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SAMSKARA, a novel by U.R. Anantha Murthy
I
have now finished reading Samskara, a novel by U.R. Anantha Murthy. It
was published in 1976 by OUP but before that in 1965 by an Indian publisher. It's the story of a Brahmin community in
India. They have all these things they can and can't do to retain their
Brahmin caste category. It reminded me a little of the Calvinist caste
system in which you had to prove you were among the elect. But there's a
lot more rules for the Brahmins! One guy has thrown it all away and
moves in with a whore and drinks with Muslims. He's teasing the others
all the time. When he dies, they don't even know how to bury him because
they can't touch him because of how he lived, but no one else of other
castes can touch him either. Buzzards gather. Plague spreads. The whore
he lives with finally just pays some Muslims to burn him and they move
on and she disappears after seducing the top Brahmin. I had a hard time
reading this novel because the names were very long. Praneshacharya was
the name of the central Brahmin. Once I got the names down I cruised.
Should I read all the criticism now of the book, or should I just get
another novel set in India and read that? I've decided to read ten books
about India because their situation is so similar to ours:
multicultural problems and disintegrating caste systems, and religions
going to pieces as they face the modern world with all its seductions.
The brief afterword explains that some of the novel is historical and literal. Real names of places are in the book, and actual newspapers and stories are named. Except for Benares, I had never heard of any of these places.
Plus some stuff isn't accurate. The buzzards gather to eat plague-ridden rats, and no buzzard would be so stupid as to eat a plague-ridden rat. (Birds aren't exactly birdbrains.) This was pointed out in the afterword. I was puzzled by this. I wondered if buzzards could eat plague-ridden rats and if they had some kind of gastric juice to fend off the plague. They don't. They have brains that would steer them clear. Is it logic or instinct that the birds have? If it's logic they'd have to discuss this, because there would be no second-chances.
The whole novel is filled with beggars, lepers, whores, filth, death, and yet, amidst all this, a kind of paradoxical enlightenment among the Brahmin but also the other castes. Even the whore (Chandri) thinks, and her thinking is beautiful. Only she and Praneshacharya are capable of appreciating beauty, the novelist asseverates. The others are going through the motions of thinking and living, but exist in a shadow world of conventions.
After the whore's once-Brahmin lover (Naranappa) dies, Praneshacharya has to figure out what to do. He has to go and ask a god because there is nothing in the law books to explain to him what he should do. Naranappa is dead, but what caste did he belong to? He was no longer Brahmin but wasn't anything else either. Until the situation is resolved, Praneshacharya is not permitted to eat. It would be pollution for him to eat. But the situation drags on for days, and he secretly eats plantains (I think these are a kind of banana).
"As the forest silence deepened, his heart began to clear. He dragged his feet slowly as he peeled his plantains and ate them. Since he saw the villager , the problem had touched deeper. One must hold it by its tuft of hair, look at it face to face. The origin of it all was a thing that had to be burned. That thing was Naranappa, who had lived kicking away at Brahminism. ... Thinking that the problem belonged to the realm of the Law of Dharma, he had run to the Ancient Law Books; he had run to god, but at last in the forest, in the dark..."
(96-97).
Praneshacharya is confused, and yet he is the only one in the village who is entitled to clarify what everyone should do. He looks up the chain, but can find nothing.
The book apparently became a popular movie in Bollywood in some language called Kannada (pictured above is the movie poster).
18 comments:
Sounds good. How does it compare to Faukner's "As I Lay Dying".
That is an almost impossibly rich question. The novelnis very brief about 125 pages. You meet at least six fleshed out characters whose lives and characters are got at through various means. Some are objective - what they eat or won't - some comes through dreams - how they talk - and treat others. Then there are paradoxes. The most ascetic is the most libertine and vice versa. It's very condensed. I found myself marveling over a paragraph more than once wondering how he got so much info into it. The narrative loops around like F and you to sometimes just keep reading in hope it will clarify itself later on. Murthy is depending on the reader to have tons of info about caste systems and symbolism. There is a five page index which helps. In general this is much more concise and pungent. A better comparison might be Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. Murthy's book is taking very seriously the religious milieu and all its trappings much as Firbanlk does in his witty 90 page novella. The cardinal and the guru here are both heads of their respective communities and who admit to themselves they barely know what they are doing. They both open with an impossible situation. Pirelli is baptizing a dowager's police dog. Firbank seems to want to hurt the church. Murthy wants to show how infinite a progress is a spiritual life. Murthy is better than either Firbank or Faulkner.
