This is in addition to a separate Hyderabad reading list, though there is some crossover in subject matter. This is more of a reading list for myself, as I haven’t read much, though I haven't found much to read either. I haven’t explored undivided Andhra yet, having only visited Hyderabad, so I focused my reading on the city. I do have some recommendations from things I’ve read over the years, though, and I dabbled a bit into Telugu fiction on my trip.
Telugu is the 14th or 17th most spoken language in the world (depending on which Wikipedia page I’m looking at) with 96 million speakers. For most of the 2010s it was the fastest growing language in the United States (not sure if that’s still true). “56% of all Indian student visas issued by the US in 2023 are from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.” On top of that, there’s a Chilukuri moving into the White House. Most important of all, it's the language of Rajamouli, so it seems worthwhile to learn more about the region and engage with its history and culture, which I hope to do more in the future. I also have posts on Telugu film and music.
Non-fiction first, then fiction.
Non-Fiction
Nearly all of the good looking non-fiction books I found to read about undivided Andhra are about the film industry, but that probably says more about my interests than what’s actually out there. I’m curious to read one of the NTR biographies. Type “NTR biography” into Amazon and you’ll find a few, I haven’t researched them and have no idea which are worthwhile.
The one outstanding thing I’ve read about the Telugu film industry is this very long piece titled Tollywood’s Kingmakers by Rohitha Naraharisetty & Divya Kandukuri, about the NTR and Chiranjeevi families, fan bases, caste, rivalries, politics, and more. I think it’s probably interesting even if you don’t know who or what they are talking about, but I can’t confirm that. I’m part of what is likely the target audience of people with an interest in but little knowledge of the topic. There’s a ton of fascinating information in here, and I’m not sure where else I could go to find it.
Politics as Performance: A Social History of Telugu Cinema by S.V. Srinivas perhaps covers similar material, I will read that one day. A more lighthearted looking take on the topic may be The Age of Heroes: The Incredible World of Telugu Cinema by Mukesh Manjunath.
Beyond the very important topic of the incredible world of Telugu cinema, I’ve got a few great longreads on Andhra for you.
First up is the fitytwo.in piece Smashed by Namrata Kolachalam, about “How Prohibition came to Andhra Pradesh, and how it’s going.” I should disclose that I’m friends with the writer (who has many other great pieces about India, too), but I don’t think I’m at all biased in saying that it’s an excellent read, full of interesting stories and details while giving you a great overview of the topic. I wasn’t aware that prohibition has often been a grassroots movement led by women against their deadbeat, abusive lesser halves:
“From 1920s America to present-day India, women have been a driving collective force in prohibition movements. In 2019, anti-liquor activists from the Karnataka Madya Nishedha Andolana marched over 400km from North Karnataka to Bengaluru. In Bihar, the women’s anti-liquor movement influenced the results of the 2015 state elections. Women form the backbone of anti-liquor protests in rural Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. The protests have typically been grounded in equal parts hope and desperation—a sense that if alcohol were gone from the home, maybe domestic violence and the worst kinds of poverty might depart too.”
And what's the point of reading about 20th century Andhra Pradesh if we don't get some NTR stories?
"Andhra Pradesh’s liquor barons were already a powerful lot by the mid-1980s, when a charismatic film actor named Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, founder of the new Telugu Desam Party, was elected chief minister. NTR’s government encouraged alcohol production and consumption under a programme called Varuna Vahini, which translates to ‘flood of liquor.’ Arrack came to be available in small plastic sachets, rather than inconvenient bottles and pots. It was home-delivered. Labourers were even paid in tokens that could be exchanged for these sachets. In the decade leading up to 1991, tax revenue from arrack increased four-fold, from ₹150 crore to ₹630 crore. Andhra Pradesh topped the country in arrack consumption.
Then came the women’s movement. The Andhra government responded to its demands and officially banned arrack sales in 1993. But protests continued, because palm wine––kallu, or toddy––and Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), [3] had replaced arrack in the lives of the menfolk. NTR was out of power by this time. Ever the political opportunist, he promised a complete prohibition if he was voted back in the 1994 assembly elections. He won and delivered on his promise. His victory was short-lived. In 1995, his son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu led a party revolt and ousted NTR. Two years later, Chief Minister Naidu lifted the ban. The state was losing revenue, he said, and bootlegging was on the rise."
Read the whole thing! I'm against alcohol but I want to open a bar called Varuna Vahini, I can't believe nobody has done that yet.
