[Dalit activist and writer Gogu Shyamala’s debut collection of
short stories, Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small
Basket, But . . . , explores caste, tradition, and exploitation in
contemporary India without romanticism.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

LOWER-CASTE LIFE IN INDIA IS ILLUSTRATED IN A NEW SHORT-STORY
COLLECTION  
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Erica X Eisen
June 8, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Dalit activist and writer Gogu Shyamala’s debut collection of
short stories, Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small
Basket, But . . . , explores caste, tradition, and exploitation in
contemporary India without romanticism. _

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_Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But... _
Gogu Shyamala
Tilted Axis Press
ISBN: 978-1-911284-74-1

here’s a scene near the end of the short story “Jambava’s
Lineage” where a woman named Ellamma notices that something has
happened to upset a group of children who are standing nearby as she
chews betel. The children are members of the Chindu caste, itinerant
performers who act out the myths of the communities they visit. But at
that day’s performance, villagers who showed the actors respect were
openly mocked: the Chindu are lowborn, the subtext was, and so were
undeserving of deference no matter how skillfully they played their
parts. When the children relate what they saw, Ellamma, an actress
herself, responds: “The best way for us is to attract them with our
performance, to make it so riveting that they sit and watch for hours.
That is the most fitting reply to those who try to ride rough over
us.”

It’s tempting to read the line as a kind of thesis statement for the
book in which it appears. _Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a
Small Basket, But…_ is the debut short-story collection of Gogu
Shyamala, a lifelong activist in her home state of Telangana.
Described
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by the _Times of India_ as “one of the foremost contemporary Dalit
voices in the country exploring the tribulations and aspirations of
her community,” Shyamala has previously edited _Black Dawn_, a
volume of Dalit writing from Telangana, and authored a biography of
the state’s first Dalit woman legislator, T. N. Sadalakshmi. These
stories, which mainly focus on the Madiga subcaste, are an extension
of her broader political engagement.

Outside of the Margins

Shyamala’s book is part of a larger wave of Dalit feminist
literature that has won recognition and scholarly attention in recent
years. Dalit writing began receiving broader attention in India in the
1990s [[link removed]] with the translation
of several influential works from Marathi, a language with some 73
million speakers, predominately in the state of Maharashtra. Still,
the Indian literary establishment has dragged its feet when it comes
to promoting the work of Dalit writers, to the point that many still
find [[link removed]] it difficult to
secure a publisher. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the barriers to entry have
been particularly high for Dalit women. In this context, the scholar
Susie Tharu has dubbed Shyamala an author less of “short stories”
than of “little stories,” a term that references both the Telugu
tradition of “little magazines” and the writer’s position as a
subaltern whose work pushes against the mainstream.

Caste politics are everywhere in Shyamala’s collection, even when
they’re not at the core of a story’s main conflict. Stray mentions
of a brother in debt bondage and meager gleanings left behind for the
poor in a landlord’s rice field reorient what might otherwise be
carefree scenes of pastoral labor or childhood games. Given all of
this, the assertion in an accompanying essay by K. Lalita that
Shyamala’s collection is “not overtly didactic” feels both off
base and unnecessary, reading as it does like an attempt at
prophylaxis against “show, don’t tell” criticisms. Perhaps
sometimes, after all, there’s simply nothing to be done but tell.

A Marxism of Sorts

Born to a Dalit family of agricultural laborers, Shyamala was the only
child in her family to receive a higher education (her eldest brother
was forced into bonded labor by the local landowners when her parents
raised the possibility of sending him for further schooling). As a
student, she was active
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with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) but eventually
became disenchanted when she saw how issues of caste inequality
persisted among the group’s membership
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despite their stated convictions.

In an interview with the _News Minute_
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she recalls protesters from privileged backgrounds talking their way
out of arrests while the Dalit comrades who stood shoulder to shoulder
with them were taken off to jail. She also cites the 1991 Tsundur
massacre — in which a mob lynched eight Dalit men in a village in
Andhra Pradesh with the complicity of the police — as a turning
point in her political development, particularly after watching the
victims’ widows shoulder the dual burden of caring for their
families alone and building the legal case against their husbands’
attackers. This latter episode recalls feminist themes that Shyamala
would draw on and develop in _Father May Be an Elephant_.

Despite her turn away from the party, Shyamala’s work nevertheless
retains a Marxism of sorts, present in the perspective through which
her characters view the world. In her stories, Shyamala pays close
attention to the great chain of labor behind the production of
seemingly simple goods, from the process of grinding castor seeds as
fuel for an oil lamp to the many steps involved in making a
replacement for a broken shoe. Members of the privileged castes, by
contrast, are depicted as alienated from and ignorant of the world by
virtue of their distance from production, a point made explicitly in
“A Beauteous Light” (the collection’s final story and also its
strongest) when a group of lower-caste villagers are discussing what
to do about a boy who has been abandoned by his Brahman family as
punishment for falling in love with a Madiga girl:
If you [fellow Dalits] discuss workmanship, they [the Brahmans]
discuss eating; if you worry about how to live, they talk about the
next birth or heaven after death . . . you value the buffalo but he
worships the cow. Why? You raise the calf into a bullock, break it in,
and domesticate it for agricultural work…. You raise bullocks
because you do agricultural work and turn the land into a productive
asset. But there is no natural connection between the world in which
they live and the tilling of the land.

