Gita Ramaswamy is co-founder of the Hyderabad Book Trust which recently launched the new English imprint SouthSide Books. Her autobiography, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary, was published in 2022. Unudurti is a marine engineer by profession and a Telugu writer based in Hyderabad.
Hyderabad-based writer Unudurti Sudhakar’s stories introduce readers to one of the most overlooked and little known parts of southern India: Kalinga Andhra or the North Andhra coast. For the first time, they have been collected and translated into English by the author and published by SouthSide Books as East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra. Unudurti’s stories are genre-bending and break new ground in Telugu fiction, exploring aspects of Alt history and science fiction. They imaginatively draw attention to the fascinating history of this region and the many communities that call it home. His characters – tragic and comic – are often driven by fundamental questions of dignity and freedom. Spanning over a thousand years, Unudurti’s East Wind carries readers on a journey through ancient Buddhist viharas, medieval seaports, colonial zamindari estates, and the modern tragedies of Communist uprisings in Srikakulam.
Unudurti Sudhakar Source: Author
Gita: You have been a marine engineer most of your life. Is it the sea or simply being a native of Kalinga-Andhra that drew you to write stories based on coastal and maritime life? How do you see this region as distinct from other areas in the two Telugu states?
Sudhakar: Looking back, my choice of marine engineering as a profession was driven by my childhood years in the Kalinga-Andhra region, where the lure of the sea is ever-present along the coast. During the summer holidays spent with my grandparents in Visakhapatnam, I was fascinated by merchant ships entering and leaving the harbour.
Some of the books that I read in the local library in my school days, such as Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-tiki Expedition amplified the call of the sea. In our state (of the then undivided Andhra Pradesh), almost every town had well-stocked libraries filled with books in Telugu that included translations from world literature.
This was an outcome of the Andhra Library Movement, which was a part of the greater Freedom Struggle and preceded the growth of the Communist Party in our region.
While it continues to be viewed as a ‘backward region,’ Kalinga-Andhra has a distinct historical legacy and a rich cultural background. For example, Buddhism and maritime trade thrived in this region.
Further, the influence of the ‘agency areas’ (as they were called in colonial times) of the tribals played an important role. Exploitation of tribals led to and culminated in what was known as the Srikakulam Movement.
Kalinga-Andhra or North Andhra / Uttara Andhra as it is also called. Source: Wikipedia
On the literary front, this region produced some of the outstanding writers and poets that shaped modern Telugu literature. These include big names like Gurajada, Gidugu, Sri Sri, Wuppala Lakshmana Rao, Chaso, Raavi Sastry, Kara, Tripura, Bhushanam…the list is long.
Some of the Odiya writers from the region that come to mind are – Gopinath Mohanty, whose Amrutara Santanam had made an indelible influence on me. Chha Mana Atha Guntha by Fakir Mohan Senapati and Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s Matira Manisha also had an impact on me. Once again, it was the translations that enabled me to appreciate the richness of literature from other Indian languages.
The river-fed regions of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh – namely Godavari, Krishna and Guntur districts were at the forefront of agriculture-led economic growth. However, it is from the so-called backward regions such as Kalinga-Andhra that a legion of story-tellers emerged.
Gita: What part does nostalgia play in your writing, considering that you have settled down in Hyderabad? Does a longing for the homeland inspire diaspora writers to write?
Sudhadar: Like the collective childhood that Marx referred to, longing for the bygone era has an eternal charm, no doubt. Unless one is able to link the past with the present and in that process, get a glimpse of the future, nostalgia per se does not interest me.
To me, writing is an attempt to come to grips with the turmoil of the present.
I feel inspired by E.H. Carr’s words that ‘History is a constant dialogue between the present and the past.’ Each section in our society has a history of its own. In one of Sri Sri’s poems Desa Charitralu (Histories of Nations), he declares that ‘Collisions between opposing forces gave birth to history.’ It is these collisions and confrontations that interest me most.
Gita: Why did the radical Left, once so active in your area, fail to grow?
