Samskara and the Indian's inner prude

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In 1965, U R Ananthamurthy came out with a remarkable book, possibly one of his finest works. Samskara is set in the small, almost claustrophobic agrahara of Durvasapura, a community of Brahmins whose world view is threatened by one of their own.

Naranappa rejects almost all of the shibboleths of brahminhood: he eats meat (and the sacred fish in the temple tank), lives openly with a prostitute, Chandri, consorts with Muslims and throws a shilagram contemptuously into the river. The novel opens with Naranappa's death, which plunges the small community into confusion. None of them is willing to give his corpse the last rites; and yet, while his corpse remains uncremated, the entire community is polluted and must face a kind of ritual starvation.

Ananthamurthy packed a great deal into the 145-odd pages of Samskara; it remains a powerful and disturbing read, juxtaposing the sacred and the profane with tremendous skill. Back in 1965, many readers were scandalised by his portrayal of the relationship between another Brahmin and Chandri, the prostitute. Many more were shocked that he would be so critical of religion and the practice of brahminism. Ananthamurthy was unfazed by his detractors; he had grown up, he said, in a very similar community to the one he fictionalised in Samskara, and he claimed the status of the "critical insider".

One would have thought that over time, Samskara had lost its power to shock, but it seems not. Recently, the 60-member Mangalore University Hindi Teachers Association asked that Samskara be withdrawn from the college syllabus, saying that it was too explicit and passages in the book were too embarrassing to be taught. There was a faint hint of the old argument about corrupting tender young minds as well. The university rejected the argument and ruled that Samskara will remain on the syllabus "" but only for the present. It seems likely that the protests against Ananthamurthy's classic will be revived next year.

The students who are threatened by the more sensual passages in Samskara are 18-and 19-year-olds "" young adults, not children. Their teachers are, presumably, old enough to know all about the birds and bees "" unless the argument is really that it's the teachers who were shocked by the "immorality" of a 43-year-old novel. If it is merely the presence of a prostitute in a novel that makes it immoral, this would give us grounds to reject Ruswa's classic Umrao Jaan Ada and Saratchandra's Devdas. And if it's the sexual explicitness, all I can say is one of the things adults do "" with great enthusiasm in India, judging by the birth rates "" is make love. We need to grow up.

The interesting part of this debate is how often it recurs, as though part of the Indian psyche is still stuck in an earlier, more conservative era and is reluctant to emerge from that place. In some recent reviews of a very different book, Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva, I was surprised to see a complex novel being discussed in terms of only one of its strands "" the relationship, often uncomfortably erotic, between a mother and her son.

Suri's book has several strands to it""it explores the straitjacketed world of the lower middle class, examines a changing India through the eyes of women who are still, in many ways, stuck in old roles, and yes, the mother-son relationship is central to the novel. But for several reviewers, just the fact that an Indian author might write with great openness about the erotic twists and turns a mother's relationship with her son might take, was shocking and discomfiting.

It is often hard for people to articulate just what it is that makes them uncomfortable. It can't be the nature of the sexual relationship "" relationships of this sort do happen, men and women often lead sensual, passionate lives. I haven't yet seen anyone arguing that the mother-son relationship in Suri's book is unrealistic "" it happens often enough in India. The argument is not that these things are unnatural or unrealistic "" but that it is unnatural to write about them. I find it interesting that at a very deep level, many Indians still believe this; and that writers intuitively understand that this makes it even more necessary for them to write with openness, to shine a light into the dark places.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar. The views expressed here are personal