Makers Of Telugu Prose–I

BY P. PITCHI REDDY, M.A., B.L.

India is a land of traditions. Its literatures were never free from their influence. In fact the history of every one of them is an eternal struggle for supremacy between the two rival forces–conservative and progressive. The more ancient the culture, the more difficult it has been for its progress. The weight of experience always dragged it down, Long years of life brought vested interests into existence. They in their turn tried to keep the general level down. The boy Hercules was never allowed to become conscious of his strength. The spirit of old age is never adventurous.

In a decadent society, ideas have a tendency to become frozen. Their mobility disappears with their progress, Our country has never been an exception to this rule.

The tremendous progress America has made during recent years is not a little due to its virgin soil. The opportunity it had for beginning everything afresh is to a great extent responsible for their pragmatism, their bright utilitarian philosophy of life.

A country without much of history or a school of thought free from traditions, is more quickly susceptible to the influences from without, than a religion or a civilisation burdened with centuries of wisdom, intelligence, superstition or folly. Again, those institutions which are comparatively new or of later origin have a new definiteness about them, the distinctness becoming enhanced by the absence of a too prominent coloured ground.

This cannot be the case with things that are ancient, with countries whose history extends to thousands of years in the past, and with religions that had their origin in the first crudest notions of mankind. Thus we see that Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, which were more or less revolutionary departures from the then existing religions, have more of individuality about them than Hinduism which is practically a series of amendments incorporated into the original religion of the savage of the pre-historic times. The literatures of Bengal and Gujerat are of recent growth, and, free from suffocating traditions, they could receive the new thought unhampered by any stifling old-world superstitions about the sacredness of ancient languages. They could give to their thoughts a new shape and force through the medium of their own mother tongue. The position of Telugu is different. We have the beginnings of Telugu prose even in the 11th century. A prior period there must have been when we had only metrical compositions, for in the literatures of the world poetry always precedes prose. Whether the same phenomena occurred in this country or not, we have towards the end of the 12th century a systematic work in which both poetry and prose were freely used. The epic of the Mahabharata, the three authors of which Nannaya, Tikkana and Errana are even today the acknowledged legislators of Telugu metre, is the first work on record in which prose was used. In it, for the first time, an attempt is made to introduce prose also for the purpose of the narrative, till then the close preserve of the orthodox metre.

Nannaya had no model for his prose which he could imitate. He could not get any help from other vernaculars. Of course, there were works in Sanskrit, but they were mostly glosses and commentaries, written by specialists and experts in the highly technical language of interpretation.

So Nannaya had to fall upon his own resources. Like a spider be had to create apparently everything out of nothing. He had more than discovered the Telugu prose. He had invented it and the invention more than justified his attempts.

H. G. Wells once wrote that only those people deserve to be called great who have changed the course of the world, but for whom the world would not be what it is now. Measured by this test, Nannaya stands out pre-eminently great in the literary world. He has not only given us a language, but the turn he gave to its course had not a little to do with its further history.

The first thing that arrests our attention in Nannaya's writings is their grandeur. The dignified lines move slowly like a magnificent procession of caparisoned elephants in the broad streets of a Royal city. It is the same with his prose. Full of Sanskrit, its high level is always kept up by its long and evenly balanced sentences; The language is always sweet, and the structure of sentences supremely elegant.

The Sabha Parva very often reminds us of the grand style of Milton's Paradise Lost. In majesty of movement and grandeur of conception, they stand unique. The resemblance between the two is something remarkable. Probably Nannaya too had been a diplomat like the illustrious contemporary of Cromwell.

If a recent comparison is wanted, it is, I think, with Jeremy Taylor more than anybody else, that we can link Nannaya's name. He is capable of a highly ornamental style, whose beauty, like the paintings of Titian and other Italian masters, compels our admiration not only by their strong realism but also by the terrible immensity of conception.

