The acquired edition of the novelSamskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.R. Ananthamurthybegins with the following excerpt fromA Kannada-English Dictionaryby the Reverend F. Kittel, Mangalore, 1894:

Samskara. 1. Forming well or thoroughly, making perfect, perfecting; finishing, refining, refinement, accomplishment. 2. Forming in the mind, conception, idea, notion; the power of memory, faculty of recollection, the realization of past perceptions… 3. Preparation, making ready, preparation of food, etc., cooking, dressing… 4…  5. Making sacred, hallowing, consecration, dedication; consecration of a king, etc.  6. Making pure, purification, purity.  7.  A sanctifying or purificatory rite or essential ceremony (enjoined on all the first three classes or castes).  8.  Any rite or ceremony.  9. Funeral obsequies.

This definition offers the direct denotations of the word "samskara", which may carry different connotations for differing people of the Hindu tradition.  It may prove useful to succinctly describe the Indian caste system.

Society in India is divided into four social classes: the brahmanas (priests and intellectuals), ksatriyas (political leaders and military men), vaisyas (merchants and farmers), and sudras (manual laborers). There are also those considered "untouchable." The epic tale of Purusha from the Rig Veda relates the story of the cosmic man being sacrificed.  From differing pieces of his body come parts of reality.  Specifically, from his mouth, arms, thighs, and feet came the castes.  This tale is an allegory.  Each caste is crucial to the formation of the one larger being, with each being necessary for mutual survival.  This idea and resulting caste system provides the tension that drives several of the characters ofSamskarato actively illustrate the many forms of samskara.

The first definition of samskara is "forming well or thoroughly, making perfect, perfecting; finishing, refining, refinement, accomplishment."  It can be considered that all who participate in the caste system are literally refining themselves and others by perfecting their respective roles.  Each caste has its duties that are conducive to the ripening and working out of one's karmic seeds.  A person is born precisely into the class that provides them with the greatest opportunity for spiritual progress.  To become the best "trash collector" one can be, for example, allows others to focus on their respective jobs and dissolution of karma.  As the individual refines him or herself, society is also made perfect, and a samskara is performed.

A more direct example of samskaras in action comes from briefly summarizing the main events of the book.  Naranappa has perished and as a Brahman requires another Brahman to perform the "funeral obsequies."  Naranappa's previous actions cause the others to question his "purity" and "refinement" and expose their own.  As the Brahman's discuss the "preparations" for the "funeral rites," Praneshacharya is catapulted into his own "rite of passage."

Praneshacharya, the most refined Brahman of the agrahara, is pressured to provide answers concerning how the heretical Naranappa's funeral rites should be performed.  This leads Praneshacharya through an internal samskara.  He has "formed in his mind" a conception of his enemy, Naranappa, as the extreme opposite of himself.  Naranappa disregarded all of the preconceived notions of what a Brahman should be in many ways, but mostly by ridding himself of his Brahman wife and courting Chandri, a lower-caste prostitute.

Much like the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures of the Buddhist tradition, Praneshacharya begins his journey as a perfected idea of preconceived notion, only to be transformed and return from his own purificatory rite as a new man.  Praneshacharya meditates in a temple devoted to Maruti, awaiting his answers to the other brahman's questions.  As an internal event meaningfully coincides with an external event, Chandri seduces Praneshacharya.  Despite his "preparations," Praneshacharya lies with Chandri, thus transcending (or regressing, as he fears) his "conceptions, ideas, and notions" of what he should be.  The unification of opposites occurs as Praneshacharya becomes identical to Naranappa.  He has a "realization of past perceptions" and the beginning of a release from them, which leads him to explore the city and it's activities that are foreign to him.  In this way he continues his samskara, of which we do not see a resolution.

Strangely, the book itself seems to be a samskara.  By archetypically providing binary opposites and having them unite by embracing the non-traditional side of the separation,Samskaraseems to promote a new paradigm.  It shows the social coercion of the caste system and the cognitive dissonance created in the minds of its followers, particularly the Brahmans, while displaying Naranappa and Putta as unattached and free-spirited.  It seems there may be a suggestion that they perhaps are the more refined by being less encapsulated by their ideas and conceptions formed in the mind.

The overall theme is stated most-efficiently in the title:Samskara.  But to expound upon it, it seems to state that even samskaras are to be "samskara-ed," which is to say transformed, perfected, refined, consecrated, or even given funeral rites.  Praneshacharya's journey seems like one of the seeker who goes to the mountain, but returns to the city a better man, more equipped to handle his life, but inverted.  Praneshacharya leaves the mountain and enters the city, and in the process is freed from many samskaras that may deserve funeral obsequies.  There seems to be a notion implicitly inferred that there is a difference between Naranappa's free spirituality and Praneshacharya's confining religion, a not-so-subtle difference between escapism and "embracism."  Whether the book is a bitterly polemical writing or an optimistic promotion of a new paradigm, it itself is definitely a samskara.