And then, when I read Samskara in English, I found it wanting. I felt the English version lacked the natural voluptuousness of Kannada that this novel needs, without the negative connotation associated with the word “voluptuous”; here it is fulsomeness, vitality. I read out my translation of some lines to URA as I felt A. K. Ramanujan’s (AKR) translation misrepresented the spirit of his text. For instance, in the passage where Chandri thinks of how she feels about Praneshacharya, the English version reads: “Her mother used to say: prostitutes should get pregnant by such holy men.” A more faithful rendition of the original would be, “Chandri tells herself, ‘Remember what Amma used to say about the kind of men from whom a prostitute should receive the fruit of the womb? Such a man is Acharya, in looks, in character and in charisma.’ ” My version brings out the essence of URA’s text: that Chandri was seeing Praneshacharya as a stud. It is an image of the primeval desire to procreate, so natural and therefore so pure. AKR changes the impact by making it moral, by making a prostitute feel the need to be redeemed by a “holy” man. URA’s text does not imply that at all. And so I asked him how he felt about AKR’s translation and he said, “Well, not everyone would agree but that was the problem with Ramanujan. He tried to write English like an Englishman.” URA’s answer affirmed my feeling about translation that each text has to be translated into the style appropriate to it. Much of the success of a translation into English depends on what the translator considers “English” proper to the text. His reply also explains many of his statements made in the interview because they refer to the text in Kannada. People who can read the novel only in English may not be able to appreciate the intensity in the novel because AKR’s style plays it down.
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I wanted URA’s free-flowing responses to take precedence over the interview structure. I provided the questions all together at the beginning of the interview, asking him to answer only those he chose. The open-ended process brought forth a deeper perspective on the novel. These were my questions:
As a writer, are you aware of the hidden texts your novel posits? Are you aware of patterns surfacing from your unconscious self, patterns you had not thought of, perhaps?
Have you deliberately made your women characters like Chandri in Samskara and Chikki in Bharathipura minor yet more wholesome than the male protagonists to draw attention to them by not spotlighting them? Is that a part of your technique?
Why is your image of orthodoxy so withered and withering an influence? What is the contradiction we are asked to see and understand?
How do you feel about Samskara now in terms of its relevance? Have mores changed much for a lot of people since the time-period in the novel?
What does Vedanta say about inner purity? Is it criticizing Praneshacharya’s type of egoism?
Is Samskara a critique of a vision of life which says we are all manifestations of the great reality and yet privileges a section of rule-makers over the others or is it a condemnation of people who subvert the vision of life to justify the social hierarchy and its exploitative tendencies?
I could see he was eager to answer my questions, to reset my eyes to see the novel as an allegory. Here is what he said:
“I was intensely conscious of a single great episode in the Mahabharata.[6] The great sage Parashara, while in a boat, falls in love with the fish-smelling Matsyagandhi. Vedavyasa is the sadyojatha, the immediately-born, born with a kamandala.[7] He makes her a yojanagandhi, the sweet-smelling one. Strangely, even after begetting a child, she remains a virgin. And grows up to be a beautiful woman and Shantanu falls in love with her. Then she poses a condition that the child born to her must become the king. Bhishma comes in the way but he becomes a great character by sacrificing his position for his father’s love. So the only thing in my head as a subtext was Parashara meeting Matsyagandhi.
“In the 1960s, I felt our great epics saw ‘right’ as a whole and didn’t take positions as shaped by reality. For instance, people in those days could have a love affair and not make it a guilt-ridden experience. Neither the woman nor the man ever thought of it as desecration. Here too, in the novel, Praneshacharya meets Chandri most unpreparedly, and here too, when Praneshacharya touches Chandri, something is aroused in him and he touches her breasts and unites with her. I am reminded of Parashara meeting Matsyagandhi. Praneshacharya has a whole set of absurd questions before he meets her and a whole set of absurd questions after he meets her. The only thing that is pure in the novel is the meeting. His sexual self is aroused and there is no question of right or wrong, only pure joy. I was made aware of this by my friend Rajiv Taranath. He said, ‘You create a whole set of absurd events like whether the body of Naranappa should be burnt or not and afterwards you make Praneshacharya wonder if what he did was right. And in between the two sets of episodes there is an experience that is neither right nor wrong. It is beyond right and wrong.’
