“My dagger is my pen”: a study of Gurram Jashua, the father of Dalit literature in Telugu

Gurram Jashua (1895–1971), whose name is also spelled Jashuva, is often called the father of Dalit literature in Telugu. In this study the historian Chinnaiah Jangam reads his life and poems as a Dalit life narrative. He argues that Jashua carried the experience of untouchability into classical Telugu poetry, a form that Brahmin scholars had long treated as their own, and turned that poetry against caste.

Jangam starts with a comparison. In the United States, slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s were the first weapon against slavery, and later reshaped whole fields of study. Dalit life writing, he argues, has met “an ironic silence” in South Asian studies. In his words, Dalit experience “has never been the occasion for an academic debate” (p. 179).

What the study argued

Untouchable on both sides. Jashua was born on 28 September 1895 at Vinukonda, in Guntur district. His father was a Golla, a touchable caste, and his mother a Madiga. Both were Christians, and his father, a pastor, was cast out of his own caste for marrying her (p. 180). Conversion did not end untouchability. Jangam quotes the 1931 census: many Christian converts from the depressed classes were “in no way better than their friends left in Hinduism” (p. 180).

Humiliation as a young poet. In his autobiography Jashua recalls school benches set apart for untouchable pupils (p. 181). According to his daughter, as a boy he slapped a caste-Hindu boy who barred him from a playground: “This slap is not for you but it is for your caste discrimination” (p. 181). When he read his poems at a meeting in Vinukonda, caste Hindus protested and he left (p. 182). A priest told him that, by the scriptures, there was “no sin in killing” an outcaste who writes poetry (p. 182). On a train a man praised his verse, asked his caste, and said that “Saraswati (Goddess of Learning) has been polluted” (p. 183).

Cast out by the church too. To master a literature built on the classical Hindu tradition, Jashua read Hindu scriptures and wrote poems on Hindu themes. His church excommunicated him for it, and he lost his teaching job. Turned away by his own father, he lived for a time in an old mosque (p. 185). Later he wrote film scripts for a touring cinema company, which would not let him into the hotel where the troupe ate (p. 186). He summed up his life this way: “There were two gurus (teachers) in my life: first was poverty and the second was caste and religious discrimination… I revolted with my dagger—my dagger is my pen” (p. 186).

Gabbilam, the bat as messenger. In Gabbilam (The Bat), first published in 1941, Jashua took Kalidasa’s Sanskrit classic Meghadutam, in which an exiled lover sends a message by cloud, and turned it around. Jashua’s hero is exiled “for generations”, and he is “an oppressed hungry man” (p. 188). A bat is his messenger because, like an untouchable, it is treated as neither bird nor beast (p. 188). The poem attacks the theory of karma and the priests who preach it. In its best-known lines the hero asks the bat, which hangs in the temple close to Shiva’s ear, to tell his story, “Making sure that no priest is around” (p. 193). It is often called the Dalit Bible.

A nationalist as well. Jangam stresses that Jashua was also a nationalist. In the second part of Gabbilam he praises Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi and J.C. Bose, but adds: “Alas, the whole of India ignores my bondage and chain” (pp. 193–194). He admired Gandhi’s work against untouchability and wrote that Gandhi’s campaign had made caste Hindus accept “untouchables as human beings” (p. 194).

Into the mainstream. Earlier Dalit writers in Telugu, such as Kusuma Dharmanna and Jala Rangaswamy, were read mostly at the margins. Jangam argues that Jashua was the first whose work “firmly secured a place in the mainstream Telugu literary sphere” (p. 195). His poems were set in textbooks from high school to university, recited in stage plays and sung in Telugu film (pp. 195–196), even though the poet Sri Sri had dismissed him in 1938 as a “second rate” poet (p. 184).

Why it matters

Jangam’s study makes the case that Dalit life writing is evidence, a record of what untouchability felt like that official papers do not hold. It also shows how one Dalit poet won a place in a literary world that had shut him out, by mastering its strictest forms and filling them with his own experience. In Jangam’s closing phrase, Jashua let the lives of “‘impure’ people” “desecrate the sacred spaces and tastes” of the Brahmin scholars (p. 197).

The study also complicates a simple story. Jashua was a Dalit, a Christian who was cast out of his church, an admirer of Gandhi and a fierce critic of caste Hinduism, all at once.

What the study does not show

• Other accounts of his life. Most of the life story comes from Jashua’s own autobiography and his daughter’s memoir.
• The poems in Telugu. The poems appear only in English translation, so readers cannot judge the metre and wordplay that made his name.
• The writers before him. Earlier Dalit writers in Telugu are named but not studied.
• The Gandhi question. Jangam notes Jashua’s praise of Gandhi but does not weigh it against Ambedkar’s attacks on Gandhi’s approach to untouchability in the same years.

Talking points

• Jangam compares Dalit life writing with American slave narratives. What does the comparison show, and where does it break down?
• Jashua won his place by writing in the strict classical metres of the Brahmin scholars. Is that a victory over the tradition, or a price paid to enter it?
• Jashua praised Gandhi in the same years that Ambedkar was attacking Gandhi’s approach. How should readers today hold both sides of Jashua together?

The work

Chinnaiah Jangam, “Desecrating the sacred taste: The making of Gurram Jashua—the father of dalit literature in Telugu”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 51, no. 2 (2014): 177–198. The article online (DOI)