It is fascinating how in a culture-scape texts speak to each other. Alternatively, they speak to us in their own voices as though we readers were the sounding board for a dialogue. It is not the question of a text influencing another or responding to it. Since texts are born out of a flux called culture which flows in between specific historical conditions, it shouldn’t surprise us that they seem to collude, collide and even frown at each other. Many times they masquerade their dissimilarities and claim separateness. But look a little deeper and you find that they are about certain substantial experiences which constitute the ethos of the period with which the texts negotiate. S.L. Bhyrappa’s Vamshavriksha written in 1962 published in 1965 is about renunciation. In the last lines of the novel the author describes Srinivasa Shrothri renouncing the family to leave for Haridwar to become a sanyasi, on his way to the Great Renunciation.
In the last lines of Samskara , published in the same year, Praneshacharya decides to return to the Brahmin ghetto, to confess to the community his new resolve. In a remarkable passage, Ananthamurthy describes the childlike pleasure the acharya rediscovers in the world of nature and in the sexuality he discovers in himself. The two novels thus interrogate two world-views which have dominated Indian culture — renunciation and immersion in experience (‘Samskara’ can also mean a mind –body experience, which clings beyond life).
Going by their reception and the biography they have accumulated around them in the last fifty years, no two literary texts could be more dissimilar. U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and S.L. Bhyrappa’s Vamshavriksha , both published in 1965 are major, representative works of two authors who have been made to symbolise two opposite trajectories.
Samskara which Ananthamurthy wrote in Birmingham almost overnight became the iconic text of Kannada modernity and also went on to consolidate, the Navya (modernistic) fiction in Kannada. The extraordinary fact is that it has none of the markers of modernity- the protagonist is not an angst ridden, alienated urban individual but Praneshacharya, the jewel of Vedanta, the Scholar-priest in a non-descript Brahmin ghetto called Durvasapura in the Malnad of the 1930s. Even after half a century since its publication it comes as a surprise that such a tale, written in an extraordinary blend of realism and symbolism, social satire and intense lyricism, verisimilitude and metaphorical polyphony should have become an iconic modernist text. It also went on to become probably the most diversely interpreted modern Kannada text with V.S Naipaul, Eric Erikson, Meenakshi Mukherjee among its celebrated interpreters.
The slender novel had the unique capacity to touch many raw nerves and even today for many conservative readers it is an immoral ‘modern’ work written with the purpose to shame a community. For hundreds of young Kannada readers Samskara performs the rites of passage into exploration of sexuality, rebellion against hypocritical orthodoxy and more importantly becoming aware of the existential self confronting the pain of living through the dualities of body and mind, instinct and intellect. The film Samskara (1975) based on the novel was a cultural event not only inaugurating the New Cinema but also proving to be hugely controversial.
S.L. Bhyrappa’s Vamshavriksha is a large narrative with powerfully portrayed characters belonging to three generations, keeping itself well within the bounds of realism with occasional and not always successful forays into literary symbolism. The power of the story-telling and the intensely dramatic and melodramatic scenes is such that the reader is pressured to respond emotionally. Though Bhyrappa is considered a ‘popular’ writer and consciously employs the grammar of popular fiction, the impact Vamshavriksha makes perhaps not as a whole, but in parts, is hardly of pleasure, complacent agreement or escape into a candy floss world, generally associated with popular fiction. It is essentially a disturbing and sombre novel about the failure of love, marriage and family, despite the author’s ambivalent attempts, especially towards the end, to imbue them with ideal purity. In a very different way it is also like Samskara about the inalienable dualities of existence-body and mind, experience and renunciation and about the horrendous pain of trying to integrate them. The material is of a kind a popular writer would not dare to touch. In a strange way these two Kannada texts seem to collide with each other. Both protagonists, Praneshacharya and Shrothri are strongly rooted in Brahmanical values and both have encounters with its values which leave them shattered. Pranesharaya discovers that the sexuality, the instinctive life he wanted to tame in Naranappa was merely hiding its red teeth and nails only to pounce on him when he found Chandri in the forest. Shrothri discovers that the Great Family Tree which he held as most sacred had been grafted with his own illegitimacy. Both of them, after the epiphanic moments of discovery, resolve to face the truth head on, accept responsibility and remake their lives in the bitter, wounding light of the truth discovered.
As critics have pointed out, they are not capable of using their experiences to radically question the value-systems they had adhered to. Their resolve is to be truthful and to accept the suffering they still see as just, caused by their own failure to live according to those values. The author of Samskara does not abdicate his authority either. In the fourth and last section of the novel, he tries to consciously fit Pranesharya into the Sartrean existentialist narrative of bad faith, authenticity, choice and freedom. It is at times awkward to hear in Praneshacharya’s interior monologue phrases from J.P. Sartre’s popular lecture ‘Existentialism and Humanism’. Chandri occupies a more shadowy liminal space than Katyayani and Karuna. However, Samskara remains an open ended text, with room for all kinds of ambiguities and also for many conflicting readings. In Vamshavriksha though there is never any doubt where the author’s sympathies lie, there are a large number of spaces untouched by his domination. The sad thing is that Bhyrappa’s powerful narrative lacks the support of a nuanced, flexible, creative language. The one question to ask of these two novels is how profoundly do they interrogate the value systems they consciously take up to analyse? How do they contribute to the great tradition of the painful individual and collective interrogation which has shaped Kannada sensibility? That no analysis of this thematic and problematic can ignore these two novels is one of the answers.
The careers of the two novelists since the publication of these novels have impacted, re-routed and even polarized major trends in Kannada culture. U.R. Ananthamurthy made a complex journey from a radical, modernist position to that of a critical insider. His voice remained the voice “addressing the unpleasant truths of our time”. S.L. Bhyrappa’s novels like Vamshavriksha, Parva, Graha Bhanga earned a huge readership and provoked much intelligent criticism. But to see the Kannada cultural scene as a boxing ring featuring Ananthamurthy vs. Bhyrappa is an insult to the diversity of Kannada literary culture. My belief is that the true battles have been fought by other writers who are not celebrated contestants.
