Language, culture and creation

In the engulfing mediocrity that defines our intellectual discourse today, one voice that remained consistently refined and nuanced is no longer with us. In the passing away of U. R. Ananthamurthy on August 22, our country has lost a powerful writer, thinker, philosopher and public activist. He was a man who consistently believed that a writer is not a neutral entity who expresses his views but is not required to fight for what he believes is right. For him a writer was a spirited part of society and politics, and needed to use his pen to engage with the vital issues of the day. In the deadening expediency of “public” debate now, he was the quintessentially cerebral non- conformist, who opposed when he thought he should and not merely to be noticed.

I first got to know Ananthamurthy well when he accepted my invitation to participate in the Afro- Asian Literary Festival. The festival was organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations ( ICCR) in 2006 when I was its director- general. The venue was the historic Neemrana Fort near Delhi, so beautifully restored by Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg. At that time Ananthamurthy’ s health was already fragile but he was still fairly mobile. The fort required a visitor to climb some considerable steps, and although I was afraid of his ability to do so, Ananthamurthy readily accepted the challenge.

That conference was memorable also for the presence of another great writer, Gulzar. In the case of Gulzar, our meeting at that memorable locale was, at least for me, path- breaking. It led to a friendship which is one of my most treasured possessions, and to several books, which include several volumes of my translation of his poems, and his wonderfully evocative translation of my poem, Yudhister and Draupadi.

But to return to Ananthamurthy. He emerged at that conference as one of the most powerful voices on the importance of writing in our own mother tongue, and the respect that must be given to our own languages. It was not a new argument, but in the context of this specific conference, where so many well- known writers from Asia and Africa were present, apart from literary figures from India, it made a great impact. Through his simple yet emphatic logic the point came through that one of the greatest losses of colonised societies is the loss of their own languages. He reiterated this in a public lecture in Delhi a little later: “We are going to lose our memory. We need English, but not of the ‘ call centre’ sort. It is not a gateway of knowledge. We need to create in our own language. The English elite in India are not as cultured as the masses. English must be taught but children in schools need to create in their own languages, because we don’t think in English. It is a received language.”

This thought, so simply yet eloquently elucidated by Ananthamurthy, was shared by several of his noted contemporaries, both in India and abroad. Professor Namwar Singh has made the crucial point that no language can be substituted by another. Like mother’s milk, our mother tongue is something we acquire in childhood; a foreign language can be an additional acquisition but never an alternative to it. The brilliant Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, began his book, Decolonising the Mind, with the statement that this will be his last book in English, and henceforth he will write only in Giyuku and Kiswahili, because a foreign language can only be a language of communication, not a carrier of culture and history. Sheldon Pollock, the great US Sanskrit scholar has made the point that until 1947, and for centuries before that, India had scholars in philology who compared with the best of the world. These scholars produced pioneering works in all our languages, including in Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit and Urdu, which were invaluable reference works and constituted a window to the roots of our culture. Unfortunately, the last few decades have seen almost no work on this literary treasure, so much so that foreign universities — and he cites the case of an important one in the US which failed to get a trained professor in Telugu who had a command over the entire classical Telugu tradi-

We need English, but not of the ‘ call centre’ sort. It is not a gateway of

knowledge. We need to create in our own language.

The English elite in India are not as cultured as the

masses.

tion — are being forced to close down their specialities in our languages.

Ananthamurthy wrote almost entirely in Kannada, and still had a huge following. He was fortunate that some of his noted works were widely translated into other languages, including English. His classic novel Samskara, written in 1965, was made into a much- awarded film, and became a sensation for its fierce condemnation of the sterile and inequitable norms prevailing in a Brahmin village. It is significant that Ananthamurthy spoke of the humiliation and degradation of the caste system when he himself was a Brahmin. He was a beneficiary of institutionalised social inequity by birth, but rebelled against it because he had the ability to think for himself and read widely and eclectically, including the works of Ram Manohar Lohia.

In recent times, even though unwell and on dialysis, Ananthamurthy spoke fearlessly about the dangers of communalism, the threat to India’s pluralistic ethos, and the use of ethnicity and religion in the rise of fascism. He was ruthlessly criticised for his views by the fanatical wings of the Sangh Parivar. There were even reports that on hearing of his death, some members of these organisations ignited crackers to celebrate. Had they even read his books? Were they even aware of the magnitude and depth of his intellectual corpus? The bigoted zeal of the illiterate fanatic has become one of the greatest threats to our society. The memory of the gentle but unbending legacy of Ananthamurthy will always be an inspiration for those who have a different vision of India.

Author- diplomat Pavan K. Varma has been recently elected to

the Rajya Sabha