Srikar Raghavan 

183602009 
Research Methodology, Term Paper 
Total Word Count - 4993 
 
Conflicts and Critiques in the Writings of U.R Ananthamurthy 
  
One of the pioneers of the Navya movement in Kannada literature, U.R Ananthamurthy was a man 
far ahead of his times, but with a foot firmly placed in his roots. In his works, one can find equally 
passionate critiques of both tradition and modernity, as Ananthamurthy perceived them. In this 
paper, I will attempt to trace his thoughts about these, by looking at three of his novels - 
Samskara,​ ​Bharatipura​, ​Bhava​ - and his last non-fiction book ​Hindutva or Hind Swaraj​. As one of 
few men whose tastes and interests straddled both western and Indian culture and thought, I feel 
he was singularly equipped with the tools for this unique project, which is why his views and ideas 
merit a closer scrutiny. In an interview with N. Manu Chakravarty, asked to reflect on his creative 
process and his understanding of India as a culture and society, URA replies, and I quote him in 
full, ‘My constant companion, Kailasapathi, a Marxist and a Communist, was of the view that 
individuals do not matter in history, and that only certain economic and political forces do. I 
argued that if individuals did not resist or fight for change, the shape of things would have been 
different, But by saying individuals do not matter, you are making history an automatic kind of 
process and, if that is the case, it is very convenient for an intellectual brought up on science and 
modern analytical tools to say what happens next is predetermined. I would say to him that I 
couldn’t be a writer if I didn’t accept the role of the individual in history.’ (Ananthamurthy, 2012) 
The individuals at the center of his novels and their inner struggles and tribulations are closely 
addressed; the protagonists in his stories are all on a mental journey of sorts, constantly in a 
monologue with their own conflicted self. I will also try to portray and contrast the internal 
conflicts that rage in the minds of his protagonists in the three fictional works mentioned, and the 
various questions it throws up. 
  
  
The Initial Years: Samskara and Bharathipura 
  
URA’s first two novels are very different from each other in how their texts are constructed. 
Samskara​ is an allegorical masterpiece, where every turn in the story, every small plot-line, fits 
beautifully into the carefully chosen title of the novel. ​Bharatipura​, on the other hand, is a slightly 
more realist work of fiction, in that sense that it is set in a particular period in time (​Samskara​ is 
‘suspended in time and place’, as Chakravarty puts it) and its characters are more grounded in 
actuality and are involved in the political sphere. However, the two works share some very similar 
ideas. There is the ever-present duality of things: the sacred and the profane, the traditional and 
the modern, the rural and the urban, the individual and the community, the pure and the unclean, 
the untouchable and the venerable, and so on.   
  
