Jayadeva’s song about Krishna: Gitagovinda, Jayadeva’s celebrated (12th century) religious/erotic poem about Krishna and his loves. The Sanskrit line quoted runs as follows: Lalitalavangalataparishilanakomalamalayasamire.
Malera: a community (as suggested later) rather low in others’ esteem, allegedly the offspring of brahmins and their mistresses, out of wedlock.
bidi: small Indian cigarette, tobacco rolled in dried leaves.
Tayinadu: a Kannada newspaper, well known a few decades ago. Tayinadu means “Motherland.” The novelist identifies the time of the novel by such references.
Raghavendra: another name of Rama, “king of the dynasty of Raghus,” specially worshipped by Madhvas of this region.
dose: “a holed, i.e. spongy cake of rice-flour, pulses, etc. baked on a potsherd or ironplate” (Kittel).
low seat: mane, a low wooden seat.
keri: see note on farmers’ section.
kali: see note on decadent age.
monism, advaita: see note on Madhva.
That art Thou: tattvamasi, the famous monistic formula.
darshan: the sight of a holy object, image, deity or person—such a glimpse is participatory, rewarding.
ek ana: “one anna” (anna being a small coin, a nickel, now obsolete) in Urdu or Hindustani. Such references mark the story as non-contemporary, strengthening the effect of an allegory in a densely realistic setting.
Bhimasena: the second of the Pandava brothers, known for his strength, size and appetite, see notes on Durvasa.
Sahukar: “the rich man,” here obviously a rich local donor.
Southern breezes . . . clove: line from Gitagovinda, see note on Jayadeva’s song about Krishna.
“Just as a work . . . prescribed rites”: Parashara, quoted by P. V. Kane, History of Dharmashastra, Volume II, Part I (Poona, 1941), pp. 189–90.
“perpetually deferred reply”: Roland Barthes, on Balzac’s Sarrasine, in S/Z, tr. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), p. 84.
rite de passage: see Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage (London, 1960; first published 1908). For further explorations of the “liminal,” see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago, 1969).
the god-heretic: cf. Wendy O’Flaherty’s Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (London, 1973).
decadent Hinduism: M. G. Krishnamurti, Adhunika Bharatiya Sahitya (1970). Here, and elsewhere in these pages, I am indebted to G. H. Nayak’s and S. Nagarajan’s articles in Sakshi 11 (1971), and to M. G. Krishnamurti’s essay.
AFTERWORD
THE TITLE, Samskara, refers to a concept central to Hinduism. Our epigraph lists some of the denotations.
“A rite of passage or life-cycle ceremony,” “forming well, making perfect,” “the realizing of past perceptions,” “preparation, making ready,” are some of the meanings of the multi-vocal Sanskrit word. Even “Sanskrit” (samskṛta, the “remade, refined, perfected” language) is part of the samskara-paradigm. The sub-title for this translation, “A Rite for a Dead Man,” is the most concrete of these many concentric senses that spread through the work.
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The opening event is a death, an anti-brahminical brahmin’s death—and it brings in its wake a plague, many deaths, questions without answers, old answers that do not fit the new questions, and the rebirth of one good brahmin, Praneshacharya. In trying to resolve the dilemma of who, if any, should perform the heretic’s death-rite (a samskara), the Acharya begins a samskara (a transformation) for himself. A rite for a dead man becomes a rite of passage for the living.
In life as in death, Naranappa questioned the brahmins of the village, exposed their samskara (refinement of spirit, maturation through many lives) or lack of it. He lived the life of a libertine in the heart of an exclusive orthodox colony (agrahara), broke every known taboo; drank liquor, ate flesh, caught fish with his Muslim friends in the holy temple-tank, and lived with a lowcaste woman. He had cast off his lawfully wedded brahmin wife, and antagonized his kin. Protected fully by modern secular laws, and even more fully by the brahmins’ own bad conscience, he lived defiantly in their midst. If they could exorcize him, they would have found in him a fitting scapegoat to carry their own inmost unspoken libidinous desires. He was their mocking anti-self and he knew it. Now that he is dead, they could punish him at least in death, by disowning him.
Was he brahmin enough in life to be treated as one in death? Did he have the necessary “preparation” (samskara) to deserve a proper “ceremony” (samskara)? Once a brahmin, always a brahmin? Age-old questions, human questions in Hindu form, they are treacherous and double-edged: once raised, they turn on the questioner.
