Vyankatesh Madgulkar facts for kids

Vyankatesh Madgulkar (born in 1927, died in 2001) was a very popular and famous Marathi writer. He was best known for his true-to-life stories about village life in a part of southern Maharashtra called Maandesh. His stories about Maandesh describe life around the time India became independent.

Vyankatesh Madgulkar loved many different things and read a lot of books. His friends and family lovingly called him Tatya, which means "grand old man" in Marathi.

Early Life

Vyankatesh Madgulkar was born in a village called Madgul, located in the Sangli district of Maharashtra. His family, the Madgulkars, likely came from the nearby state of Karnataka many years ago. They were one of eight Brahmin families in Madgul, a village with over a thousand people.

His family owned some land, and his grandfather and earlier family members lived by farming it. However, when Vyankatesh Madgulkar's father was alive, the land was not enough to feed their large family. Vyankatesh had seven brothers and sisters.

His father took a job with the government of Aundh, a small kingdom that ruled over Madgul and the Maandesh region. This job made the family move to different villages and towns in Maandesh. This way, Vyankatesh Madgulkar got to see many different ways of life in the area.

Even though his mother had old-fashioned ideas about people from different groups, Vyankatesh Madgulkar played freely with children from all backgrounds. From them, he learned how to climb trees, find birds, catch fish, and hunt.

Madgul village did not have electricity, bus service, or shops. But it did have a primary school. Vyankatesh Madgulkar studied there and later at a secondary school in a nearby town. He wasn't a top student, and some teachers even told him he wouldn't do well in the future.

When he was a teenager, he left home and joined a group of people who were fighting for India's freedom from British rule. For two years, he was considered an opponent by the British government.

His Career

After India gained its independence, Vyankatesh Madgulkar returned home. His older brother, Gajanan, who was called GaDiMa, had already become a writer for Marathi films. GaDiMa became a very famous poet and writer in Maharashtra.

GaDiMa's success might have inspired Vyankatesh Madgulkar to also become an artist. However, Vyankatesh had his own unique personality.

He often said he always felt "different." At first, he wanted to be a poet. He also loved drawing and painting. Even though he didn't finish school, he developed a huge love for reading. He taught himself to read English books using a dictionary. He read books by famous writers like John Steinbeck, George Orwell, and Liam O’ Flaherty.

Vyankatesh Madgulkar first tried to become a painter. He went to Kolhapur in western Maharashtra to learn painting. But he soon lost interest and started writing instead. He wrote his first short story when he was 19, and it won a prize. This encouraged him to become a full-time writer.

In 1948, at age 21, he started working as a journalist. Two years later, he moved to Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, to write scripts for Marathi films.

In 1955, he took a job in Pune at All India Radio (AIR), which is a government radio station. He worked there in the rural programming department until he retired in 1985. All this time, he kept writing.

He even visited Australia and the island of Tasmania while working for All India Radio. He wrote stories based on his experiences there.

Vyankatesh Madgulkar passed away in August 2001 at the age of 73. He had health problems related to diabetes.

His Writing Style

Vyankatesh Madgulkar wrote in many different ways. He wrote almost 40 film scripts and several folk plays. He even tried to create a Marathi version of the famous play Fiddler on the Roof. He translated books from English to Marathi, especially books about wildlife. He also wrote essays about his travels, nature, and interesting people he had read about, like the British traveler Richard Burton.

However, he is most remembered for his short stories and novellas (which are longer stories, but shorter than novels). He wrote 8 novellas and over 200 short stories.

His first book, Maandeshi Manse (People of Maandesh), was published when he was just 22 years old. This book is about the different kinds of people Vyankatesh Madgulkar met during his childhood in Maandesh. The descriptions of these people feel very real. However, Vyankatesh Madgulkar later explained that the descriptions were not completely true. The characters in Maandeshi Manse were created by him, based on real people he knew.

Vyankatesh Madgulkar often blended real-life experiences with his own imagination in all his Maandeshi stories. He also kept a consistent writing style.

His style often feels like a person telling a story to a group of people sitting in front of them.

Many of his stories are about poor people. Some are about things that happened during his childhood, and some are about his family members. Only a few stories have a clear plot. Most stories focus on one main character. But some stories are more about events rather than people. His book 'Karunashtak' mainly focuses on his mother.

Bangarwadi: A Famous Story

Vyankatesh Madgulkar's most famous work is his novella called Bangarwadi, published in 1954. It tells the story of a young schoolteacher in a village of shepherds in Maandesh. The story begins with the teacher walking alone at night towards Bangarwadi, through a landscape with few trees. When he arrives, he finds that the school is not working. Over the next few months, the teacher successfully gets the school running. However, at the end of the story, a lack of rain forces all the people of Bangarwadi to leave the village. The school is left with no students again.

In this story, Vyankatesh Madgulkar paints a detailed and unforgettable picture of a unique way of life. A reviewer named Taya Zinkin, who reviewed the English translation of the book in The Economic Weekly in 1958, said it was "perhaps the most important book written by an Indian about India to appear in English since [Jawaharlal] Nehru’s Discovery of India."

Bangarwadi was translated into several languages. A famous German scholar who studied India, Gunther Sontheimer, translated it into German. Bookstores in Pune and other cities in Maharashtra still sell the original Marathi book. It has been reprinted more than 15 times!

Bangarwadi was also made into a film by Amol Palekar.

Other Writings

Vyankatesh Madgulkar wrote stories about Maandesh for about 20 years, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. Later, he wrote about his family and then about nature. His last novella, Sattantar (1981), is about a community of monkeys. This book won him the Sahitya Parishad award from the central government for the best Marathi book published that year.

Translations of His Work

Vyankatesh Madgulkar's books have been translated into many languages. Here are some examples:

• Bangarwadi was translated into English as The village had no walls in 1958 and again in 1994.
• Vavtal (Whirlwind) was translated into English as Winds of fire in 1974.
• Parts of The village had no walls were included in collections like Treasury of Modern Asian Stories (1961) and Stories from South Asia (1988).
• A story called School Inspection was published in The Rough and the Smooth (1966).
• A story called Mulanyacha Bakas was published in Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology- Volume Two (Fiction) (1993).
• Bangarwadi was translated into German in 1986 and Danish in 1964.
• Service Motar (Bus service) was translated into German in 1969.
• Around 20 of his stories, including Bus Service and Shala (School), were translated into Hindi between 1958 and 1981.
• Sattantar was translated into Kannada in 1990.
• Vavtal (Whirlwind) was also translated into Russian.