In an active, busy country, full of passion and controversy, it is not an easy thing to grasp, this negative way of perceiving. Yet it is fundamental to an understanding of India’s intellectual second-rateness, which is generally taken for granted but may be the most startling and depressing fact about the world’s second most populous country, which now has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and which, while asserting the antiquity of its civilization (and usually simply asserting without knowledge or scholarship), is now dependent insecond most populous country, which now has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and which, while asserting the antiquity of its civilization (and usually simply asserting without knowledge or scholarship), is now dependent insecond most populous country, which now has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and which, while asserting the antiquity of its civilization (and usually simply asserting without knowledge or scholarship), is now dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilizations.
A recent remarkable novel, however, takes us closer to the Indian idea of the self and without too much mystification. The novel is Samskara, by U.R. Anantamurti,a forty-four-year-old university teacher. Its theme is a Brahmin’s loss of identity and it corroborates much of what Sudhir Kakar says. The novel has now had an India- wide success, it has been made into a prize-winning film and an English translation (by a poet A.Κ. Ramanujan) was serialized over the first three months of 1976 in India’s best paper, the Illustrated Weekly of India.
ACHARYA’S DOUBLE-LIFE
The central figure is the Acharya, the spiritual leader of a brotherhood of Brahmins. At an early age the Acharya decided that he was a “man of goodness-that was his nature, his karma, the thing he was programmed to be by his previous lives. In the Acharya’s reasoning none can become a man of goodness, he is that or he isn’t and the “clods” the “men of darkness” cannot complain because by their nature they have no desire for salvation anyway. It was in obedience to the “good” in his nature that at the age of sixteen, the Acharya married a crippled girl of twelve. It was his act of sacrifice the crippled girl was his “sacrificial altar” and after twenty years the sacrificial act still fills him with pleasure, pride and compassion. Everyday, serving the crippled, ugly woman, even during the pollution of her periods, he gets nearer salvation and he thinks, “I get ripe and ready”. He is famous now, this Acharya, for his sacrifice, his goodness, and the religious wisdom brought him by his years of study of the palm-leaf scriptures, he is the “crest-jewel of the Vedanta”, and the Vedanta is the ultimate wisdom.
But among the Brahmin brotherhood there is one who has fallen. He drinks, he catches the sacred fish from the tank of a temple, he mixes with Moslems and keeps an Untouchable mistress. He cannot be expelled from the brotherhood. Compassion is one reason, compassion being an aspect of the goodness of the Acharya.
A WICKED BRAHMIN DIES OF PLAGUE
But there is another reason: the fallen Brahmin threatens to become a Moslem if he is expelled, and such a conversion would retrospectively pollute, and thereby break up the entire brotherhood.
This very wicked Brahmin now dies of plague and a crisis ensues. Should the brotherhood perform the final rites? Only Brahmins can perform the rites for another Brahmin. But can the dead man be considered a Brahmin? In his life he abjured Brahminhood, but did Brahminhood leave him? Can the brotherhood perform the rites without pollution itself? Can another, lower sect of Brahmins be made to perform the rites? (They are willing. the request flatters them, their Brahmin line crossed at some time, and they feel it). But wouldn’t that bring the brotherhood into disrepute -having the rites for one of their own performed by a lower group?
DISEASE SPREADS
These are the problems that are taken to the Acharya, the crest- jewel, the man of goodness. The matter is urgent. The heat is intense, the body is rotting, the vultures are flapping about, there is a danger of the plague spreading. And the Brahmins, who are fussy about their food in every way, are getting hungry, they can’t eat while the corpse is uncremated.
But the Acharya cannot give a quick answer. He cannot simply consult his heart, his goodness. The question of the status of the dead man- Brahmin or not Brahmin, member of the brotherhood or outcaste- is not a moral question. It is a matter of pollution and it is therefore a matter for the laws, the sacred books. The Acharya has to consult the books, no one knows his ways about the palm-leaf manuscripts as well as the Acharya. But this consulting of the books takes time. The plague spreads, some Untouchables die and are unceremoniously burned in their huts, the Brahmins are beside themselves with hunger and anxiety. And the books give the Acharya no answer.
The Acharya understands that his reputation for wisdom is now at stake, in the midst of the crisis he acknowledges this remnant of personal vanity. But a decision has to be made and it has to be the correct one. The Acharya can only turn to magic.
MONKEY GOD
In the morning he goes to the temple of the monkey god and ritually washes down the man-sized idol. He puts one flower on the god’s left shoulder and another on the right. And he decides how the god will answer. if the flower on the right shoulder falls first, the brotherhood can perform the rites for the dead man. But the god gives no reply. For the whole of the hot day, while the Acharya prays and anguishes (and his crippled wife becomes infected by the plague), neither flower falls. And, for the first time in his life the acharya, the man of goodness, has doubts about himself: perhaps he is not worthy enough to get an answer from the god.
ACHARYA’S SEX PERVERSION
Exhausted, tormented, he leaves the temple in the evening to go to look after his wife. In the forest he meets the Untouchable mistress of the dead man. She expresses her concern for him, she has worshipped the Acharya for his piety, and it has occurred to her that she should have a child by the Acharya. Her breasts touch him, and he is enveloped by the moment; he wakes at midnight imagining himself a child again, in his mother’s lap. It cannot be said that he falls or sins. The words are too positive. As with Sudhir Kakar’s patients in real life, the sexual moment simply happens. “It was a sacred moment nothing before it, nothing after it. A moment that brought into being what never was and then itself went out of being. Formless before, formless after. In between, the embodiment, the moment. Which means I’m absolutely not responsible for making love to her. Not responsible for that moment. But the moment altered me why?”
