Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:59:33
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.90 2.00%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,095.75 1.08%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,448.20 0.52%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 428.55 0.13%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.05 2.21%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  UR Ananthamurthy | The interpreter of injustices
BackBack

UR Ananthamurthy | The interpreter of injustices

The acclaimed Kannada writer on the fluidity of languages, the key to finding meaning in texts, and his failing health

Ananthamurthy’s novels speak against social evils. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/MintPremium
Ananthamurthy’s novels speak against social evils. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint

U.R. Ananthamurthy, 82 this year, is one of our few public intellectuals—a literary man, an educationist, an activist, and someone with enormous width and depth of learning. A PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, Ananthamurthy’s thesis was on Europe in the Fascist 1930s. With this perspective, he views recent developments in India with alarm.

The acclaimed Kannada writer was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for his overall contribution to fiction, but lost to American Lydia Davis.

I interviewed him along with actor and theatre person Prakash Belawadi at Ananthamurthy’s home in Bangalore. Edited excerpts:

Why do you think Bangalore, in many ways like Mumbai, is so open to the outsider?

That’s because of the language.

Many of my friends who are writers in Kannada have as their mother tongue Telugu. But often this is not revealed.

D.R. Nagaraj was one of our great critics. I never knew he was Telugu. Whereas one always knows when someone is a Tamil. When these two languages began to have their own identities, Kannada accepted all the 56 letters of the Devanagari script, although they were not necessary to write the language. Tamil only has 26 letters (the number may be wrong). The advantage now is I can write “Clinton" in Kannada. I cannot in Tamil, I may have to say “Glinton".

This acceptance, sweekar, became one of Kannada’s qualities.

M.K. Gandhi. Photo: Fox Photos/Getty Images
View Full Image
M.K. Gandhi. Photo: Fox Photos/Getty Images

I have been wondering about many languages now. I have a cook from Odisha. He speaks Oriya but he also speaks Kannada and Hindi. He changes his language according to the person he speaks to. He’s almost like a European.

This is one of the qualities of certain European languages, for instance Danish. As a Dane, I can stop and turn to English without a problem.

Tamil has less of that quality, but strong cultural roots. Their past is much more memorable and alive than the past of any other country. In their poetry, in their emotions, in so many things.

Today in Bangalore, you can use anything, a little English, Hindi, any other language. I don’t like it, but then I like it also.

You have not been keeping well for a while now. How has it affected your work?

I have lost my kidneys. I was on peritoneal dialysis for a year. The man who attended to me had to wash his hands 10 times or have gloves on, which was very expensive.

My illness has brought me back to my childhood, when there were things I couldn’t do or touch without washing or bathing. It was metaphorical. I spent more than a year living this way. Then the peritoneal cavity began to lose its sensitivity, I was not being dried properly. I began going through dialysis four times a day and my wife began doing it.

I was in London for four days for the Booker Prize ceremony and we had to do it there as well. I was anxious whether my big bags would arrive.

Now I am on haemodialysis. This is also complicated. But outside of these times, I am unaware of my illness.

I drink what I do and I eat what I do. I even have a whisky in the evening. This has made things difficult for the doctor. So he increased my visits to the hospital from three times a week and 6 hours for each dialysis to four times a week for 4 hours for each session.

Because of the weakness ensuing, it is difficult for me to read any work with great concentration.

You have written about admiring the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Could you tell us why?

It occurred to me that Gandhism has two aspects: One is rough and ungentlemanly. You go and sit on dharna, don’t allow people to move. Ungentlemanly, but in pursuit of truth.

View Full Image
Vinoba Bhave

Your first novel, discovered as a manuscript recently, was published last year. But do you think the novel form is dying?

The novel has not died. But the huge novel, which would take you months to read, that is no longer possible.

War And Peace immediately makes me think the Russians had a lot of time. Otherwise how can there be a work of that kind? But shorter works show that this (the novel dying) is not so. There is that attempt to make the art pristine, as in painting. It is becoming abstract. There is abstraction going on in every art, where it becomes free from explanation. Because when you begin to explain, you begin to lose it.

The meaning of texts has to be found not by society but by individuals. What is the relationship between society and art? I’d rather ask what is the relationship between the individual and art. When I go and see a play, I see it with others but I also see it for myself.

What about the critic?

Criticism will have to come back to the individual’s response. At one time Urdu poetry was read, and we went “Wah!"—that is a much better response than criticism.

That’s why one of the great movements in the West for me was Susan Sontag’s work Against Interpretation And Other Essays.

She wrote a brilliant piece, saying that those who interpret a text are doing harm because they think the text is replaced by their interpretation of the text. It is a kind of ego thing. I should be able to say, “No, look at it yourself", or if I am a very good critic, I may be able to wipe your eyes a little and make you see something: “Here, look at this corner."

The cover of ‘Samskara’
View Full Image
The cover of ‘Samskara’

V.S. Naipaul and others have come in the tradition of people writing on books. Newspapers have to live off that sort of thing. It’s very difficult to get a text if you read all the reviews. You have to find the text yourself.

This happened in England. That place is so well educated in its schools and colleges and universities, but in the Victorian era they didn’t figure out that (Gerard Manley) Hopkins was their greatest poet. Only a few of his poems were published in his lifetime. He was a Jesuit and the Church did not allow him to publish more. But he was a much greater poet than (Alfred) Tennyson. Only after T.S. Eliot came did we discover that Hopkins was a great poet.

We have a lot of writing today but all these media commentaries may not yet produce a great
work of art.

What do you read these days?

I don’t read very much. But I read a lot of new Kannada writers, young writers, including girls, who have come from the lower classes. In India, we can see the development of the submerged classes. They have begun to express themselves, sometimes crudely. But they have a voice. We are so enamoured with capitalism and making money and development that we don’t see this development happening around us.

In my language there was a lot of folk literature, in which everyone participated. Written literature was for few people. But this is now changing because new people are getting educated.

I was chairman of a committee to find a vice-chancellor for Davangere University. I went through the applications and some of the best applicants were from the backward castes and Scheduled Tribes. Not that the others were fewer. But imagine some person who has taken a step forward, and is nearer and has exceeded the privileged, within 50 years of independence. That’s amazing. And it was done by something which so many of us hate—the reservations.

A monthly conversation on the craft of writing

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 19 Apr 2014, 12:07 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App