ABSTRACT
Though better known as a poet, A. K. Ramanujan wrote a curious autobiographical story, ‘Annayya’s Anthropology’ (translated from Kannada by Narayan Hegde), depicting a young man from Mysore going off to Chicago to study anthropology. Like young men and women of several generations over the last couple of centuries, Annayya expects Western education to provide him escape from the tyranny of social traditions. As he drowns himself in books of Western anthropology in a Chicago library, he chances upon a recent book on Indian customs. This book contains a photograph of his tonsured mother as an example of how Hindu widows conduct themselves. It is then that he learns of the recent death of his father. This has been the generic plot of all attempted escapes from tradition by Indians. Another contemporary of Ramanujan, Kannada fiction writer Shantinath Desai, began his literary career with Mukti, a novel of release from tradition. It was hugely successful with the young generation; but his last novel Om Namoh was an empathetic study of Karnataka Jainism. U. R. Ananthamurthy wrote his celebrated Samskara while he was doing research in English literature in Birmingham. Samskara engages with the power and the ironies of traditions going back to the Manusmriti. Sri Aurobindo was sent to England at the age of seven so that he grows up without an iota of influence of Indian customs. He returned to India after acquiring a Cambridge degree without knowing a word of any Indian language. Soon after, he turned to studying Sanskrit and, in an amazingly short time, took to writing profound commentaries on Hindu scriptures and myths. An individual’s uneasy emersion in the caste hierarchy and a precarious existence within dehumanizing traditions have been themes in uncountable novels, stories, plays, films, scholarly works, reform movements and other forms of discursive expression.
