He was among the rare and sensitive writers who could see through the contradiction of not thinking about man and his life in the world beyond the dharmasastras
LITERARY ICON : The crisis of the Indian bhashas weighed heavily on him. [Photo : M.A. Sriram]
U.R. Ananthamurthy and Ramchandra Gandhi occupied contrary locations, one subscribing to dvaita (the view of soul and god as separate entities) and the other to advaita. Ananthamurthy’s reflection on Gandhi’s Svaraj: A journey with Tyeb Mehta’s Shantiniketan Triptych is as much about himself — the way his mind works and the metaphors he invokes.
He compares Gandhi’s writing to an illuminating arati to the gods in temples. The arati begins with the lighting of one lamp and slowly, many others are lit and circulated around the vigraha. Gradually the whole sculpture is illuminated and made visible for us in the light of the arati. More tongue-in-cheek, he describes Gandhi as a jangama (member of a wandering Saivite monastic order followed by the Lingayats) but with an attachment to his room and the India International Centre (IIC) who could never settle into any affiliation after he left Hyderabad’s Philosophy department that he had helped build in protest against the cutting of a tree dear to Sarojini Naidu by the university administration. “Nobody else in the world has written such a book on [the] art of painting. [The] book is a prolonged meditation, where the external painting meets the inner mind to become one, the advaita,” Ananthamurthy pronounced. The dvaitin could undergo the mystic experience of non-dual being.
Both were opposed to caste. Ananthamurthy’s blog recorded the story of a group of intellectuals whom he hosted when he was vice-chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam. Gandhi had taken my mother, Francine Krishna, to the Guruvayur temple after she had expressed a desire to visit it. She was dressed in a sari and had kumkum (vermilion) on her forehead (and was married to a Hindu), but was not permitted entry on the grounds of being a non-Hindu. Gandhi protested, refused to enter the temple and returned with a Rishi Durvasa-like temper, Ananthamurthy wrote. In his blog (that has since disappeared from the net), Ananthamurthy mentions his participation in a march organised by Gandhi after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in which a group of participants were led by him singing Rabindranath Tagore’s “Ekla cholo re…” He was undeterred by the mocking passersby and on reaching Birla House, the site of Gandhi’s assassination, offered prayers. Some Tibetan monks later joined their meeting and offered prayers in their own style. Though the Tibetan way of praying may sound strange to some of us, the very strangeness moved us nevertheless, Ananthamurthy wrote. Some individuals addressed the group before they dispersed.
Reflections on caste
Ananthamurthy reflected on caste on many occasions, and his novel, Samskara (1965), evokes the decadent world of a brahman agrahara (settlement), much of it drawing on his own experience of growing up in one. He belonged to the Madhva tradition, a Vaishnava sect that followed the 13th century philosopher, Madhvacharya. His name, Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy, as professor Arindam Chakrabarti reminded me, bears the signature of Udupi Sri Krishna — the presiding deity of Madhva Dvaita Vedanta.
Yet, his novel mocks norms of purity and pollution. Naranappa, the anti-brahmin Brahmin dies, and the question is who will perform his last rites as he has no son. Till this is done there can be “no worship, no bathing, no prayers, no food, nothing.” Naranappa had not only mocked at brahmin orthodoxy, but drank liquor, ate meat, caught sacred fish with his Muslim friends and rejected his wife, living instead with a sudra woman called Chandri. Answers are sought from Praneshacharya, the head of the village, who is the crown jewel of Vedic learning. He in turn seeks answers regarding pollution from the book of dharma and then pleads with Maruti, the chaste monkey-god, but gets no answer. He comes across Chandri in the forest and both discover each other erotically in their traumatised states, giving Praneshacharya an opportunity for self-transformation.
He decides to perform the last rites, but by then the plague is manifest on Naranappa’s body and Chandri has already asked a Muslim to cremate the body. The screenplay of the film “Samskara” (1970) was written by Girish Karnad who played Naranappa.
