Satyam looked around at the wretched men and women he had been working among for the past two years. He would not see them again.
In Telaprolu, Satyam had transformed himself from a dreamer in a library into an organizer. “My friend Telaprolu,” he later wrote. “You were my study center. My comrade Telaprolu, you were the first chapter in my lifelong struggle. Red salute!”
THREE
FLEEING TELAPROLU ON THE REAR rack of a bicycle pedaled by Subba Rao, Satyam made his way to Gudivada. The old family house in Slatter Peta was still there, and still belonged to his grandmother. The widow Bodemma was still living across the street. Mr. Guntur Bapanayya and his family were still there, too.
Guntur Bapanayya had been a Communist member of the legislative assembly (MLA) since 1952. Back when Satyam was a teenage Congress supporter, he’d disapproved of Mr. Bapanayya and used to smile when Carey taunted him on the street. Today Satyam was filled with admiration for this man whose fame had spread far.
Though Bapanayya’s name means “brahmin man,” he was an untouchable. In his manner and his way of life, Bapanayya personified the simplicity that people associate with communism. MLA though he was, he was so kind and unassuming that you would never have known it. He wore the humblest clothes, thongs on his feet, and combed his hair forward over his brow. His whole family lived in a single room rented out by a poor widow. When Bapanayya first moved to Slatter Peta and met Papa, who was still living there at the time, his heart went out to the poor motherless child. He would call her over and carefully remove the lice from her hair, crushing them between his nails.
Some said he wasn’t very militant, and there was truth in the charge. During the repression of the armed struggle, he was jailed along with other leaders in the town of Kaikalur and languished there without trial in filthy and unlivable conditions. But when guerrillas attacked the prison to give their comrades a chance to escape, Bapanayya alone remained in his cell. He spent years there until the Communist political prisoners were finally let out.
Bapanayya’s desire to serve the poor and downtrodden was sincere, and for this reason his popularity among untouchables was unmatched. He easily won every election until his death, after which it was hard to get a Communist elected in that constituency.
Satyam met Bapanayya’s teenage brother-in-law, Nancharayya, who had recently quit college and was living with his mother in an untouchable shantytown on the outskirts of town called Chinavani Goodem. Nancharayya’s face was black as coal, with bulging yellow eyes and a knobby nose. The moment you looked at him, you could see he was an untouchable and the son of illiterate coolies. He was proud of this and looked down on untouchables who saw themselves as better than their brethren for being educated or having converted to Christianity. Despite his devotion to his Communist brother-in-law, during his brief stint in college Nancharayya became an Ambedkarite, an admirer of the untouchable leader Ambedkar, who tried to organize untouchables in a separate party to demand legal and social reforms.
As soon as Nancharayya laid eyes on Satyam, he fell in love with him. It was the purest love, pure as crystal. Satyam’s intelligence, his charisma, simply amazed Nancharayya. While he didn’t have a sophisticated grasp of Satyam’s politics, Nancharayya admired him as a fighter on behalf of the poor. He became devoted to him, taking over for Satyam’s brother and sister in doing those things Satyam wouldn’t do for himself: shaving his chin, clipping his nails, handing him tooth powder, bringing him food when he was hungry.
Nancharayya was a great joker. Every occasion in his life—whether the birth of a baby or the death of his mother—was a source of jokes for him. “Kadedi kavithaku anarham” (Name one thing that isn’t fit for poetry), wrote Sri Sri. Nancharayya might have said, “Kadedi hasyamunaku anarham” (Name one thing that isn’t fit to be made fun of). He finally brought Satyam out of the gloom in which he’d been living since Flora refused him. Nancharayya made him laugh again.
Not long after they met, in the spring of 1952, Nancharayya proposed an idea over tea at the Taj Mahal hotel. He told Satyam they should form a branch of the Communist Party’s People’s Theater in Gudivada. Though not himself a Communist, Nancharayya had played in a Communist theater troupe in college. A gifted performer, he also knew how to direct and choreograph. A propaganda street-theater troupe like the ones the party sponsored in other places would be an excellent forum for his talents. Satyam, meanwhile, could put his own skills to use and give vent to his militancy in these quieter days.
