Here, I am hearing chanting of Mantras incessantly. I have not experienced this anywhere. Feels like this is not a hospital, instead a sacred Yagna Shala. Every moment I feel very contented. The hard-working doctors’ effort as well as the treatment and the staff around, I am indebted to them. Dr. Shailaja’s diligence is much appreciated.

– L. Bhyrappa’s Final Note (Translated from Kannada)

Even in his final written words, Santeshivara Linganniah Bhyrappa managed to pack dense meanings before affixing his signature. A preparation to embark on a journey to the Higher Plane entailed hearing sacred words – as if Gods were whispering Mantras in his ears – to invite him to their abode – the World of Eternity. Even with the astonishing life he has lived with vast range of experiences he has had, his receptivity to novelty had not faded – when he says he had not had such an experience anywhere and anytime – and every moment is filled with delight, wonder and contentment. He expresses his gratitude to the doctors and all the staff – big and small – with such sincerity, humility and magnanimity. What a majestic way to exit from the world, and only a man of words, ideas and character is capable of such a grand departure.

Bhyrappa’s words – his final words and the innumerable words he has penned in his long life as a story-teller – reminds me of a beautiful Dohe by Sant Kabir that says – our entry into this world is marked by cry, while others rejoice, but live life in such a way that you depart with a smile while others shed tears. In short, make yourself worthy of their grief. Bhyrappa has led such a remarkable life and left behind such voluminous works that he clearly has managed to fill the space between entry and exit in an incredibly meaningful and memorable manner. In death he has relinquished co-authorship of his life and now it rests on his readers and followers to continue to author his life and his works through active engagement and deeper understanding. His death does not finalize anything, for his words live on. He showed the power and durability of his tales and his thoughts.

Bhyrappa: Dialogue between Life and Art.

Although the genesis of art is life, life is not art, and neither is art life. Art is too grand and elevated, and life is too humble, but in narrativizing life, one accords meaning to life’s pain and tragedies, thereby heightening sensibilities and strengthening consciousness. Events in life, particularly childhood experiences, may be to a great extent due to the action of grown-ups around you and some unknown powers too, but eventually engaging in a dialogue with fate and destiny is an assertion of human power. In writing Bhitti – An Autobiography – Bhyrappa did not leave his experiences to the interpretive imagination of others, instead, he took charge to give meaning to a very traumatic childhood. When I read Bhitti, I was enraged by the cruelty inflicted upon him as a young boy, astonished by his clever tactics to evade beating, wept for the pain he suffered, and was amazed by how this boy kept his wonder alive and impressed with his thirst for knowledge, even under such horrifying circumstances. I was disgusted with his sadistic maternal uncle and terrified by the cruel and profane language of his paternal grandmother. Added to this list of uncaring adults around Bhyrappa and his siblings was his irresponsible, lazy and self-absorbed father. Bhyrappa’s mother was the only caring adult in that household – responsible, intelligent and compassionate, and yet could do very little to shelter her kids – though not intentionally, as she had to send young Bhyrappa to the neighboring village for schooling – and hence he had to live with his cruel maternal uncle and take all the abuses. Reading Bhitti means to realize the depth and dimensions of Nava Rasas – all nine emotions – for it is difficult not to feel the force of myriad emotions.

Tragedy after tragedy struck young Bhyrappa; his older brother and sister succumbed to plague on the same day within a two-hour interval. Bhyrappa was barely 10 years old when his mother also succumbed to plague. Close encounters with death seemed endless in his early years. I felt numb when I read about how Bhyrappa cycled from one village to his home, only to carry the dead body of his younger brother on his shoulder and a pot of burning coal in the other hand to cremate and right away head back to the village where he was attending school. Made me wonder – am I reading a story about Vetala ghost in Chandamama or is this real life? In numerous interviews later in his life, Bhyrappa admits that he has always been intrigued by the power of death. In many of his literary works, he addressed the inscrutability, the profundity and the finality and also the unfinalizability in the realm of consciousness with regard to death. It is in this manner, Bhyrappa’s life experiences morphed into creative literary work. If one asks the question – why Bhyrappa’s works should be read – the answer is to understand the emergence of creative understanding when you dialogue with the inevitable in the wilderness of life. In short, Bhyrappa’s principle is not to be a prisoner of life experiences, but move beyond into the realm of aesthetic vision.

