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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 wouldnt 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 didnt 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 Sitas 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
brides house for his first Deepavali 2 was dead. I woke up hearing
my grandfather say, Narayana, calling out Gods 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 grandfathers 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 objects 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 ones 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 wouldnt tell stories if we were not mortals; also we wouldnt tell stories if we
didnt 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 cant 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. Isnt 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 didnt 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.
Didnt 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. Wasnt 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. Doesnt 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 Gandhijis weekly Harijan 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 Burkes 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 fathers 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, Karanths 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 Karanths
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 Bergmanns 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 30s.

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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 doesnt 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 cant 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 Gandhijis 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. Shouldnt 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? Didnt 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 dont 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, arent 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 dont 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: Hasnt 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? Dont we seek modernization so that we are freed
from the subsistence economy in which the millions in India live?
And, yet, dont 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 cant 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 backwardlooking 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
hasnt met any very serious impediments in his feverishly hasty
movements yet, and, therefore, doesnt 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. Arent 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
cant 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 couldnt
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.
Tbingen, 1992