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Address by Prof. U. R. Ananthamurthy, writer and scholar from India at the State Literary Festival, 2002.

I am not happy with the word 'responsibility'. It sounds a little pompous, and burdensome like filling income-tax forms. If reading/writing of creative literature is not a joyful act in itself it is nothing of much consequence. Bad literature can't be good politics. This is a truism that state promoters of literature, like the former rulers of Soviet Union, often target, or deliberately ignore.

Yet there is a need for a notion like responsibility. For no writer lives and creates in a vacuum. The moment one uses language, one gets related to the community that keeps the language alive. It is the vibrancy of the English language of the renaissance that made Shakespeare possible. The language was alive and vibrant because the people were alive and vibrant and responsible to the times.

Therefore all good writers are aware that they owe something to their people and the language that sustains them. Language always helps its peoples to have a sense of continuity with their own past, the dreams and achievements of a people through history that have been presented as memory. All our memories of the past in our countries are preserved in our folk tales, songs, performances, and myths.

As writers we owe an obligation to our past as well as to the present to continue what is best in our literary traditions, not by imitating the past but creatively interacting with it. We make poetry out of our quarrels with ourselves, said Yeats. And politics, out of our quarrel with others. Both these quarrels, so necessary in our times of instability and change, could be with our own traditions as well. We should take care that these quarrels should be dialogues, too among the literary fraternity.

Why else do we meet like this and you should invite a fellow writer like me from India, so near to you and yet so far! This mutual unfamiliarity is unfortunate as many of us are brought up by our education to feel we are nearer to Europe than to each other. The truth is we have so much more to share with each other than with the modernised Europe.

For instance, our common heritage and the anxieties resulting from our need to modernise and yet preserve what is best in tradition could result in significant dialogues. This distance is there among us, Indian writers in languages, as well. If only we learn from one another in Asia, then it may result in our becoming better partners in the literary endeavour with our great writers in Europe. I hope this question will engage some of you in this conference.

As writers particularly as Asian writers we need to be 'critical insiders' to our own traditions. Being mere insiders, uncritically may often result in the production of mindless celebrate writing, rhetorical flourishes and populist cliches-so easy to imbibe and so banal. Because of our 'sthrotra' tradition, and the inherited courtly behaviour of our classical past, reinforced by colonial rule, many of us mindlessly slip into this mode in our writing. Some of us, 'modernist' have been critical of that kind of pompous writing.

Being blindly critical of our traditions, on the other hand, may result in westernisation and amnesia of whatever is good in our past. In India the great 12th century poet-mystic Basava who rebelled against superstitious temple worship and caste system was a critical insider. And so was the Marathi poet Tukaram and the Hindi poet Kabir. The great medieval saint poets were all critical insiders. Mahatma Gandhi comes in that tradition. You will surely have plenty of such examples in Tamil and Sinhalese of 'critical insiders'.

There is something else in the nature of our languages too which makes the situation of our Asian writers significantly unique. There have been two great movements in languages of the world. Some five hundred years ago Latin was the language of Cosmopolis in Europe. This gave way to European vernaculars. This cultural decentralisation resulted in great creativity in European languages. Shakespeare in English and Dante in Italian were made possible because the vernaculars replaced the language of Cosmopolis in literary creation. Dr. Sheldon Pollock has done some excellent writing on this change, as well as about what happened in India. I shall speak only of the instance of Kannada in which I write. Sanskrit, which was the language of Cosmo polis, a thousand years ago, made way for the geographically bound and limited language, Kannada of the Kannada speaking country. This has been profoundly theorized in our classic of a thousand years ago, Kaviraja Marga.

The author Srivijaya sees the language as geographically limited and yet, this is important, the creation of its authors unlimited in its universals significance. We must not forget here that this decentralization of creativity didn't result in a total break with the past. For Dante, the Latin Vrigil is the guide and for the a Kannada Pampa, a thousand years ago, the Sanskrit Kalidasa is a model. This happened much earlier in Tamil. In ancient India the great Buddha spoke in the langauge of people. Creativity of our times in the whole world owes to this empowerment of people's languages, the vernaculars (I hate to use this word, unless technically).