Samskara d ​ elves into the plot immediately without any dilly-dallying. By the third page, we are 
already introduced to the main characters of the story. Praneshacharya, the venerable acharya, 
the ‘Crest-Jewel of Vedic Learning’, is taking care of his wife (who is a born invalid, and whom 
Praneshacharya has chosen voluntarily), as he hears about the death of Naranappa (his perceived 
antagonist) from the latter’s low-caste concubine Chandri. Immediately, the whole Brahmin 
agrahara is put into a state of uncleanliness; this will remain the theme of the rest of the story. 
‘Alive, Naranappa was an enemy; dead, a preventer of meals; as a corpse, a problem, a nuisance.’ 
(Ananthamurthy, 1978, pg-3) The plot is already taking a stab at the Brahminical rituals pertaining 
to the dead, and the situation is even more ridiculous given the deeds that Naranappa has pulled 
off in his lifetime. Eating meat, consuming alcohol, taking up a lowborn mistress, gallivanting with 
Muslims1; he was in every sense antithetical to Brahmin ideals, a living manifestation of everything 
they hold as profane, and yet, when death comes, he still continues to haunt the Brahmins. The 
irony of the situation speaks for itself. Praneshacharya decides to ‘look into Manu and other texts 
to see if there is a way out of this dilemma.’ The idea of Brahmins as a community looking for a 
solution to this absurd turn of events in the ancient texts rather than opting to look sensibly at the 
present and seeing things as they are, is something that Ananthamurthy finds worthy of 
questioning and parodying. The drama keeps escalating. As Chandri puts forth all her gold 
jewellery for the monetary requirements of the rites, the Brahmins of the agrahara clamour for 
Praneshacharya’s stipulation that they alone might be allowed to perform the rites and then go on 
to pocket the gold. Now, no reasonable conclusion can be reached, and the deliberation goes on 
for days; the corpse is rotting, the stench fills the agrahara, there are dead rats everywhere, 
vultures roam the skies, an old Brahmin Dasacharya even dies because of the efforts he expends in 
the wake of this disaster. And yet, Praneshacharya cannot come to a decision to cremate the body 
once and for all. He makes a trip to the old Anjaneya temple to consult with the godhead to find a 
way out of all this. What is the significance of all this, one might ask? I think, allegorically, 
Ananthamurthy is trying to paint a picture of a dead or rather a decadent Brahminical society, 
critiquing traditional thinking all the while. ‘There was a time when the Brahmin’s power of 
penance ruled the world. Then one didn’t buckle under any such threat. It’s because the times are 
getting worse that such dilemmas torment us,’ muses Praneshacharya at one point. (ibid. pg-49) 
The figure of Naranappa has brought into the village a new way of living, for lack of a better 
phrase, and he has influenced a few individuals in the village and in the neighbouring villages as 
well. A semblance of anti-Brahminism has infiltrated the society, and now, after his death, the 
agrahara must finally grapple with it; they must successfully quell it by any means, or face their 
own inadequacies. 
  
One of the things that have been criticised, about ​Samskara​, is how the women of the Brahmin 
households are portrayed. It is perhaps an unfair portrayal, but anyhow, all the upper caste 
women are constantly shown as nagging, and they are either sick or generally unappealing in any 
aesthetic sense. On the other hand, lower caste women, like Chandri, or another character called 
Belli are paradigms of beauty and sexual attraction. Narapppa, in one of Praneshacharya’s 
recollections, says ‘Be like the sages of your holy legends - get hold a fish-scented fisherwoman 
who can cook you fish soup, and go to sleep in her arms. And if you don’t experience God when 
you wake up, my name isn’t Naranappa.’ (ibid. p-26) Ultimately, Praneshacharya does end up in an 
intimate situation with Chandri, and the experience completely changes him. He feels he has lost 
his Brahminhood, and ‘becomes a stranger to himself.’ Now, his entire life beginning with his 
choice to take up an invalid wife is put into question, after the course of a single night. ‘Did he 