But Shyamala resists the temptation to romanticize a life of manual
labor. In one scene from the collection’s eponymous story, a
wife’s long-awaited reunion with her husband, returning to the
village after a year spent toiling in the city, is cut short because
she must rush to the mill and trade jowar seeds for flour to prepare
their meal. What might seem to be a diversion, an odd choice to pull
away from the action at the point of emotional crescendo, is in fact
quite revealing. Shyamala’s stories are highly attuned to how,
particularly for women, the heaped responsibilities of running a
household divert and distract from what should be the narrative thread
of their lives.

Collectivity — and the obligations that it engenders — is a major
throughline in _Father May Be an Elephant_. Women beloved by the
community are called “the daughter of the village” and characters
discuss “the good of the village” and “the fortunes of the
village.” This sense of oneness and community transcends the bounds
of the human world: animals are endowed with names, personalities, and
carefully studied physical descriptions, while a story narrated by the
communal water tank takes a zoomed-out perspective that encompasses
not only the varied activities of daily life but also the arc of
modern Indian history. (In the book’s glossary, Shyamala explains
that conflicts about water management were a major contributing factor
in Telangana’s secession from Andhra Pradesh.)

Against this background, absences — tears in the fabric of the
community brought about by exploitation — register keenly, as when a
father’s exile from the village after being framed for a theft is
embodied in the steady rot of their roof thatch, with no one left to
repair it.

This sense of collectivity is also something Shyamala’s upper-caste
characters attempt to exploit for their own ends. In “Raw Wound,”
when a landlord declares that a young Dalit girl must be given to the
temple as a _jogini_ (a female temple attendant who is sexually
available to the local men), her father attempts to send her away to
continue her schooling; in return, he is beaten half to death. It’s
a fair punishment, according to the landlord, for disobeying what he
calls “the village voice”: by depriving the community of its
_jogini_, so the landlord claims, this father has put his own selfish
wishes above the needs of the many.

_Father May Be an Elephant _is often at its most interesting when its
stories highlight how precarity is constructed, maintained, and
ratcheted up by those in power. Shyamala’s a close observer, too, of
how her characters find ways to undermine and even mock the strictures
of the system — as when a young Dalit boy, dawning to the fact of
his caste and what it means to his classmates, invents a game where he
“trips” and falls against them, to their disgust and his private
amusement.

Originally written in Telugu, Shyamala’s original text is by all
accounts a sharp and deliberate departure from the standard version of
the language in its use of vocabulary and expressions, particular not
only to the Tandur region but specifically to the Dalits who reside
there. Indeed, _Father May Be an Elephant_ was put out in English by
Navayana, a publishing house influenced by the radical anti-caste
legal theorist and economist B. R. Ambedkar, before it had even found
a Telugu publisher. This fact further highlights the difficulty faced
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by contemporary Indian writers working in non-hegemonic languages or
dialectical variants, particularly when writing in forms considered
less commercially viable, such as short fiction and poetry.

The translation, undertaken by multiple hands, generally keeps to a
rather formal English, eschewing contractions and occasionally
slipping into outdated usages (as when characters refer to the young
boys in the village as “fellows”). This formal style was chosen,
according to the translators’ note, in order to grant “the Tandur
variant [of Telugu] the status and dignity of a full-fledged
language.” I found myself pausing over this remark: if the goal of
the collection is to celebrate quotidian language and its speakers,
why scorn quotidian English as a flawed or insufficient literary
vessel? In any event, when it comes to dialogue rendered in such a
manner, the effect is to pull the reader out of the stories’
realism, a feeling that is heightened by the tendency of Shyamala’s
characters to speak in paragraphs.

The collection’s stories do sometimes feel incomplete, as though we
have just finished reading the introductory action to a more expansive
tale. In a sense, this is of a piece with Shyamala’s broader
examination of the breaks and disjunctures produced by poverty. Just
as she eschews typical literary language in favor of local dialect,
her stories are often centered less around a conflict and its
resolution than the relation between a series of quotidian events in
the river of time, from which drama may or may not emerge. At points,
her endings can seem abrupt, at others pat, and it is this latter
result that is more at odds with her project. Her characters, after
all, deserve endings in keeping with the vitality with which she has
endowed the rest of their stories.

Erica X Eisen is a writer and an editor at Hypocrite Reader. She
currently lives in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

* Short Story
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* India
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* class
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* caste
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* literature
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