Sudhakar:The Srikakulam Movement – once it linked itself with the Naxalbari struggle in an attempt to emerge as a nationwide movement – collapsed under brutal repression let loose by the state. The armed struggle phase barely lasted two years.
To my mind, it was a very local revolt without a mass base connecting it with the rest of the state. Towards the end, the leaders made a desperate attempt to link the hill regions with the plains and to collaborate with their counterparts in West Bengal, but the movement could not be sustained for long.
Looking back, it was a short-lived, spontaneous revolt that failed. At the same time, it inspired thousands of people and drew the attention of the state to the plight of the tribals. Our state lost some of its brightest and most committed people in the struggle, which to me, is a big tragedy.
Gita: As a savarna, you have written movingly about other castes too in your stories – setti, barber, Muslim. Do you agree with the criticism that savarna writers appropriate Dalit stories and lives?
Sudhakar: As long as one is empathetic and adopts a humanitarian approach, one can attempt to write on any section of society. I agree that I have my limitations imposed by my background and the lack of ‘lived’ experience. I am therefore required to study and understand the lives of the sections that you mentioned with a greater degree of openness, humility and a willingness to learn.
While I believe questions of representation and identity are significant in drawing attention to understanding the role of privilege in people’s lives, I am also of the view that operating in silos in this manner – with each section of the society writing about themselves will not facilitate conversations across castes or the eventual ‘annihilation of caste.’ It is by the conscious nurturing of solidarity in practice that literature can build bridges, and not burn them instead.
Here, I would like to narrate an incident. Way back in the 1980s, my wife Vindhya and I travelled to the agency areas near Parvatipuram to interview some of those who had taken part in the movement. We were researching into the role of women in the Srikakulam Movement.
When we asked one of the ‘illiterate’ tribal chiefs to respond to the state’s allegations that it was outsiders from the plains who had instigated the tribals, he said to us, “They (the revolutionaries) came here all the way, leaving their comfortable lives behind, to do good for us. They lived among us and gave their lives for us. How can you call them outsiders? They are our own children.”
He taught us an unforgettable lesson about the role of solidarity and praxis in forging together the disparate sections of our divided society.
Gita: Your understanding of Buddhism in Kalinga-Andhra is deep and empathic. How did this come about?
Sudhakar: I took to experimenting with writing after I turned 60, although I was very interested in reading all along. Over the years, areas of my interest gravitated towards the Buddhist legacy of the Kalinga-Andhra region, maritime history, early European incursions, resistance by the ‘natives’ and the changes that interactions with the Western world brought about – especially in our coastal regions.
All the reading, exploring, discussing with friends and scholars (the late Prof R.S. Rao, Volga, and Rani Sarma in particular) in my attempts to make sense of the present – led to these stories, I guess.
Busts of Communist Party of India (CPI M-L) Leaders Source: Author
Sudhakar: In the year 2007, when the 150th anniversary of the 1857 war was being celebrated, I thought of writing a couple of essays introducing Marx’s famous writing on those events to Telugu readers from a contemporary perspective. Later, it occurred to me that fiction would be a better choice to reach out to a larger readership.
Being an engineer, I am also interested in exploring how new technology is received and applied when it is introduced into a different culture and society. That led to the writing of my first short story called ‘Entangled and Strangled’ (included in the ‘East Wind’ collection) about the introduction of telegraphy in India by the British. In fact, this is the only story in this collection that takes place outside the Kalinga-Andhra region.
Gita: When you wrote this book in Telugu, what kind of readership did you have in mind?
Sudhakar: When my first story based on the events of 1857 was published, it received an unexpectedly overwhelming response from across the state, from readers representing different walks of life. This intrigued me and also made it clear to me that there exists a section of readership for this type of historical fiction. My subsequent writings too continued in this genre.
However, not wanting to be labelled as a writer of historical fiction, I tried my hand at other types of writing as well – including alternative history under the science-fiction category. One such story, ‘Night Wing’ that I wrote jointly with my son Jaideep, is included in this collection.
Gita: Howis the readership different in your opinion, now that you have translated your work into English?
