An author's final cry against Hindutva

The last months of U R Ananthamurthy's life were tumultuous. One of India's foremost novelists and political commentators, Ananthamurthy, who died in August 2014 at 81, had threatened to leave the country if Narendra Modi, then leading the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the Lok Sabha elections.

Ananthamurthy's remarks drew vitriol, abuse and death threats from Modi's supporters, and he remained under round-the-clock police protection for months. In June, a political tract Ananthamurthy wrote during the final stage of his life, the parting shot of a writer who devoted substantial time to warning of the dangers of Hindu nationalism, was published to widespread acclaim.

More than two years after Modi's election as prime minister, even as many continue to fear that India's founding values of secularism and diversity are under threat, Ananthamurthy's voice has served as an urgent reminder of the perils of majoritarianism and hypernationalism.

The tract, “Hindutva or Hind Swaraj,” an excoriating critique of Modi and Hindu nationalism in India, was completed between Modi's election in May 2014 and Ananthamurthy's death.

A novella-length tract, in the manner of Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Between the World and Me,” the book takes the form of a conversation with the nation.

“I feel an urgent need to talk to myself,” Ananthamurthy writes in the book as he reflects on a country he says he barely recognised, “both because of the nationwide humiliation that came my way when I rejected Modi and because of Modi's overwhelming victory that left me astounded.”

Ananthamurthy was a literary colossus in Karnataka, a state greater in size and population than England. His 1965 novel, “Samskara,” written in Kannada, about a Hindu society stifled by caste and tradition, is widely considered to be one of the landmarks of 20th-century Indian literature.

(In “India: A Wounded Civilisation,” V S Naipaul hailed “Samskara” and described Ananthamurthy as “a serious literary man,” a generous compliment from Naipaul, who tends to be parsimonious in his praise of fellow writers.)

Drawing on a formidable range of intellectual references, from Dostoyevsky to the epics of Hindu mythology, Ananthamurthy's “Hindutva or Hind Swaraj” examines the two rival ideas that have shaped modern India: the plural nationalism originating from the struggle against British colonialism, led by Mohandas K Gandhi; and the muscular, majoritarian nationalism favoured by Modi and his supporters.

Ananthamurthy compares the key texts of these dominant political strains: Gandhi's “Hind Swaraj,” a riposte to British colonialism completed in 10 days, during a ship journey in 1909, and published a year later; and “Hindutva,” the 1923 founding text of Hindu nationalism, written by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a right-wing activist imprisoned by the British for his role in India's freedom movement.

“He felt the choice was really between these two ideologies,” Vivek Shanbhag, a prominent novelist and Ananthamurthy's son-in-law, said of Ananthamurthy. “He was saying that it's time that we, as a nation, stop now and take a look before we blindly move forward.”

Shanbhag, who worked as a translator on the book, said Ananthamurthy could never forgive Modi for the 2002 riots in Gujarat, which killed more than a thousand, most of them Muslims. Modi was chief minister of the state at the time, and many consider him culpable. “He said a person like this cannot be the prime minister,” Shanbhag added.

Aakar Patel, a prominent columnist who writes for Mint, a national daily news publication headquartered in New Delhi, said “Hindutva or Hind Swaraj” was the best book on the subject of Hindu nationalism, since Modi's election as prime minister.

“Steeped in our traditions, Ananthamurthy captures the reality as nobody else can,” Patel wrote in Mint. “It is the distilled effort of a lifetime spent in absorbing, reading, writing and observing.”

In many ways, Ananthamurthy turned out to be prophetic, including about his own death. “If Modi becomes the prime minister, it will be a big shock to me,” Ananthamurthy had told a television channel, soon after he made his threats to leave the country. “I won't live.”

Unlike more measured critics of Modi, who saw his rise through a contemporary social and political context, Ananthamurthy, with his novelist's temperament, mounted his criticism in ethical, psychological and civilisational terms.

“People like Modi,” Ananthamurthy writes, “live in a gumbaz, a dome that echoes what they say to themselves over and over again.”

Climate of hostility

Modi's election as prime minister has been followed by, as many feared, a climate of hostility toward minorities and renewed assaults on civil society and free expression.

Last fall, a year after Ananthamurthy's death, dozens of writers returned their awards from the Sahitya Akademi, to protest what they considered a rising tide of intolerance and majoritarianism gripping the country.

One incident, in particular, sparked this collective revolt of writers: the killing of M M Kalburgi, a noted rationalist scholar whose criticism of traditional religious practices had earned him the wrath of Hindu nationalists. (Kalburgi was shot dead in his home in Dharwad, in Karnataka, on August 30 last year.)

Like Ananthamurthy, Kalburgi was part of a robust tradition of Indian-language writers serving on the front lines of social and political battles.

“A Kannada or Bengali writer has a connection to his people, his culture, his society, which an English writer simply does not,” Ramachandra Guha, a historian and one of India's best-known public intellectuals, said in an interview. “Most Indian-English writers who are acclaimed abroad have no impact on society.”

Ananthamurthy's death caused a wave of grief across Karnataka, a state of more than 60 million people. Tens of thousands of people lined up in Bengaluru to pay homage.

Officially, Modi offered condolences, but right-wing groups affiliated with his BJP greeted the news of Ananthamurthy's death with raucous celebrations, setting off fireworks at the demise of a foe.

Though Hindu nationalists hounded Ananthamurthy, especially during the last months of his life, their response to “Hindutva or Hind Swaraj” has been one of unusual silence.

Patel, the columnist, said he was not surprised by the muted reaction. “What passes for the ideological right doesn't have any investment here,” he said. “They don't care about knowledge and learning. They care about prejudices, anger, certitude and emotion.”