In the poem ‘Water’, the speaker recalls the ‘role’ played by water as an agent of social change. Incidentally, she uses the context of the poem to highlight the travails and tribulations suffered by the people in wadas, with particular reference to the practice of untouchability in Andhra Pradesh in the pre- and postindependence periods.
It is an age-old practice that the Dalits or the untouchables live in separate colonies situated farther away from other communities and are called ‘wadas’. Whenever the Dalits needed water they used to wait near the pond or tank until a shudra came there and gave them some water. This caused a great deal of humiliation, pain, suffering and anguish to the Dalits.
The speaker describes how an upper caste person poured water from a distance at a higher level into the *** of a wada girl at a lower level and how some water would fall on her body making her feel humiliated.
The writer also narrates a heinous incident that happened in Madigapalle in Karamchedu. It so happened that a Dalit boy tried to prevent two upper castes (Kamma) youths from washing their buckets in their drinking water pond. The two upper caste youths tried to the boy but a Dalit woman by name Suvartamma came to the boy’ defence lifting her vessel to ward their ***. Enraged by this protest by a Dalit woman, the Kamma landlords attacked the Dalit colony.
The speaker recalls how her wada people would thirst all day for a glass of water and narrates how people in wadas eagerly look forward to their weekly bathing day as if it was a wondrous festival while the people in the entire village bathed luxuriously twice a day. She also recalls painfully, how in her childhood she used to walk miles and miles to collect water from the big canal and carry back home heavy pots balanced on her head, with the muscles and veins on her necks straining and bursting. Finally, the speaker mentions how several thatched huts in Malapalle (a Dalit colony) were reduced to ashes for want of a of water to douse the *.