Sudhakar: I mentioned about “alt-history.” It is a relatively less explored genre in Telugu while in English it is a well-established way of writing. But Telugu readers are perhaps opening up to newer genres, including science-fiction. But by and large, many expect to see the proven format of a captivating beginning, the main body and an ending with a twist in the tale.
To me, however, readability is a primary attribute, more than the structure, and irrespective of the genre.
Oldtimers also feel let down when the writer does not offer a ‘solution’ to the issues raised in the story. All writings are expected to end on an optimistic note! The reasons for these expectations perhaps lie in the fact that the modern-day Telugu literature is an outcome of the reformist and revolutionary movements. This is the downside of these historic processes.
On the positive side, no Telugu writer can get away today with adverse representation of any of the marginalised sections or negative portrayal of the working classes.
Gita: Tell us about the challenge of translating fiction from Indian languages into English.
East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra
Sudhakar: Translating four of the stories in ‘East Wind’ and going through others’ translations was a great learning experience for me. It called for a much greater effort on my part than what I anticipated. Writing the stories originally in Telugu was comparatively an easier task, I must admit.
To begin with, we had to visualise who the reader would be. Young generation Telugus who can understand but cannot read Telugu? Pan-Indian readers? NRIs? Non-Indian readers? For example, if we use words like kabaddi, or rasagolla none of the Indian or NRI readers will face any difficulty in understanding. But then, what about the non-Indian readers without any exposure to our cultural aspects?
Each one of the stories had gone through four stages of editing and innumerable revisions and corrections. When different translators are involved, the output tends to be varied.
We had to deal with their work differently. Some of them of course did a brilliant job and hardly any changes were needed. Final editing by a non-Telugu professional brought in a degree of uniformity to the output.
On the positive side, my involvement in first-level of refinement helped to convey to the translators, my true intent. In some cases, we took liberties and made a few improvements to bring out the spirit behind the original text.
Overall, it was an iterative, interactive and collective, and at times, creative process.
Editor’s Note: In the following discussion, Gita Ramaswamy interviews Sudhakar Unudurti about translating his own stories in the recently published collection, East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra. An excerpt of this book has been provided to Maidaanam by SouthSide books and can be read here: Why can’t we sell it to the Europeans ourselves?
Gita Ramaswamy is co-founder of the Hyderabad Book Trust which recently launched the new English imprint SouthSide Books. Her autobiography, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary, was published in 2022. Unudurti is a marine engineer by profession and a Telugu writer based in Hyderabad.
Hyderabad-based writer Unudurti Sudhakar’s stories introduce readers to one of the most overlooked and little known parts of southern India: Kalinga Andhra or the North Andhra coast. For the first time, they have been collected and translated into English by the author and published by SouthSide Books as East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra. Unudurti’s stories are genre-bending and break new ground in Telugu fiction, exploring aspects of Alt history and science fiction. They imaginatively draw attention to the fascinating history of this region and the many communities that call it home. His characters – tragic and comic – are often driven by fundamental questions of dignity and freedom. Spanning over a thousand years, Unudurti’s East Wind carries readers on a journey through ancient Buddhist viharas, medieval seaports, colonial zamindari estates, and the modern tragedies of Communist uprisings in Srikakulam.
Source: Author
Gita: You have been a marine engineer most of your life. Is it the sea or simply being a native of Kalinga-Andhra that drew you to write stories based on coastal and maritime life? How do you see this region as distinct from other areas in the two Telugu states?
Sudhakar: Looking back, my choice of marine engineering as a profession was driven by my childhood years in the Kalinga-Andhra region, where the lure of the sea is ever-present along the coast. During the summer holidays spent with my grandparents in Visakhapatnam, I was fascinated by merchant ships entering and leaving the harbour.
Some of the books that I read in the local library in my school days, such as Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-tiki Expedition amplified the call of the sea. In our state (of the then undivided Andhra Pradesh), almost every town had well-stocked libraries filled with books in Telugu that included translations from world literature.
This was an outcome of the Andhra Library Movement, which was a part of the greater Freedom Struggle and preceded the growth of the Communist Party in our region.
