P Lalita Kumari, who writes as Volga, has a way of weaving history with the present to create a literary future which rests on lyric, love and learning. Her writing is a conversation with women ensconced in the pages of texts and discourses. Be it Sita or Yashodhara, it seems as if Volga enters the varied realms of these women and sits with them, talking, pondering and wondering. The dialogue is not only between the writer and the character, but between the contemporaneity of the writer and the historical chronotope of the character. And what this brings to the page is a culmination of Volga’s vision of how one can read literature to foresee and comment on what constitutes the present, and inevitably the future.
Pampateeram (2023) is Volga’s rendezvous with Shabari from the Ramayana. Perceived as an epitome of resilience and receptivity, Shabari and Rama’s meeting during the latter’s exile and search for Sita is often read as an exemplar of pure devoutness transcending societal rigidities of touch and taste. Shabari, with the blessings of her Guru Rishi Matanga, is assured of a visit by Rama and this assurance seems to embrace her existence. Volga renders dynamism to this element of waiting and anticipation, for she gives Shabari a life experience ridden with violence and brutality on the one hand, and a deep, intuitive understanding of human/nature on the other.
Shabari lives along the Pampa river, in an ashram brimming with birdsong. The reflective self of Shabari has been exquisitely created by Volga so that the clear waters of the Pampa and the soulful serenity of Shabari coexist to foreground the rootedness of Shabari’s life and thought. She waits, watches, wonders and worries. And these are not conventionally passive acts often attributed to women across time. Shabari thinks and loves in equal measure. And this is how she realizes, via her childhood and the subsequent nurturance from Rishi Matanga’s own journey in knowledge and untouchability, that man has a destructive streak of sabotaging and narrowly defining ‘us’ and ‘them’, creating perennially a ground for strife and struggle.
In her conversation with the translator, appended at the end, Volga shares that Shabari and Matanga Muni ‘were outcastes and tribals who stood for protecting nature and their own self-respect. [They] are not remembered as voices of dissent against empires, states and the so-called civilization. And so, I held on to that story’ (p. 136). On the Banks of the Pampa is as much Shabari’s story as it is about the questions she raises on the meaning and scope of ‘civilization’ and ‘identity’. Her childhood has shown her the friction between aranyavasis (forest dwellers) and nagarvasis (town dwellers), the loss of her parents, and the true meaning of human life. And this insight, which has come to her brutally and forcefully when she was rather young, allows Shabari to critique the discourse of war and animosity.
The beauty of Volga’s text is that it takes the oft-narrated epic story and illuminates it with a keen sense of ‘why’ and ‘how’. Volga’s Shabari not only feeds Rama in silence but also questions his Kshatriya ethic. Her Sita probes Rama into promising that he will never kill a human being in the guise of righteousness, which is a promise Rama is at pains to fulfil.
Yashodhara questions Gautama about the viability of spiritual growth if it is non-inclusive. Out of the various conversations which Shabari has with Sugreeva, Sutapa and others ‘about the dharma of nature and dharma of every living being’ (p. 75), the conversation with Rama and Lakshmana is the most evocative and poignant. She knows she will meet him. She is looking forward to knowing this man in exile, who has walked away from rajdharma, and even the grihasta dharma, to enter the forests with his newly-wedded wife Sita and brother Lakshmana. The aranya (forest) has held significance in classical literature, for it is the confrontation between the world of nature and the world of man, the ashrama vis-à-vis the rajsabha, where the limits of human knowledge and affect are tested. The rules of the court and the rules of nature are often put into conflict by the human vices of lust and unsolicited power. Shabari gives voice to this when she says to a visitor in the ashram that ‘the paths to satisfying this greed—what’s known as knowledge and science—are worshipped. I reject such jnanam and advocate ajnanam instead. I ask you to see the resplendence of ignorance. You lot equate ajnanam with darkness, but I consider it to be light’ (p. 68).
Shabari’s wisdom is knowledge born of experience and reflection, where the anthropocentric whim of the human is negated with a humbling of the soul and reverence for all species and beings. It is not knowledge which centres around ‘man’ as being the sole harbinger of ‘civilization’ with relentless power to subjugate whosoever fails to obey him. This is the wisdom Shabari expects from Rama and this is the wisdom with which she feels that the world is yet to realize the kernel of truth in her words. Shabari tells Rama, ‘I was looking forward to seeing you. My hope is that you will guide mankind into times when there would be no kingdom, no cities, no civilization’ (p. 118). ‘Mata! You’re trying to spin the wheel of time backwards, and that’s impossible’ (p. 119), pleads Rama. Shabari attempts to convince him that in his desire and duty to fight and punish, he is abiding by the rajdharma of breeding enmity. Rama shares with her the inevitability of humankind’s march towards civilization. And Shabari feels, with intense sadness, that there is not yet time for her ideas to be sown in the fertile field of egalitarian humanity.
Volga and her translator, Purnima Tammireddy, discuss factors impacting translation and the viability of translation as a process as seemingly different from ‘creative writing’. Volga credits the radical potential of translations to widen readership, which eventually broadens the engagement with her text. Translating the descriptions of landscape became a tough exercise, given the vibrancy of Volga’s recreation of nature in her story. Nature, in On the Banks of the Pampa, is throbbing with a life force that has to be felt by the reader. To render it from Telugu to English entailed walking the tightrope between describing and walking with a mellow flame to explore the warm depths of the Pampa ecosystem. Nature is a character in its own way, whispering and witnessing the perils of mankind. And in its midst, Volga exquisitely shares with us the tender workings of the mind of Shabari, as earlier for Sita and Yashodhara, to emphatically state that ideation and critique are nature’s gifts to the human mind. Our life is a collective, where language, meaning and experience must flow seamlessly, so that ‘knowing’ and ‘being’ are sustainably intertwined in our quest for living and learning.
Disha Pokhriyal is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, Delhi.