An accidental meme that goes back to Senator Ted Stevens analogizes the internet as “a series of tubes”. The network metaphor for the internet is strong in our minds. But the internet is more chaotic. Like bustling cities, the internet is a fuel that converts the potential energy constrained in orderliness, to the kinetic energy of human endeavor. The Internet releases the atoms of our thoughts to escape geographical parochialism. Internet is messy, disorderly, and increasingly ruled by social media monopolies, but it can be where “the mind is free”.
Without the internet and the current separation in space and time, I doubt that I would have read Samskara by UR Ananthamurthy, a giant of modern Kannada literature, even though I remember vignettes of the controversial movie based on the book. Most of my exposure to such literature in the pre-internet days lives in the foggy memories of Sunday afternoons spent watching subtitled award-winning films on the only channel on Indian TV.
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Followers of Indian politics know very well the Cauvery delta dispute that has been a thorn between the provinces of Karnataka (where Kannada is spoken) and Tamil Nadu (where Tamil is spoken). Bengaluru and Chennai, the capitals of two states respectively, along with Hyderabad, are cities that are the economic engines of the new internet age in India. Perhaps because of the perpetual political detente under state hegemonies, despite shared cultural and linguistic history, transfer of knowledge between Kannada and Tamil has suffered. This is a tremendous loss in a country that is now becoming increasingly de-federalized.
Now in the United States, fortunate to be left with a fair amount of discretionary time and dreaded nostalgia, I use the Internet to fill holes in my knowledge of what some derisively call as the “regional literature” of India. However, nothing is more Indian than the vernacular literature in India. It is a pleasure to catch up with them, if only in English.
Translating Complexity
Samskara is a deeply layered book founded on the Indian and particularly, the Hindu experience. A careless peruser will only find controversies, but the book brims with ambiguity and extraordinary complexity of ancient Hindu thought.
The title reflects the complexity of the book: Samskara is often simply translated as funeral rites, but the word carries many-layered meanings: “Life-cycle ceremony”, “transformation”, “refinement process”, “realization of past deeds”, “preparation”.
The story is simple: Naranappa, a rebel who did several things to outrage his neighbors in his agrahara is dead without a male heir. He died a Brahmin and so must be cremated with proper rites. But the one who lights the funeral pyre is also forever maligned. This creates a dilemma. The most learned priest in the village, Praneshacharaya, is asked to resolve the dilemma, as Naranappa’s body rots as a plague (both metaphorical and real) is moving in. Set in the 1930s, set in the dry heat of the Deccan plateau, amidst the background of the imported civics of the British empire, Samskara is an agonizing duel between the external and the internal.
Samskara records the internal struggle of an erudite man of faith, who is reflective and self-critical, and aware of his internal shortcomings, but struggling to square his doubt with resolute clarity of the dead rebel who even in his death, brings samskara to tortured minds filled with many questions.
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Reading the NYRB edition translated by AK Ramanujan, I saw the local color dance explosively between the lines. I wondered how a reader unfamiliar with the milieu of Indian rural life would perceive the book. (I realize that I must have likewise missed a lot of nuance with other cultural translations).
AK Ramanujan is a renowned scholar and Prof at the University of Chicago who translated ancient Kannada literature and Tamil poetry. He was one of the reasons I picked this book up. I love his brilliant poetry translations, particularly “Poems of Love and War” which is an anthology of poems from the Sangam literature. His translations exquisitely capture the meter, tone, and spirit of the original poems.
NYRB edition contains the author UR Ananthamurthy’s (URA) interview by Sahitya Akademi award winner Susheela Punitha (who won the award for translating another URA book Bharathipura). She observes that this English translation misses vitality and the “natural voluptuousness of Kannada that this novel needs”. Interestingly, URA agrees. He is not pleased with this translation and opines about Ramanujan’s translation: “He tried to write in English like an Englishman”. After reading the interview, I realized that I had missed some more nuance. Nevertheless, I am grateful to have read this book, and its profound scrutiny of an examined life. I don’t ever expect to become proficient in Kannada to read URA in his original writing, but I do hope to read more of his translated works.
Hurrying Through the Stages
A big lesson from the book: Skipping through stages of life results in disillusionment.
In Hindu scriptures, life supposedly progresses through four stages — learning, household, retirement, and renunciation. (As often, the English translated words do not completely capture the essence of the stages). These stages have been characterized and passed on through generations as learned wisdom. They channel a studied life into a sequential exercise of fulfillment, realization, revelation, and liberation.
Praneshacharaya abstains from “household” family life: his wife is immobile, and clearly cannot partake in connubial bliss. He considers his marriage a sacrifice in his pursuit of learning. By doing this, he “skips” the “household” stage of life. So, when temptation arrives, he is in a quandary. His self-conceit about his erudition adds to his misery. In the village fair, and at the pawn-shop, in the surprising clarity of a wife-beating, riddling and garrulous fellow traveler, his doubts torment him.
We can understand many struggles of our lives, by men and women protesting against and subverting their progression through stages. We see often this defect in how we ignore excellent advice. Wages of failures pay for the seeds of wisdom. Wisdom arrives when the past has truly sailed by.
The realization arrives only by experiencing time in stages.
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These values are universal and typically pervade through various aspects of life. When J-Lo was on the NFL Super Bowl stage mixing up variegated flags, a dash of pole-dancing, immigration, and sexual innuendos, there was something off-balance. It is easy to dismiss the protest letters as incessant complaints of perpetual religious warriors. But, there was indeed some disorientation of our aesthetic. Wrapped in many praises that extolled her looks that were “like a twenty-year-old”, there was an inescapable irony: A 50-year old who was indeed trying to reclaim her twenties. She might have succeeded, and she was trying to succeed. It was an attempted inversion of the stages of life — an exaltation of youthful exuberance overstudied experience.
This is the same puzzlement we endure when we see children eager in their promiscuity, and when some elderly people behave with extraordinary ill-will towards others. In the valley, we see founders who are unwilling to give up reins far too long in the pursuit of their ego. Everywhere, we see parents swooping in and helicoptering their over-grown children, eliminating an opportunity to learn through mistakes.
These examples we see often are violations of the natural order, that have to do with the difficulty in accepting the natural progression of stages in life.
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Living Well
That’s why some quests for immortality and longevity are distasteful. It is not about the exotic tools people slave for. The rhino horns, pangolin scales, transcendental meditation, blood transfusion, DNA soups, genetic freezing, and whatever. It is not even the peculiar selfishness in pursuing scientism.
People don’t want just a long life. They want to live young. They seek to elevate the vigor of youth over the wisdom of ag. It is a delusion that we can seek the strength of the soul, without taming time. The strength of one’s mind and body are fuel to tame time. What learning would we reach, if there was no loss in our journey?
As we grow older, aesthetic pleasures and learnings in life become distinct. Longevity without sacrifice dilutes the difference between the pleasures. If all life were the turpitude of rivulets at their source in the mountains, we will never know the benevolence that comes with the vast turgidity of slow-moving rivers that welcome life and commerce.
So here is my big lesson of life stuck in this pandemic.
Savor every moment, live through them all. Not only the vicissitudes of mortal fear and evanescent joy, but even those stultifying meaningless moments in between spent in boredom — the taxes, the payments, the scythe of deadlines — they all tell us what we learn. They teach us what we seek to liberate ourselves from.
Don’t hurry. Live through them all, minute by minute. Live.