Doll's Wedding And Other Stories - Tapa blanda

The stories in Dolls Wedding, by the finest short-story writer in modern Telugu, are nuanced, hard-hitting and marked by the total absence of sentimentality. A tightly constructed plot relies on a minimalist portrayal of characters among them beggars, peasants, widows, children and the upwardly mobile middle class whose pragmatism drives them to break convention and fight for their survival. The aged auditor s young wife in Got to Go to Eluru seduces an adolescent boy in order to produce a son who will protect her status when she is widowed; in Firewood , a peasant girl overcomes fear and speaks out when she is falsely accused of theft. A realist devoid of ideologies, Chaso was deeply interested in the actual life and the inner world of people around him.

Chaso (Chaganti Somayajulu) was born in Srikakulam, in northern coastal Andhra Pradesh, in 1915 and lived most of his life in the vibrant literary and cultural centre of Vizianagaram. He began publishing exquisitely crafted short stories in Telugu in the early 1940s. Although he (wrongly) considered himself a Marxist writer and was one of the founders of the Abhyudaya Racayitala Sangham, the Progressive Writers' Association, he was in fact a maverick individualist, closely attuned to the experience and distinctive language of people from all walks of life and the whole spectrum of society. His short stories, a compact corpus of hard-hitting, understated, lyrical works, constitute one of the high points of twentieth- century Telugu literature. Chaso died in 1994. Velcheru Narayana Rao is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. His other publications include Hibiscus on the Lake: Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry from India and Girls for Sale, a translation of Gurajada Apparao's Kanyasulkam. David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has worked closely with Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Don Handelman on a series of monographs dealing with major themes in south Indian civilization.