Modernism and Its Doubles: U R Ananthamurthys Stallion of the Sun

Ashwin Kumar A P
U R Ananthamurthys Suryana Kudure (a collection of short stories first published in 1995 and
translated as Stallion of the Sun) simultaneously operates in two registers: it is a modernists elegy to
a deeply ambiguous past (ambiguous because it is a monument to its own resilience as also the
symptom of a degenerate society at the threshold of its own annihilation) and a moment of rupture
in the very history of modernist discourse (rupture because here Indian literary modernism meets its
own double: the aberrant, degenerate village simpleton transgressing both history and reason - not
through an existential encounter with history - but by simply falling through the cracks).
The story itself is a staple of the Indian angst literature we are very familiar with. Returning to his
village, the litterateur-author-narrator, Ananthu, discovers his old friend, Hade Venkata, (the
nickname indicating the urchin that he was and continues to be) in a state of utter disrepair -
unmarried daughters, a suffering, complaining and cursing wife, an errant and wayward son and
Venkata himself in the midst of all this strife in his splendid almost reckless disregard for his lot. The
subsequent narrative is a slow and painful unravelling of the minute details of Venkatas life and his
moral failure as father, husband and above all provider of the family, occasionally interspersed with
commentaries from the narrator now on the abounding village idiocy of Asiatic proportions and
now about his own dread at the precarious distance which separates himself from Venkata.
The central drama binding the narrator and the narrated is an oil massage and a scalding hot-water
bath given by Venkata to Ananthu, an art for which he is known far and wide, and the reason why
Ananthu has come to Venkatas house this time. Venkata is supposed to have the ability to take his
clients (amongst whom are included not just the local politicians and police officers but also the
illustrious K. T. Basham) to the heights of bliss through his massages: showing the full moon as he
describes it himself. At this point the narrative shifts gears and we are no more in the familiar
domain of the room-temperature social theory of Indian modernism with its well-worn antinomies:
the alienated individual versus his rotting, self-amnesiac, non-modern counterpart, the dangers of
urbane vacuity versus the ancient violence of ahistorical modes of life and formal knowledge versus
native intuition. The massage slowly dulls the narrators consciousness; standing behind him is the
expert masseur Venkata chanting rhymes, mantras, Yakshagana lyrics and affected extempore
poetry even as he is kneading, drumming, squeezing and twisting the flesh of Ananthu and bending
as it were the rigidities of both muscle and mind. Both the narrative and the narrator from this point
onwards acquire a suppleness and intimacy that dissolves the hitherto intellectual bravado and
moral certainty of Ananthu and his puzzlement about the ways of Venkata. A process of healing has
already begun for Ananthu where what requires healing now is not only the decadent human
condition petrified in an antediluvian Asiatic mode but also the rigid varicose of a historical
rationality subsuming life to abstract and monstrous goals bypassing the dialectic of experience and
reflection. Of course Ananthu experiences nothing of the seeing the full moon after his massage but
by now the narrator has been so undermined that we cannot take this as proof only of Venkatas
failure but on the contrary also as a question about the capacity of the narrator to do full justice to
his own experiences.
I strongly believe this narrative failure to be the real success of the story.
Readers of Ananthamurthy will know that this is no isolated work of his but a central concern to
which he returns repeatedly in his novellas and other short stories. Whereas works with this theme
prior to Suryana Kudure suffer because he fails to sustain the essential ambivalence of this moral-
historical situation, then later works can be squarely seen as formulaic attempts to milk this theme
to produce a worldview, a gestalt which modern Indian literary history has shown us it is incapable
of. In some senses, then, Suryana Kudure stands at the pinnacle of Ananthamurthys achievement as
a writer.
The story ends on an ambiguous note when the narrator waking up early in the morning after a
troubled sleep owing to a row between Venkata and his son, finds Venkata transfixed in the kitchen
garden gazing at a grasshopper, the stallion of the sun of the title, which represents the lithe insect
with the mythical capacity to bear the sun on its back as also the skill to be completely submerged in
the colours of the background making itself innocuous. The stallion of the sun is only one small
element in an entire matrix of mythologies shared by Venkata and Ananthu from their boyhood
days. Probably seeing it as a metaphor or a symbol standing for some abstract idea is really beside
the point. The stallion of the sun is a only a point of entry into another completely different world of
objects and relations, a world which is the common past of both Venkata and Ananthu making them
nothing more but also nothing less than two possibilities inherent within that world. The specific
contours of that world will remain closed to the reader of this story, but will reveal glimpses of itself
throughout Ananthamurthys work as so many human possibilities.
Ananthamurthy works with similar themes in some other stories in this collection: notable are the
stories Akkayya and Jaratkaaru. In Akkayya the two academics sharing, over a glass of whiskey, the
story of Akkayya, (a child widow and the matronly sister of one of them, similar to Venkata in the
incongruity of her existence with the ways of the modern world) in a tipsy moment start drumming
on the antique earthen pots decorating the interiors of one of their American living rooms and
mouthing absurd nonsensical rhymes in a bacchanalian moment. The story ends in their realisation
that probably it is in this moment which fuses their sentimental remembrances of Akkayyas life with
the awkward and absurd (in their own words) hankering after sensitivity and sensibility is true
authenticity to be found. Although this refreshing light-weight resolution to the story shows a full
awareness of the traps of the authenticity-seeking modernist writer, in so far as it cannot shake the
received antinomies of much of modernist writing, remains an intellectual play of thin abstractions
and does not push the narrative towards taking any real risks. In fact, both in Akkayya and
Jaratkaaru, the problem gets reduced to the great conflict of historical modes of being played out on
the battleground of the modernist artist-individuals consciousness. In all these stories the problem
becomes one of seeking individual redemption from the gravity-free hell of modern alienation by
finding an authentic mode of existence. But what is the stuff of authenticity that modernist authors
are so taken by it? The hankering after authenticity is in the final instance the desire to render one
life-world completely in terms of the other. What then is the problem with it? Only that, this
necessarily intellectual task is converted into a problem of psychologies, of being able to feel or exist
in a psychological state called authenticity. No doubt, this is a critique of Ananthamurthys work but
we owe a debt to Ananthamurthy for opening up the possibility for such a critique of Indian
modernism and of the social function of writing in India. To slightly correct our previous evaluation,
then, both Jaratkaaru and Akkayya are in some senses the beginnings of a contrapuntal exploration
of the artistic-intellectual problems inaugurated by Suryana Kudure.