In February, Telangana-born academic and translator Chinnaiah Jangam was awarded the AK Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation by the Association for Asian Studies for his translation of a pioneering Telugu poet Gurram Jashuva’s Gabbilam: A Dalit Epic . Jangam notes in the book that Jashuva was the only Dalit poet he had read in school, but as he studied further “references to [the poet] faded away from the syllabus”. In 1995, Jangam met Kancha Ilaiah at the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, where the former was studying for an MPhil at the Centre for Historical Studies.
Ilaiah helped him consider centralising his thesis on Jashuva, which was encouraged by his supervisor KN Panikkar. But the association with Jashuva’s work wasn’t going to end there. As Jangam began carrying Gabbilam wherever he went and encountered multiple translations of the work during his research trips, he found it fit to translate the text to socialise and make its meaning “more accessible to non-Telugu audiences”, while keeping its rigorous anti-caste sentiments intact.
The translation published by Yoda Press features, and is dramatised by, fantastic illustrations by Laxman Aelay, and the English edition of Gabbilam is a result of this endeavour. In an interview with Scroll , Jangam, currently an Associate Professor at the Department of History, Carleton University, Canada, explains the contemporary relevance of Jashuva’s works, and mentions more anti-caste writers whose works one shoul.