After the demise of his mother, the young boy Bhyrappa went to school by sustaining himself through Vaaranna – a practice where each family among other families would take turn and feed him one day of the week – and depending on the goodness and generosity of the family – some fed fresh and tasty food while many others fed him not so tasty leftovers. What an assault it must have been on the young boy’s sense of self-worth.

There is more to Bhyrappa’s odyssey – from selling sharbat in village fairs to working as a gatekeeper in cinema theaters and entertaining people with songs and captivating stories. The phrase – Truth is stranger than fiction – holds true even for this literary giant. He wrote about travelling ticketless, walking on railway tracks practically starving, begging, working as a server in a restaurant, arrested on false charges, being a coolie in Mumbai train station and to top it all, wearing saffron clothes and following a group of drug-abusing Sadhus. Amidst all these experiences he managed to visit libraries to educate himself. His adventures and experiments with life almost seem inexhaustible. In this era of playing victim card, it is important to note that Bhyrappa recorded these painful and humiliating experiences in a matter-of-fact manner, without displaying any signs of injury to the self. It is a rare combination of candor about experiences without bitterness or forgiveness that seems to have built his fortitude and transformative growth.

Bhyrappa: A Literary Giant.

What makes Bhyrappa a literary genius? When we read his works – it is impossible to find one common theme – like U.R. Ananthamurthy’s common template of exposing what he considered as the hypocrisy and orthodoxy among Brahmins – whereas Bhyrappa explores every theme in myriad human conditions. Human foibles, strengths, resistance, retaliation, pain and suffering and laughter – every emotion and condition of life – finds expression in his works. In a hierarchically organized world of oppressor and oppressed as in the works of Ananthamurthy we confront a one-sided expression of crisis expressed in a monologic fashion. All that the reader is left to do is affirm or repudiate with very little understanding of the nature of crisis and not find any possible ways for conflict resolution. Entering into the Bhyrappa’s world is different, because every character he creates is a philosopher in his own right and therefore alongside Bhyrappa, we hear the philosophical ruminations of them – Srinivas Shrothri in Vamsavriksha, Lakshmi in Aavarana (The Veil) or even the lustful and shady character like Manjaiah in Saakshi (The Witness), or Nagabhatta, a Vedic scholar in Saartha (The Caravan). In each and every novel Bhyrappa orchestrates the incredible polyphony of voices and manages to achieve metamorphosis. He shows how and why voices clash and crisis erupts. His characters’ dilemmas are very different in each novel and so are their philosophies and their methods to justify their actions. We hear the voices of these characters without any approval or disapproval by the author. Bhyrappa leaves that exercise of judgement to his readers. For him, characters are not his mechanical mouthpieces to ventriloquize his ideas and ideals, and hence, manages to showcase the paradox and irony of human condition. Therefore, in Bhyrappa’s works we do not see any easy and superficial solutions to complex moral dilemmas. Every issue must be weighed carefully and wrestled with and accept the consequences of the choices made. Furthermore, spoken words carry as much weight as unspoken words that he directs our attention to, thereby compelling the readers to think through the inevitable challenges in human life. The highest rhetorical trope – irony – finds its fullest expression in each and every work of Bhyrappa.

What makes Bhyrappa a consummate storyteller? After all, story is the simplest vehicle of truth. Yes, his search and commitment are for Truth, and he explores its various dimensions from multiple vantage points. Bhyrappa is more than a fiction writer; he is a philosopher and earned his Ph.D. and wrote his thesis on Satya – Soundarya (Truth and Beauty). Furthermore, he is a thorough researcher, and his socio-historical novels are based on well-researched historical facts and events – be it ancient or contemporary – to become a wholesome work. His imaginative power is woven with historical facts. In order to plumb the depth of consciousness, Bhyrappa engages in what Anthropologists do – participant observation – in order to pick minute details about mannerisms and code of conduct and thought patterns of any community he is trying to depict in his novels. It is this rigor that makes Bhyrappa’s stories so captivating and persuasive.

Meeting and Dialoguing with Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa.

