate ritual of oil anointing, and pots of hot water thrown on my head, and the vigorous rubbing, and then dressing up in new clothes from an old brass trunk which smelt of sandalwood, I remember I ran out into the open courtyard. It was still dark with rumours and whispers of the emerging dawn, and then, did I all of a sudden see bright ob jects flying in the sky? I called out for my mother and grandfather, who hardly spoke to each other. But they had not believed what I told them. ‘Watch out, you will catch a cold ,’ my mother had rebuked me. I have dreamed about that ecstatic moment for many years now. My rationalist sceptical self of today still feels disturbed by the memory. For the writer in me it is important to recapture such moments, regardless of what I intellectually may feel about it, the moments in all their vividness of smell and sight and touch. The linear progression of time which is often – as you grow older – 2 the Indian festival of lights

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meaninglessly accumulative is thus resisted – perhaps. (And there may be more to it, if you are lucky and if you can ‘only connect’ as Forster put it.) I am always trying in my writing to come to terms with my childhood, but does my nostalgia ever so subtly change those days as I try to recapture them in words? Am I doing that now also, as I relate those moments to you? How else can reality become metaphor, and thus become more real than what it was at the level of appearance? You have to squint in order to see; you have to stammer in order to speak out from the depths. The Indian tradition of aesthetics teaches me it is dhwani, the suggestion, that is the soul of poetry, and vakrokthi, the indirect communication, the sole way to communion. To tell a story is to move forward and backward in time at your sweet will and, in this unrestrained movement, to conquer time and reconstruct what otherwise would be irrevocably lost. It is this sense of continuity of lived time, preserved through memory, that makes us human. It is literature in one’s language that makes this continuity possible. When I read Pampa of the tenth century or Basava of the twelfth century, I know how they thought and lived centuries ago, and that they are like me in their joys and sorrows. What am I but a link in this chain, unbroken because of my language, the precision and evocative power of which has been the concern of its supreme craftsmen through centuries. My language of daily use can do it, because words that describe reality can also leap out of the mundane and become metaphor. Thus my childhood becomes your childhood which is an act of love – an intense sharing made possible by language. To conquer time means also to conquer death, to put it off by a thousand nights of never ending story telling, where, after each night, you are spared because the story has been interesting and you are hopeful of conquering your fate … Sheherazade thus begot a child as the king succumbed to her charm. We wouldn’t tell stories if we were not mortals; also we wouldn’t tell stories if we didn’t crave for immortality. All of us, part child and part adult,


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prepare to face our own death with the magic of words through which we glimpse an immortality that was given to us in our childhood. Thus time is linear and yet it is not. Such thoughts as these can lead you to politics as well, I mean politics of saints and creative writers, of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Tolstoy. This is politics which works for the solidarity of mankind and what motivates it may well be, among other things, this mystery of life and death, this yearning for continuity, and the feeling that as we are all vulnerable we must care for each other. Even a tyrant dies, Stalin or Hitler, and wasn’t he also a vulnerable child once? What is left of Ozymandias now? All great religions have their origin in this feeling, and there is no worthwhile thought that is not born of love. And, would we have been capable of love if we didn’t die at all? Not only religions, but politics as well, which can become like religion in its intensity in our troubled times, has its origin in this feeling. Love is a much abused word which I find embarrassing to use, for modern psychology and sociology seem to insist that it can’t exist without its corollary, ‘hate.’ But I believe love exists with anger necessarily, and not hate, and your eyes can redden with anger as well as tears. That is the politics of the truly revolutionary man and of writers as well. With these thoughts I have already ventured into a disturbing area where the feeling of solidarity is fractured, and we tell stories to recover what has been lost. But first let me limit myself to my personal experience, how I needed to tell stories to overcome the trauma of my own growing-up, before I allow my thoughts to wander into areas of internecine conflicts of global significance where literature appears to be too fragile to be of any help. A writer can only see everything from within and make the concrete experience glow into significance, that is, if he is lucky. As a young boy walking four miles to my school I must have begun to tell stories in order to feel important, master of a situation which I had myself invented, where I felt supreme like fate. All gifts are perhaps complex and equivocal, and most of us begin to write because we want to be somebody. We are shy, we feel insignificant and therefore we want