“I think my novel goes beyond questions of caste and gains an epic dimension; it becomes an allegorical tale. I am not writing a novel, but an allegorical tale. Meenakshi Mukherjee was the only person who recognized this. Here is a novel that cannot be realistically abandoned. It cannot be realistically interpreted either. It has realism but it is an allegory. In allegory, realism gets changed. But in realism there is no place for allegory. So she said this is a new Indian form. I came to know this from a critic. I was not aware of this when I wrote the novel. But since I am also a professor of English, I began to see this as an insider.
“Many caste brahmins who attacked my novel did not know something that I knew. They have become unaware of the rules from the Manu Dharma Shastra because they live in the Victorian era. Now, for a brahmin, to do samskara to a body is not merely to burn it. First, there is a mantra which says that the body which came from the panchabhoothas[8] goes back to the panchabhoothas. It is a kriya[9] which does not call for love or emotion. It is the giving up of the body to the five elements from which it has come. But since we are human beings, we cannot give up the body objectively, so there is vyamoha.[10] And so there is a whole set of beliefs to cater to it: the dead person has become a pretha[11] and the pretha has to become a pithru.[12] To make him a pithru, you invoke different parts of his body—thighs, sexual organs, chest . . . and then you say, ‘gachcha gachcha pretha’ which means ‘go away, go away, pretha.’ And then you have two rice balls, one for the pithru and the other for the pretha. At that point you mix the two rice balls. You keep some thread and a bowl of milk for the pretha who we believe is hovering around us. The first kriya of dissolving the body in the panchabhoothas is very nishtoora[13] but the second one of making it a pithru is very human. Nehru, who knew this, did not want the shraddha[14] but he wanted the first kriya to be preformed, that of dissolving the body in the panchabhoothas.
“So, coming back to the novel, when the brahmins are asked to perform the cremation, they refuse to do it, not because they do not want to dispose of the body; they don’t want him as a pithru. Now comes my awareness of caste and other things like a social context. Manu said, if a man has flouted the norms of caste, he should be excommunicated. Then he is as good as dead. But here, they don’t want to cremate him because they can’t imagine him becoming a pithru. So when I say Praneshacharya did not find an answer in the religious texts, people said, ‘There is no answer, that’s why he did not find one.’ But that is not true. There is an answer, but only a conditional one. If you could throw him out, why didn’t Praneshacharya throw him out? Because Naranappa threatened to become a Muslim. If he converted to Islam and continued to live in the agrahara, could they have thrown him out? They couldn’t. The British were ruling the country and no man could be thrown out of his house. And so the brahmins would have become polluted if Naranappa had converted to Islam and continued to live in the agrahara.
“Here is a problem that has been created metaphysically but has political implications. Hence, no shastra came to their rescue. No one understood this crucial dimension of the novel. My text does not
exist in free space that some Westerner can read and understand; it exists in my context. I am a critical insider. If I were a Christian, I would have questioned Christianity from the inside like Martin Luther did.
“Actually, in the novel, Chandri fails to get Naranappa cremated even by a sudra because they too conform to brahminical beliefs: ‘ “I can’t do it, Chandramma. Should I go to hell for touching a brahmin dead body? Not for all the wealth you may give me,” says Seshappa in a drunken stupor.’ So she gets a Muslim to do it. This is the truly shastric basis of the novel. Even the best of readers did not get it. This happens even in Ghatashraddha (The Ritual, 1963). The widow, Yamunakka, is excommunicated when she becomes pregnant. As a widow, her head had been shaved with the assumption that she was now pure; she would not be desired by men nor could she labour under the illusion that she was desirable to men. But once she is cast out of her caste, she may have grown back her hair. Gandhi did this to Miss Slade, an extraordinarily beautiful woman who came to live in the ashram. She was a great musician, a close friend of Vinobha Bhave. She went back after Gandhi died. Shaving the head is a denial of femininity. But, after being excommunicated, the woman could grow back her hair. We suffer when we flout the rules, but then, why do we flout them? Because prakrithi [15] is greater than purusha.[16] I believe that we have to go on learning from nature. As a writer, I am aware of all the social laws with all their implications, but with the belief that prakrithi is superior to them.
“Sometimes prakrithi manifests itself as desire. Parashara may have been a great sage but he had to submit to the desire of a woman, Matsyagandhi. Praneshacharya is not a hypocrite in renouncing marital pleasure but he is guilty of bad faith. Many people have asked me about this. He may have flouted the four stages but not as a hypocrite, only out of wilfulness. In the Shakuntala episode, he can speak of Shakuntala in a very evocative manner without his own sexual appetite being triggered. So, he has ‘will.’
