Doll's Wedding and Other Stories , livre ebook

CHASO
Dolls Wedding and Other Stories
Translated from the Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
Got to Go to Eluru
The Theory of Karma
Dolls Wedding
Festival
Violin
Choice
A Shirt and a Towel
Fine, Enjoy It
A Rock Falls
A Kiosk at the Junction
A Hut and a Sick Man
Why Would I Lose It, Dad?
Firewood
Farmer Venkadu
Dream Love
Lady Karunakaram
Cinnaji
It Didn t Rain Here
A Vow
Transfer
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Dolls Wedding and Other Stories
CHASO (Chaganti Somayajulu) was born in Srikakulam, in northern coastal Andhra Pradesh, in 1915 and lived most of his life in the vibrant literary and cultural centre of Vizianagaram. He began publishing exquisitely crafted short stories in Telugu in the early 1940s. Although he considered himself a Marxist writer and was one of the founders of the Abhyudaya Racayitala Sangham, the Progressive Writers Association, he was in fact a maverick individualist, closely attuned to the experience and distinctive language of people from all walks of life and the whole spectrum of society. His short stories, a compact corpus of hard-hitting, understated, lyrical works, constitute one of the high points of twentieth-century Telugu literature. Chaso died in 1994.
VELCHERU NARAYANA RAO is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. Earlier he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Chicago. Narayana Rao has written a number of books, many of them in collaboration with David Shulman. With Sanjay Subrahmanyam and David Shulman he wrote Textures of Time: Writing History in South India . His other publications include Hibiscus on the Lake: Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry from India and Girls for Sale , a translation of Gurajada Apparao s Kanyasulkam .
DAVID SHULMAN is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of many books on poetry and poetics, the history of religions and the history of ideas. He has worked closely with Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Don Handelman on a series of monographs dealing with major themes in south Indian civilization. With Velcheru Narayana Rao he has published translations from classical Telugu, including Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology and The Sound of the Kiss, or the Story That Must Never Be Told . At present he is writing a monograph on Kudiyattam, an interpretation of major compositions in Carnatic music, and a cultural biography of the Tamil language.
For Chaganti Tulasi, who loves stories
Introduction
1.
I F YOU WALK ALONG THE SEA COAST IN V ISAKHAPATNAM, IN northern Andhra Pradesh, you will see a row of statues put up to honour great poets, writers, political leaders and culture heroes from twentieth-century Andhra. Among them are Dwaram Venkataswamy Nayudu, the great violinist from Vizianagaram, the town just an hour up the coast from Visakhapatnam; Racakonda Visvanatha Sastri, well-known novelist and shortstory writer; Sri Sri, famous mid-twentieth century revolutionary poet; Arudra, poet and literary historian; and also Jawaharlal Nehru, V.V. Giri, Rajiv Gandhi and others. One image you won t see there is that of Chaso (Chaganti Somayajulu), arguably the finest short-story writer in modern Telugu.
Chaso died in January 1994, with the feeling that his stories were not fully understood or properly appreciated. Perhaps he was right. When he was asked on the occasion of his seventieth birthday whether any serious criticism of his work existed, he answered with his usual laconic reserve: Sariyaina vimar a r ledu (No real criticism has appeared). 1 One might wonder why. Still, his popularity in Andhra remains high. He is always classified as a Marxist writer, who focused his art on common people and who wrote out of a social consciousness; and he himself believed, mistakenly, that he was a Marxist. His oeuvre was relatively small-a few dozen stories, most of them no longer than seven or eight pages. Together, they fill a modest volume, Chaso kathalu , which is readily available in bookshops in the big cities of Andhra and has been reprinted several times.
As a man, he combined opposites. He was a family man, devoted to his wife and children, but he tended to disappear suddenly for long stretches of time, months on end, without any communication. He came from a well-to-do Brahmin family in Srikakulam, in the far north, and lived his entire life without having to work; but he had an ear for the life and language of low-caste poor people, peasants and labourers as well as people from his own social milieu. He was deeply involved in the vibrant literary movements of the mid-twentieth century, but he spoke very little. He listened well. He was deeply read in English and, through English, knew the works of de Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy and others; but his real work was in Telugu, which he wielded with great mastery. He was hard to get to know, harsh in conversation, but he was a man of close friendships. Though he had a wide, indeed universal, vision he lived most of his life in the small town of Vizianagaram.
