Back to the Future: Tracking the Moral Imperative In, Of, and Through Samskara

Abstract

U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara has been predominantly read in terms of a temporal-ideological encounter in which an older, essentially fixed tradition faces off against the dynamics of a fledgling modernity. While there are instances in the text that lend themselves to such inference, the broad matrix within which the interpretations find articulation slants one’s reading of the novel in telling ways. This essay argues that the central dialectic in Samskara is not between tradition and modernity but between two forms of traditional thinking that conceive value and (human) reality differently. In making this argument, the essay offers an alternative, culturally oriented frame for reading Samskara in which narrative structure, form, and sense cohere to present a markedly different interpretive and moral trajectory.