– Joopaka Subhadra

There was a primary school up to class four close to my house near the Singareni Collieries. There were four classes in two rooms. Since it was build with bamboo partitions, it was called the “bamboo partition school”. We had one “sir” teaching all the four classes. We had two classes a week for each grade/standard with great difficulty. Except during these two classes, the boys spent their time swimming in the ponds, picking berries and fruits and riding cycles on the ground. However, we girls played games such as toy house, toy marriage, kitchen toys, carrying water in small containers, washing dishes and sweeping the house. We also wanted to swim in the ponds, ride the cycles, climb trees and pick fruits with friends. Once when I secretly went to a ride a cycle with my friend, my brother found out and he beat us black and blue. Why couldn’t they let us girls play freely like the boys?

I completed my fourth standard in half-taught classes, half heard and half studied. I was then admitted into a high school that was two kilometers from my house. Out of the 10-15 girls who studied with me till 4th class, only three joined high school with me. This school was away from the village in the officers’ colony. The children of Singareni coal miners had to travel four kilometers to school. The residents of the colony, the teachers in my school and the children from the officers’ colony would ‘andi’ and ‘ garu’ at the end of every word. I found these words strange and alien. I tried grasping those words and I still can’t.

Andhra cuisine, daddhojanam (seasoned curd rice), aavada (dahiwada), gongura, pootarekulu, bobbatlu, idly and dosas were talked about as telugu cuisine in our classes, but I had never heard of them. I don’t know why the food from our villages such as onion pulusu, pachhipulusu, tamarind pickle, fish curry, bone soup, brinjal dry fish, siyyalakuralu, jaggery rice, pashambuvva, bellappappulu, jawari roties, pelalu etc were not part of Telugu cuisine. Why were tongue splitting words like Subramanyam, Pankajam, Meenakshi, Subba Rao, Gayatri, Padmanabha Sastry found in textbooks. I wished there were names that we were used to such as Ellana, Mallanna, Samakka, Sarakka, Lingayya, Iyllaya, Komarayya, Bhadrakka, Posamma, Uppalamma in our text books. Even our gods were never found in books, never shown in movies and never mentioned on radio. I wished our books had Ramesudu, Buddhiposamma, Kattamaisamma, Komareelidevudu, Mallannadevudu, Samakka, Sarakka, Possavva, Uppalama and we could pray to them by placing peacock feathers in our books. I thought I could have studied better that way.

In Andhra Pradesh geography the names of the rivers were Krishna, Godavari, Penna, Tungabhadra. I wondered why there was no mention of our ‘Ganga’ flowing through my villages and many of our villages. When I asked my teacher, she yelled “What Ganga? That is in Varanasi. Shut up and sit down!” killing my enthusiasm for clarity. But the ‘Ganga’ flowing in our Mancherial was called Godavari. I did not know that until much later. I spent all my strength and intelligence during childhood memorizing and writing these words that were not agreeable to me, were unrelated to my family and my environment.

 

Courtesy of 22-12-2013 Andhra Jyoti. Translated by Tejaswini Madabhushi.
Joopaka Subhadra is a Telangana dalit feminist poet and story writer.
Tejaswini Madabhushi is a feminist and activist.