Reading Telugu Stories: Chalam explores forbidden desires

Krishna Gowda of Bookworm, one of our city’s prominent literary advocates, alerted us to a lovely set of books. Published by Aleph, these books carry English translations of the greatest Indian language “stories ever told” – for instance, The Greatest Kashmiri Stories Ever Told, The Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told and so on. Since I haven’t traveled widely inside our country, I’m choosing to ‘slow travel’, to crisscross linguistic and temporal bounds with fascinating guides, all this while slumped in an armchair or swaying on a netted hammock.

I have started out with The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told. Despite living in Karnataka, a state that adjoins both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, I must acknowledge that till now, I haven’t ever consciously dipped into Telugu literature.

Chalam: A Rough Childhood

Chalam, the author of the first story in the collection is well-known among the Telugu literati. Born in 1894, in the Krishna district, he lived through the tumultuous Independence movement. But he wasn’t really drawn by Nationalist ideals. As a child, he had witnessed something more searing: his father abusing his mother. He too had withstood beatings from that man. So much so, that his maternal grandfather rescued him from those traumatic environs. The grandfather even adopted Chalam, so that the writer’s last name was changed to reflect his grand-parentage. Moreover, his mother too moved back to her maternal home in Tenali, where he was later raised.

While he immersed himself in studying Hindu epics, and doctrines, he stayed sensitive to the brutal treatment meted out to women. This theme seems to have rippled through many of his works, with one of his better known novels, Maidanam, centered around an inter-faith extramarital relationship, while challenging the confines of orthodox Brahminism.

Chalam: Shattering Rules in His Own Life

To pursue his Bachelor’s in Arts, Chalam was admitted to a college in Chennai. Prior to his admission, he had been married to Chitti Ranganayakamma. Determined not to replicate his father’s boorish behavior, he inducted his wife into a convent school, even as he rode out to college. He dropped her off every day on his bicycle, with the couple becoming an arresting site inside ‘Madras’, as the city was called then. He also shrugged off all signs of his caste: his sacred thread and his vegetarianism. More conspicuously, he started mingling with people belonging to lower castes – a practice that was shunned in those times.

His relatives and his own father-in-law were enraged by his behavior. To such an extent, that when his mother-in-law passed away, he wasn’t allowed to enter the house. He and his friends were asked to linger outside and served food in the manner of “untouchables” – without their insouciance polluting the home.

Later on, he became a tutor, then a teacher and finally a school inspector. Always alive to the farcical elements embedded in such roles, of his last job he wrote: “I am a stove, slave of the government, school inspector and for the poor mice like teachers, I am the cat.”

The Madiga Girl: From The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told

As the translators, Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparni Dasu observe in their Introduction, “Chalam was one of the first Telugu writers to reject the decorous, Victorian writing style of his times. His prose on occasion pulsed with raw, physical passions that shocked polite society.” Like the English author D.H. Lawrence and the Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov, who were shunned by various circles for foraying into forbidden sexual desires, Chalam too faced the umbrage of Telugu compatriots.

In the story, The Madiga Girl, the protagonist is a married man who reckons with his own taboo thoughts. Each time he travels from his own village to his wife’s village, he notices changes in himself. In his village, he’s a “timid” man, who lives a banal life: working, eating, sleeping, making love (presumably, only to his wife). But in her village, where she dwells when pregnant for the sixth time, he is filled with lascivious feelings: “…I’ve an irresistible longing to stroke the nubile bodies of the village damsels.” He confesses with an almost amusing and ironic self-awareness: “In my village, such thoughts would never cross my mind.”

He attributes his desires to the elements, to Nature, to larger forces that he, a mere mortal, can hardly control: “But the breeze here, in my wife’s village, is so intoxicating that I can’t rein in unruly thoughts. Even God, my creator, couldn’t have suppressed them.” Such generalized longing zeroes in on a particular woman, whose frothy giggles and songs arouse him before he has laid eyes on her. Sure enough, her physical form mesmerizes. He pursues her, drunk with lust.

At first, she seems to resist, stoking his desire. (We all know how problematic such framing of womanly objections and relentless male pursuit has been to women across the ages). But later, when she seems to give in, at a price, he loses interest. He hadn’t realized that she was just one of those “types”: “jewellery-crazed, mansion-inhabiting city vampires.”

Shattering notions of innocent “village damsels,” Chalam depicts how grinding poverty, and the historic commodification of and violence against women have always reached into all corners of the country. If anything, the story rebukes ideas of a golden past. But written with striking flair, it shines a light on where the nation’s real riches lie: in our own languages and literatures.

Chalam on Films/OTT Platforms

Postscript: Chalam’s short story, Doshagunam has been converted into the movie, Grahanam. Apparently, the AHA channel has commissioned his pathbreaking Maidanam for a web series.

References:

The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told, Selected and Translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tampraparni Dasu, Aleph Book Company, 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalam_(writer)

https://www.ranganayakamma.org/Chalam.htm

https://www.thehansindia.com/featured/sunday-hans/controversially-yours-530488