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Intro

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man was originally written and published in Kannada in
1965 by the prominent Kannada novelist, short story writer and essayist U. R.
Ananthamurthy, a recipient of Jnanapeeth Award in 1995 and Padma Bhushna in 1998.
It is translated into English by A. K. Ramanujan in 1976 and published by OUP in 1978.
Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man portrays a decaying South Indian Brahmin society in a
village in Karnataka and deals with the problematic issues related to orthodox Madhava
Brahmin caste order; its adherence to the age old traditions of rigid caste defined value
systems, hypocrisy of high caste Brahmins and exploitation of low caste women and
harlots. It is a frontal attack on Brahminism by Bhattacharya as a "critical insider"

The basic conflicts in the text are between reality and appearance, tradition and
defiance of tradition, rituals and the law of nature. Ananthamurthy concedes in
Kaimada journal Rujuvatu that though Praneshacharya is based upon a real Brahmin of
south India, he was inspired to write such a novel only after seeing a Russian film in
Birmingham.

THEME

Samskara presents a pretentious world of high-caste Brahmins, their values and attitudes in life based upon
unreal, hypocritical, false notions, undermining vitality and beauty of life. When an unforeseen complicated
problem arises, they react to it according to their conventional prejudices and try to look for precedent in the
holy books and consequently the new questions remain unanswered.
This decay in the real spirit of religious rites is brought out as the Brahmins of the
village debate whether they should take part in the last rites of Naranappa, bom in a
Brahmin family but acted against Brahminic principles of conduct throughout his life. A.
K. Ramanujan observes:

The opening event is death, an anti-Brahminical Brahmin's death and it brings in


its wake a plague, many deaths, questions without answers, old answers, that
don't fit for the new questions. (Ramanujan, "Afterward," 139)

The title Samskara is central to the novel, which means the refinement of soul; this is to
make a being sacred by the purification of the dead body. In fact the overall drama in
the narrative progresses alongwith the question of performing the samskaras, i.e. the
last rites of a "Brahmin-tumed-heretic" Naranappa who had been a potent threat to
Brahmins of Durvasapura. Praneshacharya, a thorough scholar of holy books, and the
"Crest-jewel of Vedic Learning" (Samskara 6) fails to provide a solution to the problem.
In fact, in struggling to provide the solution he is confronted with the vital issue of life
and he deviates from the path that he had been embracing all along.

Character
Praneshacharya, the spiritual head of the Brahmin community, imagines to be living in heaven by serving his
invalid wife. He considers woman as his "sacrificial altar," and Naipaul says even "after twenty years the
sacrificial act still fills him with pleasure, pride and compassion," thus the Acharya leads a life of a household
ascetic, following the path of Tapasya, remaining celibate and pure (Naipaul, "A Defect of Vision," 105). He
tries to complete his sainthood by serving an invalid handicapped wife because he considers self-sacrifice to
be a great virtue:
He bathed Bhagirathi's body, a dried-up wasted pea-pod, and wrapped a fresh
sari around it; then he offered food and flowers in her hair and gave her holy
water. She touched his feet and he blessed her. (Samskara 1)

Many times his wife tells him that she is a burden on him and hindrance in his spiritual life, but the Acharya
simply laughs and says that this is God's way of giving him salvation:
The lord definitely means to test him on his way to salvation; that is why he has
given him a Brahmin birth this time and set him in this kind of family. The
Acharya is filled with pleasure and a sense of worth as sweet as the five-fold
nectar of holy days; he is filled with compassion for his ailing wife. He proudly
swells a little at his lot, thinking, 'By marrying an invalid I get ripe and ready'.
(Samskara 2)

Confined within the boundaries of casteism, the Acharya is totally ignorant about the vitality of life; he is
ignorant of the feminine beauty which he finds later in low-caste Chandri, the concubine of Naranappa. The
Brahminical principles are the guiding factors and he anticipates salvation by following the life of
renunciation and sacrifice.
Although his [Praneshacharya's] very name implies 'life', he is when the novel
opens ironically enough committed to a complete denial of life through
renunciation, he has based his life on extreme asceticism and sacrifice eschewing
in the process large areas of vital human experience. (Gupta, "The Ghost and the
Demon," 17)

