Saraswati Samman presented to S.L.Bhyrappa

Acceptance Speech
Honourable Dr. Karan Singhji, Chairman of K.K.Birla Foundation,
Smt. Shobhana Ji- President K.K.Birla Foundation, Director Dr. Bhattacharjee and lovers of literature.

Dr. Karan Singh presenting Saraswati Samman to Prof. S.L. Bhyarappa

At the outset let me thank Saraswati Samman Committee for selecting my novel Mandra for the Samman of 2010.
I take this opportunity to thank my countless readers in various Indian languages who have stood by me through thick and thin.
I cannot reflect on my literature without reminiscing my life.  I was born into a very poor family in a village in Karnataka.  My mother bearing the brunt of earning and looking after the children as my father was an utterly irresponsible person.  When I was ten years old plague visited our family attacking me, my sister who was married just fifteen days earlier and my elder brother.  Both of them died within a span of one hour and somehow I survived.  After two years my mother too died of plague.  I had to continue my  education in a town four miles away from my village with free food obtained in seven houses in a week as was the tradition  those days.  When I was fourteen my sister aged four died of cholera.  When  I was fifteen, my brother died of some undiagnosed illness.   I carried his dead body on my shoulder to the cremation ground burnt it assisted by a sweeper, a government servant of the very low caste in the hierarchy.
All this experience started to bother me with the questions: what is the meaning of death?  Why do people die?  When I was studying in Mysore for my Intermediate I  met a professor of philosophy in the university and posed my problem.  He gave  me a Kannada translation of  Kathopanishad with a commentary.  I read it with great concentration but could not find the answer to my  nagging question.  Again I approached the professor and expressed my inability to understand  the teaching of Yama to Nachiketa.  The professor said
they were questions which required a systematic study of philosophy to understand and he advised me to take philosophy for my B.A.   I followed his advice and took to study of philosophy in all seriousness for the Bachelor’s and Master’s course.  I studied philosophy with total concentration for twelve years, four years as student and eight years as a teacher and researcher in the subject.  I did  my Ph.D.  in  Aesthetics,  on a comparative study of truth and beauty, and continued my research on beauty and goodness.
By this time, I realised two things: philosophy, which included all branches of knowledge in both India and ancient Greece, is now shed of cosmology, epistemology, psychology and even many questions of ethics giving place to modern astrophysics, theoretical physics, economics, sociology, experimental
psychology and jurisprudence.  So philosophy now remains a study of values.  I also realised that though the Vedas and the Upanishads form the foundation of Indian Philosophy, it is Ramayana and  Mahabharata which analysed and critically concretised our national ethos.  By this time I had written my first major novel Vamsha Vriksha.  This creative experience mingled with the understanding of how values and even disvalues of life are concretised in  Ramayana  and Mahabharata, made me realize that my vocation was not formal, dry, academic philosophy but exploration of human experience through the medium of imagination, that is literature. Since I started writing and until now the general atmosphere in the country has been making demand on creative writers to subserve  literature to the cause of change, modernity and amelioration of the downtrodden.   Having  had a background of philosophy, that too axiology i.e., study of values, I have much
sympathy with these expectations.  But  I consider it is a disservice to both the values if one is made subservient to the other.  Not that  literature is against change, modernity or amelioration, but it should maintain its identity and freedom.

Literature itself is a vast, possibly the widest field in which all the values of life can be explored than in any other intellectual activity; in it the demands of political parties and social activists  are also accommodated but with a higher vision and more inclusive critical analysis.  The ameliorists and activists try to constrict the aim of creative writing to what they consider the most important to the present and pressurise the writer to write only in the way they think the best.  They attack the writers who do not fall in line as bourgeous and rightists.  They do not realise that social issues change every couple of decades and the literature restricting itself to these issues become obsolete.  Throughout I stood firm and maintained my creative and intellectual freedom.
I am glad that of my recent novels, Mandra is selected for Saraswati Samman.  I have tried to explore the relation between art and other values of life through a musician, his surroundings and persons who come in interactive contact with him. Throughout the novel music itself is the main character.  I chose music as the principal motif because it is the purest and, therefore, the most raw and powerful medium  when compared to other arts like painting, sculpture and literature.  It moves through all the basic and mixed rasas ranging from the depth of Mandra to the height of Taarataara.  Mandra is a state of total inwardness, i.e., meditation.
S.L.Bhyrappa