While it continues to be viewed as a ‘backward region,’ Kalinga-Andhra has a distinct historical legacy and a rich cultural background. For example, Buddhism and maritime trade thrived in this region.
Further, the influence of the ‘agency areas’ (as they were called in colonial times) of the tribals played an important role. Exploitation of tribals led to and culminated in what was known as the Srikakulam Movement.
Source: Wikipedia
On the literary front, this region produced some of the outstanding writers and poets that shaped modern Telugu literature. These include big names like Gurajada, Gidugu, Sri Sri, Wuppala Lakshmana Rao, Chaso, Raavi Sastry, Kara, Tripura, Bhushanam…the list is long.
Some of the Odiya writers from the region that come to mind are – Gopinath Mohanty, whose Amrutara Santanam had made an indelible influence on me. Chha Mana Atha Guntha by Fakir Mohan Senapati and Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s Matira Manisha also had an impact on me. Once again, it was the translations that enabled me to appreciate the richness of literature from other Indian languages.
The river-fed regions of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh – namely Godavari, Krishna and Guntur districts were at the forefront of agriculture-led economic growth. However, it is from the so-called backward regions such as Kalinga-Andhra that a legion of story-tellers emerged.
Gita: What part does nostalgia play in your writing, considering that you have settled down in Hyderabad? Does a longing for the homeland inspire diaspora writers to write?
Sudhadar: Like the collective childhood that Marx referred to, longing for the bygone era has an eternal charm, no doubt. Unless one is able to link the past with the present and in that process, get a glimpse of the future, nostalgia per se does not interest me.
To me, writing is an attempt to come to grips with the turmoil of the present.
I feel inspired by E.H. Carr’s words that ‘History is a constant dialogue between the present and the past.’ Each section in our society has a history of its own. In one of Sri Sri’s poems Desa Charitralu (Histories of Nations), he declares that ‘Collisions between opposing forces gave birth to history.’ It is these collisions and confrontations that interest me most.
Gita: Why did the radical Left, once so active in your area, fail to grow?
Sudhakar: The Srikakulam Movement – once it linked itself with the Naxalbari struggle in an attempt to emerge as a nationwide movement – collapsed under brutal repression let loose by the state. The armed struggle phase barely lasted two years.
To my mind, it was a very local revolt without a mass base connecting it with the rest of the state. Towards the end, the leaders made a desperate attempt to link the hill regions with the plains and to collaborate with their counterparts in West Bengal, but the movement could not be sustained for long.
Looking back, it was a short-lived, spontaneous revolt that failed. At the same time, it inspired thousands of people and drew the attention of the state to the plight of the tribals. Our state lost some of its brightest and most committed people in the struggle, which to me, is a big tragedy.
Gita: As a savarna, you have written movingly about other castes too in your stories – setti, barber, Muslim. Do you agree with the criticism that savarna writers appropriate Dalit stories and lives?
Sudhakar: As long as one is empathetic and adopts a humanitarian approach, one can attempt to write on any section of society. I agree that I have my limitations imposed by my background and the lack of ‘lived’ experience. I am therefore required to study and understand the lives of the sections that you mentioned with a greater degree of openness, humility and a willingness to learn.
While I believe questions of representation and identity are significant in drawing attention to understanding the role of privilege in people’s lives, I am also of the view that operating in silos in this manner – with each section of the society writing about themselves will not facilitate conversations across castes or the eventual ‘annihilation of caste.’ It is by the conscious nurturing of solidarity in practice that literature can build bridges, and not burn them instead.
Here, I would like to narrate an incident. Way back in the 1980s, my wife Vindhya and I travelled to the agency areas near Parvatipuram to interview some of those who had taken part in the movement. We were researching into the role of women in the Srikakulam Movement.
When we asked one of the ‘illiterate’ tribal chiefs to respond to the state’s allegations that it was outsiders from the plains who had instigated the tribals, he said to us, “They (the revolutionaries) came here all the way, leaving their comfortable lives behind, to do good for us. They lived among us and gave their lives for us. How can you call them outsiders? They are our own children.”
He taught us an unforgettable lesson about the role of solidarity and praxis in forging together the disparate sections of our divided society.