Naranappa’s targets are the strait-laced village brahmins who attend to the “rituals” (samskaras), but have not earned by any means their “refinement of spirit” (samskara). They are greedy, gluttonous, mean-spirited; they love gold, betray orphans and widows; they are jealous of Naranappa’s every forbidden pleasure. They turn for answers to Praneshacharya, Naranappa’s opposite number. But, ironically, in the very act of seeking the answer in the Books, and later in seeking a sign from Maruti the chaste Monkey-god, the Acharya abandons everything and becomes one with his opposite: contrary to all his “preparation” he sleeps with Chandri, Naranappa’s lowcaste mistress. By what authority now can he judge Naranappa or advise his brahmin followers? So far his samskara consisted of Sanskrit learning and ascetic practice. He had turned even marriage into a penance, immolated himself by marrying an invalid. His sudden sexual experience with the forbidden Chandri becomes an unorthodox “rite of initiation.” So the question, “Who is a brahmin, how is he made?” finally turns even against this irreproachable brahmin of brahmins, brahmin by birth as by samskara (in its many senses). Through crisis, through a breach in the old “formations,” he begins to transform himself. With the rightness of paradox, he is initiated through an illicit deed, a misdeed, totally counter to his past. He participates in the condition of his opposite, Naranappa, through Naranappa’s own hand-picked whore.
All the battles of tradition and defiance, asceticism and sensuality, the meaning and meaninglessness of ritual, dharma as nature and law, desire (kama) and salvation (moksha), have now become internal to Praneshacharya. The arena shifts from a Hindu village community to the body and spirit of the protagonist.
Though the word samskara does not occur obtrusively or too frequently in the narrative, its meanings implicitly inform the action. Furthermore, the action depends on the several meanings being at loggerheads with each other. It is significant that, in the brahminical texts, there is no division between “outer” and “inner,” “social” and “individual,” “ritual” and “spiritual” aspects: they imply and follow each other in one seamless unity. “Just as a work of painting gradually unfolds itself on account of the several colours (with which it is drawn), so brahmanya (brahminhood) is similarly brought out by samskaras performed according to prescribed rites.”
As in many traditional tales a question is raised; kept alive, despite possible solutions; maintained, till profounder questions are raised. Answers are delayed until the question is no longer relevant. The delay is filled with “promised answers, suspended, jammed or partial answers, snares and ambiguities.” The “perpetually deferred reply” plots the story. Question, Delay and Answer (or its absence) form the overt strategy for another exploration, for covering (and uncovering) psychological ground. Meanwhile, the physical problem of the body’s disposal has, ironically, ceased to be relevant; the body is simply, unceremoniously carried in a cart and burned in a field by Chandri and her Muslim friends, though the Acharya does not know it.
In Praneshacharya, brahminism questions itself in a modern existentialist mode (a mode rather alien to it, in fact); and the questioning leads him into new and ordinary worlds. These include not only Naranappa’s world but also Putta’s. Naranappa has an ideology; Putta has none. In the guided tour through temple festival and fair, whorehouse and pawnshop, the Acharya sees
a demoniac world of passion and sensation, where the human watchers of cock-fights are one with the fighting roosters. Putta is a denizen of this world; he is riddle-master, expert bargainer, pimp without any samskara; he is so completely and thoughtlessly at one with this world that he is a marvel. He is Praneshacharya’s initiator into the mysteries of the ordinary and the familiar, the purity of the unregenerate, the wholeness of the crude. The vision of this world is part of the Acharya’s new samskara, his “passage.”
Indeed, the story moves very much like a rite de passage. It is well known that many types of ritual, especially rites of initiation, have three stages: “separation,” “transition” (“margin or limen”) and “re-incorporation.” In and through such rituals, individuals and groups change their state or status. Such a change of state is often symbolized (as in this book) by a change of place—a going-away, a seclusion and a coming back.
Particularly rich in symbols of “tradition” is the Acharya’s flight from his accustomed village: he wanders through forests and lonely roads, meets with the riddling Putta, journeys through a non-verbal world of fairs, festivals, and performances where he is the marginal man, liminal like the unhoused dead, “betwixt and between.” Again, he experiences in himself the condition of Naranappa, once his opposite.
So a samskara is not only the subject of the work but the form as well. The Acharya moves through the three stages—though we see him not entirely into the third stage, but only on its threshold.
