Reception and Dissemination of Marx's Capital in Telugu: Language Politics and the Communist Movement It Was Not Before Nearly
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DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 1 Reception and Dissemination of Marx's Capital in Telugu: Language Politics and the Communist Movement It was not before nearly a hundred and twenty years had passed since the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 in German in 1867 that a decision was taken to translate the same to Telugu. Commissioned by the Secretariat Board of the Andhra Pradesh Communist Association, an organ of the Communist Party of India (CPI), the task of translation of Capital into Telugu began in August 1984 and took more than a decade to finally come to print in the year 1996 as a joint publication by Progress Publication, Moscow and Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti. i Despite several delays involving selection of translators, setting up of guidelines for translators, continuous comparisons of the Telugu translation with the English source text and cross- checking the same with the Hindi translation, as well as financial and other technological matters, the translation of Volume I to Telugu was almost ready by 1990. However, the untimely collapse of the Soviet Union delayed the translation project further, when the support of Progress Publication was withdrawn. It was not until September 1996 that the task was completed with the effort of five translators and the support of A.P. Communist Samiti and Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti, and Capital Volume I came into Telugu from Vijayawada. The Telugu translations of the second and third volumes of Capital were also released in November 1998 and October 2000, respectively, as part of the same project. ii The three volumes were revised and reprinted in 2017 by Vishalandhra Vignyana Samiti, when 2000 copies of each volume were printed. iii This translation is considered as the standard Telugu translation of Capital by all the Left groups, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)). It is ironic to consider how the entry of the Capital into Telugu public life coincides with the time of the deindustrialization and the gradual withering-away of communist parties in the region. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 2 It is to be noted that this is despite the fact that, as early as 1988, a group of translators associated with the CPI(M) had translated the first volume of Capital to Telugu and published it from Aravinda Publishers, Vijayawada. Although not officially ratified or commissioned by the party, this translation project released the first volume in March 1988, followed by the third volume in 1992 and the second volume in 1995. After the publication of the first impression of Aravinda’s Telugu translation of Volume I, the translation drew flak from all quarters as inaccurate and was universally criticized. Eventually, the publishers were forced to discontinue the publication of this translation, and all the books were removed from the racks. Even the CPI(M) party extended its patronage to the Vishalandhra publication and disassociated themselves with the Aravinda translation. Prior to the publication of the two complete translations of Capital to Telugu, there were several attempts from various Marxist intellectuals to translate different portions of the Capital as well as other communist texts about the capitalist political economy in the 1970s. Significant among these translations is a translation of a collection of articles. edited by M. Ryndina and G. Chernikov and translated to English by Diana Miller (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), iv titled, ‘The Political Economy of Capitalism’, which was translated into Telugu by Rachamallu Ramachandra Reddy (henceforth Ra Ra) as Pettubadidari Arthashashtram and published by Progress Publishers in 1978. In the 1970s, Ra Ra also translated an excerpt from Capital Volume I, which dealt with the process of primitive accumulation. Released by Progress separately as an independent book, titled Pettupadi Sanchayanam (The Primitive Accumulation of Capital), this was a rough translation of Part VIII of Capital Volume I. This section on primitive accumulation was revised and later brought into the Vishalandhra translation of Capital Volume I. DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 3 Working as official translators for the Foreign Language Press in Moscow, Ra Ra joined several others, like Giduturi Suryam, Jonnalagadda Satyanarayana Murthy, Uppala Laxmana Rao, etc., who were recruited for the same cause before him. These translators brought several creative and critical Marxist writings from English and Russian to Telugu, including The Communist Manifesto and The Wages System by Friedrich Engels. This translation project began in the 1950s and went on till the collapse of USSR. v They also translated a vast archive of English and Russian literature for children, including Capital for Beginners , authored by David Smith and Phil Evans. In Telugu, this Capital for children was edited by Chekuri Ramarao and released by Hyderabad Book Trust in 1985. vi However, none of these translations found much popularity among the struggling masses of the