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to be noticed. Isn’t this the beginning of some tyrants also? Well – the extroverts get all the admiration, and despite our contempt for them we feel envious of the life-force that makes them swell in selfconfidence. We retreat into the world of daydreams, and begin to populate this hermetic world with words that do our bidding. The boy who jumps and skips and runs and swims and dangerously perches on a tree defies the irrevocable laws of nature like gravitation and time. We do it in day-dreaming with the aid of words. This is indeed cunning – and with luck, in the positive sense of the word also. To begin with, this business is all very smooth. Aided by romances, books in attics that smelt of yellowing decay and dust, I rode on the winged Pegasus. But this could not last long. I was helplessly in love with a real girl, unapproachable to a weakling, and what is more, a brahmin boy. But the forbidden didn’t seem all that forbidden either, for Gandhiji had begun to find fault with our orthodox society and I used him to rationalize my feelings. The elders in our agrahara 3 had begun to grow uneasy with what this little man in a loin cloth preached and practiced. He certainly seemed like a man of God, yet why did he do everything to bring about varnasamkara, the mixing of Castes? How could this man know better than the holy writ of the shastras? In my attempt to feel distinguished, a boy apart from other boys, I had begun to devour eagerly the learned talk of the elders in the elaborate ritual meals served at the holy sanctuary, which was on the bank of a river. After the initiation ceremony of upanayanam, I was a devout brahmin boy, or tried hard to be one. My ideal in those days was a Brahmachari, a celibate, who lived in the sanctuary and taught me Sanskrit. He took only one meal, which he begged from other brahmins in a little bowl. He read late into the night his palm leaf manuscripts from a castor oil lamp in a niche of the wall, until it burnt out of its own accord. He never pushed the wick for a brighter flame. He practiced the ultimate in aparigraha, non-possession. He owned only two loin clothes which he re3 brahmin settlement


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ceived as a gift every year. I remember a particular afternoon when an old man who was slightly ‘touched’ asked him for his upper garment, angavastram. He was teaching me then Kalidasa: How could he give away something which he had already used? Yet, after some embarrassed hesitation, he gave it away and braved the whole winter bare-chested, for he could get another piece of cloth only the next year. This incident moved me very profoundly. I remember lying on the sand bed of the river and trying hard to reach the ultimate experience of sin and shame for my unredeemed self. Didn’t I feel envious of the healthy and robust cowherd boys, who indulged in an unabashed love-life that was denied to me? I was then in love with a girl of the fisherman caste, who had tattooed hands and forehead. Wasn’t she like the Shakuntala of Kalidasa, which I was reading with the Brahmachari, my fiercely celibate teacher? But, then, how could he teach me those erotic descriptions unmoved, as if those words were there merely to be grammatically and syntactically placed and explained? But I had never even talked to the dark-complexioned girl who adorned her hair with the strong smell of champak flowers, and carried fish on her curved waist in a basket. Even her walk in this supple, triple bent gait was like a dance. No – my desire to feel the extreme sensation of guilt and shame, a prelude to spiritual liberation, was also perhaps play-acting, for I wanted even in this to achieve distinction, a feeling of apartness. And I was conscious of that. I wanted to be sensitive and I nourished that self in a diary where I poured out words of inner turmoil. My sentences were long and tortuous and flowery, precisely because I could never put down, even to myself, what really tormented me. The other boys talked unashamedly of their discoveries of the hidden pleasure of their bodies, but I dared not open out like them and hence I needed words. Thus words fascinated me, paradoxically, for they were a means of hiding rather than revealing. Doesn’t this aspect of language remain a temptation for the writer always? – a temptation inherent in the very nature of our profession? Particularly so, when you are famous and the fame makes you a respected – and, therefore, inhibited – public figure.

