摘要
Samskara by U. R. Anatha Murthy who passed in 2014 belongs to great literature. A perennially changing and challenging text, Samskara is included in Oxford India Perrenials—Classics from a century of Oxford University Press (OUP) India’s rich and diverse publishing tradition. A masterpiece of Indian, Asian, and World literatures, which was originally published in 1965 as Manohara Grantha Mala, Dharwar and translated into English in 1976 as Samskara, has received significant scholarly attention capped with Samskara: A Critical Reader edited by Kailash C. Baral, D., Venkat Rao, and Sura P. Rath (2009), the first volume of its kind to be published on one of the classics of Indian literature. The protagonist of the novel, Praneshacharya, the spiritual leader of a community of conservative Brahmins, experiences and realizes certain natural and universal elements that can strongly undergird his calling as a spiritual head of a community after committing adultery at an unguarded moment with a prostitute. An understanding and appreciation of the reality of natural desires need not be accompanied by religious dogma. At the end of the novel which does not really have any closure, he is beginning to honestly position himself to appreciate and preserve humanity and spirituality in a more robust manner rather than in his past stance of asceticism and sticking narrowly to the letter of his religion. What is attempted here is a critical examination of Putta as an albatross and as a catalyst in the beginning transformation of the protagonist from a narrow life of asceticism and self-denial into a fuller life of integration of spirituality and humanity.