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​On one occasion, he catches fish from the sacred temple pond, and eats them with his Muslim friends, thus 
breaking the taboo that anyone who did this would cough blood and die. This taboo-breaking takes on a 
grander scale in Bharatipura, where the hero decides to take Dalits into a temple, again an act that is said to 
make them ‘cough blood and die.’ 
clutch his duty, this dharma, to protect this wife lying there lifeless, a pathetic beggar-woman - or 
did the dharma, clinging to him through the action and culture of his past, guide him hand in hand 
through these ways? He did not know… Now every one of his beliefs seemed to have turned 
topsy-turvy, returning to where he had started in his sixteenth year.’ (ibid. pg-75-76) As he now 
returns to care for his wife after this incident, he begins to feel how ugly she is. He realises that all 
this while his conceptions of beauty had resided purely in the godly realm, and that he had never 
desired anything in the real world, until now. The conflict now, is that ‘the acharya felt not only 
remorse, but a lightness in the thought that he was now a free man, relieved of his responsibility to 
lead the way, relieved of all authority.’(ibid. p-77) One gets the impression that Ananthamurthy is 
trying to say that traditional ways of thinking come with a burden that can be lightened, if only one 
were to question their validity. This particular strain of thought, referring to women as just 
desirable objects, is perhaps not the best way in which this could have been brought out, but 
allegorically, it simply points towards the extremes that traditional thought can lead to, and it is 
just one of the things that ties the story together. In his dismay, Praneshacharya admits that he 
sees no solution at hand, leaving his fellow Brahmins helpless, with only the one choice of moving 
away from the impure agrahara. In meantime however, Chandri, with the help of a Muslim friend of 
Naranappa, has already cremated the body and departed, unknown to everyone else. This again is 
just a subtle mocking of the inability of the agrahara, and an esteemed scholar, to deal with an 
anomaly. And now, Praneshacharya’s wife passes away, just in time for the plot to shift to the next 
phase, and the acharya leaves town, ‘meaning to walk wherever his legs took him.’ The last part of 
the novel is a jump from the social setting of the village into the mental wobblings of the Acharya. 
‘Now my person has lost form, has found no new form, it is like a demoniac premature foetus 
taken hastily out of the womb,’ he muses. To Praneshacharya, Chandri is a representation of the 
profane, and after he has lain with her, his sacred status has been nullified, and he does not know 
how to come to terms with it; he enters an existential mode and now is travelling into a new world, 
so to speak. In this journey, he meets Putta, a simple-minded chap who takes him through the 
pleasures of the modern world: a temple-festival, a fair, a restaurant, a whorehouse, and a 
pawnshop. Praneshacharya is travelling from the past to the present, and is struck by fear; fear 
that someone would recognize him, fear that he was committing profane acts despite the fact he 
already considered himself no longer a Brahmin; he decides to go back to the village, back to the 
past, to confront things once and for all. He is still unsure of what awaits, and his mind is not 
calmed yet. The story ends openly, with the Acharya looking backwards. Like AK Ramanujan writes 
in the afterword, ‘what is suggested is a movement, not a closure.’ ‘The novel ends but does not 
conclude.’ I think Ananthamurthy sees the internal questioning as an end unto itself; it is sufficient 
that an open negotiation with an Indian reality has taken place; it is sufficient that this mode of 
existentialism has been visited upon. Praneshacharya himself serves as a representation of the 
existential crisis that the larger Brahmin community finds itself in. And speaking now of 
existentialism, another avatar of this manifests itself in the character of Jagannatha, in 
Bharatipura 
  
Jagannnatha has returned from London to Bharatipura, his hometown, after a western education 
that has put him in touch with the breadth of knowledge that it has to offer; from Marx to Forster 
to Yeats, he has read widely and emerged as a rational minded atheist. In a letter to his girlfriend 
Margaret, he writes, early in the novel, proclaiming his ambitions, ‘Dear Margaret, surely, unless 
we destroy God, we will never be creative. We are still embryos in the womb of God; we’re not born 
at all. We’re not yet caught in the churning of history. We should be.’ (Ananthamurthy, 2012, pg-11) 
There is a resemblance to URA himself that Jagannatha inevitably invokes in a reader, as one 
compares the views and life of the two. Talking about existentialism and the translation of 
knowledge into action, URA says, speaking of the time during which he wrote ​Bharatipura,​ ‘ I read 
a lot of Sartre those days because of his own problems with the need for action and also the need 
for reflection, between which there is a strange connect… Coming back to ​Bharatipura​, because I 
had come under the influence of Marxism, etc - I thought temple entry should be a process of 
deconstruction. We must deconstruct the myth - demythify.’ (ibid. Pg- 256-258) Jagan is consumed 
by the sole idea of accomplishing something purposeful, something that matters; his plan is to 
take the Holeyaru ( the lower castes of the village) into the sanctum sanctorum of the Manjunatha 
temple, thereby announcing their rise in society. He writes, in another letter, ‘It is this Manjunatha 
who has made it impossible for us to take any social action in India. And because such meaningful 
action is impossible, social life seems totally pointless. By deriding the truth of our situation as a 
figment of a fevered imagination, we are living in self-deception. Therefore, if there is to be a 
revolution of any significance at all, the Holeyaru, the lowest of the low who live among us, must 
be able to stand, heads held high. The one step that they take is the only change is the only change 
that matters.’ (ibid. pg-30) 
  