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My ideal hero of those days, who appeared to me alternatively wooden as well as glowing with tapas, ate less and less and one day, when he thought he was called, walked away to the distant Himalayas. He came to this decision by tossing the leaf of a bodhi tree. And there was my father too, another figure who dominated my imagination in those formative years, who alternated between fits of religious worship and wanderlust. He frequented law courts as an agent of landlords in endless litigation of land ownership and rent collection but also brought copies of Gandhiji’s weekly Hari jan and translated its message to the others in our agrahara. My father was full of these contradictions. He was a self-taught man who managed to escape from his priesthood, passed many examinations privately, taught himself astronomy, astrology and mathematics and got himself ultimately entangled in the intricacies of law for a livelihood. But as a family we remained poor and owned no property. Thus his mind served the interests of the rich landlords, but his heart throbbed for the poor and venerated the Mahatma. As an autodidact he admired Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and a silly popular novelist of those days called Reynolds. He had a great wealth of knowledge of English words in print, but not as spoken language. He took more care to see that I learnt by heart Burke’s famous speech impeaching Warren Hastings than the Purusha Suktha, a great hymn of the Vedas. This was an exercise he gave me to increase my vocabulary and I chanted the speech exactly like a mantra – oh, how absurd I should have looked then! – sitting cross-legged in an agrahara on the bank of a river. The clash of East and West reflected in my father’s appearance as well, for he alternated between a cropped and a tufted head, and finally reconciled to a little tuft of hair in the centre of his cropped head. When I look back, it was a strange world in which I lived. My morning was Vedic. During the day, in the school hours, a teacher questioned the veracity of the stories of Puranas. How could a battlefield be the likely place for the long sermon of the Bhagavadgita? On my way back to my agrahara from my school, a cleanshaven man, clad in pure white, forever lounging in the shop of a doctor, would stop us boys and talk to us about Bernard Shaw.


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Even in those days, when he was not lounging, he either read or listened to the immaculate English of the BBC from a radio run from a dynamo, and his own English was idiomatically perfect. Many years later when I was to leave for England for higher studies, this man, one of my early mentors, asked me when I would be emplaning. For he thought the question, ‘ When are you flying?,’ idiomatically improper. Thus I traversed what would be centuries of the West within the single span of a day. A reformist, an Arya Samajist, would come to our agrahara and challenge our Sanskrit pundit with the arguments in favour of the theory of evolution. And was the earth round or flat? Could a Brahman sanction the Caste system? I could have been a contemporary of Galileo! Inheriting a world like this, I could only make sense of my own existence by ‘demythifying’ the reality that enclosed me, sealing me off from the rest of the world almost hermetically. I was surrounded by too many sacred things. Therefore I would urinate secretly on a stone under a tree, which people worshipped as a folk deity of great power. This way I would prove to myself, trembling in terror during the nights, that the stone was a stone was a stone. I began to despise the holy mutt (sanctuary) that my father served, for it was entangled in litigations against the poor tenants. I began to see a gap between what was believed to be true and what was actually practiced. It was then that I read the work of one of our great novelists, Karanth’s Chomana Dudi, the tragic story of an untouchable who wants to own land. The romances that I was addicted to seemed silly after this. If the reality that I saw around me could be written into a fascinating story, then all I had to do was to become a keen observer myself. My elders who hated Karanth’s revolutionary ideas still admired his art as a writer, and talked about him with fascination. Thus in my search for apartness, I had found a way out – an act which was both moral and powerful and, this is important , a way of belonging to a community with which I could quarrel, as if it were a quarrel with myself . And it was. I began to edit in those days a manuscript journal for circulation in the agrahara. A young man from an orthodox family who had

