SHYMALA GOGU’S FEMALE PERSPECTIVE AND HER STYLE OF WRITING STORIES

   

 

 

Enugantha Tandri Kanna Ekula Buttantaa Talli Nayam (Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket, but…)

 Set in the Madiga quarter of a Telangana village, the stories spotlight different settings, events, and experiences, and offer new propositions on how to see, think, and be touched by life in that world. There is a laugh lurking around every other corner as the narrative picks an adroit step past the grandiose authority of earlier versions of such places and their people—romantic, Gandhian, administrative—and the idiom in which they spoke. These stories overturn the usual agendas of exit—from the village, Madiga culture, and these little communities—to hold this life up as one of promise for everyone.

 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.

(  *"This post is part of the Bookish League blog hop hosted by Bohemian Bibliophile" (link to https://bohemianbibliophile.com/)