Enugantha Tandri Kanna Ekula Buttantaa
Talli Nayam (Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket, but…)
With her intensely beautiful
and sharply political writing, Shyamala makes a clean break with the tales of
oppression and misery decreed the true subject of Dalit writing.
The arrangement of stories is akin
to a flower slowly opening up. The first story takes place entirely in a
domestic setting, the second expands and involves the entire community, by the
third we get the first glimpse of the first upper-caste character, by the
fourth caste oppression is brought fully out in the open through a land
dispute. As it slowly moves from the idyllic to the realist, Shyamala is always
foregrounding the inter-caste and intra-caste relations through conversations
and interactions with her characters.
Time and again, she highlights the
importance of stories, of oral traditions, and how they are tools for community
building and solidarity. It is these myths and legends that connect her
characters to a shared past, creating an alluring ethnographic lineage that
reinforces their inherent humanity.
Another interesting aspect of Shyamla’s writing is her young characters and
child protagonists. She constructs them just as intricately as her adult
characters, complex and well-rounded.
From Adivaiah in “Obstacle Race” to Sangayya
in “The Bottom of the Well”, from Balamani in “Tataki Wins Again” (translated
by R Srivastan) to Badeyya in “Braveheart Badeyya” (translated by A Suneetha),
from Syamamma in “Raw Wound” to Cina Ellamma in “Jambava’s Lineage” (translated
by N Manohar Reddy), the children shine. They are brave and inquisitive,
curious and precocious, always asking hard questions and always questioning
societal norms. They are not coddled by adults or treated as inferior. There is
a constant dialogue that privileges children and considers them deserving of
respect and attention.
Even though each story has a different translator, overall it’s a translation
that mimics and retains the unique flavors of Shyamala’s Telugu, quite distinct
from the more standardized version. The translators are not occupied with
finding English equivalents to their Telugu counterparts, they do not even go
to the trouble of italicizing words directly pulled from the original.
Needless to say, it was refreshing
to read and added depth to the quietly intense stories. The volume is also
supplemented by an exhaustive glossary titled “Gogu Shyamala’s World” which
details the socio-cultural lives of madiga (and other Dalit) communities,
providing information about ecology, myths and legends, castes and subcastes,
and games. It adds to the reader’s knowledge without exoticizing actual lived
realities.
There is a specifically female perspective in many of the stories: mothers
struggle to educate their children, make good marriages for their daughters,
and keep art and culture alive. They are left powerless and penniless when their
husbands die, beaten while their husbands are all too alive, or sent away to
avoid the fate of belonging to the village’s men; when they show strength they
are called witches and ostracised. Their vulnerability is foregrounded
implicitly in some cases, and explicitly in others (as one elder explains to an
overly dismissive boy, “There is a special way in which girls are insulted or
looked at, and it is excruciating”).
The short essay on Shyamala at the
end of the collection indicates that her own experience has inflected many of
the situations in the stories, including the vulnerability of children, the
focus on hard work and dedication, and the importance of education.
No comments:
Post a Comment