A Stream of Migrant Narratives
On first reading, the book struck me as an important record of Telugu culture narrated through the voices of Adivasis, the most marginalised of communities. The book deserves to be translated more as a cultural responsibility than as a linguistic enterprise.
Ironies hide in plain sight. Tribals form nearly 6.2% of the world’s population and approximately 8.6% of India. But literature by them or about them is meagre, to say the least. Telugu is the 14th most spoken language in the world. Yet it is an underrepresented language in translation, with barely a handful of books published each year.
“Sanchara Sravanti” (“A Stream of Migrant Narratives”) is a compilation of a weekly Sunday column written by Dr. Vattipalli Krishna Sastry (VNVK Sastry), originally serialised in the “Andhra Prabha” daily between 1989 and 1990 for forty-three weeks.
The text being a work of non-fiction, it offers readers access to tribal realities in a literary form. It documents fast-disappearing identities and oral traditions along with scholarly observations and commentaries on the various challenges faced by tribals and nomads in the face of progress. The book is memoir, travelogue, oral history, and narrative non-fiction rolled into one; it stands at the intersection of postcolonial literature, indigenous studies, and alternative modernities.
It presents to the reader a tapestry of lived experiences, oral histories, and social realities of nomadic tribes and forest-dwelling tribals in Telugu-speaking regions of India, as encountered by the author during his professional tenure in the Department of Tribal Affairs, under the Government of Andhra Pradesh. It captures a layer of India’s society that remains sorely untranslated to date. On first reading, the book struck me as an important record of Telugu culture narrated through the voices of Adivasis, the most marginalised of communities. The book deserves to be translated more as a cultural responsibility than as a linguistic enterprise.
V.N.V.K Sastry, who retired as Director, Tribal Cultural Research and Training Institute, Hyderabad in 2005, was active in the field of tribal research for over five decades. Among the several books written by him are “Between Gond Rebellions” and “Changing Patterns in Tribal Societies”.
Each of the forty-five narrative essays in “Sanchara Sravanti” is an anecdotal recollection, laying bare how these communities, once keepers of cultural traditions, have now been reduced to penury and forced down detrimental paths of living. These vignettes are drawn from the years the author spent with nomadic and forest-dwelling tribes, over the course of his extensive career. They blend ethnography with storytelling, recounting authentic lived experiences of the author while also capturing the poignant truth of indigenous tribes caught in the whirl of modernity. These tales of suffering, uprooting, and exploitation, usually in the name of development, are conveyed in lucid and evocative prose, with remarkable empathy and insight, taking readers on an emotional journey.
Dr. Sastry’s eyewitness accounts expose the social stigmas, neglect, and economic hardships faced by these communities in today’s society. Exemplifying the vast changes coming about in their ways of life and customs, issues faced by women and children and the oppressive mechanisms of state and society, each recounted incident brings a different lens to the socio-economic-cultural transformation of the thirty-odd Scheduled Tribes of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana including the Gonds, Chenchus, Koyas, and Savaras.
More than just chronicling their transient lives and hardships, these essays also shed light on the context and conflict in tribal regions that later led to several policy and developmental changes by the state. The author’s reflections are deeply empathetic with the tribal cause and unflinchingly honest, questioning the ‘development’ imposed on these communities and urging the public, as also policymakers, to rethink prevailing notions and frameworks.
As a vital cultural document, “Sanchara Sravanti” holds far greater importance today than when it was first written twenty-five years ago. Tribal discourse, owing to its oral nature, seldom finds expression in print and is even rarer to be found in translation. The book paints a vivid picture of a completely different world for the reader through real-life stories that examine and explore various aspects of migrant living such as erosion of cultural legacies, erasure of tribal identities and the conflict between ancestral knowledge and modern development. Dr. Sastry’s astute observations as an anthropologist and tribal researcher, and the emotional weight of the stories he relays make the book an indispensable archive for posterity.
“Sanchara Sravanti” offers a de-glamourised view of tribal realities in South India. It fits into both university bookshelves as well as the corner bookstore and appeals to a diverse readership with its varied themes related to indigenous cultures and complex global concerns. Tribal literature in Telugu, from within the community or by external stakeholders, is few and far between. Consequently, there is very little to be found in English translation. Dr. Sastry's narrative technique bridges the gap between academic research and accessible literature, making complex social themes relatable to a broader audience.
Though South Asian narratives are increasingly finding appeal among Anglophone readers, there is a greater need to introduce non-dominant and marginalised voices to balance the elitist urban narratives in vogue.
Parallels can be drawn between “Sanchara Sravanti” and “The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin” by Verrier Elwin or “Tryst with the Tribes: Tales from Tribal Heartlands” by Pravir Krishna, among others, as books that echo similar themes, blending personal narratives with socio-political-administrative views, offering deep insights into the lives of India's tribal communities.
As a Telugu-speaker, the theme of the book captured my attention, bringing me closer to the fast-disappearing communities and customs of my cultural heritage, while the episodic narration of their harsh lived experiences, a reality I’m not oblivious to in my everyday life, resonated deeply with me.
The publication of “Sanchara Sravanti” in English translation will also contribute significantly towards bibliodiversity in the Anglophone landscape for several reasons. The book at once brings to the fore a language, a theme, and a mix of genres that have remained obscure and underrepresented in the world of translated literature. Telugu, in itself, is a language gravely underrepresented in translation, despite being one of India’s oldest and major languages, spoken by nearly eighty-three million worldwide.
An English translation of “Sanchara Sravanti” would not only help in preserving an important and endangered cultural archive, but also catalyse conversations on vanishing indigenous tribes, loss of cultural heritage and memory, not to mention redressing the existing imbalance in representing less-heard voices by a droplet.