Father May Be An Elephant and Mother A Small Basket, But… by Gogu Shyamala, translated from the Telugu by Diia Rajan, Sashi Kumar, A. Suneetha, N. Manohar Reddy, R. Srivatsan, Gita Ramaswamy, Uma Bhrugubanda, P. Pavana, and Duggirala Vasanta, Tilted Axis Press, 2022.
To read Gogu Shyamala’s Father May Be an Elephant, a landmark collection of twelve Dalit feminist stories translated from Telugu, is to uncover the gaping absence of women in Dalit literature. Rarely are stories exploring the intersections between feminism and Dalit experience translated into English. First published by Navayana, an anti-caste indie press based in New Delhi, the seminal stories are now distributed through another radical small press, Tilted Axis.
In the title story, children play in balmy, wet weather, shrieking with happiness as the clouds part to reveal a rainbow. A young girl waits for Mother, who has been “weeding the paddy fields all day.” Born in a house where musty dampness is etched into the soot-covered walls, she is used to seeing her family slog for hours. While a thunderous rain pours outside, the family members soothe one another, consoling and rubbing each other’s overworked backs. Father has lived away in the city for almost a year to earn back the money he was wrongly accused of stealing by the patel, a person belonging to a non-subaltern caste. On the rainy day he comes back, a tender joy spreads among the “orphaned birds.”
In his absence, the family survived on thick gruel, but to celebrate his return, Mother buys a kilogram of meat with chili and salt to make curry. The children relish the meal, roasting the meat over woodfire, content with full bellies. But when Father asks his wife for money to buy toddy, he is informed it was all spent to prepare the feast. Angered by her response, Father “beat her like she was cattle,” not stopping despite the wailing of the kids. “We were scared that he might beat us too if we went near him,” worries the panic-stricken protagonist, helplessly watching this violence along with her siblings. Father is ultimately berated by his own mother, who reminds him that it was his wife who took care of everyone while he was away. The title is a popular idiom—despite the elephant-like prowess of the father, the woman is the reason a family survives.
When a critic praised Shyamala for portraying the oppression of Dalit women, the author said it was “completely unintentional.” But her intersectional feminism is undeniable. Through a caste-based lens, her stories add complexity to the way one reads discrimination. They shed light on the doubled oppression experienced by Dalit women who, in addition to the control exerted on them by the men in their families, also depend on men and women from the dominant castes for work. Therefore, they are forced to endure mistreatment both within and outside the household.
Shyamala’s fiercely defiant stories are written in the language used by Dalits in western Telangana, positioning her Telugu variant as a “full-fledged language,” while offering a glimpse into the lives of the Madiga community. The Madiga caste’s occupation is historically associated with leatherwork and tannery, which are seen as polluting by the privileged castes. In her lyrical collection, the consequences of the caste system are explicit and irrefutable; but more importantly, her work brings forth the daily, dignified lives of her people.
In “Braveheart Badeyya,” a son notices that his mother is forced to remove her slippers if the dora, the most powerful landlord in the village, appears in front of her. “I am born in the caste that makes slippers for everybody, but my own feet are left bare,” laments Badeyya’s mother when her uncovered feet are pierced by thorns and her slippers are chewed up by dogs. She astutely observes: “We have neither the caste nor the power. If we have to gain that power, caste has to go.” Badeyya stays up all night to make a new pair of slippers for her, knowing she cannot afford to skip a full workday.
Shyamala also touches upon the outlawed rituals and practices still persistently forced on the Madiga community. In some of her most searing stories, she talks about the sexually exploitative jogini system—a religious practice that forces Dalit women into sex slavery. Under the system, a woman as young as twelve years old is married off to a local deity, as a way to please the gods and bring boon to the village. The jogini is forced to fulfill the sexual needs of all the village men and is seen as a prostitute by the dominant castes. In “But Why Shouldn’t A Baindla Woman Ask For Her Land?” a jogini called Saayamma asks for her property, illegally occupied by the dora’s cousin, to be returned to her as payment to perform at the Ooradamma festival. Ooradamma, a deity of the Dalits, appears in the dora’s dream, telling him to hold a sacrifice in her honor or suffer dire consequences. The jogini, belonging to the Baindla community (historically, priests assisting at Dalit festivals), has powerful connections in the village, and even an influential man like the dora cannot risk upsetting her. The festival, other than to appease the deity, is also a way for him to assess how much control he has over the oppressed castes. When Saayamma refuses to perform unless her land is returned to her, he has to keep a “calm front” and continue to offer only wages. Finally, she says:
“Dora, don’t pay me coolie wages. Just give your daughter away as a jogini. Tell her to do the soothsaying during the festival. I will pay her the wages.” Saying this, Saayamma pounded the table in front of the dora with her fist.
