– Gogu Shyamala
If any one were to ask themselves what it would be like for a madiga to be a creative writer in the media, the answer would be “like the journalist Nagaraju”. Endowed with the skills of an English journalist, and of a painter, an aspirant to the Indian Administrative Services, the multi-talented Koppula Nagaraju’s life provided the youth of all social castes and classes, and especially those of the dalit/madiga and kin communities with many insights and examples.
Everybody knew that Nagaraju was about to die. An emaciated dark skeleton on the bed, he would greet all who went to meet him heartily and had endless conversations with them. He would advise those yo
unger, speak to journalists about stories, and to painters about painting. With the sharing of the doctor’s prognosis among well-wishers through social media like Whatsapp, almost everybody knew of the impending tragedy, but no one was willing to confront or accept its reality. Nagaraju’s friends, mainly journalists and scholars were trying various ways to assist with his treatment. As part of this they wanted the Telangana government to take care of expenses towards better treatment. Even as some of these efforts succeeded, Nagaraju died on the morning of 12th April 2015.
When he finally breathed his last, those around him felt, as I did, not pity that he passed away, but grief at the loss of a great journalist, painter, dreamer and scholar.
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Nagaraju was born in Sarapaka village, in the Bhadrachalam mandal of the Khammam district on 25th May 1980, to a madiga couple. His parents worked as agricultural wage labourers, and because of the shortage of work, also worked at a paper mill six kilometers away. His mother was pregnant with Nagaraju when she worked at the mill. She laboured right until the time of delivery. It thus seems as if Nagaraju learned about hard labour from within his mother’s womb. Nagaraju’s father died when he was four, leaving his wife with the burden of bringing up four children. By the time he was five or six, Nagaraju would go to school slate and chalk in hand, and after school sell ice-creams. His mother remembers that he paid all his expenses with money earned that way. As his expenses grew with his moving to the higher standards in school, he met these by painting signs, and images of cine stars and social reformers for shops. He had learned to paint from the time he began school. We may notice signs and hoardings signed by Nagaraju in and around Bhadrachalam town and Sarapaka village.
He joined the MA history programme at the University of Hyderabad after finishing school at Sarapaka. He then acquired a journalism diploma in Chennai and went to Delhi on a Tehelka Fellowship. After this he began working in the New Indian Express as a journalist.
Nagaraju was deeply interested in journalism, and had many dreams about his work in English media. He said on one occasion that he would write stories the like of which had never been seen. We can understand the depth of his imagination about the media and the strength of his heart from this comment. As part of this effort, he wrote many stories and special articles for the New Indian Express. He wrote about the experiences, suffering and oppression of those who laboured endlessly; their thoughts and desires for social justice. He would travel hundreds of kilometers through towns and wilderness, in trains, buses and on foot to research his stories. His eyewitness style of writing made his essays irrefutable proofs of the truth of the situation. These stories brought a plurality to the vision of the newspaper.
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In the public meetings held to mourn his death, and in the ensuing protests and demands, some issues and questions came to the fore in common thinking.
Dalits who come from the bottom rung of society suffer poverty, endure bondage, have been targets of bodily and mental exploitation, and are left behind with no growth of wealth, education or health. Nagaraju the Learned (as we may title him) was different from this. How his mind gained access to the secrets of the knowledge of education we do not know, but we do know that however many obstacles he faced, he never lost grip on education and more, on higher education. One way to put this would be to say that rather than study to live, he lived to study. That is why, being a painter and journalist, he decided on the IAS as a career goal. If he were a person who simply studied that he may survive, he may have survived either with his sale of ice creams, or with his earnings as a hoarding painter, or as many a wage labourer and dalit have done. However Nagaraju, never descended to the limited passivity of ‘money security’ and immediate well being; instead he always demonstrated a deep desire to keep moving towards a future of higher education. Nagaraju would leave behind money and wealth without hesitation, but in keeping with Ambedkar’s teaching, never missed an opportunity for higher education. This character which marked Nagaraju was something I and many around me loved. Several scholars felt deeply that this goal-drivenness should not end with Nagaraju’s life, but should be disseminated to youth in general and the bahujan youth in particular.
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There are some saddening and regrettable aspects of Nagaraju’s health, which I would like to share with you here. The Mala/Madiga kin communities and bahujans keep society working through their labour and service. However when they fall ill, neither government, nor private institutions seem to provide an adequate return to them. Not only this, these individuals from oppressed communities seem to lack the consciousness to draw on the state and other institutions for these services. If we look at Nagaraju’s health, we see that he was unable to notice the changes in his body. Even if he noticed these changes, we see no sign that he would have consulted a proper doctor or have taken a second opinion in order to diagnose his disease (even though he had the capability to do so). Nor did the doctor he consulted, as the disease progressed, diagnose his disease correctly. Once when he was travelling to Sarapaka he suffered unbearable pain in his chest and got off the bus at Suryapet. The doctor advised a chest X-ray and sputum test. He was then advised to go the TB hospital in Erragadda. There he was prescribed TB medication, even though his sputum test was negative and the chest X-ray was illegibly dark. He later said that even though it was extremely difficult and painful, he followed the regimen for five to six months. When the disease did not respond, he finally went to a cancer specialty hospital. By then the cancer had reached the fourth stage. In the end, Nagaraju did not survive any measures to keep him alive. I feel, had he received a proper diagnosis earlier, he could have been treated more successfully and survived a little longer.
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The media too, was both indifferent and discriminatory towards Nagaraju as evident in two actions. One, the Resident Editor of New Indian Express did not grant him leave to take care of his illness. Two, when he was unable to go to work, the paper removed his name from the rolls. Nagaraju was deeply depressed when he heard of this. It is certain that the newspaper did not take care of Nagaraju as a journalist who was one of their own when he was seriously ill. In addition, the Dalit journalists’ accusation that the newspaper had been indifferent and discriminatory to Nagaraju because he was a Dalit is also inescapable.
His greatness was that his stories brought strength and a wider perspective to the newspaper, but the ownership of the press, had acted towards Nagaraju as if it had lost its progressive orientation and had fallen back onto an outdated dominating mindset. There is nowhere in evidence a consciousness that a person/journalist/creative journalist in their staff has to be given some importance. It is likely that those who see Brahminical hegemony, which perpetually seeks an ideological stranglehold on society through its caste practices and is extending its grip on the media, will not expect that the paper will take responsibility, assist or take care of him. However, the actual question is what the rights given by the Constitution to the journalist worker Koppula Nagaraju are. A further question is how can a modern news paper like the New Indian Express fall back on medieval Manuvada practices? The effort to rescue those like Nagaraju from chaotic and insecure situations like the one he was in should have been conducted as a struggle. In this struggle, confronting and surmounting the paper’s capitalist, landlord, Manuvada hegemony is inescapable. It is also an absolute necessity that we see clearly that Dalit rights are human rights.
If the journalists who are emerging from the new generation of Dalits should not be lost as Nagaraju has been, we must learn from his experience and establish mechanisms at different levels in the community, professional bodies and society that help them surmount economic and health problems and those such as discrimination and indifference.
Gogu Shyamala is a fellow at Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Hyderabad
gogushyamala@gmail.com
Translated from telugu by R. Srivatsan