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Articles: Literature | A Man of No Consequence
- Dr. Rajeshwar Mittapalli
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Early enough in the novel, Ra.Vi.Sastri tells us about a couple of traumatic experiences that Subbaiah had gone through during his childhood. (1) Subbaiah’s mother passed away when he was a mere toddler. His father married again five years later. His stepmother was an uncouth woman and she used to beat him everyday. Luckily for Subbaiah this woman eloped with a neighbourhood gentleman within a year. (2) When Subbaiah was ten years old his father was attacked and savagely beaten by two unknown assailants. It has been suggested that these two incidents—the cruelty of his stepmother and the physical assault on his beloved father—are responsible for the sprouting and persistence of inferiority complex in Subbaiah. But there could be a host of other reasons as well.
One of them seems to be the unequal power relations obtaining within the families of coastal Andhra Pradesh. In this region of Andhra Pradesh, possibly because of excessive feminization of society, especially among certain upper castes, women tend to be in command of family affairs, while men often play a subordinate role. Some of the important fictional works of the era, the ones that sought to depict social reality frankly and honestly and not advocate the so-called ‘women are the victims’ theory for the sake of being politically correct, bear out this truth beyond doubt.
The women of these novels, who clearly lack in social concern and are openly money minded on top of it, often compel their men to sacrifice their individuality and that way prevent them from realising their potential as human beings and from fulfilling their social and moral obligations. In G.V. Krishna Rao’s Keelu Bommalu (Puppets), for example, the wealthy and well-respected village landlord Pullayya suffers a moral downfall unable to contend with his cantankerous wife Lakshmamma. Full twenty years later the situation did not change for the better for men. Thus in Vasireddy Sitadevi’s Matti Manishi (The Man of Soil) the manipulative and ambitious heroine, Varudhini, makes a virtual slave of her husband Venkatapathy by putting her considerable physical charms to good use, and renders her father-in-law Ooraboyina Sambaiah a pauper by appropriating his money and then investing it on highly risky ventures.
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