"If I am a writer," said UR Ananthamurthy once in an interview, "it is because of the memories of my youth. It is like a trust from which I can keep drawing endlessly".
The use of that word "trust" always fascinated me. At one level it was straightforward – a literary bank he dipped into, confident it would sustain him through his writing life. At a deeper level, it meant a belief system that was sieved through the experience of growing up in a small town, travelling abroad for studies and then responding to the injustices that were now more clearly etched out around him.
Of his first novel Samskara, VS Naipaul wrote that it captured the "Indian idea of the self" as a "form of social inquiry", which highlights the decay of Indian civilisation. Ananthamurthy brought to bear upon the story of a high class Brahmin who had slept with an untouchable and thus "defiled" himself, the moral dilemmas that the non-thinking, ritual-following leaders of society are seldom exposed to.
As writer, critic, teacher, activist, public intellectual, Ananthamurthy stood alone – it was not something he minded even when that sometimes turned out to be literally true. He was one of the leaders of the modern Kannada literary movement, the Navya or "new" school. Long before it became a fashionable term in economics, he was the master of "glocalisation", using a precise cultural milieu to expose a global truth.
In his later years, he abandoned the overarching form of public discourse which were the feature of his novels to take on specific personalities – Narendra Modi, Narayan Murthy among them – as symbols of larger faults in society. For years he had been spoken of with some awe as a contender for the Nobel, and was in the long list for the Man Booker International prize in 2013. Although his novels were originally in his native Kannada, he wrote beautifully and evocatively in English. His newspaper reports of the Tianenmen Square riots (he just happened to be in China then) are the works of an English master.
He was a warm and affectionate man, who went out of his way to greet youngsters. On one of the last occasions we met, he asked wistfully, "Do you remember the old days in Bangalore when people just walked in and out of friends' places without announcement? Why don't we do that any more?"
He loved Shimoga, where he was born, Mysore where he lived for a while, Kottayam where he was the vice chancellor of the university, Bangalore, Kannada (he was in the forefront of the change of name to "Bengaluru"), the poetry of Eliot and Ramanujam, and his role as a writer whose impact went beyond the written word. We will miss him.
