By Srini Bodduluri
The State is capable enough to gobble up the bodies of those it kills, without traces. Yet, it throws up the beaten-to-death and bullet-ridden body of Sakhamuri Appa Rao, the Maoist, for all of us to see. Why? Is it not to instill terror in us so as never to have anything to do with questioning and rebellion?
And while you are still in the stupor, you see another media image of a frail, greyer man crying out into the wilderness over the Maoist’s mutilated body that is draped in red. His moan vents helplessness, anger, retribution and determination to rise again. The picture exorcises the terror. The neutral onlooker becomes a sympathizer and the sympathizer, a confirmed Maoist. The state does not realize the futility of its counter-productive stratagem. It firms up for another encounter. The greyer man moves on to pen a poem, an obituary for the departed. He is Varavara Rao.
The Capitalist State jailed an unarmed Varavara Rao for the right reason of his poisoning its body politic but on the wrong trumped up charges, which could never be proved. In jail he continued the tirade through an amalgam of prose and poetry, by way of letters from the prison, commissioned by Arun Shourie for the Indian Express, and here they are, aesthetically bound together by Penguin now.
The end flap of the dust cover describes the writer as a ‘Maoist Ideologue’, though the writer himself claims to have come to Maoism through poetry. This poetry-prose is potent enough to wean away those who believe Maoist practice to be decapitation of humans and thwarting of development to a more sympathetic understanding of the phenomenon. Ideologues, given to taking on Maoism from a theoretical standpoint, would be found wanting in refuting this propaganda, perfected in extremely humane terms and poetic nuances. Jail, its environs and inmates, the flora and fauna, come out alive. The yearning for freedom, the longing for love and the ruminations on life and death will touch and move you to tears.
Though not a substitute for its reading in Telugu, the Book is a must-read. Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes the foreword which disappoints, given the highly creative and original nature of the work and the complicated and much-to-be-said about theme of stealing freedom from a poet for dreaming of a better world. While the second letter is the best translated one, there are several instances where only Telugu words were translated, leaving out what the writer wanted to tell us. There are printing mistakes as well.