Jagan criticises every aspect of traditional ways of living that he encounters and that he deems 
irrational. Seeing his childhood mentor Sripathi Rao’s wife after a long while, he thinks: ‘She 
sounded bored or disgusted. Narrow forehead, small eyes - no one had ever seen her happy. Could 
she have lost what girlhood joys she might have had in years and years of sitting in front of a 
smoky wood fire and years and years of childbearing? ‘(ibid. pg-19) In another poignant episode, 
he is introduced to a friend’s daughter-in-law Nagamani who behaves in a servile manner, 
supplying him with food and drink. ‘Nagamani is so engrossed in her chores in the kitchen, she’s 
not aware of the beauty blossoming in her body. These women live only to cook and serve 
delicious meals; those Holeyaru live only to carry the shit that this food becomes; and between 
these are the men of Bharatipura, whiling away their time on their verandas, digesting the food 
they’ve eaten - Jagannatha trembled with rage.’ 2(ibid. pg-69) He tries to overcome the inherent 
notions of purity and impurity in the society by trying to teach some of the Holeyaru to read, by 
giving them white clothes to wear, by encouraging them to ‘touch’ him; in one intense scene, he 
makes them touch the holy saligrama of his house, the gravity and sheer gall of which leads the 
head priest and cook of his house to instantly tender their resignations. I too can relate to this 
particular incident because at our ancestral home in Talakad, my grandfather worships a 
saligrama everyday with great reverence. It was only on one occasion that it was transported to 
Mysore for festive reasons, and even on this occasion, it was carefully purified, wrapped in pure 
silk, and brought down, after which it was installed again only by means of more elaborate rituals 
and chanting. Even the family members are forbidden to touch it. Jagan feels that every part of 
this ritualised tradition is a sham, and must be eschewed. The significance of this ‘touch’ is simply 
that it is so rooted in Indian culture. It is, at one level, an absurd phenomenon, at at another level, 
such a concrete idea that it must be shunned to bridge any gap in social hierarchy. All these 
events, of course, are only leading up to the larger event - the temple-entry, the defeat of God. 
  

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​Nagamani commits suicide in the same chapter, reinforcing Jagannatha’s desire to lash out against 
this tradtional, patriarchal society in some substantial way.  
All the while though, Jagan is continually wracked by a doubting voice in his head. He writes of his 
concerns in his letters to Margaret. ‘Now, I’m plunging into action desperately, Margaret. In my 
anguish, am I making a commitment to a pointless action? Am I exposing myself to ridicule? Is my 
commitment a farce? We live in apathy, Margaret. All our dreams are but heaps of areca nuts, 
ready to be bagged and sent to the market. Sometimes, the crop decays and our dreams come to 
nothing.’(ibid. pg-74-76) Jagan’s thoughts reflect the constant dissonance that someone in the 
margins of history is bound to experience. In​ Samskara ​too, Praneshacharya undergoes this when 
he has perceived that he has moved on from his past into an uncharted realm. Jagan, in a more 
voluntary way, is trying to do the same; he wants to push forward into the future, breaking free of 
the fetters of the past. The question is that of the unknown. What happens next? In spite of one’s 
best intentions, a fear of the consequences of one’s actions are undeniable. But, despite all these 
deliberations, despite the fact that someone burns down a few huts of the Holeyaru, killing a kid, 
despite the fact that Jagan receives an anonymous letter threatening to expose his true father if he 
proceeds with his plan (implying that his mother was an adulterer), the event does take place, and 
the Holeyaru enter the temple. ‘If I don’t lend myself to a great cause, I’ll stay soulless,’ Jagan has 
decided at one point (ibid. p-168) The course of history​ can​ be changed by an individual is what 
URA is trying to say, as it always has been. The ending is ambivalent, and one is free to make of it 
whatever one wishes. The book is a call to action, an aggressive critique of tradition, and a 
deliberation on the mental debates of those at the heart of it - all rolled into one. 
  
