Varavara Rao: A Life In Poetry

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About The Book

Varavara Raw A Life in Poetry is the first-ever collection in English of poems by the Telugu poet, selected and translated from sixteen books that he has published. Having begun to write poetry in his early teens, Varavara Rao, now in his early eighties, continues to be a doyen of Telugu modern poets. He was a consistent comrade-in-letters to all the social movements from the 1960s to the 2010s, and this volume is a capsule of momentous social history captured in his poetic imagination.

The poems in the collection offer an artistic blend of tender response and thoughtful reaction to social realities, as well as an explosion of powerful emotions from a voice sought to be subdued. Varavara Rao's poetry, more than anything else, is an offering of solidarity to the voiceless, the underdog and the oppressed.

About the Editors

N. VENUGOPAL is a poet, literary critic, journalist, public speaker and translator with thirty-two books, both in Telugu and English and as many in translation, to his credit. Leaving his mainstream journalism career, including the Economic Times and the New Indian Express, after over twenty years, he has been editing his own alternative small venture, Vecksbanam, a monthly journal of political economy and society, for the last twenty years.

MEENA KANDASAMY is an activist, poet, novelist and translator. Her books of poetry include Touch and Ms Militancy, and she is the author of three acclaimed novels, The Gypsy Goddess, When I Hit You and Exquisite Cadavers. In 2022, she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and was also awarded the PEN-Germany's Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work as a 'fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word'. Her latest published work is The Book of Desire, a translation of the love poetry of Thirukkural, and her own political poetry pamphlet, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You.

Introduction

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH VARAVARA RAO

My first memory of encountering the name 'Varavara Rao' was in the newspapers. This was in the early 2000s, when warring guerrilla groups came to peace-talks tables. As a young Tamil woman, I consistently followed the Norway-brokered talks between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Government of Sri Lanka. Likewise, I was fascinated by what was happening on home ground: the talks between People's War and the Indian government. Perhaps because of the way in which the print media at that time both valorized and demonized the guerrilla fighters, I was fascinated that three people had dared to be emissaries between the governments and the fighters. One of the interlocutors was Varavara Rao, the other two were Gaddar and Kalyan Rao. Growing up in a household without television, I would wake up every morning and read about the progress in these talks as if it were a serialized novel. (Both talks ended in failure; in both cases the state used the ruse of the talks to go on a spate of naked aggression.) To my younger self, being an interlocutor seemed like an act of absolute courage and immense responsibility. At that time, little would I have imagined that one day in my life, I would get the opportunity to work with the poetry of this fierce, larger-than-life poet.

My second memory of encountering Varavara Rao's name was during a particularly traumatic episode in my brief marriage. The man I married was a self-professed Maoist; he asked me to read aloud a particular poem of Varavara Rao: 'Photo'. The poem speaks about the risks that await were a revolutionary's photo to fall into the hands of the police. 'I lost all my desire for a photo,' he writes and equates the smell of a burning photograph to the 'stench of iron heels and brutal feet/The stink of khaki dress'. Knowing that my (then) husband was looking for validation for his poetic tastes, I said something to the effect that 'this poem strikes deep'. 1 savoured the poem, little aware that it was going to be a precursor to something very sinister. I did not realize that this poem would form the philosophical basis for my abuser embarking on a process of my erasure. Upholding this poem by Varavara Rao as the truest example of a poet committed to the revolution, he would taunt me.

'Why this narcissism? Why do your photos float around on Facebook? Do you realize that if we were to ever go underground, we would be haunted by all these pictures of you that are everywhere?' Such intellectual bullying would be followed by strict, supervised action: I would be forced to delete my pictures from social media, from my own laptop, from my website, from wherever they existed. Because: a future threat, the fear of the state, the fear of repercussion. Those terrors lay in the faraway unknown, but the terror of displeasing a violent man was immediate. I did as told, believing that my obedience would pave way to his kindness. It did not. These days, as I poke around my Internet presence, trying to find my pictures before 2011, I remember this poem. Written by a radical poet to call out state surveillance and intimate memory, I had the misfortune of inhabiting a lived reality where these powerful lines were deployed to serve the purpose of a toxic-masculine act of female erasure. For the many years that followed, I associated the name Varavara Rao with a painful memory; the poet had no role to play in the emotive violence inflicted on me, and yet, his words were appropriated to serve the most unintended cause.