Book Review of K. Purushotham, Gita Ramaswamy and Gogu Shyamala, Eds. The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing (OUP, 2016). (original) (raw)

Dalits, aboriginals, subalterns, slaves, serviles, tribals, etc., are connected with an umbilical cord of the same section of the hapless society. Dalits and subalterns in India, aboriginals in Australia and Canada, Afro-Asians in the UK and the USA have sprouted and taken full-fledged areas of creative aesthetics in literature. A plethora of articles, books, monographs, autobiographies, memoirs, novels and poems have emerged as powerful visible forms of protest against the prolonged and chequered history of agony, anguish, exploitation, cruelty, maltreatment, malice and malevolence. Migration from one place to another has taken place to protect themselves from and protest against the sovereign/superior/colonizing and consumerist class. Earlier, misuse and mishandling of the marginalized communities became the subject matter of literary practices by few including the widely accepted 'holy trinity', M. R. Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, who penned down and set the milestones in the literary sphere. With the passage of time, people from the beleaguered and subjugated class came forward to protest their subdued status in the society. They professed their creative articulations avowedly and started writing in the indigenous languages in several regions of India. Since they confined their writings in a particular language/dialect, the readership, therefore, was restricted to the speakers of the same language or was cramped in the same territory. Thanks to the translation studies in India which emerged from the late nineteenth century, the original texts in Hindi, Braj, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Rajasthani in northern India and Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam in south India received recognition by the academicians, researchers and creative writers. Thus, the need of translation came to the fore to get wider readership. When many bilingual writers began writing both in their native languages and in English, the publishers, too, came forward to encourage them. The writers, poets and playwrights-cum-activists, such as Ananthamurthy, Ramanujan, Karnad, Manoj Das, Niranjan Mohanty, and Arun Kolatkar, Kamla Das and Mamta Kalia, carried forward the legacy of bi/multilingualism of Tagore, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Bachchan. But there is a brigade of authors, poets, novelists, travel writers, especially from pre-colonial India, who originally wrote and published in their native languages. Afterwards, there emerged a line of academicians who attempted in translation to get esteemed degrees, fellowships and certificates of appreciation. Few institutions of high approbation like Sahitya Akademy, New Delhi, were founded to promote and promulgate vernacular works in translation. Some publishers, such as the Writers Workshop, Seagull Books, Samya, Zubaan, Harper Perennial, Penguin