Bhava 
  
The novel ​Bhava​ is quite unlike either of URA’s first two novels. It is similar to​ Samskara,​ in the 
sense that it revolves around ideas of identity and a search for a sense of belonging, and in the 
sense that it deals with allegorical and metaphorical themes. But ​Bhava​ plays host to more surreal 
and metaphysical ideas. It is full of questions that are never answered. The story begins with the 
two protagonists Sastri and Dinakar meeting each other on a train, where Sastri notices an amulet 
on Dinakar’s neck that he last saw on his wife; Sastri thinks he murdered his wife decades ago, but 
now it doesn’t seem to be so. Throughout the story Dinakar does not know who his parents are, 
and Sastri does not know if Dinakar is his son or not.. Dinakar finds himself in the house of another 
man Narayan, whom he knew from the past, where he encounters Gangubai - his first mistress. 
Gangubai has a son Prasad, who is going to become a saint, and whose father could either be 
Dinakar or Narayan. All in all, there are a lot of ins and a lot of outs, everyone is somehow linked to 
the other, nobody really knows what exactly happened, and nothing is revealed in the end either. 
Simply saying, the novel reads like a hybrid of an Agatha Christie and a Paulo Coelho book, but 
with no triumphant or mysterious revelation at the end. The crux of the novel is the depiction of 
the identity crises that mark the protagonists. 
  
Sastri and Dinakar, when they meet, are donning the clothes of a Puranik and an Ayyappa devotee 
respectively. But this is just another one of Ananthamurthy’s typical bipolarities. In actuality, 
Dinakar is a serial womaniser and a famous TV star, while Sastri is a violent man with aggressive 
urges in his personal life. Just like Praneshacharya in ​Samskara​, Sastri enters a limbo of sorts, 
when he realises that he hadn’t killed his wife, and his whole life after that had been a lie. Sastri’s 
mental state is described in very dark terms. He keeps seeing demons in his head; there are 
references to ghosts, and red eyes, and so on; one gets the feeling that Ananthamurthy is playing 
with the theme of death again. Dinakar has been searching for Sitamma, a mother figure from his 
past whom he knows by association with Narayan. He is in a limbo of his own as well, having a 
mid-life existential crisis. As Judith Knoll writes in the afterword, ‘ He suffers in part because his 
mind is alert and discerning; a ‘modern man’, he is both blessed and cursed with the yearning for 
an integrated self to which his highly developed self-consciousness is an obstacle.’ Both Sastri and 
Dinakar find solace in simple things. Sastri always returns to his innocent mistress Radha who 
never fails to console him. Dinakar is satisfied as he watches the simple-minded Sitamma draw a 
rangoli, or cook peacefully. I am reminded of an Emil Cioran quote here. ‘Innocence being the 
perfect state, perhaps the only one, it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to 
leave it. Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves is only that and nothing but that.’ 
Marked by complex mental despairs, the protagonists are inherently attracted to the subtle, 
unconflicted characters of Radha and Sitamma. Perhaps something can be said here of the 
simplicity of village life; as opposed to the chaos that characterises a city like Bombay or Delhi, 
where Sastri and Dinakar are said to have spent their formative years. The story plays with images 
and metaphors like these, and one is just left with a vivid picture of the narrative as one puts the 
book down. 
  
