Reflecting on Novels in Translation from Each of India’s 28 States - Karnataka - Samskara: A Rite For A Dead Man

The second in my series — Samskara: A Rite For A Dead Man

Samskara: A Rite For A Dead Man by U. R. Ananthamurthy

STATE: Karnataka

Original Language: Kannada

First published in 

Publisher in English — New York Review of Bookes.

Translated by A.K. Ramanujan

I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one. 

The latent richness in the content of this book could easily weigh down an easy-breezy newsletter so I’ll start with the form of this unique novel. It has two distinct parts:

1) In Part 1, a community bickers in attempt to solve a shared problem.

2) In Part 2, a hero departs on an individual journey.

The premise of the novel is deliciously simple; we are in a deeply religious community of Brahmins in South India, Mysore, in some indeterminate time in the late 19th or early 20th century when bleatings of modernity are being heard, tempting youths into a new world. A group of rural brahmins live together in an agraharam.

(Side note: an agraharam is both a living arrangement and an architectural practice; it is uniquely South Indian, dating back to the 3rd century CE at least. According to Wikipedia, it’s basically a neighborhood of Brahmins, taking the form of two rows of houses running North-South on either side of a road with temples at both ends of the road). 

One member of this community, Naranappa, has died. Someone must perform the funeral rites that are central to the soul’s welfare and harmonious progress. However, Naranappa went out of his way to violate numerous taboos — drinking, meat-eating, consorting with lower-castes and Muslims, and generally having a good time. In fact, he took great joy in profaning all things Brahmin; so, now the community must decide how to address the conduct of his life in the handling of his death. All sorts of grievances — financial, familial — prevent the community from coming to a consensus. Meanwhile, the body begins to rot, mirroring the rot that has taken root in the decaying community.

This is a provocative, dark inciting incident. It’s also an invitation to remember our own mortalities. Originally, when I wrote this piece, I ended with the following line: “One day, you will be a dead body; and people will need to make decisions about how to dispose of you, too.”

Bit dark for a newsletter. But, like the Brahmins of the Agrahara, we must go forward.

The community entrusts the problem to its most prized theologian and respected leader, Praneshacharya. 

An incident — the central incident of the book — takes place and it precipitates a crisis of faith in Praneshacharya, who, until then, had lived by the strict moral code of scripture. He goes off into the wide world, and has some adventures, and the narrative moves inward. It becomes psychological; we are in very close third-person point-of-view with our hero as he has experiences and encounters on the road. The problem of disposing of Naranappa’s body — the book’s inciting incident has faded, overshadowed by larger problems; in fact, it fades to such a degree that it’s resolved offscreen. Meanwhile, the original community problem is now centered in the body and mind of one man and he must wrestle with it. 

AK Ramanujan, the renowned scholar, poet, and UChicago professor, and also the book’s translator, had this to say about the book’s structure: 

“Perpetually deferred reply plots the story. Question, Delay, and Answer (or its absence) form the overt strategy for another exploration, for covering (and uncovering) psychological ground.”

Content-wise, discussing this novel is like trying to eat a whale; there’s too much. Firstly, there’s theology and Vedanta, subjects I won’t to pretend to know much about. There’s the dual / dueling approaches to life — Discipline vs. Hedonism. But someone could easily say, ‘No. You’re describing asceticism vs. Epicureanism’. See why I don’t want to get into it?

More tension between isms — realism and symbolism. For example, there is a literal plague in the novel involving rats and carrion and while this may seem like a neat symbol for decay, it’s also real both in the world of the novel and in what we know of late 19th century Southern India. There is tons to unpack re: gender and class, in overlapping layers. For example, the story’s brahmin women are absolutely imprisoned by stricture while the lower-caste women are granted a higher degree of agency. 

And the writing changes, too; it begins satirically, acerbically poking fun at the greedy, meal-obsessed brahmins of the agrahara; the POV is omniscient. We inhabit many characters as they go about prosecuting their agendas, trying to secure favors and eat some tasty meals along the way. But in Part 2, it’s stream of consciousness and imagistic. Take this passage in close-third: 

“Praneshacharya looked up. The long evening of a summer day. Streaks of red on the west. Line after line of white birds returning to their nests. Down below, at the edge of the tank, a stork is gurgling. It's almost time for lighting the lamps. How many days ago was it that the lamps were lit in the agrahara, that the returning evening cows and calves were tied up and milked and the milk offered to the Lord? The clear far away forms of the Western hills grow dim, like a world melting in a dream. The colors of this moment fading the next, the sky grows bare.”

Sometimes, lyrical and theological, and other times bawdy and profane, Samskara is rich with dualities. It has full, complex characters with many sides; it also has classical archetypes. Some of its characters — Chandri and Putta — manage to be both. It’s a funny book. It’s a dark, dark book. It’s a sudden emergence of something satirical and yet truer and bigger. Here we are, so many of us, thinking that we construct our lives consciously — choosing, refusing, making a big deal about what we choose and what we refuse — when, in fact, so much of what happens in our brain is delusion, fantasy layered onto an unknowable reality.  

The many natures of Samskara, its layered richness, is what I suspect will ensure that this book remains a timeless classic. It will forever be a rich document of a place and time at a crossroads of history, while also being a high-quality psychological novel. 

5/5. Rich, dense, timeless in subject but stylistically fresh. Unforgettable. 

More in this series: 

Pyre - Perumal Murugan - Tamil Nadu