The novel Bharathipura (1973) is also about a village and the prejudices of reformist modernity. Jagannatha, the educated, rich zamindar’s son wants to transform his antiquated society, preparing the way for the advent of secular modernity. He teaches the Holeyaru Dalits, who work as scavengers, the French and Russian revolutions, then leads them into a temple from which they are prohibited to smash the stone image of the deity and rid themselves of their irrationality and thereby enter history. I can recall his powerful telling of the story of the Shaligram and how violent reformist iconoclasm can be, a metaphor for fundamentalisms everywhere. In a lecture on Mahatma Gandhi’s ahimsa and the significance of the Tibetan struggle for our times, Ananthamurthy reiterated the importance of Gandhi for the American, South African and Burmese struggles. The talk concluded with a story of his meeting (along with the writer Nirmal Verma) with the Dalai Lama, a figure whom he felt continued Gandhi’s practice of non-violence. During the meeting, an ant climbed up the clothing of the Tibetan spiritual leader. Even as he spoke to the visitors, he carefully picked up the ant in his hand and placed it on the floor. In his world there is also space for that ant, Ananthamurthy remarked.
He often came to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and was a dear friend to many of us, bringing with him to our workshops, the vachanas of Allama and Basava, the world of bhakti and the bhashas. The crisis of the Indian bhashas weighed heavily on him and he spoke on one occasion of how Kannada had been rendered to the domestic space in his lifetime. This year, in July, he was to attend a conference on Metaphysics and Politics hosted by the Backwaters Collective in Kochi, supported by the Narayana Guru Foundation, but could not make it. This is an annual event that he and Ashis Nandy have been promoting, which is a very special space for reflection on conceptions of ultimate truth without losing sight of the realities of politics and society.
I had initially circulated a note on Ananthamurthy to a group of friends. This is what Mukund Lath wrote:
“The story of Shankar and the Chandal is well known. Obviously, if atma is brahma, not only untouchability but any non-inclusive attitude toward man — towards living beings as such — makes no sense. But unfortunately Shankar’s atma-darshan is quite divorced from his ideas about how man should live, the institutions he should build. In these matters he falls back on the dharma of the Smritis. This is irrational. It is, in fact, contradictory to the spirit of his tattva-drsti. What is true of Shankar is true of many of our deepest spiritual thinkers, advaitis or dvaitis, who refused to follow the implications of their deepest understanding of man. Unlike Gandhi, they could not think about man and his life in the world, beyond the dharmasastras. Ananthamurthy was among those rare sensitive souls, poets, writers, who could not only see through the contradiction, but feel it in his very bones. With Ananthamurthy, this feeling, this sensitivity, could be seen in him also as a deep man of action. One could feel that his authority — his sense of true adhikara — was inspired by it. This is how I remember him.”
(Shail Mayaram is Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-mind-and-metaphors-of-ur-ananthamurthy/article6367252.ece
Ananthamurthy loved whiskey and a good argument …
“Growth or Development: Which Way is Gujarat Going”, edited by Indira Hirway, Amita Shah and Ghanshyam Shah, Oxford University Press, 604 pages, Price: Rs 1,395.00
The chapter by Sebastian Morris of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, may be considered an exception for showering praise on Gujarat’s high growth. But as YK Alagh notes in his preface, Morris’ chapter “puts to test whether some states are exceptional” and have been able to create a different model, and the answer is a big no. Morris says in his chapter, “A Comparative Analysis of Gujarat’s Economic Growth”: “Growth of regions since the reforms of 1991-03 can be considered in two phases: 1992-04 to 2002-03 and 2003-04 onwards. The very growth achieved in the latter period is mirrored at the regional level with particularly the services sector growth rate moving upwards in the second period. Gujarat like many other states is no exception.”
Rest of the book, presumably taking this as the overall context, seeks to give the impression that reason for Gujarat’s high rate of growth is mainly due to “low labour costs in the state (on account of repressed wages and poor quality of employment), the higher rate of savings (given high income inequality), high tax concessions and other incentives to corporate investments, vast migrations to Gujarat, and the increasing use of capital-intensive machinery in Gujarat—all of these factors may have allowed it hold on to its advantage” (Introduction). The growth rate accelerated in agriculture because of the “Narmada project, and particularly ample rainfall.”
