The South Asia Center recently sat down with Sravanthi Kollu, who recently joined the Department of Asian Languages and Literature as UW’s first-ever Assistant Professor of Telugu, to learn more about her scholarship and teaching interests.
SAC: To begin with, we are eager to know what inspired you to choose the fields of literary history, postcolonial South Asian poetry and critical caste studies.
SK: I wrote an MPhil dissertation on Dalit and non-Dalit feminist movements in the Telugu speaking regions. When I was conducting research for that dissertation, my MPhil advisor and some of the people I was interviewing introduced me to a landmark anthology of Telugu feminist poetry called Nīlimēghālu (Blue Clouds). I was not familiar with Telugu poetry back then and I could barely comprehend the poems, but I was struck by the force of what I was hearing, this curious mixture of speech and slang that the poets used to critique gender hierarchies. My doctoral dissertation focused on language debates in colonial South India, particularly on Dalit critiques of language reform movements. The passionate debates from that time (1910s-1940s) on common language, and on whether a language can be held in common, similarly stayed with me long after I submitted the dissertation. My current research is truly an attempt to bring these two experiences together and to examine the important connections between speech, poetry and politics.
SAC: Could you give us a brief overview of your current book project, On Common Speech and Late Colonial Romanticisms?
SK: Romanticism was an incredibly important literary movement in colonial India across different languages. In a brief span of time, roughly from the 1920s to the 1940s, Indian romanticisms in these languages altered how poetry was written and written about. But, we have a restricted understanding of this movement because romanticism has not been studied comparatively across these languages, and because the focus in studies of romanticism has largely been on elite literary production. My book studies romanticisms across Telugu, Hindi, and Kannada to show that though these writers were part of very distinct linguistic-literary traditions, we can trace the evolution of shared vocabularies and ideas in their writings. I also place Telugu Dalit romantic poetry at the center of the book. Dalit poets such as Gurram Jashuva (1895-1971) were drawn to romanticism, but especially in Jashuva’s poetry we see him writing metered verses in a very poetic diction, a style we associate with neoclassicism rather than romanticism. This poses an important challenge to how we conceptualize romanticism and its legacies and this is what I elaborate on in the book.
SAC: What sparked your interest in studying Telugu vernacular literary and social movement texts?
SK: My introduction to Telugu literature as a student was through contemporary Dalit writing. It is an unusual entrypoint, because I did not read the Telugu literary canon till a few years later. I also knew more about Kannada literature than Telugu literature when I began the research for my M.Phil. degree, having studied Kannada in school. But, the writing I encountered spoke to contemporary debates in the Indian academy, on caste and social privilege, on caste within academic spaces and on the frameworks we have to study caste. Though my entry into Telugu was driven by these personal circumstances, I was reading Telugu authors in translation as part of my coursework for the M.A. degree in a city (Bangalore) where Telugu was not the first language. This is indicative of how central Telugu writers have been to contemporary Dalit literary and social movements.
When you read these texts, some of which are collated in Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayana’s Steel Nibs are Sprouting: New Dalit Writing from South India, the question of language comes up repeatedly. In my long years of postgraduate training, I simply followed these threads all the way back to colonial era language debates and some of the binaries that were established then which Telugu writers and those in the diaspora continue to use, for instance speech and writing, vulgar and ordinary language. I was part of a group of Telugu speakers who were involved with the first Letters for Black Lives initiative and I was struck by someone’s use of the word ‘granthikam‘ (‘bookish’ in colloquial usage) to describe the language we defaulted to in the first letter. This word was at the heart of the Telugu language reform movement in the 1920s and the fact that it resonated within disaporic conversations about language and race was incredibly fascinating. The social valences these words acquired in the 1920s clearly had continued relevance, outside the Telugu speaking states in India, and these ongoing overlaps is why it is so important to return to the language debates.
SAC: Could you tell us more about your work in community psychoanalysis?
SK: I am part of the Community Psychoanalysis Concentration at Boston Psychoanalytical Society and Institute, alongside therapists, social workers and other academics, and it has been a fantastic experience. The cohort is part of an initiative to rethink psychoanalysis through its more radical histories, for instance, through the free psychoanalytic clinics established in 1918. We began with reading Russell Jacoby’s The Repression of Psychoanalysis, which introduced me to a history I was unaware of within psychoanalysis. We read this alongside some established figures who have explicitly worked through the intersection of the psychic, the structural and the social, such as Frantz Fanon. Much of our work in the group has been about re-thinking psychoanalytic practice, given the number of my fellows who are practitioners and this has meant debating what the limits of a dyadic psychoanalysis are. While this is not yet tied to my current research, it has been a fantastic opportunity to return to questions that I would like to pursue further, particularly around desire, social justice and caste and gender, and ultimately about language. It has also helped me think more deeply about my work as a teacher, about what it means to create more equitable classrooms that do not disproportionately reward students who can enact the kinds of learning behaviors we are used to, speaking up in class for instance, or turning up to office hours and at extra learning opportunities. At a time when the word ‘community’ has become ubiquitous, working within this group has helped re-establish how violent communities can and, historically, have been. It has also helped draw my attention more and more to group behavior and to the social unconscious, something that is difficult to access as literary scholars unlike perhaps in the consulting room, but it is absolutely essential to how we exist.
SAC: What learning outcomes do you aim for students to achieve by the end of your classes?
SK: I want my students to leave with a sense of familiarity with and love for the diversity of literary traditions in South Asia. All my courses include major South Indian writers; by virtue of my training and my research I do not limit South Asian literature to those written in Hindi and Urdu. But I also want to explore with my students what it means to center South Indian texts and authors – how does it change our received understanding of South Asia or of literature? I do not presume that we know the answers to this question already.
My courses also, usually, include a non-traditional writing component, which both my students and I truly enjoy. In the winter quarter I’ll offer a course on language politics in South Asia that includes a translation assignment that students will work on through the quarter. They do not have to work with a written text, or even with a different language, they can translate from what we think of as ‘dialectal’ English to ‘standard’ English. Doing the translation and reflecting on it has helped my students bring artistic and audio-visual competencies into the classroom and it has helped them pay attention to the capacious ways in which they use and relate to language, and some of the hierarchies we default to, between dialect and standard language for instance.
SAC: We like to ask our faculty members about their transitions; how has moving to Seattle been for you? Is there any particular aspect of the city that impressed you, or are you looking forward to exploring?
Seattle weather reminds me of the weather in Bangalore, where I grew up. This makes the city feel very inviting to me. I’m also looking forward to exploring the coastline in and around Seattle. Access to these many waterbodies, with their different ecosystems, is fascinating. My toddler would love the parks too, and I’m looking forward to discovering the city with her later this year.