Book review: 'Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket But…'

Book: Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket But…
Author: Gogu Shyamala
Publisher: Navayana
Pages: 263
Price: Rs305

With growing popular and academic interest in Dalit writing, we have seen a flourishing industry come up around memoirs, autobiographies, poetry and fiction. Navayana has had a major role in publishing poetry, graphic novels and polemical prose dealing with the caste conflagrations in contemporary India. Translators — both the good ones and even some bad ones — have made their careers out of bringing marginalised texts to light and, in the process, engaged a reading public as well.

In Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket But…, Gogu Shyamala, a highly respected activist and Telugu writer from the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, offers vignettes that offer glimpses into the life of the Madiga community, who are one of the most exploited, even among Dalits. Evocative settings, songs and incidents populate her fiction. Stories like “Braveheart Badeyya”, in which a son is saddened that his mother cannot wear slippers in the presence of the upper caste landlord even when walking on thorn-infested land, map family and community upon one another. In ‘But Why Shouldn’t the Baindla Woman Ask for Her Land?’, a woman fights for her land rights and the elders — upper caste landlords — complain “she does not know her place and doesn’t know how to talk to her superiors”.

Lower caste children demonstrate their skills and all their talents are attributed to their caste identity in ‘The Bottom of the Well’. ‘Raw Wound’ is a story about the oppressed condition of women who are forced to become jogini by villagers. The tag of jogini may sound respectable, but these women are considered the village’s common, sexual property. The protagonist’s parents ensure their daughter does not have to suffer such the fate of becoming a jogini by smuggling her away to school.

There is an evidently oral quality to most of the stories. The colloquialisms, slang and song are all well written to lend authentically local colour and a world — otherwise unknown — is drawn for us in detail. Shyamala’s focus is the woman in Madiga households. She portrays them as tough, opinionated, courageous, and she makes no excuses for their hardened attitude. Indeed, it is this that constitutes their strength, the Dalit feminist stories suggest, whether evidenced in how a woman deals with her family, land or the young ones. Shyamala also works her stories around issues that have been at the epicenter of the Telangana campaign: irrigation and water resources. Thus, Shyamala refuses to make the stories domestic, so escaping the usual trap laid for women writers.

One cannot, however, judge these only as plot-driven tales. If one is looking for a tightly-wrought narrative, this is not the volume. Shyamala does not moralise or overtly politicise grief and suffering — that is for the reader to glean. Violence is only in the subtext and Shyamala does not depict it obviously, thus marking an interesting shift within the genre of Dalit writing.

The translations are run of the mill, making the tales lack fire occasionally and often, Father May Be An Elephant… reads like the equivalent of a slow motion sequence from cinema. But the descriptions possess an astonishing clarity of visual spectacle and sensory delight as they portray the lives of the village. That the collection is meant as an ethnographic guide to the community is made clear in the last section of the book, titled “Gogu Shyamala’s World”, which has brief entries on ecology, land issues, myths and belief systems of the Madigas, including even their games and recreational activities. An interesting move, one that makes the readers immediately aware of the larger contexts to these stories.