Burning in the flames of adversity, tormenting himself in the process of cleansing his own soul off the dirt of stagnation and the silt of tradition…”, as Vavilala Subba Rao, the authority on Chalam, says, it is not always that a writer makes his own life the source material for his works.
From his childhood days to the days of rebellion to the heights of spirituality at Arunachalam, Gudipati Venkata Chalam experimented with his own body, mind and soul in his quest for the Eternal Bliss.
Seeking answers for human suffering and the role of religion, Chalam joined the Brahmo Samaj, but left it on finding its principles rigid despite the nobility of its purpose. Now began the real struggle of an artiste with himself on one side and with the society on the other. Almost all his protagonists exhibit a three-fold development of character. In Mydanam, his most popular novel, Rajeswari, the heroine, deserts her husband, who is a worldly person lacking in aesthetic sense,
and elopes with Ameer. In her second phase, Rajeswari lives with him in poverty and in a barren land devoid of any conventional beauty. The third and the toughest phase comes with the entrance of an adolescent Meera to whom she gives herself as a token of gratitude, motherhood and a love beyond all earthly reasoning, thus her character accomplishing the three phases of evolution, physical, psychological and spiritual.
Chalam in his later life came under the powerful influence of Bhagavan Ramana Maharishi . That was because the Maharshi’s preaching was concerned more about the question of ‘who am I?’ . In Atmarpanam, Chalam pra
ises the sublime nature of the pleasure spiritually oriented people experience, God or no God. In Jeevithadarsam of the same period, the heroine exhibits the same three-fold evolution, physical, psychological and spiritual. By now Chal
am’s characters developed from the noble savages of Mydanam to those of non- attachment and renunciation.
The search for the eternal was yet to begin under the supervision of Souris, his own daughter and spiritual guru. All through the 25 years of his spiritual journey at Arunachalam, his association with people like Major A.W. Chaudwick, encounters with god men, disappointments and severe illness, Chalam never sundered from the path of exploration and at last became one with nature in Arunachalam, God or no God.
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