Realism and Existentialism in U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Short Stories

Author(s): Dr Mohammed Sattar

Abstract:

In Ananthamurthy’s short stories we find Navya, Authencity, Desi-marga, immediate and rootedness, ethical authenticity of the self, ‘Jeernagni’, Native, insider concepts. Ananthamurthy is undoubtedly one of the main architects of the ‘Navya’ movement- the modernist phase-in Kannada Literature. None would contest the sharp intellectual dimensions that he gave the ‘Navya’ movement, which severely interrogated vague abstractions, sweeping generalizations and lofty and sentimental ideals, that individuals, communities, literary texts, spiritual and philosophical discourses and theories of aesthetics often tend to uphold as “Values” of life, and rigorously looked for ‘authenticity’ in individual social life. This search for ‘authenticity’ of the ‘Navya’ tradition has always been acknowledged by all, including the later generations of artists and activists who had several disagreements with it. One can have a glimpse of this quality in all his prose pieces, especially “Tradition and creativity”, “The Search for an Identity”, “Why Not Worship in the Nude?”, “Gandhi’s Triumph Over the Fear of Death”, and the autobiographical-intellectual narrative, “Five Decades of my writing” where the classical, the marga, fuses with the local/indigenous, the desi, the rational finds its juxtaposition with the mystical/non-rational, and ideological/philosophical converses with the realistic and existentialistic in addition to that experiential.

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