I had once rashly told [Rammanohar] Lohia that he and D. H. Lawrence were the two great influences on me as a Kannada writer and that I wanted to write about that. I was only barely thirty then, still finding my way about, experimenting in short fiction and poetry. Lohia had listened with interest to my views on Lawrence and had chided me good humouredly for my reluctance to use four lettered words, even though I admired Lawrence’s reverence for the whole of life, for all the functions of the body. ‘The Essential U.R. Ananthamurthy,’ Edited by N. Manu Chakravarthy and Chandan Gowda, Aleph Book Company, 2023.Lohia could see without my telling him why Lawrence was necessary for liberating me from the inhibitions of an orthodox Brahmin upbringing, but where did Lohia come into the picture? He had suggested that it would be interesting if I could write about that. “Don’t bother yourself too much with footnoting and quoting, but write straight from your feelings,” he had advised. I had then gone on to talk to him of the political and spiritual rebellion of the 12th century Kannada vacanakaras, and Lohia probed me with extraordinary keenness for details about the careers of Basava, the Brahmin rebel who got a pariah married to a Brahmin girl, and the woman saint, Akka Mahadevi, who asserted her spiritual equality with men by going about naked. Both of them are great poets of the 12th century Veerashaiva movement. My own understanding of this movement was deepened that day by Lohia’s questions and comments.On the question of why I associated Lawrence with Lohia in my mind, I was vague then, and still am vague. Yet they existed in my mind simultaneously, and they had together given me an angle that made it possible for me to connect disparate strands of my experiences and thoughts. Writing, as I did, under the cultural imperialism of European-born ideas, like many other Indian writers, I was fortunate to have read Lohia, for he rooted me in the Indian soil. Those were the days when, for the Indian intellectual, the unorthodox behaviour of a Ginsberg was revolutionary, whereas Lohia’s actions seemed quixotic.I had read Lohia avidly, particularly his essays in Interval During Politics, and yet I could not explicitly state why I associated Lawrence with Lohia. Only in my creative writing such as in my novel, Samskara, and some novellas I wrote during the period like Ghatashraddha, I feel I did synthesize the creative influence of the two on me. What I could do in my creative writing, I still can’t do in expository thought. I can only mumble a few general observations. Lawrence and Lohia were both passionately concerned with the existing state of their cultures and related all their speculations pointedly and concretely to the lived reality. They were both highly and imaginatively selective in what they thought was the living tradition of their countries, and in the mode of their choice, what guided them was a highly developed moral sense of what a living thing felt like. Both could combine love with anger, without the cleansing effect of which love can degenerate into an inconsequential general good-will. Considering how easily universal love is mouthed as meaningless cliches in our country, Lohia’s ability to change these ideas into action was a gift that only moral geniuses have. Lawrence whose intense concern was with personal fulfilment went on, as a natural extension of such a concern, into a daring enquiry into questions of culture and the destructive element in modern civilization – that is, into areas of collective life with an immediacy that reminds you of a visionary like Blake. There is an excess in him which may make one feel awkward, but the over-insistence is only a matter of emphasis, an emphasis that the age itself necessitated by its moral blindness. Lohia too exceeded, at times, the limits of propriety, which produces in some of his disciples, who are without his moral refinement and keenness of intellect, the effect of a caricature. It is the fate of all Gurus to produce caricatures. Lohia chose, in contrast to Lawrence, the political arena as his area of concern but he didn’t stop there. He never lost sight of the individual, his craving for privacy and beauty. The moment itself engaged all his attention, and yet he was capable of detachment. He could speak of “Nirasha ki Kartavya,” a project of “socialism in one hundred years.” Of the seven revolutions he speaks of, the last, but not the least, “aims at protecting privacy against encroachment by the collective.” There is another important matter of cultural taste where they were surprisingly similar. Both preferred the immediacy of the artistic expressions of folk-culture to those of classicist sensibility. For a certain kind of classicism in music, architecture and literature with their elaborate and intricate structures and conventions are more often than not products of imperialist and hierarchical social systems, whereas the folk-arts are the intimate and immediate expressions of the intuitive ‘body’ of man that don’t require an elaborate Shastra….The importance of Lohia’s mind for us lies in the unique way in which he was open to both Marx and Gandhi, and the creative way in which he learned from both of them. Although I am untrained in systematic political thought, his criticism of Marx has seemed to be of seminal importance. England ruled us not only through its superior technology but