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Understanding Chalam
A. RAMALINGA SASTRY
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A discursive on Chalam’s ‘Sahityam.’
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Chalam stands credited with 180 odd literary works
Photo: C.V. Subrahmanyam
Ramatheertha
Sahitya Surabhi, which organises discursive meets on literature on every first Sunday, featured a talk on Chalam Sahityam by well known writer and critic Ramtheertha last week.
Born in an orthodox Brahmin family in Andhra Pradesh on May 19, 1894, Gudipati Venkatachalam, who with his stamp of irreproachable frankness and invincible expression of it in his literary works stands eternised as Chalam, died a fortnight before his 86th birthday in Arunachalam at the Ramana Maharshi ashram. The first phase of 27 years of his life, besides formal education, was marked with intense disquietude resulting out of his keen concern for the aberrant denial of all sorts of freedom to the fair sex in particular.
The next 29 years was a period of ventilation of this concern through creative writing in the form of novels, short stories and plays. The rest of the 29 years was a saga of renunciation at the feet of Ramana Maharshi in Arunachalam during which period also he was known to have compiled his own musings, composed short verses called Sudhaabinduvulu and translated works of Tagore and the like, elucidated Ramatheertha in his prelude.
Starting with the scripting of the novel Sasirekha at the age of 27 in 1921, Chalam stands credited with 180 odd literary works of his own all together. The theme of portrayal of characters, building up of sequences and their narration with invariably a poetic finish stands highly individualistic and amazingly native, Ramatheertha eruditely affirmed analysing a few excerpts from select works of Chalam. With a similar exercise on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Franz Kafka’s work Metamorphosis (translated version in English), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the likes, he also emphatically brought home how the feature of occurrence of co-existence of such indispensable aberrations and reformatory zeal in the humanity all over remains a universal feature irrespective of the race, religion and region to which it belongs.
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Friday Review
Bangalore
Chennai and Tamil Nadu
Delhi
Hyderabad
Thiruvananthapuram
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