He is back from London, having read a passage from his first novel, Samskara, at the Man Booker ceremony where he was shortlisted for the international award which recognises a literary lifespan. The prize eventually went to American writer Lydia Davis and the media in India rather rudely screamed: URA “loses” and “fails to win”.

The man himself, Dr U.R. Ananthamurthy (or URA as he is usually called), 80 and undaunted, feels the trip was wholly worthwhile, the inconvenience of his daily dialysis regimen notwithstanding.

In his orderly and elegant house at Dollars Colony in north Bangalore, URA takes short steps leading out of book-laden rooms towards the open sit-out framed by plants and a wall sculpture of Anjaneya (Hanuman). “I am happy I went. I took a risk because of my ill health but the nomination acknowledged the importance given to a mother tongue, and I don’t mean Kannada in the narrow sense of the term,” Ananthamurthy says.

The nomination came as a surprise for, barring a couple, not many of his “important books” are available in English. “They must have thought here is a strong writer on the basis of that. That pleased me immensely because it didn’t happen by my asking,” he says. The nomination of his friend Urdu fiction writer Intizar Hussain from Pakistan cheered him further.

“So I thought they (Man Booker) were getting some value for their prize by including these names. That’s what I told Sir Christopher Ricks (literary critic and scholar) when this was announced: ‘We have brought you glory. You have brought our mother tongues to Queen Elizabeth, so we have gained from each other.’ I was a little drunk at that time. Ricks also laughed, ‘That’s true’. They got more out of us than we out of them,” URA chuckles.

Despite a sore throat, he speaks without interruption. Alert, opinionated and not noticeably jet lagged, URA has taught abroad several times. “I personally feel that after Sartre and Camus, there aren’t great European writers any longer. I find great people in Latin America. Great literature came from Russia which was a backward country before the Revolution — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. So Europe is thin currently. It is interested in pretty things, intelligent things and they have also given it (the award) to a writer who is also very intelligent (but) not dealing with big risky themes,” he says bluntly.

The stingy praise among his peers back home over his nomination came as no surprise. “We are like the Irish. Yeats lived in Ireland surrounded by a similar psychology but he never left Ireland because they were his people. I feel that way about Kannada. I know the meanness but this is my home. And one lasts longer here. In England now, a writer of the last decade will be forgotten in the next decade, whereas Karnataka has a longer memory. Tamil too.”

His wife, Esther, and daughter, accompanied him on the trip that renewed fond memories of a country where he did his doctoral programme in English literature and even taught at a government secondary school. “I love Britain, their great poets and their great critics.”

It was when he was studying for his doctoral programme that he wrote Samskara, a novel that he looks back on with some wonder. “I was in England. I had not spoken Kannada for a long time. I was fatigued. I sat down to write and it happened. Even now when I read, I am surprised I wrote it,” he says. The novel was made into a film five years later and went on to win the National Award in 1970.

The writer views the collision of different universes closer home as one that merits strong interventions in public life. His endorsement for the Congress in the recent state polls was a piece of that, he admits.

For someone who had always been anti-Congress (he was either a communist or a socialist), the decision to endorse the Congress was one of urgency, inviting predictably rant from the Sangh Parivar. His fans were also dismayed at what they thought was a “blank cheque” to the Congress.

“But I felt that unless we vote for one party now, Karnataka will be sold,” he reasons. Karnataka had always witnessed corruption, he says, but “looting the earth was never there: selling away iron ore, water, all the sand. Now no river flows as it used to flow in my childhood. This exploitation has to end. And it is unseen — people don’t see it as corruption but this should become an issue.”

So when chief minister Siddaramaiah chose to call on writers rather than visit temples the day after he was elected, URA was ready with some advice. “I have known Siddaramaiah for 30 years. He comes from a lower class and has been a very honest man. I loved him when he was young. I told him he should be the humane alternative to the Narendra Modi image. The country will be totally ruined if it were to accept Modi as an icon. I hope he will succeed but there are many difficulties,” he muses.

A critic and scholar, URA’s approach has been an active engagement with the socio-political milieu more directly than writers are wont to do. He has headed the Sahitya Kala Akademi and National Book Trust and is currently the chancellor of the Karnataka Central University.

Dressed in a kurta-pyjama, a red coral ring on a finger, the Padma Bhushan awardee is aware of his detractors. A columnist was banned from entering his house after he wrote that URA had manoeuvred a chancellorship in order to acquire grants for his dialysis expenses.

“I was very angry. I called him and said you cannot come to my house. I have made enough money from my books to pay Rs 60,000 every month for this treatment,” says URA, agitatedly.

His books bring him royalty, but Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurthy had a humble beginning. He was born to a Brahmin family with modest resources in a small village in Karnataka. He grew up reading Gandhi’s Harijan, which his father, who had a printing press, subscribed to. Some local leaders from backward communities would also visit his father and there was a flow of ideas. And around that time a peasant movement was building up. “At the press I would help put all these things together (he gestures with his hands to indicate fitting the blocks), write pamphlets and print them on a treadle press and then hold meetings.”

He took on orthodoxy in his own community, repeatedly. “Struggling with your community means struggling with your mother, someone you love,” he says. “I was aghast in middle school when the great crime of untouchability dawned on me.”

The family had by then moved to the town of Shimoga. “Shimoga was ideologically a very rich place because there were ryots, communists, socialists, Gandhians, and we as boys used to discuss a lot (of things). And then the Sangh Parivar took over Shimoga. I am so happy it has come back,” he smiles, referring to the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party in that constituency.

The writer navigates the past and present adeptly, discarding what he feels are old shibboleths. “I can still pick up an idea which I had left behind and then go further, unmindful of what is happening now.”

His ideas, he says, are simple. So development is a bad word. The new meme instead should be sarvodaya, a word which envelops development at the human level and for the lowest echelons — suitable not for just India but something the Prime Minister could take to America on a visit.

Looking at the churn in society, and the divide between Bharat and India, the writer suggests a return to discussion of ancient texts such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Upanishads and Bhagwad Gita. He blames the Left for conceding these texts to the RSS instead of engaging as some of the best minds did at the onset of the 20th century.

“I am never afraid when I take up a thorny issue. As a writer you should be engaged in both the sadhya, the immediate, and shaswat, the eternal,” he says looking ready to figuratively left hook any dissension.

Despite instances of literary vigilantism and moral policing, the writer’s existence is easy today. “All these languages are also hiding places for writers. Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Manipuri and so many languages — there is a new generation of people: the shudras who get educated and bring their own knowledge, women writers, Dalits. The Indian subcontinent has a vast backyard of people’s memories. And the backyard has begun to speak; there will be a constant supply of energy. Europe is exhausted but not countries with a vast backyard like Asian and Latin American countries.”

His one unrealised ambition lies beyond his penmanship. “I want to fight an election, without spending money. My friend (the late socialist leader) Gopala Gowda, for whom I used to campaign, would ask for one rupee and one vote in his constituency. He won two elections that way. Somewhere in my mind, it should be possible again.”

In the world of ideas, all is possible.