They took the idea to the party leaders and were told there was no money for such a thing. During the armed struggle, even the Gudivada party unit had found the money to sponsor propaganda troupes. Now no one would think of it. “Have you lost your minds?” they asked. “We can hardly afford to keep up our whole-timers. Do you know how much it costs for even simple sets and lighting? And actors and dancers would need to be paid on top of that.”
But Satyam and Nancharayya were determined to find a way. They went off to think the problem over. Satyam followed his friend home to Chinavani Goodem. After Nancharayya’s mother fed them, they went out into the chilly winter night wrapped in an old blanket. Nancharayya showed Satyam the canal flowing beside the shantytown. They came upon a ballakattu, a kind of raft, moored along the bank. Nancharayya knew the man who plied the ballakattu and his wife well. The two friends sat down on the side of the vessel. Wrapped in their blanket, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea supplied by the ballakattu man’s wife, they talked and laughed into the early hours. Every now and then a passenger came by and they would go back and forth across the canal. There, under the bright moonlight, they came up with a plan.
*
THE CASTE WHOSE OCCUPATION IS the most degrading, the most indecent, the most inhuman of all, is known in coastal Andhra as pakis. In print, they are called manual scavengers or, more euphemistically still, porters of night soil. In plain language, they carry away human shit. They empty the “dry” latrines still widely used throughout India, and they do it by hand. Their tools are nothing but a small broom and a tin plate. With these, they fill their palm-leaf baskets with excrement and carry it off on their heads five, six miles to some place on the outskirts of town where they’re allowed to dispose of it. Some modernized areas have replaced these baskets with pushcarts (this being what’s thought of as progress in India), but even today the traditional “head-loading” method prevails across the country.
Nearly all of these workers are women. They don’t know what gloves are, let alone have them. As their brooms wear down, they have to bend their backs lower and lower to sweep. When their baskets start to leak, the shit drips down their faces. In the rainy season, the filth runs all over these people, onto their hair, into their eyes, their noses, their mouths. Tuberculosis and other infectious diseases are endemic among them.
When India developed into a modern society with public buildings, schools, offices, railways, cinema halls, and sewage systems, these paki men and women were hired as janitors and sanitation workers. Since the pakis’ work is a caste occupation, their wages are not true compensation but charity that may be given or withheld. Because of the resulting fluctuations in their income, most pakis are forced to borrow at high rates and become mired in debt. Even their hours of work are irregular. Those who work for the railway are told a day’s work stops when the trains stop coming. The trains never stop coming.
The pakis of Gudivada lived in a separate peta of their own, located behind the Gowri Sankar Cinema Hall. Cinema halls were typically built in poor neighborhoods because better-off people wouldn’t live within range of the noise. But the Gudivada pakis loved having a noisy cinema hall right beside their homes. From outside its walls they could enjoy the music and dialogue all day and all night. And they befriended the ushers, who when the hall was not full would let them in to sit for free in the floor class (that is, on the bare floor—the cheapest class of seating in Indian theaters). By the first or second week of a movie’s run, every paki in G
udivada could recite all its dialogue word for word, with every nuance in tone, and sing all the songs. At night, they would get in for the late show that otherwise only unrespectable types, and the prostitutes they brought with them, attended and learn the dances that went with the songs. Every man, woman, and child in the paki colony loved to perform. Even the elderly pakis loved to dance, although they preferred their traditional koya dances to the cinema choreography their children and grandchildren were learning.
Satyam’s idea was to recruit volunteer performers from the paki colony in place of paid professionals. Nancharayya predicted just how the party leaders would react. He described the scene acting out the reactions of the party leaders, mimicking their voices and gestures. Yelling, seething, his nostrils quivering, his face turning red, he showed Satyam what he should expect.
