Verse, ablaze

Varavara Rao: A Life in Poetry is a collection of poems in English by the Telugu poet and activist, edited by Meena Kandasamy and N. Venugopal. Below, an excerpt from Kandasamy's introduction

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH VARAVARA RAO

My first memory of encountering the name 'Varavara Rao' was in the newspapers. This was in the early 2000s, when warring guerrilla groups came to peace-talks tables. As a young Tamil woman, I consistently followed the Norway-brokered talks between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Government of Sri Lanka. Likewise, I was fascinated by what was happening on home ground: the talks between People's War and the Indian government. Perhaps because of the way in which the print media at that time both valorised and demonised the guerrilla fighters, I was fascinated that three people had dared to be emissaries between the governments and the fighters. One of the interlocutors was Varavara Rao, the other two were Gaddar and Kalyan Rao. Growing up in a household without television, I would wake up every morning and read about the progress in these talks as if it were a serialised novel. (Both talks ended in failure; in both cases the state used the ruse of the talks to go on a spate of naked aggression.) To my younger self, being an interlocutor seemed like an act of absolute courage and immense responsibility. At that time, little would I have imagined that one day in my life, I would get the opportunity to work with the poetry of this fierce, larger-than-life poet.