Indian Texts: Narrative

Rajagopal Parthasarathy

U. R. Anantha Murthy (b. 1932) is the preeminent writer of his
generation in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in
Karnataka State in south-central India with an unbroken literary
tradition of about fourteen hundred years. Samskara was first
published in 1965. An English translation, by A. K. Ramanujan,
followed in 1976.

Anantha Murthy himself explains the rather fortuitous circum-
stances by which he came to write the novel.¹ He was then a
graduate student at Birmingham University, England, working on
his Ph.D. dissertation, Politics and the Novel in the 1930s, under
the supervision of Malcolm Bradbury, the English critic and nov-
elist.

In writing Samskara, Anantha Murthy was coming to terms
with the realities of his own oppressive Madhva Brahman past in
a remote Karnataka village. The writing itself can be viewed as a
samskara--a rite of expiation, prāyaścita--to atone for the op-
pressiveness of Brahmanism when its orthodoxies were being re-
peatedly questioned in the reformist climate of the 1930s and 40s.
The novel, thus, is a serious contribution to the dialogue on the
politics of religion in the Subcontinent.

Samskara calls into question the meaning of Hindu India, and
of the institutions that help to define it. Foremost among the
institutions is caste (jāti), a hierarchical ranking of social classes
based on how pure or impure each is. Four social classes (varnas)
are traditionally recognized: the Brahmans (priests), the
Kshatriyas (warriors), the Vaishyas (merchants), and the Shudras

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