I also recommend reading about Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh (the former capital, Hyderabad, went to Telangana after the state split in 2014). A gleaming, futuristic city is envisioned, you can see concept art here (note that the architecture firm sued the city over non-payment for their work, not that surprising for anyone who has done business in India).
There was a great read about Amaravati called Urban Dreams by Rollo Romig (another writer who has a terrific catalogue of India longreads). It’s from 2017, so it theoretically needs an update, but it turns out nothing has really happened since then. I remember reading it when it came out, being excited by what must be India’s most ambitious urban project, and then googling it every six months to discover that no progress has been made. Progress on the city, which is the grand dream project of chief minister Chandrababu Naidu who transformed Hyderabad, stalled when he was booted out of office in 2019, but he was voted back in power in 2024 and the grand city of Amaravati is back on track, or so they say. I want to believe.
I’ve yet to learn much of anything about the history of the Telugu people or the various Telugu empires other than Vijayanagara (see my Hampi post for numerous recommendations there), and I don’t know where to begin. I only ever spot massive multi-volume tomes meant for people who are more serious about the topic than me. Wikipedia has served me well so far, though: “After the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire, various Telugu rulers called Nayakas established independent kingdoms across South India serving the same function as Rajput warriors clans of northern India. Kandyan Nayaks, the last dynasty to rule Sri Lanka were of Telugu descent. In this era, Telugu became the language of high culture throughout South India. Vijaya Ramaswamy compared it to the overwhelming dominance of French as the cultural language of modern Europe during roughly the same era.”
Telugu Fiction
This section isn’t very good, I admit, but it should still be helpful to people looking to read Telugu fiction translated into English. Hopefully one day I’ll update this with more recommendations, especially as more translations come out.
As of writing this, there has not been much Telugu fiction that has been translated into English, especially when compared to other widely spoken Indian languages, and honestly most of what has been translated doesn’t really call to me. Short story collections dominate, and though I’m not the biggest fan of short stories and prefer to read novels, I couldn’t find any Telugu novels that excited me.
I narrowed my choices down to The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told, which collects short stories that span roughly a century (this is part of a series by Aleph that covers numerous Indian languages, I’ve sampled the Bengali and Marathi collections and found them to be good), and Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, which sticks to modern stories, the earliest being from 1997, but most are from the 2010s (part of a new series of modern stories by Harper Perennial, I believe just this and an Urdu collection have been published so far).
Since I have mostly read classic short story collections in India, I thought I’d switch it up and go with the latter, The Best Stories of Our Times, which is edited by Volga who appears to be the biggest name in contemporary Telugu literature. I honestly regret this decision and wish I went with the classics collection, but I quite liked some of what I read in here. I read the first 10 or so of the 26 stories in it, and I jumped toward the end of the book to read Volga’s story. It’s a mixed bag, as perhaps most collections are. Some stories are quite dull, and none really knocked me out, but I found many to be reasonably interesting and enjoyable, so it’s worth checking out for those who want to read something translated from Telugu and would prefer stories set in the modern world as opposed to the classics.
If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Bottu Feasts by Manasa Yendluri, about a Christian woman who joins a new school as a teacher. A quick read, entertaining, and it touches on societal ills while also having a sense of humor, which I’m not sure I could say about any of the others. Some other standouts were On a Friday Night by Peddinti Ashok Kumar, about migrant laborers in the gulf, and Water and Fish by Karuna, about communist guerillas, both stories surprisingly compelling and suspenseful given their short lengths. I also really liked Yours, Swarna by P. Sathyavathi, a slice of life look at a girl who works in a clothing store. The Volga story, Sorry Jaffer, and Get Published by Mohammed Khadeer Babu are both about the plight of Muslims in India today, and both were good (especially Sorry Jaffer, one of the best I read in the collection). However, I found both to be somewhat heavy handed in a way that distracted from the story itself.
That gets at an issue I had with the collection as a whole, which is that it seems entirely uninterested in stories that aren’t about discrimination and poverty. I don’t have an issue with any of these stories being in here (even the boring ones, maybe someone else will get more out of them), but I find the single minded focus in the selection of stories to be limiting. There’s a place for it, and if you want to publish The Telugu Oppression Collection or whatever, go right ahead, but I feel this was the wrong approach for a book whose intention is to showcase a major language’s best contemporary short fiction. I’ve already said I’m not the biggest short story fan, but I’ve read numerous short stories in Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Urdu, and Gujarati (and hopefully stories in more Indian languages soon!) that left me thinking “How delightful, creative, witty, clever, charming, interesting, unique, etc”, or stories that made me say “what a sharp character portrait”, or stories that felt as complete as a full novel, all of which builds to a portrait of a rich literary scene out there. I hardly got any of that here.