The dora is shocked by her “brazen” speech but remains silent in the face of her assertions. Though he does not acknowledge the goddess as a part of the “real Hindu tradition,” he sees Saayamma’s defiance as a manifestation of Ooradamma’s rage. Thunder comes crashing down, as she steps forward, as if to attack him. While her brothers drag Saayamma away, the caste elders join their hands and pay her “obeisance.” Unable to stand up for himself, the dora berates the caste elders instead, likening them to women who wear bangles.
Saayamma, a jogini, might have been considered the sexual property of the privileged caste, but in her community, she is considered a priestess. “Why does the dora keep saying the baindla woman banged her fist on the table? She didn’t do it for nothing. It was only to ask for her rightful land,” everyone says as they discuss the event. Similarly, in “Raw Wound,” a young girl is sent to a hostel in Tandur to escape being forced into becoming a jogini. Her father is exposed to the unfettered anger of the patel who beats him mercilessly, through which he still relentlessly protects his daughter. Trying to reason with his abusers, he says: “I have left both my sons to bondage. I would like to send at least this child to school.” The story is similar to Shyamala’s life, who too was the only sibling to be sent to study while her brothers were forced to become agricultural laborers. In order to stop the beating, a sharma says: “The government has no shame. ‘Education for all’ they say. If everybody is educated, who will do the work? Each person has an occupation, a skill.” This echoes what Shyamala’s family was told by the dominant castes: “If you get your children educated, who will slog for free in our fields?”
While caste is a weapon that can be used to stigmatize work, Shyamala subverts the dominant caste gaze by giving her characters speaking roles, often with long, dexterously written monologues. In “Jambava’s Lineage,” she not only honors her artist community, but also gives an unflinching look at the vetti system, in which subaltern castes were forced to work without pay.
Theirs was an uncivilized world, one that knew no humanity. All we knew then was suffering and misery. We were not allowed to live like human beings. In the villages as well as in the towns, those who owned large lands enjoyed power. We had to address them all—brahman, velama, reddy, kapu, karnam, Muslim nawabs—as dora! Had to bend and salute them. Work for them without wages. There was no way we could ask to be paid.
When describing her work, Shyamala has spoken about wanting to “battle the mainstream stereotype” of presenting Dalit characters as either victims or heroes. Her stories’s distinct and groundbreaking oral quality has attracted a large number of translators. The translation uniformly retains this oral quality, most strikingly in its employment of honorifics and “half-names” used affectionately amongst her Dalit characters but by the privileged castes to further demean. Interestingly, people from the privileged castes are usually called only by generic lowercase last names like patel or reddy, perhaps as an act of subversion. The translators, particularly Diia Rajan, A. Suneetha, and N. Manohar Reddy, have spoken about the author’s playful and adventurous writing style and her use of language as ways to dismantle hegemony. Many of the translators are activists and academics themselves, most notably Gita Ramaswamy, who co-founded the Hyderabad Book Trust, a non-profit Telugu publishing collective, and A. Suneetha, who is a senior fellow at the Anveshi Research Center for Women’s Studies, where Shyamala too is a researcher.
By fictionalizing her lived experience, Shyamala’s stories delineate the roots of exploitation. While touch is seen as polluting, rape is still an accepted form of control. Yet, when women are molested, they fight, sometimes even hitting men back. Shyamala shows that despite a lack of support, Dalit women are courageous and bold. While her use of language expands the aesthetics of Dalit literature, it also offers a glance into subaltern traditions, such as use of the dappu, a percussion instrument played during weddings and funerals, that ultimately became a symbol of resistance in the 1990s when the Madiga community fought to be included in the Scheduled Caste category. Interweaving history, politics, and lore, Shyamala’s delightful stories have much to unpack, both at a craft and sociological level. The brief pauses, seemingly mundane moments of work on the moist soil, all reinforce the humanity and dignity of a people that are continuously oppressed. Children are brave and curious about the world, parents work hard to give their kids the best lives possible, and backbreaking labor does not steal away joyful laughter. Rich, tactile, and unforgettable, Father May Be an Elephant is a call for solidarity and collective action.
Suhasini Patni is a freelance writer based in Jaipur and Delhi.
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