Volga beckons a novel cruise

The book ‘Gamaname, Gamyam’ set in the pre-independence era is a narrative of three women and their perspective of development and modernity. The book traverses significant political upheavals of the time

On a leisurely Sunday afternoon, post a frugal lunch, I devoured the 400 page novel by Volga, ‘Gamaname, Gamyam’ (Journey, the goal) in a single sitting of six hours, at a speed of roughly 70 pages per hour. By half-past eight in the evening, I finished the meaty narration, and fixed my already delayed evening coffee and checked a few unattended calls, which came in the meantime.

The novel is a sure page turner and the meandering style, unambiguous and disarming prose of Volga, will walk the length with you. The reader allows the writer to be a seasoned communicator and a spirited enlightener. ‘Gamaname Gamyam’, is a narrative based on the life and times of Dr Achchamamba, (in the novel ‘Saradamba’) niece of famous historian Komarraju Lakshmana Rao, who lived most of her life in the trying times of pre-independence. Generally, novels written to provide a spin of events in a real person’s life face an imminent hazard, of reducing them into autobiographies.

Volga, in tranquil nature handles the text and inclement social conditions the protagonists come across. Intentionally, the writer puts away the chronological detail of the novel but keeps on passively hinting at the currents of time. This helps the reader to go ahead with the text without diverting his attention to the significance of the dates and years in the history, which hover in the background throughout the book.

Volga takes away the additional sheen of the characters, since the narrative involves majestic personalities, who had towering presence in the history, like Kandukuri Veeresalingam, his wife and active abettor of his espoused cause Rajyalakshmi, Unnava Lakshminarayana, Gadicharla Harisarvottama Rao, Durga Bai Deshmukh, who speak and are portrayed in the novel.

Gandhi, Nehru, Kasinadhuni Nagesvara Rao and Tanguturi Prakasam Pantulu get a passing mention in the course of the narrative. More so she had taken the character of Komarraju Lakshmana Rao ( Rama Rao in the novel) and kept most of his personality under the mat, except his fierce passion for getting his girl Saradamba educated and making her a doctor to serve the country.

By now, the reader comes to know that the writer has picked a time chunk from recent history and this is not just a boy meets girl or a routine caste-clash or an escapade into a whimsical mythological theme. From sentence one, the writer will be held under scrutiny and the way she wove the characters around the historical times.

Although it remains a moot point to cross check the blend of history and if the life and times of historical personalities portrayed is accurate, that does not take away the thematic significance of the novel. For the characters in the novel, their personal life is a part of much wider and forceful social cataract that keeps on falling at a stupendous speed, affecting all of them.

The narrative is mainly about three women – Saradamba, Annapurna and Visalakshi. Early in the novel, the trio all aged around 10, had another friend Dhanalakshmi of the same age, who dies after a child marriage, when the aged husband resorts to forced sex on the pre-pubescent girl. Saradamba, a Brahmin girl, Annapurna, a Kamma landlord’s daughter and Visala, the daughter of a courtesan, find different paths in life and perceive development and modernity differently from their points of view, which is nevertheless influenced by their social positions.

Saradamba’s grandma Narasamma is bent upon performing her marriage early in her childhood. Ramarao, the father, stands up to his mother, who unable to bear the violation of tradition retires to Kasi for the rest of her life, handing over the family matters to her son, and wishing him well with his daughter’s future. Ramarao relocates the family to Madras, to avoid the local displeasure of having a girl of marriageable age in his house and to save his wife Subbamma from facing inconvenient questions on this count.

Their decision yields the expected results, and notwithstanding some crucial vacillations regarding joining the Independence movement, Saradamba, progresses to become a London-returned surgeon in the medical profession. Drawn into the buoyant optimism of being a communist, to change the world, Saradamba, is clearly the leader of the pack. She is ably assisted by Murthy, a married person with whom she got introduced in the wee hours of a day, in the backdrop of Marina Beach, where our protagonist would be practicing the art of public speaking before the endless gushing waves of the ocean.

One of her childhood friends, Annapurna, at early age gets married to Abbayya Choudhuri, who studies for some time and participates in the freedom movement and she rises in the ranks of the Indian National Congress. Visala, the courtesan’s daughter has a quite different understanding of what is progress in her life. Like Madhuravani in Gurajada’s ‘Kanyasulkam’, she yearns to become a family lady, and, of course, an educated one, to take care of her life. Volga makes sure that at suitable intervals the three women come together and the life as it came to them, is observed, discussed and reflected upon, at least by Saradamba, the better-capacitated individual.

In a novel crammed with social upheavals like First and Second World Wars, the Hungry Thirties, the Bengal Famine, the formative period of the Left parties, the idealism that has motivated the youth. Volga discusses the real meaning of human freedom and absence of dominance in the relationship, be it in a family or at social levels.

There is no novel in recent times that touched the bulk of four hundred pages and brought in four generations of female characters, with the freedom movement and international developments casting their long shadow on the characters, which have sustained. The noted real life personalities marched through the framework, created and controlled by the ace novelist. The perennial question is to end domination in every human sphere. People who ask for it are the mockingbirds.

For them, equality is a civilisation itself. Volga’s novel has a flock of such mockingbirds, and the novelist has pulled out a strong narrative of Indian character in the transformational decades, decent, dignified, robust and standing up for a cause. The novel brings the memory of the master storyteller Vuppala Lakshmana Rao, for the socio-political themes he brought to life in his unique dairy-jotting mode novel ‘Atadu-Aame’.

This is a must-read material and deserves a translation to communicate to the non-Telugu speaking world. Speaking on behalf of times is not at all easy, and with all that significant debatable platinum class material the novel made its core content; with “unease this crown adorns, the fragile head of Volga”.