Praneshacharya has his reservations for Chandri, the low-caste woman and the mistress of the apostate
Brahmin Naranappa. He is of the opinion that if he talks to her, he will be polluted and will be required to take
bath again before his meal. The purity/pollution paradigm, is at the back of Brahminical thinking which
manifests itself in the behaviour of Praneshacharya for low-caste Chandri, responsible for the downfall of
Naranappa, highlighting the caste binaries in its real essence. With sobs, Chandri announces
Naranappa's death and this creates a serious problem for the entire community.
According to Brahmin customs they cannot have meals before the cremation of the
body and they are in two minds regarding cremation rites because he was a Brahmin
turned heretic. Praneshacharya perceives the problem and the hurdles en-route in the
way of the cremation of Naranappa:

"Naranappa's death rites have to be done: that is the problem one. He has no
children. Someone should do it: that's problem two"

Naranappa's un-Brahminical deeds are the root cause of this problematic issue in the eyes of the Brahmin
community. In his lifetime he had openly flouted, mocked and questioned the basic ideology and code of
conduct prescribed by the caste priests and exposed the hypocritical and sinful living of the narrow-minded,
selfish, greedy, jealous Brahmins whose Brahminhood consists only of following age old rules and rituals
without caring to understand them and living in the fear that disasters would fall upon them if these rules and
rituals are not observed. The cremation of Naranappa poses a major problem for the whole Brahmin
community. Garudacharya ponders: "The real question is: Is he a Brahmin at all? What do you say? He slept
regularly with a low-caste woman"
Every Brahmin wants to escape from the responsibility of the cremation of Naranappa and they all refer to
Naranappa's un-Brahminical deeds. The Brahmins further say to Praneshacharya that if they perform the rites
of Naranappa, they would desecrate themselves. Praneshacharya is confused and perplexed; he tries hard to
have a solution.
... it's a deep question - I have no clear answer. For one thing, he may have rejected Brahminhood, but
Brahminhood never left him. No one ever excommunicated him officially. He didn't die an outcaste; so
he remains a Brahmin in his death. Only another Brahmin has any right to touch this body.

the entire community of Brahmins threatened to excommunicate him, but Naranappa's personality was so
strong that no one had the courage to do so, rather he warns;
'Try and excommunicate me now. I'll become a Muslim. I'll get you all tied to pillars,
cram cow's flesh in your mouth and see to it personally that your sacred Brahminism is
ground into the mud.'

Naranappa challenges the Acharya openly:


Let's see who wins in the end - you or me. I'll destroy Brahminism, I certainly will. My
only sorrow is that there's no Brahminism left to destroy in this place.

On the symbolic level the polarities are expressed through Praneshacharya and Naranappa, both of
them are high born Brahmins, but at the same time the two are opposite to each other in their ways
of living and attitudes. On the symbolic level, Praneshacharya has suppressed the devil Naranappa
in a corner of his very self, he desires physical satisfaction but every time suppresses it in the name
of religion.

The problem of cremation becomes more complicated for everyone thinks in terms of money and the greedy
nature of Brahmins is exposed. The high-caste women who are not prepared that their husbands should
perform the death rites of Naranappa are jealously looking at the gold ornaments, which are adorning the
body of low-caste Chandri. At first the high caste Brahmins are not ready to perform the last rites of
Naranappa because of the expenses, then Chandri gives all her jewellery for cremation and everyone gets
ready for the sake of gold.
When they see gold, their ideals crumble and instead of fearing desecration, they start thinking of grabbing the
opportunity to perform the last rites of Naranappa:
The Brahmins bowed their heads: they were afraid, fearfiil that the lust of gold might destroy their
Brahmin purity. But in the heart of everyone of them flashed the question: if some other Brahmin
should perform the final rites of Naranappa, he might keep the Brahminhood and put all the gold on
his wife's neck.