The reasoning is strange but that is now the Acharya’s crisis: not guilt, but a sudden neurotic uncertainty about his nature. The earlier crisis has receded: the dead man has been cremated during the night by his mistress, with the help of a Moslem. The Acharya is left with his new anguish. Is he a man of goodness, or has he really all his life belonged to the other, “tigerish” world? Men are what they are, what they have been made by their previous lives. But how does a man know his true nature, his form?
HINDU BLISS
“We shape ourselves through our choices, bring form and line to this thing we call our person”. But what has been his defining choice the long life of sacrifice and goodness, or that barely apprehended sexual moment? He doesn’t know, he feels only that he has “lost form” and that his person is now like “a demonic premature foetus”. He is bound again to the wheel of karma, he has to start again from the beginning and make a new decision about his nature. In the meantime he is like a ghost, cut off from the community of men. He has lost god and lost the ways of goodness. “Like a baby monkey losing hold of his grip on the mother’s body as he leaps from branch to branch, he felt he had lost hold and fallen from the rites and actions he had clutched till now”. Because men are not what they make themselves, there is no question here of faith or conviction or ideals or the perfectibility of the self. There is only a wish for knowledge of the self, which alone would make possible a return to the Hindu bliss of the instinctive life: “to be just to be.”
CASTE SINS
Formless now, his wife dead from the plague, and with her death his special act of sacrifice abruptly terminated, the Acharya decides to wander, to let his legs take him where they will. This is really an attempt to test his responses to the world; it might be said that he is trying to define his new form by negatives. What do other people see in him? Does the peasant see the Brahmin still? Do other Brahmins see the Brahmin, or do they see a fraud? At a village fair, is he the man to be tempted by the women acrobats, the pollutions of the soda-pop stall, and coffee stall, the lower-caste excitement of the cock-fight? Between the pollution- free Brahmin world and this world, the world of ordinary pleasures, of darkness, a demon world of pressing need, revenge and greed, there is no middle way. All round him are purposive eyes. Eyes engaged in things… Immersed. The oneness, the monism, of desire and fulfilment. Men are defined by the world, they are defined by the pollution they can expose themselves to.
ANTI-BRAHMIN FEELING
The Acharya is terrified, he feels himself being transformed from ghost to demon. But neurotically, he continues to test himself. His caste sins mount and he understands that by exposing himself to pollution he has become a polluting thing himself. He comes to a decision. He will return to the brotherhood and confess. He will tell them about his sexual adventure with the dead man’s Untouchable mistress, his visit to the common fair, he will tell them that though in a state of pollution (partly because of his wife’s death), he ate with Brahmins in a temple and invited a man of lower caste to eat with him. He will speak without repentance or sorrow. He will simply be telling them about the truth of his inner self, which by a series of accidents – perhaps not really accidents he has just discovered.
BARBARIC CIVILISATION
Samskara is a difficult novel and it may be that not everyone will agree with my reading of it. The translation is not always clear; but many of the Hindu concepts are not easy to render in English. Even so, the narrative is hypnotic; and the brilliance of the writing in the original Kannada can be guessed. Anti- Brahmin feeling (and by extension anti-Aryan, anti-Northern feeling) is strong in the south and some readers of the serialization in the Illustrated Weekly of India have seen the novel as an attack on Brahmins. This is a political simplification, but it shows to what extent Indians are able to accept the premises of the novel that are so difficult for an outsider: caste, pollution, the idea of the karma- given self, the anguish at the loss of caste identity.
The author, U.R. Anantamurti, is a serious literary man. He teaches English to postgraduate students at Mysore “University, which has a lively English department and he has also taught in the United States. His academic background seems a world away from the society he describes in the novel, and it is hard to assess his attitude to that society. Knowingly or unknowingly. Anantamurti has portrayed a barbaric civilization, where the books, the laws, are buttressed by magic and where a too elaborate social organization is unquickened by intellect or creativity or ideas of moral responsibility (except to the self in its climb to salvation). These people are all helpless, disadvantaged, easily unbalanced, the civilization they have inherited has long gone sour, living instinctive lives, crippled by rules (I didn’t try to solve it for myself. I depended on god, on the old law-books. Isn’t this precisely why we have created the books?), they make up a society without a head.
References to buses and newspapers and the Congress Party indicate that the novel is set in modern times. But the age seems remote, and certainly Gandhi doesn’t seem to have walked this way. The Acharya’s anguish about his true nature, though presented in religious terms, is bound up with the crudest ideas of pollution and caste and power. Brahmins must be Brahmins, the Acharya reasons at one stage: otherwise righteousness society without a head.
References to buses and newspapers and the Congress Party indicate that the novel is set in modern times. But the age seems remote, and certainly Gandhi doesn’t seem to have walked this way. The Acharya’s anguish about his true nature, though presented in religious terms, is bound up with the crudest ideas of pollution and caste and power. Brahmins must be Brahmins, the Acharya reasons at one stage: otherwise righteousness will not prevail. Won’t the lower castes get out of hand? In this decadent age, common men follow the right path out of fear if that were destroyed, where could we find the strength to uphold the world? It is an aspect of this righteousness that when an Untouchable woman begs for a gift of tobacco, the Brahmin woman should throw it out into the street, as to a dog. In this way pollution is avoided, and righteousness and fear maintained.
