Indian Way of Thinking in U.R. Ananthmurty’s Samskara:A Rite for a Dead Man

Ananthamurty is a renowned Kannada writer who won the Jnanpith award in 1995. Samakara is his first novel and is considered as a classic in Indian literature. Samskara, originally written in Kannada was published in 1965. It was translated by the renowned poet A.K.Ramanujan in 1976. The novel was made into a feature film which was initially banned by the censor board for portraying sensitive caste issues. But later the film won the president’s gold medal for the best Indian feature film of 1971. Ananthamurthy, along with other writers of bhasa literature like O.M. Vijayan and Panniker in Malayalam, Dilip Chitre and Balachandra Nemede in Marathi, Agyey and Nirmal Verma in Hindi, Buddhadev Bose and Amiya Chakravarti in Bengali and Sitakanta Mahapatra and Manoj Das in Oriya, experimented with the new facets of language and reality and thereby ushered modernism into Indian literature. In this paper I would like to analyse the novel Samskara by linking with it to the various strands of Indian thought. Is there a specific Indian way of thinking? Here I wish to study some of the inconsistencies and discrepancies in the Indian that are quite obvious in this novel.