The Indian literary world has lost a giant, the intelligentsia a major voice and the country a person of impeccable intellectual integrity. It is a sign of the times that the death of Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy was celebrated by some lumpen elements driven by the sheer hate that politics alone seems capable of generating.
The irony of such extremes was stressed much more in the passing of a writer who, in one of his famous books, mocked the death in a Brahmin colony of a hated figure in his iconoclastic style. It took courage for a person of his Brahmin background and early education to revile the caste system, the evils of which would have been apparent to everyone but few would have ventured such an opinion in public.
In a country polarised by political opinions and buffeted by two opposing streams of thought, the danger in questioning the right to hold an opinion is an unwelcome trend. Significantly, for a personality who has been projected as a writer with strong political opinions, Ananthamurthy was the very epitome of grace in dealing with people who did not subscribe to his views.
The English professor’s espousal of the Kannada language was yet another instance of his ability to think through a subject without letting his own education and experiences obstruct his clarity of thought in forming an opinion, that too in an IT-driven city that has made capital out of English as the language of communication with the world. What we will miss most are his opinions, fearlessly expressed for society to mull over and then make up its mind.
