Rescuing History from the Left

I DO NOT WISH to sound overly sensational or sentimental, but I was supposed to see SL Bhyrappa on the day he died. He had been ailing for a while, but the end felt sudden and unexpected. Also heartbreaking for so many in his large circle of family, friends, admirers, and millions of readers.

In my own case, I must confess that I did not know the great man all that well, but I owed him a special debt of gratitude. Indeed, one of his last acts of literary, intellectual, and personal generosity was the touching blurb he sent for my new book, Hindutva and Hind Swaraj: History’s Forgotten Doubles.

I shall quote it in full: “An inviting and compelling exploration of the ideological and political differences between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. This book is unique and brilliant.” Bhyrappa’s words, emblazoned on the front cover of my book, have bound me forever with him. He was in hospital, but he sent his endorsement through Dr Gouri Sekhar, one of his closest confidants and supporters.

After the publication of the book, I had travelled to Bengaluru, one of my express intentions being personally to hand over a copy to him. I even secured, from his publishers and caretakers, September 24 as the date on which to call on him. But early that morning, I got the unhappy tidings of his passage to the great beyond. As one writer to another, to be able to offer this truncated tribute as a heartfelt but hugely inadequate recompense is the least I can do.

I had, of course, met Bhyrappa on multiple occasions. I found him not only kindly and encouraging, but curious and solicitous of my welfare to a degree that was as gratifying as it was surprising. After all, I was not a Kannada writer, nor someone directly involved in the many literary or political controversies that he had fielded and forded so courageously during his 70-year career as a writer.

But Bhyrappa was a large-hearted man, interested in talent and integrity wherever he encountered them. He was also extremely well-read and learned in an academic, not just authorial way. No wonder because he had a PhD in Philosophy and had been a professor for decades. He was also quite up-to-date when it came to the goings on in the nation’s capital, not excluding Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I was a long-standing professor.

Soon after the Jawaharlal Nehru University fracas during the eventful days of February 9-12, 2016, I was invited as a speaker to the Sahitya Akademi’s annual festival of letters. It was in the inaugural morning panel on February 19, with Bhyrappa as chair. My presentation, ‘India’s Intolerance Wars’, was about how JNU had become an anti-government platform under pretexts that were not entirely honest.

What had been dubbed as a poetry reading was actually a separatist rally, which threw the university, even the nation, into turmoil. The rest, as they say, is history, my own small part in it narrated in my book, JNU: Nationalism and India’s Uncivil War (Rupa, 2022). Bhyrappa sent a sharp, no-holds-barred blurb for the book: “JNU is known for creating concocted history and anti-India student groups, in addition to false and negative archaeology which prevented a resolution of the Ayodhya problem for two decades. It is a mouthpiece of communist parties with Indian taxpayers’ money. But the insider, Professor Makarand R. Paranjape, known for his courage and objectivity, has offered a balanced picture based on personal experiences.”

Bhyrappa knew the treacherous terrain of India’s culture wars from the inside. As reader in philosophy, NCERT, he experienced ‘history-fixing’ first-hand, long before the Ayodhya depositions of ‘eminent historians’. The chair of ‘National Integration Committee’ tasked with ‘rewriting’ history, G Parthasarathy, the inaugural vice chancellor of JNU, admitted that there were Muslim atrocities in the middle ages. But GP, as he was popularly known, nevertheless,wanted the committee “to remove thorns from the minds of the growing children” so as not to breed hatred in their hearts. When Bhyrappa demurred, he was quietly removed from the committee, replaced by a more complaint ‘leftist’. Bhyrappa recounts the incident in his preface to Vikram Sampath’s book on Tipu Sultan.

The political and ideological battles within Kannada literature are well-known, with real benefits accruing to those, mostly on the secularist, leftist, or the Dalit side, owing to their proximity to the establishment. Bhyrappa took them head-on in Aavarana (2007), available in English in Sandeep Balakrishna’s translation. The novel really blows the lid off India’s history and culture skirmishes.

It has a whole section on Tipu, even his dream diary. Bhyrappa presentsthe same material that Karnad had used 10 years earlier, but in a totally different light. Even the title, which means covering or concealing, is symbolic. It may even refer to the purdah, or veil, as the cover of the translation suggests. Bhyrappa clarifies in the very first line of his preface: “The act of concealing truth is known as ‘aavarana’, and that of projecting untruth is called ‘vikshepa’.” Thus, Bhyrappa sets out to uncover the whole sordid ideological and institutional apparatus behind our history and culture machinery. The book was sold out before it even came out—and then went into 10 reprints quite rapidly. Aavarna, quite interestingly, turns into a novel within a novel as also a meditation on the meaning of history. While being so self-reflexive, even postmodern in a sense, it remains grounded in a revisionist historiography.

Of his many works, it is Aavarna, though not his greatest literary achievement, which has come to acquire a nationwide cult status. Especially because it became the voice and embodiment of the huge counter-secularist, Hindu cultural upsurge which, evidently, also brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power at the Centre. Such is the power, albeit grossly underestimated, of great literature. Bhyrappa’s most acclaimed work, the monumental Parva, translated so ably by Raghavendra Rao, contrarily, demythologises the Mahabharata story in a manner that left-liberals ought to have heartily approved of.

But that didn’t happen. Bhyrappa, though he came third after his two competitors and contemporaries, UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad, when it came to national awards or state largesse, was by far the most popular when it came to the number of copies his books sold. Indeed, neither friends nor foes could confine him to any slot, whether literary or ideological. From navodaya (renaissance) to navya (modernist) to bandaya (revolutionary) and beyond, his enormous and energetic oeuvre traversed and transcended all the major movements and intellectual currents of our times.

Deeply admired and cherished not only in his native state of Karnataka but all over India, Bhyrappa’s legacy, both creative and critical, is as compelling as it is enduring. It is my privilege to have inherited a part of it, albeit in another tongue.