Since its Kannada publication in 1965, the novel has been promoted as a revealing description and honest report of some of India’s most pressing societal problems. As a European and an outsider to Indian society, I am puzzled by its success: why has it been received as a tale of liberation, both in India and abroad? How is it possible that in many parts of the world the book is used in classes on Hinduism? Why is it considered helpful in understanding the Indian social structure and attitudes towards life and death?

Let me explain my puzzlement: On the one hand, the novel depicts the Indian society as corrupted by caste and inhabited by hypocritical, greedy and perverted Brahmins. On the other hand, lower caste women are ‘valued’ merely for their sexual availability—they say “…Yes to everything, never a No.” What is liberating about either of the two? To me, it seems that the celebration of Samskara epitomizes the continuing success of 200 years of colonialism in India. Its greatest achievement is a literary reproduction of the colonisers’ characterisation of Indian society.

The images in this novel are mere repetitions of the orientalist stereotypes that the West produced about India. This is clearest in its descriptions of Brahmins. The story has often been read as a symbolic representation of the stifling nature and hypocrisy of Brahmanism and of one man’s emancipation from its clutches. Even if symbolic, its representation of Brahmins takes the form of stereotypes, which attribute the behaviour that one finds among certain individuals to an entire group, as though this sketches the psychological profile of this group. That is, properties such as hypocrisy, greed, duplicity, envy—which can in reality only be attributed to certain individuals in all groups—are transformed into the properties of the Brahmins as a social group. In European history we have a tragic example of where such stereotyping leads to: the propaganda about the untrustworthy and greedy Jew and its culmination in the Holocaust.

Where do Samskara’s stereotypes about Brahmins come from? Research has shown that the description of Brahmins as cunning priests has European roots. If we browse through European descriptions of India, from the 16th century onwards, these describe the Brahmins as crafty, self-serving priests, who created a tyranny of rituals and dogmas to manipulate the laity. This characterisation developed against the background of the European Reformation and its theological debates between Catholic and Protestant Christians. According to the Protestants, the Catholic priests had corrupted the true religion and had misguided the masses of believers into idolatry. They were seen as the servants of the devil trying to prevent the growth of the true religion. In the same way, the Brahmins of India were considered to be the priests of the “false Hindu religion.” Priests, whether Hindu or Catholic, were considered as a most suspicious and hypocritical group in the European experience after the Reformation. Hence, the stereotypes which said that “Brahmins are crafty, cunning, hypocritical,...” Samskara’s entire narrative revolves around the reproduction of such western stereotypes as though they are true descriptions of the Brahmins.

Its description of women is even more revolting and also reminds one of colonial European sources. Whether characterised as liberating (as is the case for the outcaste women) or stifling (as is the case for the Brahmin women), Samskara refers to both groups of women almost solely in the context of their complying with or hindering the satisfaction of male sexual desires. This can hardly describe the Indian reality. Are all low caste women voluptuous and waiting and ready to have sex, as the novel seems to suggest? No, this is trivially false. Are some low caste women like that? That would be trivially true, because there are nymphomaniacs everywhere in the world. Similarly, for the Brahmin women. Do they all have “sunken cheeks” and “sagging breasts,” as described in the novel? This is false. Naturally, some will have those characteristics. In short, the author can neither be speaking about “some” nor about “all” Brahmin and low caste women. Therefore, he cannot possibly be speaking about the Indian realities.

What then do we make of this characterization of women? Is it to be read symbolically? What can this be a symbol for, one wonders? Reading all the passages about women one after the other, what one gets looks like an adolescent’s pornographic fantasy. Again, knowledge of the 19th century European literature on “the oriental woman” helps us to make sense of Samskara. These stereotypes again belong to the realm of the colonial literature, which idealised the sexual freedom of the ‘oriental’ or ‘savage woman’. Her allegedly uncomplicated attitude towards sex made the minds of European men go wild. This depiction emerged in sharp contrast with 19th century Victorian England’s puritanism. Its prudishness and suppression of sexual desires led to pornographic fantasies about exotic cultures and lower classes. These attitudes reappear in Anantha Murthy’s depiction of Indian society. ‘Mills and Boon goes to India’, as it were.

I really wonder how some of the lower caste movements could pick out this book as though it is supportive of their case. Some of my Indian colleagues from Karnataka told me that, as students, they experienced a similar unease with the depiction of women and Brahmins in the book. But, their questions were countered by their teachers: “this is a work of art, read it symbolically.” Such claims negate the impact the book has had both in India and in the West: Samskara was, and still is, received as a depiction of Indian social realities. They also threaten to misunderstand the concern of the teachers in Karnataka purely as prudishness. Something more is at stake: do Indians today still want to celebrate novels that reinvigorate the western colonial stereotypes about their society?

Sarah Claerhout is a research and teaching assistant at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap (Ghent University, belgium). More information on www.cultuurwetenschap.be