At last Praneshacharya decides to take the help of God and his spiritual powers. He proceeds to the shrine of
Maruti, places flowers to the left and to the right of the image and prays for a sign. He finds no solution or
sign and decides to go back home to give medicine to his invalid wife. On the way to his house, there in the
mid of jungle, he meets low-caste Chandri. She is more healthy, vibrant and attractive than the Brahminical
women. She wants to have a child from Praneshacharya. In darkness all the desires of Praneshacharya are
awakened. The physical aspect of Praneshacharya's life had been consciously suppressed by him owing to his
marriage with an invalid woman. All these suppressed yearnings have gone into his subconscious and find
their ways in his discourses on the puranas and the classics. Now Praneshacharya becomes aware of the
feminine beauty, which he finds in low caste Chandri. It shows that the essence of life is in living life to the
full and not in denying the boons of life. With this awakening Praneshacharya feels the futility of his position
as an Acharya.

He decides to confess everything in front of entire community and desires that Chandri should tell everything
to the Brahmins, but he does not find Chandri, and tells high-caste Brahmins that he could not get the solution
and they should solve it themselves, "What manner of man am I? I am just like you - a soul driven by lust and
hate. Is this my first lesson in humility?"

Thus through the sexual union of Chandri and Praneshacharya, the soul and body of Acharya are reconciled.
In the beginning Acharya is the Crest-Jewel-of Vedic learning,
102
worshipper of Vedas and the follower of scriptures, by the end he resolves to confess his relationship with
Chandri, Meenakshi Mukherjee aptly remarks:
Praneshacharya's passage through the novel is from being one kind of hero to another. In the beginning
he is one of the homogeneous community albeit a head taller than others. By the end he is a lonely
man unsupported by the community or God, and he has to chart out his own path.

He goes away from his community, to seek identity, his true form, his basic human nature and his very self. He
decides to go for an unknown destination.

She doesn't want to create any problem in the life of Acharya, who is god-sent man in her life. She arranges
for the cremation of Naranappa with the help of the Muslim fish-merchant, Ahmad Bhai whom Naranappa had
bailed out in times of distress. First she decides to take the blessings of Acharya before leaving the place but
she doesn't want to bother Acharya more and proceeds to Kudapura.

Chandri is the woman who makes all the difference in his life, doesn't belong to any caste, creed and
community but the basic principle of her life is the principle of love and humanity. She knows that the dead
body knows no caste, community and religion:
That is not her lover Naranappa, it's neither Brahmin nor Shudra. A carcass, a stinking rotting
carcass.

Samskara is a journey of high-caste Brahmin's life, from darkness towards light, from spirituality
towards regeneration, from barrenness towards fertility, form bookish wisdom towards experience
and from high caste identity towards humanity. All credit for these godly changes goes to low-
caste prostitute Chandri. "Praneshacharya's accustomed world is shattered by Chandri's touch; he
becomes aware of the opposition between his earlier detachment and present involvement"
(Mukherjee)

... although Hinduism says that the fountain-head of creation is Ananda and the creation itself is an aspect of God,
our society is ridden by caste-system, puritanical inhibitions, fear of experience, and indifference to whatever
remains outside our system.

"writing is to search; compare and juxtapose, grope and search. Search in the infinity all
the pleasures and pains of life.1
U.R. Anantha Murthys writings examine the nature of a traditional society that is trying to modernise itself.
The title Samskara is a multivocal Sanskrit word connoting both being and becoming. Superficially the novel deals
with the dilemma of performing the last rites of Naranappa, a rebellious Brahmin who could not be
excommunicated from his community by the rest of the Brahmins; yet at another level it also Judges the
quality of an entire way of life through the major characters, Praneshacharya and Naranappa Who are
presented as foil and counterfoil to each other. Two dominant strands of meanings interlace in the course of the
narrative; the first, the rite to passage for a dead man, applicable to Naranappa and the second, samskara as
perfecting, applicable to the protagonist Praneshacharya.

Bhagirathi, Lilavati and other Brahmin women are contrasted with Chandri, Padmavati and Belli, the low caste
women. Which brahmin girl, cheek sunken, breast withered, mouth stinking of lentil soup,-which brahmin girl
was equal to Belli?,249 ponders Sripathi. The lower caste women are compared to the mythical damsel, Menaka
known for her extraordinary beauty and the apsaras. As Meenakshi Mukheqee remarks, In Samskara
Praneshacharyas invalid wife is made to epitomize the diseased sterility of the entire agrahara.

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