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run away to join the army had come back and begun to talk to us of distant lands and different customs. He organized us into a make-believe army and taught us to parade every morning. We played Second World War as Hitlers and Churchills, taking sides. Those were momentous days. The orthodox elders talked of an imminent pralaya – the cataclysmic end of the world as predicted in the Puranas. Our school was closed because of a plague in the whole town. A city doctor came and inoculated us in the agrahara. The untouchables living on a hillock near our agrahara began to die suddenly, and they set fire to the thatched mud huts when a whole family would succumb to the pestilence. Why did they die so rapidly? Some elders were of the opinion that it was a punishment, because their caste people in other parts of India had entered temples, instigated by Gandhi. But to me it was apparent that they died because the doctor, an upper caste man, had not gone to their huts to inoculate them as that would result in touching them. In the whole series of this fateful drama an event stood out for me as the most enigmatic. The most beautiful girl among the untouchables had suddenly disappeared. Why did she run away? Why did she not succumb to her fate passively like the others? I had found an answer for I knew the secret – the young man who paraded us every day was her lover. Which meant she was no longer ‘untouchable’ for she was touched by the most desirable young man of the agrahara. And the touch had aroused her and heightened her awareness – which made her different from the others of her caste, thus releasing her from the spell of centuries of enslavement. I remember to have written a little fable in my magazine on this, couching it in metaphors and abstract verbiage, for, although I wanted to reveal what I knew, I was plainly afraid and dared not speak without metaphors. I wonder even now whether the subterfuges of metaphors and symbols are not partly necessitated by this kind of predicament in the profession of a writer, who has to belong, as well as stand apart, in a community. You need metaphors not merely to hide, not merely to subvert – but even to own up to yourself what you begin to glimpse vaguely and disturbingly in the hidden layers of your consciousness.


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I really wrote the story I wanted to write after nearly twenty years – in a far off country, England. I had gone to see Bergmann’s film Seventh Seal with my friend and doctoral guide Malcolm Bradbury, a distinguished critic and novelist. The film had no subtitles, and therefore, fortunately for me, I understood it vaguely. It was a partly understood haunting experience – such experiences can trigger off your creativity. The spiritual crisis of the hero came through and I remember I had remarked to Professor Bradbury that a European had to create the medieval times from his reading and scholarship, but for an Indian writer it was an immediate experience – an aspect of living memory. Ever since then, this has been a pet theory of mine – that different world-views which are the result of different historical epochs co-exist in the consciousness of an Indian writer, and, therefore, for him Chaucer, Langland, Shakespeare, Dickens and Camus are contemporaries – however apart they stand historically for a European. Professor Bradbury said in reply to my remark that I should find a style and a theme which could embody such a co-existence. After two years in England I was getting fatigued, having had to speak English always, and I had grown nostalgic. Moreover I wanted a good excuse for postponing the writing of the next chapter of my thesis, and what better excuse can there be than telling your guide who is also a novelist that you are writing a novel? I wrote my Samskara thus, almost in a feverish speed. Did the gypsy of the Seventh Seal transform himself into my Putta? I remember putting down on the paper that my hero, Praneshacharya, turned back to see who was following him – and then came Putta, and wrote the rest of the novel for me. The beautiful paraiah girl who escaped the plague in my agrahara started the story which I could finish only after twenty years, after Bergmann moved me, in a foreign country, far away in space and time from the preoccupations that I have always carried with me, obsessions that have fed on whatever I have read, be it Marx, Freud, Sartre, Ishavasyopanishad , or the dialectics of Hegel which I happened to be reading at the time for my thesis on ‘Politics and the Novel during the 30’s.’