Hirway adds, “Keeping wages low is another major policy for allowing high rates of profits and thereby raising the rate of savings and investment in the economy. This undermines the interests of labour. The state ranks very low among the major 20 states in casual and regular wage rates for male and female workers in both rural and urban areas. In 2009–10, the daily wage rates of male regular workers were Rs 187 and Rs 306.58 in rural and urban Gujarat respectively, and Gujarat ranked 18th and 20th respectively in these rates among the major 20 states in India. It ranked 9th and 20th in 2004-5.” There was failure to reduce poverty through the state-sponsored Gharib Kalyan melas: “Incidence of tribal poverty in Gujarat has increased from 31.2 in 1999-2000 to 34.7 in 2004-5 and to 35 in 2009-10. The state ranks 14th among the major states (lowest is rank one) in terms of poverty among the ST population. The incidence of poverty among OBCs is again 45.4 as against 9.4 among the others”.
Sunil R Parekh in the chapter, “Some Facets of Industrialization in Gujarat Industrial”, points towards how, despite loud Gujarat government claims, the state’s employment rate has suffered. To quote, “The period 2000-10 could be considered as most significant in terms of the flow of investment to industry”. But while employment grew from 3.5 lakh to 11.5 lakh — “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just 3 per cent, the gross output registered a CARG of 22 per cent”. In absolute numbers, “the state witnessed new job opportunities of 4,70,353 during the first four decades as against 3,36,355 in the last decade. As compared to the degree of industrialization, this does not represent a significant figure, as more and more industries in Gujarat have now become technology-driven with the introduction of automation”, with the gross output going up “from Rs 365 crore to Rs 6,42,000 crore”. He adds, “One can state that the benefits of rapid growth of industries have not been passed over to labour either in terms of increased employment opportunities or in terms of higher wages or in terms of quality employment.”
Parikh further says, “Gujarat is one of the most industrialized states in India”, but the value added tax (VAT) collected to Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) output ratio is “one of the lowest in the state… In fact, at 3 per cent, it is the lowest among the six major states in India. That is, in spite of Gujarat contributing 17 per cent of the industrial output in the country, its ratio of VAT to output is only 3 per cent, one-third that of Maharashtra. This is really remarkable because Gujarat has one of the highest rates of VAT, 14 per cent as against 12.5 per cent in other states.”
In the chapter “High Growth Agriculture in Gujarat: An Enquiry into Inclusiveness and Sustainability”, Amita Shah and Itishree Pathak suggest how the benefits of better irrigation facilities have failed to reach the poorer sections. Giving the example of a spot study, the scholars says, “Benefits of watershed projects were found to be confined mainly to landed households (despite a clear emphasis to include the landless as project beneficiaries). Among the landed households, those with medium and large landholdings had a larger proportion of beneficiaries as compared to marginal and small farmers within a village. This was vindicated by the fact that identifying beneficiaries from the farmers with marginal–small landholdings was often difficult as a majority of the project beneficiaries were found to be in the medium–large landholding category.” They add, “A substantially large proportion of the beneficiary farmers (that is, about 40 per cent) did not have access to irrigation, especially from groundwater sources even after completion of the project.”
PK Viswanathan and Jharna Pathan in “Economic Growth and the State of Natural Resources and the Environment in Gujarat: A Critical Assessment” say that “a major challenge facing the state’s natural resources (including land and water) is the emerging conflicts between industrial and agricultural sub-sectors to access land and water for expansion of activities in their respective contexts. While the conflicts in accessing and holding the rights over landed resources are most likely to get proper solutions (through state as well as legislature mediated processes), the access and control rights over water resources are going to be highly contested, especially in a water-starved state like Gujarat.”
Ghanshyam Shah in “Governance of Gujarat: Good Governance for Whom and for What?” gives the example of how the government-launched Mukhyamantri Amrutum (MA) Yojana of April 2012, which sought to provide to the below poverty line (BPL) persons medical and surgical care for the treatment of identified diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular surgeries, burns, and neonatal diseases involving hospitalization , empanelled 54 hospitals, half of which are private. “Though the government announced that the scheme would be managed through a corporation or registered trust, so far this has not been done”, he points out, adding, “The government admits that the government institutions are inadequate to provide specialized services, especially for obstetric care, due ‘to the shortage of skilled staff, the poor facilities at government hospitals, poorly trained personnel with indifferent and unwelcoming attitudes’ (Central Bureau of Health Intelligence). This was the reason, according to the government, for its inability to reduce the maternal mortality rate (MMR) rate in Gujarat.”