And that was just the reaction Satyam received. What will it do to the party’s reputation, the district leaders demanded, to associate publicly with such dirty people?
In the 1940s, when the Communist Party first came to Gudivada, the pakis were spontaneously drawn to it. But after setting up a paki union and a municipal union for the paki sanitation workers, the party did little organizing among this community. The only member who had anything to do with them was the town secretary, an impoverished kamma man named Atloori Seetharamayya, who was also secretary of the paki union. On this account the other kammas in the party used to mockingly refer to him as “Paki Seetharamayya.” They never considered him and his wife as their own because they subsisted on food donated by the pakis.
After the district leaders went off shaking their heads, Satyam got Atloori Seetharamayya to call a meeting of the town committee. At the meeting Satyam explained at length how absurd it was for a party of the oppressed to be ashamed of being represented by the oppressed. A chasm had opened within the party between the haves and have-nots. It had to be returned to its proletarian tradition.
Atloori Seetharamayya, while sympathetic, was not a deep political thinker and, in any case, had no funds at his disposal. But he told Satyam if he wanted to go out and recruit a troupe that expected no payment and performed at its own expense—well, he was welcome to try.
That was all Satyam needed to hear. He and Nancharayya walked right over to the paki peta behind the cinema hall. Satyam had never seen houses and alleys cleaner than the ones he found there.
They met Adinarayana, the secretary of the all-paki municipal workers’ union, who was delighted with their plan. The residents of the colony were no less keen. The only problem was, they were all busy. One good thing for pakis in Gudivada was that enough shit was produced in the town every day to give every able-bodied man, woman, and child among them paying work. Only after they got back home in the evening, scrubbed themselves clean, and put on fresh clothes were they ready to perform.
Satyam recruited ten residents of the colony to sing, dance, and play instruments for the troupe. Many children, both boys and girls, offered to join. Two paki sisters known as Pedda Parvathi (Big Parvathi) and Chinna Parvathi (Small Parvathi)—one thirteen, the other eight—were excellent dancers, the little one especially. Eighteen-year-old Venkatesu could really play doluk (a type of drum). To these Satyam added mala laborers recruited from Mandapadu, including one Maddali Venkateswara Rao, the greatest singer in the whole area.
Satyam decided to give his troupe a name that would set it apart from the People’s Theater groups sponsored by the party in other places. He no longer believed that all of the “people” were on the same side. As he saw it, two lines operated within the party, a feudal line and a proletarian line. He called his performers the Toilers Cultural Forum.
Once assembled, the Toilers had little time to prepare. In the second week of January, on the eve of the harvest festival, the Communist youth organization was holding a districtwide dance and drama competition in the village of Guraja, twenty-five kilometers away. The Gudivada town committee refused to give the Toilers bus fare to get there. But Satyam would not be discouraged. “The Chinese, they walked thousands of miles,” he said. “What is twenty-five kilometers?” So, taking inspiration from Mao’s Long March, the fifteen troupe members loaded their props, costumes, and instruments on their backs and set off on foot.
The Toilers had prepared two plays to present for the competition. In the first, a landlord finds out some of his harvest is missing. He blames the paleru and punishes him brutally. Unfortunately, by the time the troupe reached Guraja, the man who played the paleru was shaking violently. He had come down with a high fever from walking in the sun and was unable to perform. The second play, called Rickshaw Puller, about the inhumanity of using a man as a beast of burden, proved impossible to stage for lack of a key prop. The troupe couldn’t find a single pulling rickshaw in Guraja to use for the performance—they’d all been replaced by rickshaw cycles.
Greatly disappointed not to be able to take part in the drama competition, they decided to enter for singing and dancing. They had formidable rivals in the troupes from Guraja and Mudinepalli, another big center of Communist theater. Those troupes had elaborate sets and props and paid performers, many of whom would soon move on to Madras, the cine capital of south India. They were lavishly funded by rich kamma supporters, landowners who intended to turn their agricultural profits into capital by investing in the rising film industry. Accordingly, the People’s Theater troupes served to train aspiring kamma stars, directors, screenwriters, and lyricists.