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I began to write in order to be a somebody among people who, I thought, had more power, brilliance and beauty than I, but this quest could have been utterly inconsequential for others, if luck had not led me to my real themes. All that I have written which I thought was worth publishing – and there is a lot which doesn’t get written at all – is a form of a dialogue with myself, and often not quite successful attempts at self-clarification. My upbringing in a brahmin family, my father who was a man of great will with the strength and weakness of an autodidact, my education which set me on a journey away from my roots – all of them have fashioned me into the kind of writer that I am. Of course, the fact that I have to embody myself in Kannada, a language that has its own traditions, its own contemporary pressures to which I have contributed as well as responded has also shaped me into what I am. As a writer I have a feeling that I am living backwards in time. For instance I have moved very hesitantly from the rural scene of my childhood to a semi-urban scene in my second novel Bharathipura and an urban plus rural scene in Avasthe. This is true of my tales, too. I feel I can’t handle with ease truly urban material. Is it because I am still burdened with my past? Or is it because of my medium, the Kannada language, which is fully alive in rural setting and in my childhood, both of which were uncontaminated by the English language? Professionally I am an English teacher, and therefore under pressure to articulate myself all the time in the English language. This results in a split perhaps, where emotionally I am Kannada and intellectually English. It is indeed difficult to achieve a unified self – for which you have to acquire the region of English for Kannada – the ideas and feelings that are increasingly a part of our cultural milieu. You have to do it without making Kannada sound artificial by what it has acquired through the deliberate manipulative will of the writer. You may have observed, that even as I was speaking of the difficulties and problems which I encountered in my growing up as a writer, they were bound up with politics. Writing in my language, Kannada, has all along been a political action in itself, whether one


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was aware of it or not. Even Pampa of the tenth century was creating a tradition that had to contend with the dominant Sanskritic Pan-Indian tradition. Basava, a mystic revolutionary of the 12th century, did so consciously. They absorbed and transformed the Sanskritic tradition and forged ahead with the help of the desi, the indigenous modes of the Kannada country. The first was a Jain and the second a Veerashaiva – and both were rebels against the dominant Vedic religion. Once it was Sanskrit, now it is English, the language of the elite. As Pampa and Basava knew their Sanskrit well, modern writers in Kannada know their English well. We must also absorb and forge ahead, as they did. With a difference, though: The English language, because of what comes with it, the technological western civilization, is more alien and more powerful. My language, Kannada, has survived the domination of the language of the ruling classes because of the illiteracy and also cultural denseness of the majority of its speakers. Therefore its strength lies equally in its oral and its literary traditions. Hence, it is hard to write powerfully if you are not rooted in village life, and, also, if you are unexposed to the West. This gives rise to sheer schizophrenia, often. While I reflect on the way we respond with half our mind to the modes of thought and life of the West, and with the other half to those of ancient India, an incident in the life of Gandhiji strikes me as symbolic. This happened in the early years of Gandhiji’s return from South Africa to India. He was wandering in rural India in search of ways he could serve the poor of India. A traditional pundit met him and spoke critically of his apparel. Shouldn’t the potential Mahatma look truly Indian? Should he not be wearing the yajnopavitham, the sacred thread on his body and the traditional tuft on his head? Gandhiji agreed with him that his cropped head was a shameful concession to the West, lest he should look comical in their eyes, but why wear the sacred thread which was allowed only to the upper-caste twice-born? Didn’t the millions of poor Indians from lower castes live a simple and godly life without it? Therefore he chose the tuft but rejected the yajnopavitham. This kind of choice that Gandhiji continuously made amazes me in