through its ‘enlightened’ liberalism of Mill and Bentham, and there are any number of apologists of British Imperialism among us who argue that we needed the British to free us from superstitious practices like Sati. The same argument is put forth by Marxist westernizers who condone the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or the Chinese invasion of Tibet, arguing that the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin would liberate these areas from cruel feudal practices. We forget that a living culture should be able to produce a dynamic of creative internal struggle and evolve on its own, meeting on its way the continuous new challenges of history. Contrary to what we profess, we are truly believers in the iron law of determinism which maintains that human consciousness has no choice except the one of accepting modern civilization. Lohia saw that the fascination of Marxism for many of us lay in its theory that the inexorable laws of development of capitalism would themselves bring in socialism. The struggles of the revolutionary party would only hasten the process. Capitalism was also supposed automatically by its own nature to assure unlimited happiness for mankind. Lohia vigorously attacked such formulations of history and restored to human consciousness and to human culture its rightful freedom and dignity. There are forces which limit our choices, yes, but man can struggle against them. In the sense that it cripples our choices and holds up Europe as a model, Marxism is used as the latest weapon of Europe as against the rest of the world. We succumb to it, not realizing the erroneous nature of its analysis of the growth of western capitalism itself. In the linear conception of history where capitalism is perceived as a higher form of development than feudalism, and which, when mature, gives way to socialism, we in Asia would always be inferior to Europe. The superiority of the West is thus ensured either under the theory of Mill and Bentham or of Marx and Engels. Lohia in his criticism of Marx’s theory of the development of capitalism saw that capitalism consisted not alone of an internal circle represented by the West European economy but of two circles-an internal West European circle and an external world circle, from which the west-European internal circle draws its sustenance. Capitalism and imperialism are thus twins. Imperialism is not a tumour of capitalism. They are two circles, one placed inside the other, the rim of the inner circle possessing an enormous porous capacity to suck into itself the dynamics of the outer. There is no use racing with the West, even if you go communist. If Russia is struggling in vain to catch up with the United States of America, China tries in vain to catch up with Russia. We have to opt for an alternative system which is neither Russian nor American. Socialism will be such an alternative when it destroys not only capitalist relations of production but capitalist means of production. The answer is a small-unit machine, and a mode of production that involves man’s creative impulse and not subjugate him to its monstrous power.If the mode of production is the same, whether under capitalism or communism, the consciousness of man remains also the same. Man will forever be driven to seek the spiritual outside the material realities, rather than celebrate the ever-renewing universe of the actual. Lohia, therefore, did not denounce, or look askance at man’s effort in history to define the nature of his being in relation to the universe, the most important expression of which is religion. I am quoting him now at length for I feel that what he says is important, and some of his followers in South India in their pursuit of rationalism and attack on religious superstition have not fully grasped:“While an old time socialism denounced religion as opium to man, the more modern attitude seems to be one of indifference to matters of religion and belief in secularism. This is not a complete attitude. Religion appears in four different ways. It breaks out as quarrels, sometimes bloody, among various religions. It defends and upholds the existing order with its modes of property, caste and woman. It is also an ethical and social training in good conduct. Finally, religion at its best appears as the discipline of compassion and contemplation.“The first two expressions of religion are indeed an opium to the people. Instead of making politics religious and thereby softening somewhat the clashes of power, religion itself becomes political and thereby add fanaticism to intrigue. Such a religion must of course be denounced, but the other expressions of religion cannot be a matter of unconcern to politics or socialism (Marx, Gandhi and Socialism: 374-75).”I said that Lohia’s main importance for the literary people consists in his vital criticism of culture in which he neither denounces the past nor extols it, but with great flexibility of mind, discriminates between its living and sterile expressions in the present. His test is life, life in the present, and the search for ways in which our stagnant national life may become creative again and not stay satisfied with mere repetition. The above is an excerpt from ‘The Contemporary Significance of Lohia’ (1984), in the volume, The Essential U.R. Ananthamurthy, edited by N. Manu Chakravarthy and Chandan Gowda.U.R. Ananthamurthy (1932-2014) was a celebrated Kannada writer.