Absent voices: Women in U.R. Ananthamurthy's 'Samskara' — a Lohian reading

By Prem Singh 

U.R. Ananthamurthy’s "Samskara" (1965) stands as a landmark of modern Indian literature. Set in a decaying Brahmin village in Karnataka, the novel dissects the moral crisis of orthodox Hindu society through the story of Praneshacharya, a revered scholar who breaks caste taboos. Yet for all its radical questioning of Brahminical ritual and hierarchy, the novel remains strikingly conservative in its treatment of women—an irony that becomes especially pronounced when viewed through the lens of Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist-feminist philosophy.

Ananthamurthy was deeply influenced by Lohia, the socialist leader for whom nar-nari samata (man-woman equality) formed the first pillar of his doctrine of "Sapt Kranti" (Seven Revolutions). Lohia argued that women were among the most exploited sections of humanity and insisted that Indian women look to Draupadi—intelligent, questioning, courageous—as a model rather than the silently suffering Sita or Savitri. Given this ideological backdrop, one might expect "Samskara" to foreground women as agents of social change. Instead, the novel renders them voiceless, functional, and ultimately subordinate to male spiritual and sexual journeys.

The women in "Samskara" fall into two rigid categories. The Brahmin women—Bhagirathi (Praneshacharya’s invalid wife), Lakshmidevamma (a half-mad child widow), Anasuya, Sita Devi, and Lilavati—are depicted as physically repulsive: plump, disfigured, quarrelsome, and spiritually barren. They are confined to domestic drudgery and show neither intellectual curiosity nor sexual agency. Shripati’s wife, for instance, denies him conjugal relations by “tightening and twining up her thighs” on her mother’s advice, reducing marital intimacy to a mechanical transaction devoid of communication.

In stark contrast, the lower-caste women are eroticized as dark, beautiful, and sexually available. Chandri, Narnappa’s mistress; Belli, an untouchable girl; and Padmavati, a prostitute, are described through the lustful eyes of Brahmin men as ripe, sensual, and servile. Their physical beauty is catalogued in detail: Durgabhatta compares Chandri to a Chitrini of Vatsyayana; Shripati likens her to Menaka. These women exist to satisfy upper-caste male desire. When Shripati takes Belli by the river, no words pass between them. When he visits her hut while corpses burn nearby, he dismisses her attempt to speak—“Belli was all right for sleeping with, she was no good for talk.”

Chandri emerges as the novel’s most memorable female character, and at first glance she appears to possess agency. She chooses to live with Narnappa, initiates sexual contact with Praneshacharya in the forest, and later makes the bold decision to perform Narnappa’s funeral rites with a Muslim’s help rather than expose the Acharya to scandal. She is mobile, self-reliant, and ultimately walks away from the village alone. Yet this independence is illusory. Her “strength” derives from the traditional institution of prostitution, which she never questions. She hopes her encounter with Praneshacharya might “bear fruit” in pregnancy, viewing even her sexuality through the lens of male blessing. Most tellingly, her entire narrative function is to serve as the “sacrificial altar” for Praneshacharya’s fall and subsequent liberation. His subjectivity expands infinitely after their encounter; hers remains static. She is a medium for his unwinding, not a consciousness in her own right.

The same pattern holds for every woman in the novel. Bhagirathi exists as a prop for Praneshacharya’s spiritual ambition—he admits she is merely “the sacrificial altar for my sacrifice.” Lakshmidevamma, the only woman who raises her voice to curse those who robbed her, is dismissed as a mad rant and ignored. Padmavati is spoken about by the pimp Putta but never allowed to speak for herself. Sex across caste lines is always silent, wordless, and transactional. No woman engages in genuine dialogue with a man about philosophy, politics, or even personal grievance. They are denied interiority, excluded from the novel’s central debates on scripture, salvation, and samskara itself.

This absence of gender politics is particularly glaring given the novel’s historical moment. Published in 1965, "Samskara" depicts a village supposedly isolated in the early twentieth century, yet even by then the tides of the freedom movement, social reform, and anti-caste struggle had reached the remotest corners of India. Narnappa himself predicts that Congress will soon force temples open to outcastes. Within the text, voices of revolt against Brahminism exist; voices of female revolt do not.

From a Lohian perspective, this constitutes a profound failure. Lohia believed women were not defined merely by their relationships to men and insisted they possessed capacities beyond domestic and sexual roles. In "Samskara", women are exactly that: domestic servants or sexual objects. The Brahmin women are caricatured as ugly housekeepers; the lower-caste women are romanticized as earthy temptresses. Neither group is granted the intelligence, questioning spirit, or political consciousness that Lohia championed.

Literature need not offer solutions to social evils, but when a writer of Ananthamurthy’s caliber, openly indebted to Lohia’s egalitarian vision, constructs a world where women cannot speak, think, or rebel, the result is a narrative of “great promise but aborted literary protest.” Chandri’s departure from the village should mark an emancipation; instead, it merely closes the door on a character who was never truly allowed to enter the novel’s moral universe. The samskara—the rite of passage—remains exclusively male.

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This is the abridged version of the paper was read by the author at the regional center of the Sahitya Akademi in Bengaluru. UR Ananthmurthy chaired the solo seminar