U. R. Ananthamurthy

Ananthamurthy grew up in a Brahmin household in rural Karnataka, was educated in a traditional Sanskrit school before university, and later earned a doctorate in Birmingham, England, where sustained exposure to European modernism and existentialist writing sharpened the moral and formal ambitions of his Kannada fiction.

Samskara (1965) strands an orthodox village priest, Praneshacharya, with the problem of burying a fellow Brahmin who lived in open defiance of caste rules, and no scripture will tell him how; his search for an answer unravels into his own moral and sexual crisis, the caste order's authority undone by a single unresolvable case.

He became a leading voice of the Navya, or 'new,' movement in Kannada letters, chaired national literary and film bodies, and remained a prominent, often controversial public intellectual on secularism and caste until his death in 2014.