Bengaluru: AAs a creative writer of intellectual depth and critical thought, U.R Ananthamurthy belongs to eternity. A rare intellectual of Renaissance accomplishment in the country after Vivekananda or Aurobindo, who combined creative writing, modernity, cultural rootedness, educational reform, social justice, democratic values and political criticism, he was always ahead of his times in concepts and ideas.
Creatively Critical
Ananthamurthy used to say: ‘Just to narrate elegantly what is apparent about human life, you need no creative writer. A piece of creative writing is respected for its intellectual depth and critical strength.’
Literature being an intellectual domain of deeper knowledge that is inherently subversive, a serious writer maintains a critical stance, either of the liberal pragmatic type or the radical intellectual type. URA belongs to the latter category, one that presses a creative writer to brave the risks of speaking the truth. He believed that serious intellectual writings are inevitably critical and that critical consciousness makes them creative.
A critical writer not only questions the tacit assumptions of the creative interpretations of other writers but also subjects one’s own thought to critical re-examination. It is this readiness of intellectual honesty, displayed even to the extent of upsetting one’s own opinions and interpretations that puts URA in a league of his own. Critical responses to creative writing by others, he believed, serve a moral purpose that at the first instance is to assure oneself of the validity of one’s own arguments, a caution against false reasoning. Therefore, he was absolutely uninhibited in the criticism of his fellow writers.
He knew very well that critical perspective of creative writings and democratic political set up are intimately linked together. According to him, anything that destroys intellectual freedom to critical articulation precludes a genuinely creative literary work. Hence, he was utterly impatient of fascism, autocracy, caste-ism, and religious fundamentalism. This forced him to boldly express his uncompromising attitude towards reactionary and revivalist formulations, that usually demand an unquestioning acceptance of history, culture and religion that have been distorted to justify those who create and propagate dogma. He ran into controversies for criticisms of both types, as the Bairappa issue (Avarana) or the Modi issue (leaving the country) exemplify.
Eminent Educationist
He had a clear concept of education at all levels. Mother tongue, he believed, should be the medium of knowledge transmission, for that is what one acquires as the primary channel of communication. Any alien language, that is to be studied, should be an object of learning and never it’s medium. His argument rests on the fact that language is metaphor, which culture imparts, and hence one cannot learn it as part of education. He believed that future intellectuals reside in the surviving villages and not in the cities where the youth go linguistically up-rooted. Real learning, he said, means unlearning and it is enabled by one’s mother tongue only. He, as the Chairman of the State Education Commission, advised the Government of Kerala to introduce English as a subject of learning at class III onward, but not to use it as the medium of instruction.
He was annoyed with the system of higher education in the country, which has not been successful in building up a knowledgeable, critically conscious citizenry, the most vital requirement of a democratic nation. He found that the methods of teaching, earning and research were becoming too mechanical and that one needed to be creative either about achieving national development or about acquiring individual competency. He said and wrote that the mechanical ways and means of teaching and research in colleges and Universities continue to deprive knowledge of its critical edge, its politics. He was convinced that sources of knowledge and modes of knowing should not remain compartmentalized, stereotypical and rigid, allowing the learner little or no flexibility. This kind of segregated learning, he believed, distanced the youth from objective social reality and curbed creative intelligence.
His perspective was of interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary teaching and research, which he practised when he was Vice Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, by establishing schools of interdisciplinary studies in the place of discipline based Departments. I had the once-in-a-lifetime chance of founding a school of interdisciplinary school of social sciences at the University where he made me a professor by invitation. He understood interdisciplinary study does not pit two disciplines against one another, but actually draws them closer together. Interdisciplinary education, he said, consists of creating a new object that belongs to no one. He used to say that knowledge generated beyond disciplines and across their interfaces is strikingly fresh, regenerative and converging. Convergence crosses not only disciplinary barriers. It cuts across, he used to say, wide ranging domains of knowledge from arts, sciences, humanities and technology to management and manufacturing studies.
Culturally Rooted
URA used to say that radicalism is not Western, which it is often made out to be. In India it goes back to ancient times, some of the ideas of which are surprising even today. When colonial modernity entered the Indian middleclass, it uprooted its educated and intelligent members. Very few remained rooted, choosing instead to absorb the dynamic of modernity in its entirety.
Only a few used to refresh their views of their own culture. Such reformists of rootedness had emerged in many Indian states during 18th and 19th centuries. In Karnataka, he was attracted by such culturally rooted great minds like Basava, Pampa, Kumara Vyasa, and Allama Prabhu. He was a Basavite in anti-caste ideas and women equality. His vachana-s influenced him in his dissent and protest against the Brahman orthodoxy.
He was, indeed, influenced by his elder contemporaries such as D.R. Bendre, Gopalakrishna Adiga and Shivarama Karant. Several Western thinkers like Tolstoy, D.H Lawrence and Camus incisively influenced him, but without allowing him to be swept off. While URA insisted on remaining culturally rooted, this did nothing to hamper his innate affinity for change. He loved his roots and respected change, making him the epitome of the modern man. We miss him at this critical juncture. His demise leaves a vacuum that will never be filled again.
The writer was URA’s successor as VC, Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam. He is a leading social scientist and historian