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his relation to the East and to the West. He truly was a critical insider. I have chosen to call the Mahatma a critical insider for good reason. He was neither a sentimental, backward-looking Orientalist who would think everything in the past of India was good, and hence must be revived, nor a westernized modernizer whose narrowly rationalistic and scientific mode of thought would reject the entire past of India as a burden. Some among the English educated class in India make an attempt to combine Orientalism with modernization which is not only futile but gives rise to inauthentic modes of thought and feeling. The insensitive don’t even make an attempt at such a reconciliation. They are happy to plead for modernization regardless of the pain and suffering which it would cause, to millions tearing their roots apart. I would include both communists and the champions of private enterprise in the category of modernizers – for their ultimate aim is the same. Their socalled adversaries, whom I call revivalists, aren’t different either. They want a strong India with an atom bomb, and their memories reach back only to Shivaji who tried to found a Hindu empire in the Moghul times, and not to the Vedic sage, Yajnavalkya. These modes of thinking – either Orientalist/revivalist or modernizing communist/capitalist – are ultimately imitative and inimical to true explorative creativity. Our politicians as well as writers and thinkers are mostly affected by these pragmatic ideological considerations. Our future as a nation is therefore threatened either with waste of unused past, or of regression, similar to what we see in Iran. No magic can prevent such happenings. A truly critical insider would have boundless compassion for the poor and disinherited in India, would passionately engage himself with the present in all its confusion of values, and only with such a mind and heart would he know what is usable in the rich past of India for a creative present. These things are more easily said than done; both in the world of action which is the domain of politics and in literature. The demagogic revivalists as well as the technologically powerful modernizers are likely to tempt most of us out of this search – which is


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both unpopular and spiritually strenuous. Speaking of myself as a writer, I am co-opted by one of the dominant groups, whatever my intentions may be and however complex my creative work. My contemporaries have responded only to what is most obvious to them and whatever is accessible and current in the air. Thus I am described as a rebel against the caste system, a votary of individualism, a modernist against traditions – for which I am either praised or disliked. Nowadays when I speak the way I have spoken today, I am also either attacked or praised as a traditionalist, as a lapsed revolutionary, or as one growing soft (or wise?) in the manner of all writers past their middle age. People don’t seem to respond to the passionate critique of religion in my earlier works, and the critique of modernization which follows, in my later works. It is true that I have lost some of my earlier certainties and keep asking nowadays such questions as these: Hasn’t our rebellion against the traditional India been motivated also by the desire of our class for more comfort and self-centered well-being? For instance, can we get married outside our castes without a safe government job? Don’t we seek modernization so that we are freed from the subsistence economy in which the millions in India live? And, yet, don’t we also yearn for the values of an organic community, and at the same time catch up with the West? Those of us who write in India have to find answers to such confusing questions – without which we will become inauthentic. The answer will have to be found not only in creative writing, and, let me add, it can’t be found merely in writing – for choices have to be made politically and economically, too. Even to find an answer at the personal level may be difficult for most of us, for we are not all Tolstoys; yet we can embody the tension of such transformation as truthfully as possible. To simplify is to falsify. To sentimentalize is to deceive oneself. If we are lucky we may at least achieve a little more clarity, a little more compassionate understanding in the manner of Chekhov. Would a metaphor clarify what I wish to express in this conflict between the Indian traditional mode of life and thought, on the

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one hand, and, on the other, the vigorous and youthful modernity of the scientific and rationalist West? The traditional India has wisdom, but on the whole it is backward–looking and lame. The rationalist, scientific West is energetic but self-absorbed and blind. You must have heard the story of the foolish blind man sitting on the neck of the lame man, thus becoming immobile when they should have done it the other way round to the advantage of both – the blind carrying the lame? No, on second thought, I feel that this metaphor will not work. The two parties in the conflict do not even agree that one is lame and the other is blind. The lame traditionalist thinks, being a custodian of feudal vested interests, that any movement is unnecessarily wasteful. The blind westernizer hasn’t met any very serious impediments in his feverishly hasty movements yet, and, therefore, doesn’t feel it necessary to carry an extra burden on his shoulder. Therefore we encounter in India modes of thinking which reject the caste system but accept a totalitarian state. Or we have the namby-pamby liberalism which in practice is west-oriented, but at the sentimental level, traditional. Or one may cling to the traditional way of life, without hesitating to use scientific implements only to consolidate the hereditary power. Aren’t many of us Anglophile Brahmins, including the greatest and most sensitive among us – the late Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru? You see now how I have mixed up my metaphor, and thereby abolished the separateness of the two kinds of thinking with which I started for convenience. Yet the problem must bother us, for there are the hungry, illiterate millions who may never be the recipients of what we call progress, the benefit of which can accrue to only a few, given the socio-economic realities of our times. Therefore the question must continue to haunt us: What we call progressive and modern, is it good for everyone and, if it is, is it accessible to everyone? I have cluttered myself with such questions, for which no answers can be found merely in literature, and I find myself conceptualizing a lot more than what is good for me as a creative writer. Orwell – although a great activist himself – found that it was necessary for a writer to be passive sometimes in order to be


