Bookmarked with R. Sivapriya: Kondapolam by Sannapureddy Venkatarami Reddy

Five years ago, in August 2021, I got a message from Narasimha Kumar, a former classmate from my MA programme at the University of Hyderabad. He had translated a Telugu novel, Kondapolam, and asked me to connect him to a publisher. The working title was The Hill Farm. I had just come back to publishing, my second innings, and didn’t have plans to publish many or even any translations. Yet, it was clear from Kumar’s proposal that there was something special about the novel. The pitch that helped me carry it through acquisitions was that an engineer goes sheep-herding, encounters a tiger and becomes a man. But really, it is the world he moves through and the thick detail of it wherein lies the magic. 

Sannapureddy Venkatarami Reddy, who wrote Kondapolam, taught biology in a government high school in a village at the foothills of the Nallamala ranges in Andhra Pradesh. And his novel is about a group of gollas (shepherds) taking their starving sheep to graze in the hills while waiting for rain to fall on the plains. It is a deeply observed narrative — we pass each day, each night with the gollas and their sheep in the forests they traverse. We hear pythons whistling, we drink from water holes and are alerted to dangers from birdsong, we rest under canopies and calculate provisions, we are stalked by tigers, we get to know of grass sweetest to sheep: 

They walked through a grove of yepe trees, the lush green leaves of which formed a canopy over the trail. The recent rains had changed the shoots on the tree branches into leaves. The red polika and white polika trees too sported green leaves. While the shoots and buds were just about making an appearance on some of the trees, their branches and twigs still looked like dry sticks. The birds perched on those trees were like unripe fruit that never fell down.

The rains had washed away some of the ashes of the burnt grass, but not all. The ripe leaves that fell off the trees covered the remaining soot. From between the leaves, one could see grass shoots popping out like thin green tongues. It was nature in its varied hues and forms. 

With the various small bushes and dry grass fields having burned down during the harsh summer, only the trees were left standing around proudly. The forest land looked strangely empty at places. The stones bore the marks of the forest fires, as did the tree trunks. It seemed like it was the job of the green grass shoots to cover up the black burn marks and make the forest floor look more presentable until the heavy rains came down and washed it all away.

The yepe did not bother itself with all these changes and bloomed well before the other trees. It grew as tall as twenty-five metres, and in full bloom, they made one wonder if the green of the grass had been absorbed by the tree and made its way to the top, greening the leaves on the few drooping branches.

It ought to be tedious, this level of detail, but the novel has your complete attention, and you don’t want to exit. The Hill Farm was published as Tiger Lessons in 2025, and in the process transformed my understanding of landscape. Of how the land and its denizens shape each other continuously at every level, from the grass and the ant to the forest and the river. And that humans too are tightly woven into the terrain. 

The truest pleasure of translated fiction is the gift of new visions and new worlds. Many readers (and I) would not have ever encountered Nallamala in such an unforgettable manner without the genius of Venkatarami Reddy. However, I always feel curious about the original, especially the sound of it, if the translation is from an Indian language. How does Kondapolam sound? Its precise descriptions, the brotherhood of humans and animals, the beautiful spirit of the novel, the author’s compassionate vision of the world — all of it in the musicality inherent to Telugu. This unattainable longing is also part of the joy of reading a translation.