Maybe that is partly because of the Telugu literary landscape, which may just not be as good as the languages I’m comparing it to. Still, the editorial direction is clear. The three page intro by Volga begins with two quotes, one from 1935 and another from 1956, by a famous Telugu writer lamenting that Telugu short stories only focus on Brahmin households, youth that have passed BA, and love stories, ignoring the issues of the lower classes. A totally valid complaint, and Volga follows it by talking about how the Telugu short story came of age in the 1990s with a wide range of diverse storytellers. Good to know! But then, in this very limited amount of space to introduce readers to modern Telugu literature, she feels the need to inform us about how in the 1990s, “Economic liberalization and technological advancement spurred on religious sentiments. They increased caste violence. They increased violence on women. Market forces conquered human relationships and destroyed them. With crises in the agricultural sector, farmers’ suicides became commonplace. With increased migration, poverty, insecurity, and violence surrounding it increased. Rural populations depending on handicrafts lost hope.”
I was all ready to shout at Volga “Hey, this is library!” but thankfully she let us know that “Telugu short stories recorded these conditions and history. Perhaps politicians and historians may be provoked to contest and distort these conditions to make this appear as a golden period! [Sam interrupts: And annoying travel bloggers like me, too. Who wants to posit that it was the prosperity of this period that prompted such a literary flourishing?] But the Telugu short story will remain a truthful representation of the living conditions and the distress of the time.” Okay, so even if one differs with her perspective on the big picture, we can still find value in the individual stories collected in this book. And I did! But I wish I were reading a short story collection that was more focused on showcasing a diverse array of literary talent than a narrow range of literary activism. After a handful of stories I found myself wanting to read a romance about Brahmin youth who passed BA.
I am ranting much more than I ever want to rant on this blog. Anyone who knows me in real life knows I can rant all day about anything and everything, I am RantGPT, but I really want this to be a space that is only focused on cool stuff I like and is less whiny and catty than most of the internet. Sometimes I gotta rant though. I want to be clear that I did really like a handful of stories from this collection, and there was a good diversity of stories despite them all being depressing. I intend to keep reading from this collection on trips to the Telugu speaking lands of Andhra, Telangana, and Texas in the future. I will also read more from this series of translated modern short stories (based on the intro, the Urdu book seems better), and I will likely read more from Volga, even though...
But oh my goodness what an ego she has. I couldn’t not mention this. See this part of the intro, discussing the huge challenge of narrowing down stories for this collection: “Because I hold the uncanny ability to overcome even the most difficult of situations, I reached the shore holding on to the twenty-six stories. I know I have to endure the critical gaze of my contemporary writers, young writers, and critics. [Sam interrupts again: And annoying travel bloggers.] It has been my habit to put up with such things for almost forty years now. So I was able to take up this dare-devil act of courage.”
This is satire, right? How did this get published?
Okay I’m moving on.
I saw a few novels and short story collections that explicitly state in their descriptions that their goal is to highlight caste/gender oppression. I’m down to read some one day, but without a strong personal recommendation or great reviews I’m not going to prioritize it. Most of the books I saw I could hardly find reviews for.
I wish some of these collections would try a little harder to get my attention. Do you want people to buy your book or not? I do plan to at least read the title story from “How Are You Veg?”, that caught my attention, and the cover is kind of fun. I appreciate that basic showmanship. But the short story collection “Here I Am,” like, are they even trying? (And I quite liked that writer’s story in the collection I read, discussed earlier). Same with the collection The Rock That Was Not. The title story is about breast implants. Why not call it “The Rock That Was Not, AKA Breast Implants”? And what is that cover? It would not be appropriate in this family friendly blog to share the image or even the description of what I had Dall-E make based on the title and content, but it was awesome and would certainly have at least 10x’d their sales, and I don’t think it would have prompted any death threats or FIRs. I realize that publishers of feminist literature might have different ideas than I do about how to sell books, both in terms of marketing and ethics, but still.
(By the way, I read the title story about the not-rocks in the Kindle sample and liked it. I’m not sure if it’s just the novelty of reading a story about breast implants, and if the appeal would wear off over time. I also suspect the rest of the stories in the collection won’t be as fun. Kudos to them for putting this as the first story, though. They at least got that right.)