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receptive, and record honestly what is. At least, writers like myself should never forget our limitations, wherein lies our strength also. We may not be good as political agitators, which I realized painfully once when I got involved in my adolescent years in a socialist peasant struggle, and later when I went campaigning against the rule of the late Indira Gandhi. Yet writers are also citizens and they can’t shy away from their responsibilities. If we think that we are special, and nurture jealously our refinement far away from the maddening crowd, we may degenerate into trivial aestheticism. Living means involvement and being close to events beyond your control; yet writing recognizes distance and the capacity to see from above. We may be living through times where seeing from above is not only difficult but morally impermissible. Yeats once wrote, That is the choice of choices – the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the market carts; but we must see to it that the soul goes with us … . If the carts have hit our fancy, we must have the soul tight within our bodies, for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations that it will for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood.

If we have taken to the choice of market carts, let us remember that we do not have the analytical power or tools of the sociologists and economists, nor the manipulative skills of the supreme strategists of politics. Nor should we ever become public figures like Robert Frost, for then we may become slaves of the expectations of our admirers. There is something wrong with us writers, if we do not lose a few of our admirers with every new book that we write. Otherwise, it may mean we are imitating ourselves, or trying to keep true to the image that we have built for ourselves in the public eye. Rhetoric is dangerous, for it evokes a public emotion, the emotion of the crowd. People want to feel safe and comfortable listening to lies, yet their souls want to listen to truth. We should never lose the capacity to say those things in which we believe when we are absolutely alone. No one can save us if we have gone so far as to tell ourselves lies and believe in them. These are all the

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hazards of becoming public figures, mouthpieces of political parties, and poet laureates of the ruling class. Art is still a good hiding place – as someone has said it. It allowed Solzenitsyn to remain a believer, and it has made it possible for many nonbelievers to retain their integrity in times of religious intolerance and bigotry. An artist draws his strength from what Joyce called, ‘ Silence, Exile, and Cunning .’ An artist is thus both a guerilla and a crusader. What does it mean in Kannada today to be a writer? It was during the days of the Emergency fifteen years ago that I realized an aspect of this question with a disturbing sense of uneasiness. How could one write about the perennial problems of love and death, or the sorrows and joys of existence, when one couldn’t write about what everyone thought of all the time – the loss of fundamental freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution? This feeling itself was a paradox, because when these freedoms legally existed, one hardly thought of them or used them altruistically, but when they were taken away they became an obsession. Our art depends on language, the daily means of intercourse from the trivial to the metaphysical, and it is language which is the first victim, since authoritarian regimes have to sustain themselves through its abuse. I remember going to a literary meet where I was asked to lecture, and when I stood up to speak I had an overwhelming feeling that the audience expected me to express myself on the one topic that engrossed them all. The feeling that the audience generated in me was so great that I overcame my timidity and said things which I never thought I would say before I went to the meeting. The profession of writing is still held to be important by our people and a writer is looked upon as a conscience-keeper. The writer can do this only if he never abandons his role as a critical insider, and never feels afraid to swim against the tide. The man who fails to listen to his innermost voice has little that is valuable to give to the public. The political parties and governments must remember this, in their own interests as well, for they too need


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sanity in hours of crisis, and this is hard to come by in the frenzied crowds of which they are the manipulators as well as the slaves. Tübingen, 1992

U. R. Anantha Murthy · Being a Writer in India

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