With several significant exceptions, this blossoming into poetry is absent from descriptions of emotional and sexual relations between men and women. Although such relations (mostly Shastri's and Dinakar's) permeate the novel, they are more often a source of confusion and pain than of joy. (For the men, that is; we have little direct access to the intimate thoughts of any woman in the story, although Saroja's disgust is painfully apparent.) Consider Shastri's relations with his two wives, or the irony and brutal ‘honesty’ in Dinakar's letters to women with whom he has had an erotic connection. For each of these men, the involvement that most attracts beauty of language is the earliest and most innocent: Shastri with Radha, Dinakar with Gangu.
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Language itself is also a theme in Bhava.
Anantha Murthy has commented that Indians live in an ‘ambience of languages,’ that the story plays with the notion of translation, and that the ‘translation of events’ was one of his preoccupations in this work. For example, translation comes into play when telling someone at home what happened in the workplace; or in telling something to one's mother, as opposed to a colleague. What is spoken in the home, in the street, in the office, on ritual occasions — all of these differ. And while the narrative of Bhava is in Kannada, to an exceptional degree the experiences of the characters originate in a multiplicity of languages: not only Kannada, but English, Hindi, Urdu. As well as sign language. And the languages of the heart. In many of the conversations, at least one character cannot use his or her mother tongue. Frequently, two or three characters converse only in a second language. Above all, at times there is no common language at alclass="underline" so we have a Kannada narrative in which Dinakar, a major figure, cannot speak with a woman who is like his ‘true mother’ because she knows only Kannada, and he speaks none. Yet they communicate. In fact, that they do not share a language and still communicate so well emphasizes the deep connection between them.
Therefore the use, or mis-use, or circumventing of language becomes a metaphorical component of the novel, which is also about communicating: difficulties in communication echoed as difficulties in language.
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Bhava is a departure for Anantha Murthy; he hasn't written any novel quite like it before. This may be a matter of disappointment to some readers who have come to expect from him work that is iconoclastic, rigorously challenging beliefs and practices, revealing forms that have lost their meaning — all of which characterize Samskara, for instance, and are absent from Bhava. The concern with crises of identity and spirit, although present and compelling in much of his earlier work, always has a dual purpose. The Acharya's spiritual crisis serves also as a microcosm of the crisis of Identity in a whole community of brahmins. His rebirth takes place in a political/sociological context, necessitated by the surrounding religious and social decay. There is no such context in Bhava, which has a much smaller canvas; its crises of identity are not placed alongside the monoliths of community, society, tradition. The crises are simply there, products of individual defects in bhava; which is to say, products of being human. Bhava spotlights the individual caught in the web of being, of samsara. Everywhere there is evidence of samsara's illusoriness, the bane of ‘not knowing‘: I don't know what is real. I don't know what ‘real’ means. I don't know who I am. I don't know whose father I am. I don't know whose son I am. I don't know what the ‘I’ in ‘I am’ means. So while the details of this novella are rooted in the Indian reality, the ultimate resonance is more immediately universal.
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As in many traditional tales a question is raised; kept alive, despite possible solutions; maintained, till profounder questions are raised. Answers are delayed until the question is no longer relevant.
— A.K. Ramanujan on Samskara
Few of the mysteries in Bhava are ever resolved. The author's reluctance to solve them for us — his adopting a perspective that is diffused, not omniscient — is connected with the theme of ‘not knowing,’ and with the changing relevance of having questions answered. The characters move beyond the kind of resolution they required earlier, because critical changes take place in those most in need of a shift in their terms of being, most in need of a rebirth.
Shastri and Dinakar — who, especially if we think of the bhavavali, could be aspects of the same character enacting the same fate in different parts of the cycle — echo one another when abandoning their questions about paternity:
‘“What does it matter if he is my son? Or if he is not?” Dinakar thought. “Whether I am his father, whether I am not, I should touch his feet.”’
And Shastri thinks, of Dinakar,
‘“Whether he is my son or not, he seems to be one who can give me a new life.”’
By the end of Bhava, Shastri is, for the first time, benignly preoccupied with the future — his unborn grandchild and the reconciliation with his daughter. He begins to feel, wonderingly, tentatively, that even in old age he may yet, for a while, live without suffering and fury. The ordinary blessings might be his.
Prasad decides that he can live in the world while not being of it. Having adopted the saintly simpleton, Chandrappa, as his spiritual father, he becomes unconcerned with the identity of his natural father, and loses his resentment of Narayan Tantri. In consequence, the pressure on Narayan Tantri to marry Gangu evaporates. Although Narayan Tantri is prepared to marry a woman born into the prostitute caste, Gangu herself comes to feel that the loving acceptance by Sitamma renders a public ritual unnecessary.
Dinakar, even without full awareness, has never before been so much among family: his ‘other mother.’ Sitamma; Shastri, who seems like ‘a relation from some past life’; Prasad, in response to whom he experiences, for the first time in his life, the ‘welling up of love for a child.’
When, at the end of his pilgrimage, Dinakar comes down from the hill and thinks, ‘“That” is not to be won if you seek it wilfully,’ he expresses an earned — if not completely experienced — response to Prasad's ‘Who am I?’
‘Thou art “That”.’ Tattvamasi.
Then he thinks of the evening when he ‘became captive to Prasad's unshakeable calm, and for a moment at least … was fully open, free of any desire or expectation.’ He thinks of blessing Prasad — how it had seemed that Prasad ought to have been blessing him — and is in a state of exaltation.
The dazzle of illusion, even when we see through it; the ways in which we entangle ourselves, the ways in which we work free—
How dp we get to change?
When all is said and done, it seems a matter of grace.
Notes
[The definition of ‘bhava’ given in the ‘Translator's Note’ is from A Sanskrit-English Dictionary, by Sir M. Monier-Williams.
In the Afterword, use is made of material from: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1997; The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. Robert A.F. Thurman. London: Thorsons, 1995; A Handbook of Tibetan Culture, ed. Graham Coleman. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1995; and U.R. Anantha Murthy's Samskara, tr. A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.]