The etymology of Sāhityam is from Sahitam – meaning ‘to be with’ – and books are the best companions. When a writer’s words penetrate deep into your soul the effect is indescribable and that is the impact Bhyrappa’s works had on me. His works gave me an understanding of the world around me, taught me subtleties of Dharma and a deeper insight into the complexities of the human world.

My area of academic interest and expertise is in the – Philosophy of Dialogue – more specifically as advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin, a literary theorist and thinker from Russia. Therefore, any text that lends itself to dialogicality carries special interest in my mind and that led to my work on Dialogic Consciousness in The Mahabharata. Bhyrappa’s works of fiction carry all the features of dialogicality: it is open-ended, heteroglossic and polyphonic and thus beckons the readers into the world he creates. One of the most significant works of Mikhail Bakhtin was on Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics – and in his works Bakhtin found the dialogical nature of artistic creation. Bakhtin discovered the multi-voiced and multi-layered nature of Dostoevsky’s works and from them he discerned a theory and philosophy of dialogue to counter a very limited, oppressive and static monologic impulses. Whenever I read Bakhtin’s insights into the collected works of Dostoevsky, my mind travelled towards the collected works of Bhyrappa. If Dostoevsky’s works stand as an emblem of Russian intellectual traditions, I was convinced that Bhyrappa’s works embodies Indian intellectual traditions with all its sophistication, force and multi-temporalities. Thus, the desire to theorize Bhyrappa’s literary works along the lines of Bakhtin’s writings on Dostoevsky started taking root and grow in my mind. After some time, it became an obsession that I could not shake off and hence had to act on it. I managed to reach him by phone and told him briefly about my proposed project on his works and expressed my desire to meet him in person during my travel to India.

In summer of 2023, I was in India and Bhyrappa’s assistant set up a visit to his home in Mysore on August 9, 2023. The day turned out to be the most memorable and meaningful, filled with productive exchange between a literary giant and a modest academic. My heart was filled with gratitude and humbled that a person of his stature and creativity heard every word I uttered with great attentiveness and curiosity. What I thought might be, perhaps a 40-minute meeting turned out to be a four-hour dialogue. I told him how much and why I like his works, what is unique and special about his fiction and why theorizing his works is an urgent need to counter the Left-dominated discourse in academia. He told me that the Left is not knowledgeable at all about the cultural ethos or the ground realities, and nor are they equipped with analytical categories to understand the complexities and contradictions of human life. He explained how with deracinated identities, they have positioned themselves as social justice warriors and have weaponized literature to dismantle social structures. He told me that members of the so-called ‘Progressive Writers’ club threw stones and smashed his windows, and this was also recorded in his autobiography. They referred to him as a Madi Brahmin (In Brahmin households, after taking a bath they do not touch anyone till they complete their prayers and partake their meals), meaning he had all the Brahminical privileges. Anyone who is aware of even few details about his life-story knows how far privilege was from his life. He told me how important it was for a writer or for that matter a researcher to be acutely mindful of ground realities, with comprehensive knowledge of the cultural past, and minutia of mannerisms among humans, their eccentricities and peculiarities and their pathos. He narrated few personal stories on how he would always visit and stay with families to understand human interactions.

Bhyrappa glanced through pages of my books and asked thoughtful questions about my work. He said he too is an admirer of Russian literature and added that storytelling is ingrained in the Indian psyche and the canvas is vast, and no other culture can come close. Stories are meant for self-realization and not self-affirmation and hence any culture with colonizing past or impulses tend to have a very small canvas and it is this imperialistic mindset that the hollow Left has imbibed. Bhyrappa also cautioned me against mechanical adaptation of Bakhtin’s works on Dostoevsky to his works, because the former is guided by practices of Russian Orthodox Church, while his works are informed by subtleties of ethical actions as demonstrated in Sanatana Dharma. I assured him that Bakhtin’s writings on Dostoevsky was only a model, and my project on his works will be faithful to Indian cultural ethos and history.

It has been the greatest honor and privilege of my life to have met and engaged in a long dialogue with Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa. I was praying that he would stick around till I completed my book, but sadly, he and his creator had another timetable in mind. But his blessings will bring the book to fruition. Having had the opportunity to meet and dialogue with him – Priceless…