Will he, can he, ever integrate it with his old ways, his past samskara? We do not know. We only see him mutating, changing from a fully evolved socialized brahmin at one with his tradition towards a new kind of person; choosing himself, individuating himself, and “alienating” himself. We are left “anxious, expectant,” like the Acharya himself at the end of the novel. Thus, a traditional pattern, like Question, Delay and Answer, or a three-part ritual, appears here without the usual climax or closure. Such inconclusive, anti-climactic use of tradition is very much a part of this modern tale.
I think I have said enough, perhaps too much, about the resonances of the title. Samskara is a religious novel, a contemporary reworking of ancient themes. So, naturally (according to some, too easily), the work tends to allegory, and finds continuous use for mythology. The characters are somewhat simplified, and represent polar opposites. The characters come in sets: e.g. Praneshacharya v. Mahabala-Naranappa-Shripati; their lowcaste mistresses v. the brahmin women. Neatly, schematically, the opposites are mediated. Praneshacharya merges with his opposite number through Chandri, the latter’s lover; the Acharya’s erotic description of a classical heroine rouses Shripati, and he makes love to an outcaste woman on the riverbank.
The complex relations between asceticism and eroticism are well-worked in Hindu thought and mythology. The mythology of Shiva details the paradoxes of the erotic ascetic, the god-heretic. The erotic plagues and tempts the ascetic; the two are also seen as alternative modes of quest, represented here by Naranappa and the Acharya. They speak the same language.
Naranappa’s mischief revels in mythological reminders and precedents. Didn’t Parashara the great ascetic put a cloud on the holy Ganges as the fisherwoman ferried him across, take her in the boat, bless her body with perpetual fragrance? Out of this union of sage and fishwife came Vyasa the seer, compiler of the Vedas and epic poet of the Mahabharata. Didn’t Vishvamitra the warrior-sage succumb to the celestial Menaka and lose all his accumulated powers? He once ate even dog-meat to survive a famine and became the proverbial example of “emergency ethics” (apaddharma). And didn’t Shankara, the celibate philosopher, use his yogic powers to enter a dead king’s body, to experience sex, to qualify for a debate on the subject with a woman?
Praneshacharya often wonders whether there is not a serious side to Naranappa’s mockery and sensuality; whether sacrilege is not a “left-handed” way of attaining the sacred. By an ancient inversion, salvation is as possible through intoxication as by self-discipline, through violation as through observance of the Law. The Lord may even be reached sooner through hate than by devotion. Naranappa’s way gathers strength by enlisting, not defying, instinctual urges. Praneshacharya himself remembers out of his past in Benares, another Naranappa-like figure, fellow-pupil Mahabala. Mahabala gave up the “strait and narrow” path of Sanskrit learning and found “reality” in a whore in the holy city itself.
The other polarity is quite blatant: while all the brahmin wives are sexless, unappetizing, smelly, invalids at best, the women of other castes are seen as glowing sex-objects and temptations to the brahmin. Lowcaste and outcaste women like Chandri and Belli are hallowed and romanticized by references to classical heroines like Shakuntala, and Menaka, the temptress of sages. Besides being classical, women like Chandri are also earthly and amoral, ideals of un-troubled sexuality.
As in an early Bergman film, the characters are frankly allegorical, but the setting is realistic. An abstract human theme is reincarnated in just enough particulars of a space, a time, a society. Though the name of the village is allegoric, named after Durvasa the angry sage—all the nearby villages and cities are real places on the map, Shivamogge, Basrur, etc. Several details suggest that the time of action could be the early ’30s or ’40s: references to older coins (anna), and to the then-popular daily Tayinadu, the rise of the Congress Party, etc. Yet the time is a stereotype of what might be called Indian Village Time—indefinite, continuous, anywhere between a few decades ago and the medieval centuries. The cycles of natural season and the calendar of human ceremony are interlocked in Village Time. The rigid greedy brahmins mindlessly live off it, while Praneshacharya mindfully lives in it until it is interrupted and cancelled; then he drifts out of the accustomed village spaces and cycles into the outer world and comes back. The dead man, the heretic, defied it all and lived in his own time and territory, his body.
“Realism” and “allegory” (I hope the terms are clear in context) are generic patterns of expectations; the attempted realism of place, time and custom raises certain expectations in the reader. Occasionally, this felt mixture of modes makes uneasy reading. “Realistically” speaking, there are many things wrong with the story. I have heard it said that the central dilemma regarding the death-rite need be no dilemma to a learned brahmin like the Acharya, “Crest-Jewel of Vedic Learning”; there is an answer to this very question in a text, the Dharmasindhu. Certain simple ritual modifications and offerings would have solved the problem, as the guru of Dharmasthala clearly suggests. And every villager is supposed to know that no crow or vulture would touch a plague-ridden rat. Several dramatic pages on the plague flout such native knowledge.
