UR Ananthamurthy was central to Indian literature

It is heartbreaking that the first piece I write for DailyO should be in remembrance of UR Ananthamurthy. Ananthamurthy was a great and outstanding writer from a galaxy of luminaries among the Indian languages. He was also, beyond that, the conscience of a generation who wrote with conviction and passion in their mother tongues but recognised a larger common identity as Indian writers. His epochal novel, Samskara: Rites for a Dead Man, first published in 1965 and translated into English by AK Ramanujan, described the hopes and terrors of transition and change in a newly independent society, and its dilemmas of coming to terms with a looming, unformulated modernity.

Just two years ago, when asked for a quote for an "Indian Literature Abroad" brochure, he sent me the following: "If you look at the diversity of Indian literature you come to see its unity, and if you look for unity, you are struck by its diversity."

In a sense, Ananthamurthy himself was central to the idea of Indian literature. The themes of "Unity in Diversity" and "Many Languages One Literature" had been a stock in trade of literary discussions in the pre-social media era. But it was Samskara, in its iconoclastic Kannada edition, in its evocative English translation, and its powerful film version, that provided the recognition of a common legacy and idiom to writers and readers grappling with the disconnect between their local and global sense of self.

I first encountered Samskara in 1974. It was only many years later, in 2002, that I actually met Ananthamurthy. We had invited him to the path-breaking International Festival of Indian Literature. His sense of fun, and gentle, humane charm, was memorable in sessions marked by sharp linguistic and ideological debate. The steep ramparts of Neemrana Fort-Palace were playing host to a formidable array of talents. Sunil Gangopadhyay and Nayantara Sahgal, Ashokmitran and Allan Sealey, Amitav Ghosh and Paul Zacharia, Shrilal Shukla, Bhalchandra Nemade, Kiran Nagarkar and Khushwant Singh. VS Naipaul was there too, with his wife Nadira. The rifts and divides between the bhasha voices and the angreziwalas had risen to a crescendo of intellectual acrimony. In the evenings, watching the sun set over the low Aravalli hills, it was Ananthamurthy, he with the twinkle in his eye and the lilt in his voice, who bridged these tensions with a larger perspective on the business of words and writing.

"I write from my experience of growing up in a village," he said. "The village itself was a universe. It contained all the characters that I needed. And then, it contained all the characters of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata…"

In a subsequent session in New Delhi, he spoke of a pan-Indian literary understanding. "There are two languages that can be understood anywhere in India… and these two languages of India are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. You can easily refer to the characters in them and make sense to anyone in India. This may not be true of Western epics, but it is certainly true of Indian epics."

Richard Crasta, who was in the audience, rose angrily to protest that he had been brought up on Bugs Bunny and could not accept this point of view. There were some titters in the audience, but URA explained what he perceived as the abiding power of myth as against that of ephemeral popular culture, until the temperature was moderated again.

In the thoughtful keynote address which he delivered at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2009, he sat on the mirrored stage of the Durbar Hall and spoke at length on how India had inherited its combined identity of linguistic pluralism and national identity from Gandhi and Tagore, who saw India as a civilisation, and not only a nation state. In 2011, at the front lawns of Diggi Palace at the JLF venue, Ananthamurthy was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize. I met him again, several times, at the India International Centre, New Delhi, and in the first meeting of ILA (Indian Literature Abroad), of which he was the chairperson. He called me concernedly after the Uttarakhand floods last year, and we spoke again a few times about different things.

UR Ananthamurthy's resistance to the homogenisation of culture won him many admirers and his share of enemies as well. When he died, there was a section of people who burst firecrackers to celebrate. Whatever their motivation, I say, they did not understand him at all, or what he stood for, what he represented. To his wife Esther, and his family, my deepest condolences. In the world of books and letters, he lives on.