It is hard to evoke today the sheer intensity of the intellectual and cultural life of Vizianagaram in the first half of the twentieth century. This is the place where Gurajada Apparao shaped an organic modern awareness in Telugu at the start of that century, distinct from the colonial model of modernity prevalent at that time. His play, Kanyasulkam , is one of the surpassing works in the whole of the Telugu literary tradition. 2 Apparao was at home in the Vizianagaram court during the days of Maharaja Ananda Gajapati, a scholar himself and patron of poets and other artists. In those days Vizianagaram was, in many ways, the liveliest cultural node between Calcutta and Madras. It was home to Maharaja s College, one of the best of the modern educational institutions in south India, and to a famous music academy. More than that, Vizianagaram maintained a profound, organic connection to the rich early modern culture of northern coastal Andhra, with its unique tradition of tantric yoga, its rooted artistic modes such as tiger dancing and wrestling, its intense Sanskrit scholarship, its Telugu and Urdu poets and its ongoing ritual praxis. Most of these domains were directly supported by the Vizianagaram royal court. One might argue, in fact, that it was precisely this complex, incongruous set of features that provided the matrix for the birth of a modern consciousness and the emergence of a writer like Chaso.
Imagine a young, cultivated man in Vizianagaram, in the 1930s, who spent his days reading journals that arrived by post from England-the Times Literary Supplement , the Criterion (edited by T.S. Eliot), the London Mercury (edited by J.C. Squire), Punch, Strand , the Nineteenth Century and After and the Saturday Review . He and his friends felt themselves to be the proud contemporaries of Eliot and Pound and the cohorts of Auden, Spender, Cecil Day and Louis MacNeice. They would discuss deep into the night the works of these poets and the literary currents they represented. A small group of three close friends came to constitute a kind of microcosmic literary salon with Chaso at its centre; the other two were Srirangam Narayana Babu, a modernist poet of unusual talent (unfortunately yet to be discovered by modern Telugu critics), and Ronanki Appalaswamy, a minor poet in his own right. Both these friends turn up in one of the stories, Cinnaji , in this volume. But Vizianagaram in the mid-twentieth century was also home to other literati including the most famous poet in modern Telugu, Sri Sri (Srirangam Srinivasa Rao); Arudra, historian of Telugu literature, literary critic and poet; and Racakonda Visvanatha Sastri, the short-story writer whose statue you can find on the Visakhapatnam beach. While Sri Sri was adored by most Telugu speakers in Andhra, Chaso had little liking for the man or for his work, much preferring Narayana Babu. With hindsight, we can today appreciate Chaso s good taste. In any case, the vibrancy of the literary scene in Vizianagaram, and indeed in northern coastal Andhra generally at this time, is very clear. For these writers, the world of literature had no boundaries, and nothing human was strange.
2.
Chaso was born in 1915 in the small town of Srikakulam, not far from the Orissa border. Though he was the first-born son in his family, he was adopted by his childless aunt, Chaganti Tulasamma, after her husband died; the boy grew up in his aunt s house. His natal family were Niyogi Brahmins; his stepmother was an Aradhya Saiva, with the sign of Siva around her neck. Various stories give us the picture of a confident, proud, somewhat strict and severe young boy, very careful with money and accounting. He went to school first in Srikakulam and then, after turning thirteen, at Vizianagaram Municipal High School. Upon finishing high school, he enrolled in Maharaja s College in Vizianagaram; but he never completed his degree.
He learned English well. One day in Telugu class, the teacher, Visvanatha Kaviraju, was teaching an essay by Carlyle in Telugu translation; Chaso, who had read the essay in the original, was chatting with his friends on the back benches about how poor the translation was. The teacher, irritated, said to him, in the time-honoured mode: Am I teaching, or do you want to teach? Chaso stood up and said, If you let me teach, I ll teach. Visvanatha Kaviraju brought him to the front of the class and handed over the task to him, whereupon Chaso showed the class how the translator had ruined the elegant original. The teacher, no longer angry, threw his copy of the book to the floor and went home to study Chaso s copy of the English version. 3 It was at Maharaja s college that Chaso first met Ronanki Appalaswamy; both