But the book’s allegoric and narrative power marshals enough poetic images, ideas, stereotypes, and caricatures around the central human figure of the Acharya and his mutation, so that most readers are “bounced” into the novel and ask no questions. Indeed, in the Acharya, we see “allegory” wrestling with “realism”; in him an archetype wrestles with himself, and becomes atypical.
Not every reader is so taken. Certain brahmin communities in South India were offended by the picture of decadent brahminism. They felt that brahmin men and women were unfairly caricatured; they were offended by the novelist’s rather intrusive partiality for Naranappa and the sudra women.
A more serious objection is that the central figure projects a narrow part of the Hindu ideal—not the integrity of the four stages of life, in which desire (kama) and the goods of this world (artha) are affirmed and celebrated in their time and place and it is part of the design of dharma to do so. To this way of thinking, the Acharya’s brand of self-denial is aberrant. As his invalid wife Bhagirathi reminds him in the opening pages, he is in the second stage of life, a married householder. Yet he lives as one arrested in the first stage (celibate student), or as having progressed to the third (forest-dweller), or even the fourth (ascetic renouncer). As an Acharya he ought to have known better than to marry an invalid, a barren woman who would onl
y cripple him in all the pursuits necessary for an able-bodied, able-spirited brahmin. Neither the author, nor his one rather idealized brahmin, seems to be aware of such discrepancies.
Yet it is such a discrepancy that makes the entire action possible. Despite all his virtue, the Acharya does not have the virtue of living out fully his present stage. Having exiled kama from his house and family, he had to find it outside his customary space, in the forest; his sense of dharma had to be undone and remade by it.
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One could reasonably take the view that this novel, written in the ’60s, is really presenting a decadent Hinduism through the career of a limited hero, capable only of arcs, not full circles. As said earlier, the last phase of the Acharya’s initiation is an anxious return, a waiting on the threshold; his questions seem to find no restful answers. What is suggested is a movement, not a closure. The novel ends, but does not conclude.
A. K. RAMANUJAN
“SAMSKARA DOES NOT EXIST IN FREE SPACE . . . IT EXISTS IN MY CONTEXT”
In Conversation with U. R. Ananthamurthy
SUSHEELA PUNITHA
WHOSE English? What kind of English? So much depends on what a translator considers English.
An open-ended conversation with the author in the thirty-fifth year of the English translation of Samskara brought new insights to the ever-shifting world of English renderings of regional language texts in India.
To me, reading Samskara in Kannada was like stirring a hornet’s nest. My head swarmed with questions. I saw the relevance of the novel as an indictment of people of any religion (though brahmins are used as a prototype here) who think they are superior to the set of spiritual beliefs to which they belong and therefore manipulate it to boost their ego. While Naranappa makes a great show of defying the dictates of his dharma with his wanton ways, Praneshacharya flouts them subversively. By marrying the invalid Bhagirathi, he desecrates his grihasthashrama[1] to bolster his ego: “He oozes smug self-righteousness as he gloats, ‘Good she’s an invalid; I’m ripening well.’ ”[2] Wouldn’t he have matured better if he had chosen to be celibate? While Naranappa putrefies openly, Praneshacharya does so secretly with his self-imposed impotency. He impresses the other brahmins of the agrahara[3] with an outward show of regard for the niyamas[4] yet he lacks the inner humility that goes beyond egoism to practice what he preaches. No wonder then that he could not find the right advice from the Scriptures on Naranappa’s samskara.[5] No wonder he could not shepherd his flock across an arid patch. The brahmins of Durvasapura are like mindless sheep, lost and wandering from shepherd to shepherd to be led towards green pastures when all they wanted was the permission to eat to assuage their hunger. Hunger and satiation provide the “infra-structure” on which the novel rests, but space does not allow me to probe this theme. I have focused mainly on the man and the writer in U. R. Ananthamurthy (URA) coming together or standing apart, looking at each other. So, set against these two non-heroic protagonists is Chandri, wholesome and honest, the only person who lives her dharma to the fullest. Born to a prostitute, she is exempt from the dharma of the two-in-one main character but she is faithful to her own; she fulfils her responsibilities as mistress by living with Naranappa for ten years. After his death, she fortifies her progeny by sleeping with Praneshacharya.
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