Indian · 1932–2014
Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy was born into a Madhva Brahmin family in Melige, Karnataka, and took a doctorate at the University of Birmingham on politics and the English novel. He came home to lead the Navya movement, the modernist turn in Kannada literature that broke with both devotional poetry and social-realist fiction. He wrote Samskara in 1965 while a student in England, after watching a Bergman film, and it detonated in Karnataka: a novel in which a Brahmin community cannot decide who may cremate a man who broke every rule. He taught at Mysore, served as vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, chaired the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust, and argued in public for decades about caste, Hindu nationalism, and the future of Indian languages. He won the Jnanpith Award and the Padma Bhushan, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.