Ananthamurthy loved whiskey and a good argument …
I met U. R. Ananthamurthy in 1985 in Iowa City, where he was a visiting professor and I was a student at the Writers Workshop. On the first day of class, a seminar on Indian mythology, he looked around at his ten or so students, and said, “Why don’t we go to my house, and continue the class over dinner and whiskey?” And so we abandoned the classroom for the rest of the term, and met at his house every week. The classes, fuelled by good Scotch and his wife Esther’s tamarind rice, went on until one in the morning.
Ananthamurthy introduced us to medieval Indian thinkers. We laughed, we drank, we argued, and transported ourselves out of the harsh midwestern winter. For Ananthamurthy, there was no division between his students and his private life. In the decades since then, I’ve regularly stayed with him, to seek his advice about my writing, and about the scope and direction of my life. For me and many, many others, he has been an intellectual lodestar, the wisest man I’ve ever met. Ananthamurthy was politically engaged, he was a public intellectual, but first and foremost he was a storyteller. His stories were a vibrant combination of the folk tales and gossip of his village, and the epics, scriptures, and great texts of world literature.
Once I went to receive him at the Mumbai airport, and he came out beaming. When the cabin crew on his flight from Bangalore had seen his name, they had upgraded him to business class. “In India,” he noted, “it still means something to be a writer.”
These were the things he loved: his wife Esther and his daughter Anu and his son Sharath and his son-in-law Vivek and his grandchildren; good whiskey; electronic gadgets; the films of Ingmar Bergman; the evening adda in his house; the Kannada language; and a good argument.
This is what he hated: hypocrisy.
I will miss him so.
(Suketu Mehta in Scroll.in)