Gita: Your understanding of Buddhism in Kalinga-Andhra is deep and empathic. How did this come about?
Sudhakar: I took to experimenting with writing after I turned 60, although I was very interested in reading all along. Over the years, areas of my interest gravitated towards the Buddhist legacy of the Kalinga-Andhra region, maritime history, early European incursions, resistance by the ‘natives’ and the changes that interactions with the Western world brought about – especially in our coastal regions.
All the reading, exploring, discussing with friends and scholars (the late Prof R.S. Rao, Volga, and Rani Sarma in particular) in my attempts to make sense of the present – led to these stories, I guess.
Source: Author
Gita: How would you like to describe the process that led to writing East Wind: Stories from Kalinga-Andhra?
Sudhakar: In the year 2007, when the 150th anniversary of the 1857 war was being celebrated, I thought of writing a couple of essays introducing Marx’s famous writing on those events to Telugu readers from a contemporary perspective. Later, it occurred to me that fiction would be a better choice to reach out to a larger readership.
Being an engineer, I am also interested in exploring how new technology is received and applied when it is introduced into a different culture and society. That led to the writing of my first short story called ‘Entangled and Strangled’ (included in the ‘East Wind’ collection) about the introduction of telegraphy in India by the British. In fact, this is the only story in this collection that takes place outside the Kalinga-Andhra region.
Gita: When you wrote this book in Telugu, what kind of readership did you have in mind?
Sudhakar: When my first story based on the events of 1857 was published, it received an unexpectedly overwhelming response from across the state, from readers representing different walks of life. This intrigued me and also made it clear to me that there exists a section of readership for this type of historical fiction. My subsequent writings too continued in this genre.
However, not wanting to be labelled as a writer of historical fiction, I tried my hand at other types of writing as well – including alternative history under the science-fiction category. One such story, ‘Night Wing’ that I wrote jointly with my son Jaideep, is included in this collection.
Gita: Howis the readership different in your opinion, now that you have translated your work into English?
Sudhakar: I mentioned about “alt-history.” It is a relatively less explored genre in Telugu while in English it is a well-established way of writing. But Telugu readers are perhaps opening up to newer genres, including science-fiction. But by and large, many expect to see the proven format of a captivating beginning, the main body and an ending with a twist in the tale.
To me, however, readability is a primary attribute, more than the structure, and irrespective of the genre.
Oldtimers also feel let down when the writer does not offer a ‘solution’ to the issues raised in the story. All writings are expected to end on an optimistic note! The reasons for these expectations perhaps lie in the fact that the modern-day Telugu literature is an outcome of the reformist and revolutionary movements. This is the downside of these historic processes.
On the positive side, no Telugu writer can get away today with adverse representation of any of the marginalised sections or negative portrayal of the working classes.
Gita: Tell us about the challenge of translating fiction from Indian languages into English.
Sudhakar: Translating four of the stories in ‘East Wind’ and going through others’ translations was a great learning experience for me. It called for a much greater effort on my part than what I anticipated. Writing the stories originally in Telugu was comparatively an easier task, I must admit.
To begin with, we had to visualise who the reader would be. Young generation Telugus who can understand but cannot read Telugu? Pan-Indian readers? NRIs? Non-Indian readers? For example, if we use words like kabaddi, or rasagolla none of the Indian or NRI readers will face any difficulty in understanding. But then, what about the non-Indian readers without any exposure to our cultural aspects?
Each one of the stories had gone through four stages of editing and innumerable revisions and corrections. When different translators are involved, the output tends to be varied.
We had to deal with their work differently. Some of them of course did a brilliant job and hardly any changes were needed. Final editing by a non-Telugu professional brought in a degree of uniformity to the output.
On the positive side, my involvement in first-level of refinement helped to convey to the translators, my true intent. In some cases, we took liberties and made a few improvements to bring out the spirit behind the original text.
Overall, it was an iterative, interactive and collective, and at times, creative process.
An excerpt of this book has been provided to Maidaanam by SouthSide books and can be read here: Why can’t we sell it to the Europeans ourselves?
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