That's such a goad that question that I hope others take it up. Faulkner appears to feel he is above his characters and laughs at them. Firbank too. Murthy is very much with each character. I feel he becomes intimately each one and although he judges them it's never without incredible affection even for the lepers with limbs fallen off. He gets lots of humor into each scene but he doesn't distance himself. The world is impossible and academics barely get it and no one else does either. It's just too immense. Even a single event opens into endless questions. This is my first trip in this culture and I don't know its cliches yet.
Have you read Andrew Ward's The Blood Seed: A Novel of India? I think the author spent a portion of his childhood in India. It's a bit longer than 125 pages. The story is set against the backdrop of Indian history from 1850 to 1950.
No. Is this good? how so? I haven't heard of it.
Then, of course, there are the Flashman novels, which are what Kippling would have written, if Kippling wrote blue novels. Not exactly high literature, but they seem to get the context right.
i recently finished for the second time a novel by rudy wiebe a canadian mennonite writer he wrote the story THE TEMPTATIONS OF BIG BEAR big bear was the last hold out the last one to stand up boldly to the political land drunkenness of the british his is a story of great dignity wiebe manages to imagine the humour and the dignity of the very human river cree people a novel utilizing real names and real events rudy wiebe this is the second intro to anantha murthy one of my brothers has recommended him highly so well what to do with literary urgency keep reading keep turning the pages keep the hearth lit tea anyone
jh
It got good reviews and opened doors for him, though it sold mostly to libraries. I read it in Fiji, where forty percent of the population is Indian, after checking it out from the library at the University of the South Pacific. I later bought a used copy in hardcover after arriving in Manila. It was never issued in paperback.
Ward's childhood adventure in India came about due to Indian independence from British colonial rule shortly after WWII. The novel tells a story connecting an historical incident, the Cawnpore Massacre, to Indian independence a century later. Since then he's written primarily essays, mostly for the Atlantic and NPR, and non-fiction, including serious scholarly historical works on the Cawnpore Massacre in India, the Fort Pillow Massacre near Memphis during the American Civil War, and more recently a large collection of American slave narratives drawn from interviews produced during the Great Depression with funding from the Works Progress Administration. Quite a few African Americans raised as slaves and freed by the 13th amendment were still alive in the Roosevelt era. Their recollections of slavery and emancipation were systematically recorded by "writers" at government expense to ensure that their accounts would be available for posterity through the National Archives.
My sister spent a year in Mumbai on a Fulbright Fellowship studying tabla and eventually wrote a dissertation on that topic for her doctorate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. Obviously ethnomusicology isn't a real discipline because it employs anthropological constructs that aren't politically correct. But the Indian fellow who supervised her dissertation does have some interesting ideas. He wrote a book about the history of history before moving back to India. He's in New Delhi now, which I surmise used to be Delhi before independence made it New.
This whole area is new for me. I loved Murthy's novel but I confess it's a new area for me. I have mostly read in the French and American literatures of the last thousand years and then Greek literature of yore and some Finnish and some Japanese and Chinese etc. I don't think I'd read in the Hindu tradition. I got interested via Nussbaum's book on Women in India and then one of her new books on the use of the humanities. I shall google Ward's book. I think I would like to read more about tue caste system but from within their own writers.
In terms of our own "indians" I've read lots more but feelnthat that tradition is no longer authentic. Howard Norman translated some Cree poetry. I liked that a lot. I loved his translations of a Creole Haitian poet named Paule Breton published by Graywolf. That's a beautiful book called The Woe Shirt. It is surrealist prose poems told by an itinerant poet in Port au Prince. He told the stories to tourists for a living. Whatever happened to Aristide?
Artemis - a Greek goddess who shot deer with her bow and arrow.
Artemas Ward - a Revolutionary War major general from Massachusetts and 2nd in command to George Washington.
Artemus Ward - a pen name for Charles Farrar Browne, journalist and editor of Vanity Fair during the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's favorite author.
Ward's book is available at Amazon.com for one penny. Ha! I am not the only one.
It has three glowing reviews attached.
It's a bit long for my taste: 700 pages.
However, it looks good. Thank you for this suggestion.
i just bought a hard cover 1st edition for 8 bucks press a button VOILA delivered right to the proper box we are hard-wired to read
But don't get too caught up in it. You have to make your acceptance speech for the Vatican. I know you're a dark horse a long shot but you're starting to pick up traction!!
But don't get too caught up in it. You have to make your acceptance speech for the Vatican. I know you're a dark horse a long shot but you're starting to pick up traction!!
http://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/when-hinduism-meets-the-internet/
If JH is elected Pope I will convert to Catholicism the next day.
the bridge is mighty rickety
pontifex in absconditum
If you are interested in further exploring U.R.Anantha Murthy's ouevre, read his remarkable short stories in "Stallion of the Sun and Other Stories," available from Amazon, etc.
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