  
Critiquing the Modern: Hindutva or Hind Swaraj 
  
In his last book ​Hindutva or Hind Swaraj,​ one sees a very noticeable difference in URA’s rhetoric. He 
is scathing in his criticism of the current Hindutva hoopla, and of their notions of modernity and 
development. He writes, ‘The evil of out times are mines, dams, power plants and hundreds of 
smart cities. Shadeless roads, widened by cutting down trees; rivers diverted to fill the flush tanks 
of five-star hotels; hillocks, the abode of tribal gods, laid bare due to mining; marketplaces without 
sparrows and trees without birds.’ Also interesting is his change of tone while talking about 
religion and God. While, in ​Bharatipura​, Jagannatha is out to establish the Nietzschean notion of 
the dead God, in this book the earlier expression retains none of its vindictiveness, and in fact 
celebrates the Gandhian notion of God. He writes, ‘Gandhi was able to reach his inner God, and 
heed His words in his fasts, in his silences and in his solitude. With his last fast, he opposed Nehru 
and Patel, both dear to him. This was possible because of divine grace.’ (Ananthamurthy, 2016)3 
URA’s thoughts resonate with Gandhi’s thoughts of Hindu practices that need to questioned, too. 
He writes, reminding the reader of ​Samskara​ and ​Bharatipura,​ ‘Gandhi’s clarity of thought comes 
from the greatness of ancient India as well as the meanness of its decadent practices. In his words, 
Gandhi paid more attention to the greatness, but in his actions, he focused on its meanness. Like 
untouchability, casteism and unclean holy places that discriminated among people on the basis of 
their caste.’ (ibid.) His earlier attractions to Marxism too are subtly denounced. He writes, ‘This 
chaos arises because we believe that the earth is an akshaya patra with limitless resources. (Greed 
created by development.) The race to scrape the bottom of the akshaya patra begins. Even a man 
with a conscience is drawn towards it, even as he is troubled by the thought that this akshaya 
patra could be an illusion. In Marx’s view, it is possible to have so much production and progress 
that the state withers away. For him too, the earth is an akshaya patra.’ (ibid.) Ecological concerns 
are a major part of several of his arguments. He draws contrasts between Christian mythology and 
Indian mythology, and puts forth the argument that the Hindu vision is ecological, while the 
former is purely self-centric. And thus, again going on to continue his passionate tirade against the 

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Since I was able to access only an e-book version of this work, and because this does not have any
page numbers, I am unable to complete the citations precisely.
modern corporate scenario - ‘An assault on nature in one place is felt elsewhere too - and so the 
evil of developmental politics in unbearable hear, bitter cold, ravaging floods, harming the world, 
here, there everywhere.’ (ibid.) At several points, the book becomes fairly repetitive in the 
arguments that URA is putting forth, but they are, nevertheless, valid, fair, and thought-provoking. 
Savarkar’s and Gandhi’s visions are compared, and Ananthamurthy defends his position that Hind 
Swaraj is relevant in light of modern day politics more than ever. The book is a little patchy, and 
disconnected; Ananthamurthy acknowledges this too, and attributes it to his declining health at 
the time of writing the book. But the message is clear - modern notions of development are 
severely questionable, and the brand of Hindu nationalism that is currently at play is equally so. 
  
  
 