I would like to highlight regional fiction from different parts of the country, but it’d help if the publishers would put a little effort in. It need not even be titillating. Who are these covers for? They’re so bargain bin looking, the sort of thing you’d only read in a village with no internet connection and no other books. It’s the 21st century and Rajamouli is a household name in world cinema. Come on, people. There’s a Tamil Dalit feminist writer whose covers would totally appeal to someone who wants everybody to know through their choice of books that they are smarter, more sophisticated, more artistic, and a better person than everybody else. Let’s get some of that energy injected into Telugu literature!
Okay enough ranting.
As mentioned above, the biggest name in contemporary Telugu literature that’s been translated seems to be Volga, whose books Liberation of Sita and Yashodhara are feminist retellings of the Ramayana, focusing on Sita, and the story of Buddha, focusing on his wife Yashodhara. These aren’t the sort of thing I was looking for while I was in Hyderabad, but I think they’re supposed to be good and I’ll check them out one day. And I'm happy to report they have real covers. I’ll keep an eye out for more from Volga in the future, and as I stated earlier I thought her story in the collection I read was very good, despite some issues I had with it.
Somewhat more interesting to me are some 20th century classics that have been translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, who I must note looks kinda like Groucho Marx without the eyebrows. They did a pair of novellas Haha Huhu & Vishnu Sarma by Viswanatha Satyanarayana, apparently a big name in 20th century Telugu literature. The stories didn’t seem that exciting to me, but I’m totally fascinated by the author who “[wrote] novels by the dozen, often dictating several novels the same day to scribes who worked in shifts […] no one edited his work, and apparently no one proofread it either.” He was also a very divisive figure. “He was too modern to be outdated and too outdated to be modern. He was everywhere – as a writer, critic, public intellectual and a formidable opponent of everything the new middle class stood for. For about half a century, he walked the Telugu literary scene like a four-hundred-pound gorilla in the living room who could not be ignored.” These quotes come from the intro, which I would love to read, as quoted in Jai Arjun Singh’s writeup on the book. He seemed to like it, though doesn’t give much of his opinion.
The Narayana Rao/Groucho duo also translated the collection Doll's Wedding & Other Stories by Chaso, who is apparently a big name. I really liked the first story (available in the Kindle preview), it was like a PG-13 RK Narayan story, and it takes place on a train, nothing hits me to my core like Indian Railways set stories. I expect to get this on future trips to the region. Jai Arjun Singh also liked this one.
They have also translated a number of medieval books, plays, and poems, some of it from the Vijayanagara court. These would likely bore me, but it is great to see these translations being made. Titles include The Demon’s Daughter, The Sound of the Kiss, or The Story That Must Never Be Told, When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others, A Lover's Guide to Warangal. Narayana Rao alone translated the colonial era play Girls for Sale and co-translated Theft of a Tree, and “legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband’s affections.” One can also read Krishndevaraya’s own classic Amuktamalyada (translated by the guy who wrote a good Krishnadevaraya biography, see my Hampi post for more info). And lots of translated Telugu poetry. These all may be boring as hell to the average person, but I like that they have titles and covers that at least try to get people’s attention, and that can make one look cultured and interesting when reading them in public, unlike some other translated books. Too bad they aren’t for rubes like me, but I would love to watch the movie versions, or read an Amar Chitra Katha version or something.
(Serious question, why is nearly all of the medieval Telugu literature that’s been translated of an erotic nature? Are the translators just perverts? (Groucho, your mustache isn't helping your case.) Is it demand driven and that’s all they get funding for? Is it supply driven, and all of the non-erotic Telugu literature has been lost to time while various historical perverts have preserved these for the benefit of future generations or just their own perusal? Or are there many non-erotic works that have been translated but I only noticed these because it turns out I am the pervert in this equation?)
One last Telugu book I would love to and very much plan to read is Forests, Blood, and Survival: Life and Times of Komuram Bheem. The real life Komuram Bheem! Only 80 pages, and a cool cover. I don’t know much about it and can’t find a preview, but the blurb on the back calls it historical fiction that mixes “ballad, myth, and storytelling.” I’m not expecting it to be as eventful as RRR, but I’m looking forward to it. There are some other interesting looking books from the publisher, unfortunately their website is terrible and it’s difficult to search by language, and most of the books are actually in Telugu. In English I spotted some Dalit folklore and oral history and north-coastal Andhra short stories.
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