“But Naranappa has a different kind of will. When he is dying, he calls out the name of god, ‘Narayana! Narayana!’ In the Bhagavadgita, Krishna says, ‘Those who remember me at the moment of death will attain me.’ T. S. Eliot quotes this line in Four Quartets and in brackets, he says, ‘The moment of death is every moment.’ So, both Praneshacharya and Naranappa are two sides of the same coin. Both of them live a life of will. If there is one character in the novel who has no will, he is Putta. He is the counterpoint. Hence my novel is about wilfulness and willessness.
“I had sent my novel to Adiga and others and they said it seemed incomplete. I sat down to rework it and I heard footsteps. It was a magical moment and Putta came in. My novel was transformed completely after his entry. Any person who lives in wilfulness is a person who lives in bad faith or in hypocrisy; I would call it plain bad faith. When there is tiredness in what you do, even being good, it is not genuine. In Chandri, there was no tiredness. She was faithful to Naranappa but desired Praneshacharya. In her there was no guilt. People want to read the novel as sudra and brahmin coming together but I feel it diminishes the novel by restricting it to our context. In the Indian civilization, there must have been a time when brahmin and sudra were one. Otherwise, our colour would not have been these beautiful shades of brown. There must have been so much of mixing in the past that someone must have thought of the caste system.
“I was reading Mahabharata and in that Vedavyasa says there was no rule that a woman had to be faithful to one man. Her sexuality was so abundant that even after being taken by many men, there was more of it. It is like many rivers joining the ocean and the ocean still not being full. On the other hand, the sexuality of man is like firewood. He says this in Adhiparva[17] and he also says that all the rules for the woman were made much later by man because he could not handle her sexuality. Chandri represents that kind of abundant sexuality.
“The structure of this novel came to me magically. I was caught by it unawares. I have written nothing else with such abandon and discovery. While Naranappa and Praneshacharya form one end of the spectrum, Putta and Chandri form the other. Praneshacharya’s sexuality which had, perhaps, been accumulating, found release in Chandri. And this is release in more than one sense.
“When I situate my novel in a realistic situation, there is a strong inner text. It allows for all kinds of emotions in authenticity. So to study the novel as a caste and religious text is to diminish it, to under-rate its metaphysical dimension. To say Chandri is a sudra woman is to say nothing. My friend Paul Green, a historian, said the person who takes Praneshacharya around and introduces him to things he has never done in his life is Putta. Now Putta is a Malera by caste. Maleras are a brahmin-sudra caste. In fact, even in Ghatashraddha, after Yamunakka is cast out of the community, she will perhaps grow her hair, marry someone, and become a Malera. This happens everywhere. There must have been some brahmins who flouted the rules and became lower in the hierarchy.
“Putta takes Praneshacharya to koli-anka,[18] gets him to drink coffee, and arranges for him to visit Padmavathi. So, in a way, Praneshacharya is living Naranappa’s life and, in doing so, he is performing Naranappa’s shraddha. It is completed in Praneshacharya sleeping with Chandri. The Muslim burnt his body and Praneshacharya performs his shraddha.
“I wonder how at that age, with all my foolish ideas, I could write this novel which has meant so much to so many over the years. I was reading a lot of Hegel at that time. And here, the Hegelian metaphysics of opposites becomes true. The shanka[19] and jagte[20] which are ritually used to produce sound during worship become tools to frighten away the crows and vultures that hover over the dying in the agrahara!”
1. A reference to the four stages of the Hindu way of life; grihasthashrama is the second stage, that of a householder.
2. All translations from Samskara seen here are mine.
3. Colony where the brahmins of a village or small town live.
4. Vow; observance.
5. Funeral rites.
6. Epic written by sage Vedavyasa.
7. A hand-held container used by sages to carry water.
8. The five elements, viz., earth, fire, water, air, and ether.
9. Ritual.
10. Affection; attachment.
11. Spirit of a dead person.
12. Spirit of an ancestor.
13. Harsh; fiercely frank.
14. Death ceremony performed invoking the spirit of the dead.
15. Nature (imagined as female).
16. An individual; a male.
17. First canto of the Mahabharata.
18. A cock-fight.
19. Conch.
20. A gong sounded at time of worship.
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