Patanjali Sastry: The Avant Garde Fictionist

Spaces speak and nature don an elemental role in the fiction of Patanjali Sastry. For his oeuvre spread across five and half decades starting from 1962, with the first story ‘Seetanna Tata’. And since then he has come a long way, and now has, to his credit, 70 plus stories, seven plays out of which three printed, novelettes, translations of Gatha Saptasathi and monographs for SahityaAkademi.

Tallavajhala Patanjali Sastry is the grandson of two doyens of Telugu literature. One is TallavajhalaSivasankara Sastry, from the father’s side, and Mokkapati Narasimha Sastry, the author of famous novel ‘Barrister Parvateesam’ (which was made into a movie and staged many times in the history of Telugu theatre). He while holds the two in high esteem, but he dedicated his first stories volume to both grandmothers (paternal and maternal).

While RachakondaVisvahatha Sastry is a maximalist writer, whose canvasses are nothing less than seas and mountains, the style of Patanjali Sastry is to observe a minimalist technique. Hence his stories become dense, multi-layered and give the reader a chance to strain grey cells in order to go ahead in sync with the taut craft of the writer.

Skilled writers use voids and silence too as characters. In the story ‘Fear’, Ravi Sastry showcases a tea stall, which is in youthful days, hopes that the rain would subside. In the end, he overcomes his fear psychosis, and walks boldly into the rain, hoping to finish his work in all circumstances. In another story, ‘Vennela’ (Moonlight) RVS uses the moonlight effectively to convey the story.

Such strong traits add to the environment of the narrative, be in a film or a story, like the incessant rain and dilapidated village-scape in Satyajit Ray’s gem of a film ‘PatherPanchali’. In his stories, Patanjali Sastry also makes nature a character, and often it has similar moods or precipitating changes, which has an impact on the characters. In ‘DevaraKotessu’, along with all the legion of characters, there is drought too.

This is a condition that no one can escape. Another brilliant example is from ‘Horu’ (The tumult – In this case apt because it is a condition of the sea, and also in the mind of the female protagonist), a novelette, where in Subhadra, the wife of a senior civil servant suddenly realises that how peripheral she has been living, in the Bhadralog style, and craves for the raw appeal of life and its experience. This buzz or tumult continues in her mind, and at the end of the vacation, she opts to stay at her parents’ place, so that she can take a decision about her life.

Similar themes or the “grain of the story” is dealt with on bigger canvas by DH Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by Frederick Forsyth in a short story Marylin and Murgatroyd, in the recent times, and way back the question raised by Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Doll’s House’ is also essentially the same.

A deep observer of woman’s bondage through the tides of civilisation, Patanjali Sastry, has the right percentage of discussing the plight of women in human societies. This overhauling is carried out in all the continents, in the last three centuries.

In the footsteps of doyens of Telugu literature, like Kandukuri, Gurazada, Chalam, in the present times, Patanjali Sastry has built a strong case that demands a critical review of the social patriarchal perspective of women and their role.

His three plays – ‘Madhavi’, ‘Soodilonchi Enugu (Elephant from the needle’s eye)’, and ‘Amma! Endukedustunnaavu? (Dear, why are you lamenting?)’ raise the question of women in a sharp voice. Madhavi, is a Vedic legend, in which the princess was made to marry three kings in the contract for a certain number of designed horses.

And in the end, she realises, that neither the sage, (Viswamitra) who demanded such freak horses, nor the disciple who wanted to achieve this lunatic goal are not serious about her. She curses the customer point of the view of men about women, and retreats into the depths of the forests to become a tree. The other plays also depict the injustice meted out to women, irrespective of change of times, and that is exactly the question and point, Patanjali Sastry wanted to make.

He stupendously succeeded in reaching the goal. Taking a new leaf from the creative bough of the glorious immediate predecessors, Patanjali Sastry brings the ecological concerns too with aplomb into his basket of stories. Concretization of living spaces in the name of urban development is opposed in fable like story, and much like the effect of Akira Kurosawa, Patanjali Sastry’s character Jogi Pantulu in the short fiction ‘Jogi PantuluTirigiRaledu’ depicts in the love of the character for the nature, and how suddenly one day he disappears into the alluring green-scape of nature.

Famed director Akira Kurosawa also stated many a time that man is nothing without nature and questioned the blind support for the technology. He went on record to say this: “People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better. Especially scientists.

They may be smart, but most don't understand the heart of nature. They only invent things that, in the end, make people unhappy. Yet they're so proud of their inventions. What's worse, most people are, too. They view them as if they were miracles. They worship them. They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings is clean air and clean water.”

Giving every story a different treatment, and his novelettes have a distinct thematic depth. Patanjali Sastry dwells more on allegorical method, and his sometimes terse, disconnecting sentences of one or two words, always point out at parallel realism.

Ravi Sastry has produced thousands of pages of work, and his social perspective remained a shining beacon throughout, and in the case of Patanjali Sastry too, who is a generation younger to RVS, it is the human society with all its deficiencies and excesses, explored, examined, exhibited and demanded to be addressed, in the realm of life what is supposed to be a fair place for mankind, animal kind, and all the flora and fauna, for whose mute voices, literature should always be the reverberating dais.

Patanjali Sastry in his own words often travels to the river and sea confluence and there sailing in a contraption of a modern craft, in a brown swelling strip of waters of Godavari, he looks at the blue rollers of the sea and becomes a part of the canvas his pixels lost. His penchant for everything flowing and flying makes him a sea gull and a mountain eagle. Talking to him is an enriching experience, which is worth having it and worth sharing.

By: Rama Teertha
The writer is a bi lingual poet, translator, critic and an orator