Under the impact of globlization we see after a thousand years another cycle. People's languages are threatened; their power is diminishing. Perhaps the whole world is moving in the direction of English as a language of Cosmo polis because the most powerful nation in the world, USA uses it Of course, not because Shakespeare wrote in it.

Therefore I feel it is the 'responsibility' of writers in our languages to see that people's languages, which have a history of their own, and a sense of continuity of valuable memory of what it is to be human in history, are empowered. This is as mush a political task as it is a cultural task. The task means many things; One, it means decentralization of economy and empowerment of Village level democratic institutions; two, it means truly federal governments. Such determined political action is needed, not for mere cultural reasons of identity, but for meaningful governance, and even efficient government in a large country like India.

Languages in India are an aspect of our pluralities and pluralities are a guarantee of our democracy.

We use the phrase 'unity in diversity' to describe the nature of our civilization in India. This means that if a dictatorial ruler insists on unity only in the interest of highly centralized governance, we then become acutely aware of our diversities. For instance, this happened in Assam, in Punjab, in Thamilnadu, and eventually led to Emergency in India. At the same time, if separateness is insisted in the name of diversities, and Yugaslav situation is created we profoundly become aware of the oneness of our civilization. That is why I feel in countries like India if we over centralize, we may balkanize. A happy situation for us is when a tagore could be a senegali and simultaneously a great Indian poet. A Gandhi could be Gujerathi and at the same time a great Indian soul.

The so-called globalization, which in reality is Americanization, is a threat to many of our cherished and tested values. Writers in our languages, have to respond to this threat. There is no future for our languages otherwise. They may survive as kitchen languages only.

Let me move to another question that preoccupies some of the best writers of our times in the world. This is an important question that demands clarity of perception, for the lack of it has been resulting in inhuman cruelty and brutality and destruction of all civilized values. There is no literature, no theatre, no poetry without culture and civilization. There is no civilization without love and compassion for all forms of life, and for this earth and this sky, which sustains and nourishes life.

A Character in lgnatio Silone's novel, 'Fontamara', speaks of two evils, Money and State, which are as old as fleas, hateful in themselves but bearable as long as they are kept within limits. But both Money and State are able to access the single-minded devotion of some passionate people. These people in politics and big business could be righteous in their self cantered pursuit of power and justify any immoral act in the name of the welfare of the people. For instance, the slow ecological diaster is justified in the name of prosperity and strong state. Those who are knowledgeable of such matters say that more people have than in the earlier communal holocaust when India was partitioned.

Mahatma Gandhi as well as Tagore had therefore rejected the European idea of Nation-state and opted for a different nation of Nationalism, appropriate for a pluralistic civilization like India. There may be a lesson for this disturbed world in message of these two visionaries of my country. But we do not seem to heed to them in our pursuit of money and strong state. Today, the communal frenzy let loose by the state itself in Gujerath, and the support that terrorism receives in Pakistan, and the attempt to justify the one with the other frighten us. The world literature has to respond to these challenges of our times. This needs compassion, and vision and profound self-reflection. We as writers will have to be conscientious witnesses to the terrible events of our times, as well as act as citizens to restore sanity and compassion.

And finally, a few words about the senseless, and absurd passions of our times to which any of us, and the near and dear ones to us may become victims. The write Karahasan brings out the cruel absurdity of a mind set through a Bosnian joke;

There's a joke I was told was Bosnian, though it sounds Jewish, in which lvek is in a local tavern and the moment he hears that the name of the man standing next to him is Moshe he kills him without thinking twice. He does not deny the deed to the police, he simply justifies it by saying "And what about what they did to our Jesus?" "It happened two thousand years ago", Police inspector exclaims. "Yes, but I only heard about it yesterday", says lvek.

The man who is killed no longer seen as an individual with his own history, his own inviolable physical body. Every one else who does not look like me, or worship like me, or speak like me is the hateful. The 'other' need not be a grown-up man or woman. A mere child could be the abstract 'other'. Such a mindset is terrible.

If literature has a great contribution to make it is this: it makes you suspect abstractions. It makes a hamlet Hesitate to kill his own father's murderer.

We don't just represent something; we have living bodies and living histories as individuals and, at the same, time, as members of a community. That is the great lesson of all great literatures.

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