Akku by vaidehi notes by muhammad azam

AKKU

Vaidehi is the pen name of Janaki Srinivasa Murthy. She was

born in 1945 in Kundapur, Udupi Taluk, in coastal Karnatake. After

doing her B-Com in Kundapur, Vaidehi married K L Srinivasa Murthy

and went to live in Shimoga. They later moved to Udupi and then to

Manipal, where they now live. Vaidehi has two daughters, Nayana

Kashyap and Pallavi Rao. Short story writer, poet, dramatist,

biographer and translator, Vaidehi is the recipient of several states

Sahitya Akademi awards as well as the prestigious Anupama Prize,

the M K Indira Prize and the Attimabbe Award.

As a noted Kannada writer Vaidehi is hailed by Critics and

readers alike for her evocative portrayal of the inner world of women.

She writes with deep compassion and understanding about women,

who live amidst sorrows and poverty but somehow find the strength to

go on living. She focuses on the ordinariness of their lives, writing

about the midwife turned gatekeeper at the town’s new cinema, the

half-crazed woman who thinks she is pregnant, the compulsions of an

honest but poor man’s wife, or the upheaval caused when a girl

confesses to her neighbour that she wants to be a prostitute.

The stories, which are full of wry humour and acute social

description, celebrate the joyous fact that A wave once created only

grows bigger and bigger; it can never recede. In this collection of

MUHAMMAD AZAM, LECTURER, SHAHEEN ACADEMY, G-6/1-3, ISLAMABAD PH#03335418018

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twenty stories, the translators capture the subtle nuances of Vaidehi’s

stories and their multiple ambiguities, bringing her to a wider

readership. Among her well known short stories are Gylabi Talkies,

Page from the Interior, Abha Akku, Saugandhi talking to Herself!,

Ghost and The Inner Life”. In all these stories, Vaidehi has portrayed

the grim realities of women suffering at the hands of indifferent men.

One of the main missions of Vaidehi, among the most compelling

Kannada women writers of our times is the retrieval of the

woman's voice from the past. The women characters, Vaidehi

portrays are freer emotionally than earlier. Alegalalli Antaranga is

a compilation of Vaidehi's short stories written over the last three

decades. In the 80-odd short stories, spread into six collections,

Vaidehi steers clear of jingoistic feminist positions, but presents

the perspective of a woman as it affected her, from the politics of

everyday life. Therefore, the stories mostly capture the woman's real

world, her real experiences, and the various aspects of self-fashioning,

without taking overt, ideological stances.

Vaidehi is one of the most unusual voices we have in Kannada

today, who also opened up a new worldview with a refreshingly new

spoken language. Even in being strongly rooted — in a specific

geographical location with a distinct language dialect — Vaidehi's

stories achieve a pan-Indian sweep.


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From women being passive narrators of stories, women now tell

stories that emerge from their lived life experiences and memories. As

Vaidehi herself puts it, there was a clear demarcation between the

outside world; with its loud, authoritative voices (the Chavadi and

beyond), and the inside world; entrenched in its poignant,

disquieting silences (the kitchen, the backyard and a little more).

Most of Vaidehi's narratives are invariably set against the backdrop

of these two distinct worlds — the outer realm with its imposing

voice and the inner realm shut into a silence. The tension in

negotiating these two worlds, often perceived as infringement, seen

as protest by the patriarchal order, make for the plot of most Vaidehi's

stories. Vaidehi's women are almost always a product of their

situation, hence their negotiations are unstated.

CRITICAL SUMMARY OF “AKKU”

Akku from her collection Antarangada Putagalu is one of Vaidehi's

most haunting story. It is the story of Akku, a zany middle-aged

woman, who takes on the world in her state of madness. Akku's good-

for-nothing husband suddenly disappears, and Akku goes around

imagining she's pregnant. Vaidehi's akku, the "dark double" gives a

hearing to her simmering anxiety and rage.


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Akku, appears as strong case of insurrection, in her not being normal.