Telangana region or among the common Telugu speakers of Andhra. In 1995, an English daily captured this problem in a quote by a student activist, “The…translations, by Marxist ideologues, are pedantic stuff. It is difficult to read and understand them.”vii The official translation of Capital Vol.1, whose first impression was published in 1996, had released only 1000 copies in the market. Despite being ratified and patronized by the various parliamentary Left parties, the book did not undergo any reprint until 2017, when 2000 more copies were published. Given that we are dealing here with a region mired with Left struggles of different hues and shades during the intervening decades, it becomes imperative to investigate the reasons for the unpopularity of the text even among the leaders of the Left movement in Telangana. This paper attempts to chart out the language politics of the Left movement, which may have been responsible for the rejection of this iconic text in the Telangana region. The Emergence of Telugu Communists in Hyderabad DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 4 Indian national politics had not entered into the Hyderabad state in an organized fashion until 1938, as the Congress and the communist parties of India were not legally sanctioned to practice their politics in the erstwhile Nizam’s Hyderabad State. Till then, most of the activities of both the Congress and communist fractions within the political territory of Hyderabad were mostly social reformatory, related to citizenship rights and the development and flourishing of regional languages and literature, the problems of the coolie and ryots, and on questions of democratic and political rights. To realize these rights, Andhra Jana Sangham was found in 1921, which later became Andhra Mahasabha (AMS) in 1930. To understand the creation, dissemination, and reception of Marxist thought in the Telugu region, especially Telangana, we need to closely look into the language politics employed by AMS. This was an umbrella organization for both the Congress and the CPI (officially formed in 1936), with the Congress appealing to the ruling elite/landed classes and the CPI to the productive social groups, especially the peasants. Before the Telangana armed struggle actualized in the form we know it today in June 4, 1946 with the martyrdom of Doddi Komaraiah, sporadic incidents of revolts by the productive classes, comprising poor peasants, landless agrarian labourers, and artisan caste groups, against the landlords had already began in rural Telangana by 1930s. While the food crisis, a consequence of the two world wars, and famine, etc., emaciated the village populace, the vetti viii (bonded labour) and the atrocities by the landlords ignited their anger to wage their revolt against landlordism. These revolts soon attracted the educated intelligentsia (both the Andhra immigrants as well as natives) belonging to the peasant communities, who were already active in AMS under the influence and leadership of the immigrant brahminical upper castes from Andhra and their counterparts in Telangana. The entry of the peasant and artisan groups into modern DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 5 education had provided them with new knowledges of geography, history, politics and society. The knowledge of Marxism and socialist societies in the wake of the global social revolutions (French revolution, American revolution of the late 18 th century, and the contemporary Russian revolution (1917), Chinese revolution, apart from the two world wars) generated a new social consciousness that was germinal to the constitution of modern social subjectivity. The waves of the ‘spectre of communism’ had already wooed the conscience of the young urban-educated peasant groups of the early 20 th century; by 1930s, it spread across the literate and the illiterate alike, who began chanting the slogan of communism in Telangana and elsewhere. ix The Advent of ‘Capital’ in Telugu Heartland As early as late 1920s and early 1930s, these intellectuals of the Teluguland began engaging with Capital as a text. The famed Meerut Conspiracy case, which went on between 1929 and 1933, saw arrests of hundreds of youth in British India who were charged with hatching a conspiracy to overthrow British sovereignty and establish a branch of Comintern in India, with aid from the Communist International. It was in the course of the four years of the duration of the Meerut conspiracy case that a wide range of people from all walks of life, who had been introduced to socialist ideas, came together under the same roof of a prison house. One of the charges listed in the Meerut Conspiracy Case was ‘reading Karl Marx’s Das Capital ’. x The accused included not only people who had participated in the anti-colonial struggle from the Madras Presidency regions of Coastal Andhra but also those studying in educational institutions in other parts of the country, like Benaras Hindu University and Kashi Vidhyapeeth, where they were introduced to Marxism through their association with North Indian communists, and especially those from Bengal in Eastern India. These young students founded the ‘Young Communist League’ in BHU and formed the ‘Socialist Study Circle’ to read the writings of DEVULAPALLY KOTESH | 6 Marx, Engels, and Lenin.