The competition at Guraja went on for days. At the end of the week they announced the prizes. Chinna Parvathi, the eight-year-old girl, won first prize for dance, and Satyam first prize for singing. The audience’s verdict gave Satyam the courage to approach the party leaders gathered there and ask them to invite the Toilers to perform in their home villages. They all refused this offer with a comradely smile. The paki dancers were too wild, they explained, and spoke funny Telugu. “No, mister,” they said, “your shows are too much like mala bhagothams” (Indian minstrel shows performed by untouchables).
But then a big, burly man came up to Satyam. He smiled and offered many encouraging words to the Toilers. When the man introduced himself, Satyam recognized his name immediately. Back in Telaprolu, the librarian used to tell him, “You are like Kondapalli Seetharamayya. He used to cycle from Jonnapadu to read in this library.”
Kondapalli Seetharami Reddy was the son of a landowning reddy family. Like the great Sundarayya, the main organizer of the Telangana revolt, he dropped the caste name Reddy to signal his rejection of caste feeling. He and his wife had joined the party in their youth, at the time of the armed struggle. While she toured the countryside in the People’s Theater, he took training in firearms and went off to fight in Telangana. He had a reputation for being good at wielding a stick and training others in hand-to-hand combat. This last part, inevitably, was what impressed Satyam most. He admired this man, twenty years his senior, who was distrusted by the party leadership but had a following among the militant youth. Seetharamayya likewise saw something special in Satyam. Their meeting at Guraja would be the beginning of a long, eventful association.
After the competition, the Toilers were exhausted. Nancharayya put Chinna Parvathi and another little girl on a bus, while the rest of the troupe, including the poor man with a fever, set off on the long march back home.
From then on the Toilers put on shows in one or another of the low-caste colonies in Gudivada every evening except for Sundays, when the municipal workers had a day off and the troupe could travel to neighboring villages. They had to do their own publicity on the way to the venue, so instead of taking the shortest route, they would walk through four or five nearby villages to advertise the show, chanting slogans and singing revolutionary songs as they went. They crossed rice fields and mango groves, carrying their drums, their harmonium box, and their gaslights on their heads and their costumes and makeup in sacks. They would always raise a pair of red flags, one in front and one in back of their procession. Children wou
ld follow them from village to village to see the show.
When they arrived at the malapalli or madiga goodem where they were performing, they announced their show by circling the colony two or three times, beating their madiga drums, and clapping their hands. They performed outside on the ground. For lighting, they tied a stick up crosswise and hung two gas lanterns from it. In place of curtains, they borrowed straw mats from the villagers.
Before each performance, Satyam would make a brief political speech. Then the troupe would sing and dance. Before the drama started, Satyam would announce that the actors had to leave as soon as it ended so they could get up early for their jobs, but that he and “Mr. Director” (Nancharayya) would be spending the night. “In the morning we will be coming from door to door,” he told the crowd. “Please, we ask you to give us a fistful of rice.” On their way back to Gudivada they would sell the rice they’d collected. It might fetch fifteen rupees. Five rupees went to rent the gaslights for another week. Another five rupees went to the family of their lead singer, who was the most desperately impoverished member of the troupe. The remainder they put into a fund for other expenses that came up. The local people would arrange meals for the troupe.
Fond of that Rickshaw Puller play, Satyam and Nancharayya kept a lookout for a pulling rickshaw. Finally, they spotted one in front of the house of a government doctor. They went to see the doctor-amma, hoping to borrow it for a single night’s performance. But she was glad to get rid of it. So the Toilers were able at last to stage a production of the play, which turned out to be a great success, and from then on they carried all their equipment in that rickshaw, which could easily be pulled by one man.
*
BACK IN TELAPROLU, PRASANNA RAO’S other two children were getting ready for their final exams. Prasanna Rao had no worries about his daughter, but Carey was a constant concern.
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