There hangs an air of uneasy silence with Ajjaya's iron fist controlling

the breath of every occupant of the house, but nobody can put a stop

to akku living life entirely on her terms — a man's prerogative. The

vigilant Akku and her indomitable spirit refuse to be suppressed by

the heartless wounds inflicted on her. So much so, in her version of

the world around her, the distinction between Akku as a conscience-

keeper and a tattletale is blurred; the distinction between truth and

untruth.

In Vaidehi’s Telegu Story “Akku/Elder Sister”, the protagonist,

addressed as “elder sister”, is portrayed as the only person capable of

defying society, of standing up for her rights, and of making

transparent the double standards of male morality –but to what avail?

In the English translation, the richness of the dialect Vaidehi uses is,

unfortunately, completely lost. The story ends with her finally getting

yet another of her regular disciplining beating. This infliction of

physical violence on a woman who, although a keen observer of her

surroundings, is obviously mentally deranged, cannot be read as a

record of women’s indomitability in the face of society’s

repressiveness:-

“Ayyayyoh! Vasu is killing me! Appayya! He is beating me. He is killing my baby, Appayya! You ask this fellow why he was sitting and waiting on Thammannaya’s verandah day-before-yesterday, Appayya - -!”He hit her on her screaming mouth. No one stopped him. No one intervened either to say no’ or pull her away from him. Every minute the size of those gathered around was


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growing. It appeared as though they stood there wishing the scene to go on forever. There was a matching momentum to the screaming and the thrashing. When Bhanu-chikki with her arms on her hips observed, “If it is not craziness, what else is it? This one can make a fool of anyone . . . ,” her voice seemed to be edged with tears. “If I had been beaten up like this I would have just died. Isn’t this why they say crazy people are very strong!’ said another woman’s mother.

Docility that is regarded as a high virtue for the woman gets cleverly

turned into a vice, an inability to attract the opposite sex. Much that

Sougandhi desires to scream from rooftops that she wouldn't even

mind being raped — contrary to what the world thinks of her — she is

trapped; in a devious traditional society that has a suit-yourself

attitude to modernity.

Resistance in Vaidehi's stories is at once subtle and powerful. Subtle

because it doesn't gratify in celebratory feminist positions, powerful

because it attacks the basic construct of a traditional society, even as

she recognizes that modernity is not complete in itself. Vaidehi is

clearly a product of her times: the seventies with its "second wave"

of feminism. Therefore one finds in her works the smell of jasmines,

tinkling anklets, dark kitchens as well as a movement into thresholds

marked "strictly for men". There is an awakening of desire and an

awareness of sexuality. If multiple ambiguities exist, even that is true.

Exhausted, leaving Akku there, “All of you — clear out!” Vasuchikkappayya ordered. Soon after that he himself came out, shut the door quickly and bolted it. Fear of Akku rushing to the door immediately to bang on it and demand her freedom were belied. Our desire to secretly unbolt the door when no one was looking also lost its warmth. Akku remained inside, waving her ‘tuwaal’ through the small window and shouting, “That Thammannayya’s wife is waiting for you - go, look, run, run fast! Shameless man! Come and hit me,let me see...!” _


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Vasuchikkappayya clamped his hand over Akku’s mouth and dragged her into the kitchen closeby that was used for cooking on special occasions. Pulling out a stick of firewood from the pile there he brought it own repeatedly on Akku’s back, like beating a garment on the washing stone.

Akku remained inside, waving her ‘tuwaal’ through the small window and shouting, “That Thammannayya’s wife is waiting for you - go, look, run, run fast! Shameless man! Come and hit me,let me see...!” _

The side effects of allopathic drugs make people think of alternative-

Indian systems of medicine. Similarly, the havoc of fertilisers are

taking farmers back to natural/organic farming.

Vrikshayurveda in essence is vanaspathika jeevana vignana — the

science of growing trees. It is a discipline said to have been well-

established even before sixth Century A.D. Surapala's 60-page

Sanskrit manuscript was procured from a library in England and got

translated, first into English and then into Hindi and Marathi. The

present work is a Kannada translation.


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Akku by vaidehi notes by muhammad azam

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