Novel
Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man
ಸಂಸ್ಕಾರ
U. R. Ananthamurthy · 1965
Synopsis
In a Brahmin colony in a village in Karnataka, Naranappa has just died. A renegade Brahmin, he ate meat, drank, lived with Chandri, a woman of low caste, associated with Muslims and threw a sacred stone into the temple pond. No one is willing to perform his funeral rites, and no one can eat until they are done. They turn to Praneshacharya, the most learned and the most ascetic, who seeks the answer in the sacred texts without finding it there, while the body rots.
Context
The novel was published in 1965; its author, then a doctoral student in Birmingham, wrote it in England, and it was his first novel, which brought him immediate fame in Kannada letters. A. K. Ramanujan translated it into English for Oxford University Press in 1976, with notes and an afterword, and New York Review Books reissued it in 2016. It was adapted for the screen in 1970 in a prize-winning film that opened the new wave of Kannada cinema.
Who it is for
A short novel, with no French translation, which exists in English with a glossary of the rites and myths that it does not explain.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's most accomplished and most discussed work, and as a classic of modern Indian letters.
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