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Sensitive societal narrative Gulabi Talkies & Other
Stories Vaidehi
is the pen name of noted Kannada writer Janaki Srinivasa Murthy. She is
hailed by critics and readers alike for her prolific short stories,
poems, plays, biographies and translations. Her deep and compassionate
understanding of the inner world of women allows her to meaningfully
mirror the ordinariness of their lives, and yet eloquently depict their
resilience in the face of sorrow and poverty.
The opening
of a cinema hall called Gulabi
Talkies, in the story by the same moniker, facilitates not just in
the transformation of an otherwise sleepy village into a small town, but
also that of a midwife into a gatekeeper. In Just a Box, the
protagonist invites ridicule and an onslaught of unsavoury rumours in
her quest to acquire an old chest, at any cost, from a fellow villager
who is hell bent on keeping it from her`85 at any cost. A young girl
causes a flutter when she gaily confesses to an elder neighbour her
desire to live the life of a prostitute in Chandale. All of the
writer’s characters reach out for understanding and support, whether
it is the wilful Ammachchi in Remembering Ammachchi, the thieving
Bachchamma in Tale of a Theft or the dedicated Ahalya of Dependants.
The stories themselves are portrayals of sensitive societal narrative. Vaidehi’s
chosen language of expression is a little-known dialect. She is well
versed in standard Kannada, too, as it is the speech of the region she
is depicting. This makes her characters appear all the more distant,
culturally. The translators who don’t inhabit the world of the
characters and lead urban lives have evidently tried to put together a
remarkable piece of work that loses nothing in translation.
Nevertheless, there is a feeling of regret, as one puts down the book,
at linguistic limitations and, therefore, the inability to read Vaidehi
in the Kundapur dialect.
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Gulabi Talkies is a compilation of 20 of her short
stories written through the 80s and 90s, with pastoral South India as a
backdrop. Edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, these stories have been
translated into English by Mrinalini Sebastian, Bageshree S., Nayana
Kashyap—Vaidehi’s Madekeri-based daughter—and Tejaswini. Most of
the stories convey, through Vaidehi’s celebrated naturalness and wry
humour, the female experience that manifests itself in the daily lives
of these women in a distinctive fashion. Through this book, a varied
readership will be introduced to a barely-glimpsed, nearly forgotten,
rural life; the characters’ preoccupations and their pace of life—nothing
short of an anachronism from another time. 