Conclusion 
  
The works discussed in the course of this paper do not by any means cover the vast body of 
writings that URA produced over his lifetime. Missing here are two of his novels, his collections of 
short stories, his collections of poems, a play, his autobiography, and his journalistic articles and 
other non-fiction pieces that have appeared in numerous Kannada publications. And also since all 
the works referred to here are English translations, it is missing, in a significant way, the essence of 
his feelings that his Kannada writings bring out so evocatively. However, it does cover the span of 
his lifetime, from his first novel ​Samskara, ​to his last, ​Hindutva or Hind Swaraj, a​ nd offers a 
reasonable glimpse of his thought processes and his espoused views at different points in his life. 
His first two novels immediately bring to mind a young, bristling Ananthamurthy, trying to address 
the decadent aspects of Hinduism in the country. ‘From his childhood he was surrounded and 
impacted by waves of conflicting worlds and their expressions - traditional and ritualistic 
household, acrimonious debates of philosophical positions in the pathshala where he studied 
initially, reformers who tried to reason with people on the evils of caste system, educationists who 
were busy in bringing the world of Marx to the consciousness of Indians, the new world of 
electricity, radio, newspapers, and adults who had fallen in fascination with the language of Old 
Blighty.’ (K. Sreenivasarao, 2014) These conflicting worlds are what Ananthamurthy draws upon in 
his first two novels, and like any other writer, he writes to find out what he really thinks about 
them. Ananthamurthy’s fascination with the language of the Old Blighty though, remained only in 
the realm of his literary tastes, as he chose to write his fiction only in Kannada, a language that 
meant so much to him. His stories deal primarily with the psychological aspects of his 
protagonists. From Praneshacharya in ​Samskara​, who finds himself living as a relic of the past, to 
Jagannatha in ​Bharatipiura​, who is fervently and avowedly rushing to meet the present, we see 
the creative genius in URA that allows him to put himself in the shoes of characters in varied social 
milieus. In ​Bhava​, which as a literary entity is in an existentialist category of its own, the 
psychology of identities is further visited upon, and it is safe to say the Ananthamurthy really liked 
getting into the minds of his heroes. A major part of this psychological description is a noticeable 
internal conflict in the characters, they are in an in-between world, constantly finding themselves 
in a sort of philosophical no-man’s land, where their own decisions are put into question. This 
ambivalence, I’ve come to see, is typical of a character in a URA story, noticeable also in some of 
his short stories like Prashne, Kartika, or Sooryana Kudure. In an interview with N. Manu 
Chakravarthy, when asked to recontextualize his novels, Ananthamurthy says, ‘I would 
recontextualize my works by the experience of my living in a society where a certain degree of 
functional inequality exists. And, hence, my whole attention has shifted from the Bharatipura kind 
of world to the modern world where ​development ​needs to be critiqued and not ​tradition​ with the 
same intensity. Perhaps, if I were in a village, I would have to critique tradition with some 
intensity.’ (Ananthamurthy, 2012, pg-256) This particular sentiment finds a strong voice in his last 
book. His critique of modernity is wildly passionate, and one gets the feeling that he is deeply 
disturbed by what he sees around him. The Dalai Lama once commented that George Bush 
brought out the Muslim in him, criticising him for his unfair treatment of Islam. It seems to me that 
despite Ananthamurthy’s atheist views, Modi seems to have brought out the Hindu in him. 
Marshalling all his knowledge of Hindu mythology, stories, and traditions, Ananthamurthy fiercely 
repudiates the Hindutva notion of Hinduism as put forth by Savarkar and his minions, showing 
how it falsely, and with dangerous consequences, represents and reinvents the ancient Hindu 
culture. Like a shape-shifting octopus, Ananthamurthy adapts himself to the social and political 
atmosphere of the times, and responds intuitively to it’s dangers and pitfalls. One only hopes that 
his message isn’t too late in its arrival.   
 
 
 
Works Cited 
 
1. Ananthamurthy, U. (2016) ​Hindutva or Hind Swaraj.​ Harper Collins 
2. Ananthamurthy, U and A.K Ramanujan. (1978) ​Samskara, O ​ xford University Press 
3. Ananthamurthy, U. and Susheela Punitha (2012). ​Bharathipura​. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. 
Press. 
4. Murthy, A. (1998). ​Bhava.​ Nueva Delhi: Penguin Books. 
5. Sreenivasarao, K. (2014). Ananthamurthy—The Humanist Who Bridged Tradition and 
Modernity. ​Indian Literature,​ ​58​(5 (283)), 23-25. Retrieved from 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/44753937