Lived Structures: Caste, Reform and Political Agency as Individual Consciousness in U. R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara, Bharathipura, Avasthe and Bhava

Abstract

Criticism on U. R. Ananthamurthy has shown that caste in Samskara and Bharathipura operates not only as an institution but as internalised consciousness. This paper argues that the same mechanism organises his fiction more broadly, and that it extends to religious authority, reformist modernity, party politics and the family. Through a comparative, interdisciplinary close reading of four novels in English translation, Samskara (1965), Bharathipura (1973), Avasthe (1978) and Bhava (1994), the study examines how social structures are lived as private experience by four protagonists: Praneshacharya, Jagannatha, Krishnappa Gowda and Vishwanath Shastri. The analysis combines sociological theories of caste and hegemony (Dumont, Ambedkar, Gramsci, Foucault) with existentialist ethics and narratology (Sartre, Genette). It finds that in each novel a public institution produces a private crisis: ritual paralysis becomes spiritual doubt, temple entry becomes the reformer's self-division, political compromise becomes bodily paralysis, and inherited notions of lineage become uncertainty about origins. It further finds that Ananthamurthy's narrative techniques, including free indirect narration, spatial symbolism, analepsis and open endings, are the means by which this internalisation is represented. Three hypotheses, concerning social critique, the tradition–modernity conflict, and literary technique, are tested and supported. The paper concludes that Ananthamurthy's central subject is the point at which structure becomes consciousness, and that social reform in his fiction fails or stalls wherever it changes institutions without changing that consciousness.