Rendezvous with Yendluri, the poet

It happened nearly one and a half decades back, in 2002, but the memory is fresh even today. Dr Boyareddy Subramanyam Reddy for whom I edited Thathvika Kathalu, invited me to American Telugu Association conference held on July 2 at Dallas and asked me to find out whether Yendluri

Sudhakar got the visa as he was also invited. That was the first time that I talked to Yendluri intimately though we crossed our paths many times before that. After reaching America he became my roommate, and thus I had the opportunity of enjoying the company of a Dalit poet, par excellence.

Telugu people living in USA are not different from the native Telugu people of our two states and the repercussions of our caste system are clearly visible there too. So the voice of the upper castes is stronger there also.

Moreover, the importance given to literature during their conferences is relatively lesser than the other popular fields like movies. Those few people who are interested in literature are more interested in the feudal art forms like Avadhanams.

We were very much comfortable with the progressive gatherings like that of Detroit, but at other places we were not given the due importance. But, whenever there was an opportunity Yendluri announced that he came there as a representative of millions of cobblers of India, without mincing words.

He used to relate the injustice done to the Dalits since times immemorial and patiently tried to reason them. He never hesitated to rage a war against the Hindu epics and ethics, which coerced and dwarfed Dalits long ago.

He never forgets that he is a Dalit as well as a poet. The poet in him is always vigilant to react to every experience. And every single word that strikes to him would unfurl scores of words that resonate rhythmically with it. He is a poet of the masses and he always prefers people for loneliness.

He would call and speak to anybody in the US too, where everybody behaves like a stranger. He nostalgically remembers his childhood spent in the narrow lanes of the old city of Hyderabad and always wishes to share his happiness with family and friends.

He wrote his travelogue of US in the form of small poems - around 134 in number. Here is one from the collection:

O Blackman,
O Blackman
Child of the villages of blacks
Guy with the eyes that glitter like blue diamonds
Living in ghettos, dark stables
With shackles of slavery
In dusky dungeons
For centuries together
And won the battle
Branded and called as a nigger
Vociferously
Buddy of black soil
You would rein America one day
Perhaps you would
Rule it forever.

Yendluri’s recent book, ‘Kavyathrayam’, brought back all those memories once again. It is a book of three long poems, “Kotha Gabbilam”, “Vargeekaranam” and “Gosangi”.

It is not easy to write a long poem and Edgar Allan Poe, the great American poet, who is acclaimed as the father of symbolist movement, considers even Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ as having more prose and according to him it is a combination of many small poems.

Yendluri’s sincere effort to make these three poems more poetical can be easily noticed throughout but the contemporary nature of the themes and the issues related to them are obviously given priority.

Very much like Gurram Joshua’s ‘Gabbilam’ Yendluri’s “Koththa Gabbilam” becomes a messenger of Dalits and the poet requests the bat, which leaves Rajamahendravaram for Hyderabad, the then capital of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, where the poet was born and brought up - to deliver his life story, record his childhood memories, listen to the drum beatings of his clan and to rise its voice for their rights.

And in the course of his appeal to the bat, the poet exposes the conservative Rajamahendravaram, relates the nature of Eluru and Vijayawada, and the plight of common man in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. Finally he asserts,

A humane country without the cast and religious discrimination
Has to be established.
A social equality that allows the man to be a man
Has to be created.
Now all castes are to be united
To proceed towards progress.
Now all castes and creeds are to get assimilated economically.

The second poem, “Vargeekaranam”, has a controversial theme, the need of re-division of the schedule castes. Here, he voices the injustice done to the sub-castes in the current reservations system.

That a poem called “Yekeekaranam” (Unification) was also written and published immediately after the publication of Yendluri’s poem demands a detached and justifiable understanding of the whole issue.

Yendluri’s clarion call for justice becomes more obvious in the third poem, “Gosangi”. The story of “Gosangi” is taken from Krishnadevaraya’s ‘Amukthamalyada’.

The poet takes cudgels against the scholars, who refer the same story as the story of Maladasari as Gosangi is a dependent caste of Madigas. He avows that the influence of Ambedkar made him to delineate the story of “Gosangi” in a modern and compassionate way.

The poet says,

O krishnaraya,
I don’t know whether it is right or not to question you
But then I didn’t notice that the jewel of your crown remains untouchable
Hail, Moorurarayaraganda,
The untouchable hill that you couldn’t win over
Peeps at you
as a dark flaw in your history.

Yendluri’s poems remind us the words of Mathew Arnold, who said that a poet himself has to be poem. He is a genuine poet, who conscientiously becomes a voice of his people.

By: Madhurantakam Narendra
(The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, writing in both Telugu and English)