Another characteristic of Nannaya's prose is its modernness. Inspite of its long antiquity, it can easily pass, and the difference cannot be very easily observed, for any prose work of the 18th or 19th centuries. The same is the case with Tikkana's poetry also. This may be due to some extent to the fact that the complexion of our language has not undergone any revolutionary changes. ¹

We do not have two varieties of Telugu like the Old and the New English. Ours has been a gradual growth, too slow, like the development of an organism, for perception.²

But the reason for the modernness must be sought elsewhere. Their greatness lies in their originality and the universal nature of their writings, in their imagination which could envisage the immense possibilities of a living language, their keen appreciation of the potentiality of the Sanskrit language and the value of the vernacular idiom.

It is a long distance from the 12th to the 19th century, and in the interregnum, we do not find any prose writer worth considering. Of course, prose was being employed all these days but none of the authors, so far as we are aware, seemed to have thought it worth their trouble to bestow any considerable attention to the improvement or even modification of its texture. Towards the end of the 15th and during the 16th and 17th centuries, there was an attempt to make it alliterative, sanskritised, and more difficult, and each poet of the succeeding generation vied with his predecessors in incorporating as many difficult and archaic Sanskrit words into the body of his one or more descriptive catalogues of trees and things of tropical, temperate and frigid regions, shuffled in at inappropriate places and made to continue to most inconvenient lengths.

But like a cool oasis in the midst of an equatorial desert, or a human dwelling-house in the centre of an uninhabitable dense forest, we find amidst so much of inartistic pedantry, – shall we call it Panditism?–a few prose works like the Jaimini Bharatamu written about the 18th century by a member of the family of the ruling Nayak of Madura. Though of the old groove, there is still an attempt at simplicity and the narrative element is given its due prominence.

Barring this and a few others, the period between the 12th and the 19th centuries did not show any considerable improvement either in the output or in the quality of the prose produced. Towards the second half of the 19th century, with the introduction of English in our educational institutions, there was a serious attempt in certain quarters to turn to prose. Not that poetry was ignored, neglected, or looked down upon. On the other hand, it was the time when a large amount of work was done in that direction. A number of translations and re-translations of ancient Sanskrit works was made during that period, and though no original work of any significance was produced, imitations of the existing Prabandhas, especially of the erotic type, were profusely published.

As a result of the establishment of the Madras University, some of the eminent scholars and Sastris had been appointed in the various colleges for teaching the different vernaculars of the country. And it will not be an exaggeration to state that almost all the literary productions of the period, especially in Telugu, we owe to the efforts of these erudite scholars and savants.

The age of the patronage of the aristocracy was gone. The days when authors could depend for their recognition on the intelligent support of the literate public had not yet come. And during this period of transition, it was these colleges and schools, gathering these intellectuals together, which made it possible for them to utilise their energies and capacity for the development of their literature according to their lights and comprehension.

Thus we see a Chinnayya Suri of the Madras Presidency College producing during this period one of the most famous prose-works of the century–Neeti Chandrika–supposed to be an adaptation of the Sanskrit Pancha Tantra, but strikingly original in many respects. Venkataraya Sastri, the author of the Pratapa Rudriyam, the greatest of our original dramas, from the Madras Christian College, had to his credit about a score of books mostly written in prose. Rao Bahadur Kandukuru Viresalingam Pantulu, who perhaps is practically the pioneer among us of every new type of literary expression, was for sometime the Telugu Pandit in the Presidency College. There were some more who did equally valuable work but these three are taken illustratively.

Again there were lesser luminaries who, at the instance of either a rich patron or a commercial concern, produced a considerable amount of prose in the shape of translations of the various epics, Puranas, Itihasas and even Sastras.

The old barriers were broken and the present circumstances were too disorganised and unsystematic to stem the tide of unbridled license that prevailed in the literary world. Influences of various types have acted and reacted with the result that, from the midst of this confusion, a sort of eclecticism was evolved. But unlike its pernicious effect in a different sphere (in philosophy), the result of this new outlook in the field of our literary activity has been, on the whole, praiseworthy. This is in part due to the absence of any sort of religious atmosphere enveloping the new influences.

Before the present century the amount of prose we had was very little, and whatever existed was in the form of translations from older Sanskrit works. With the establishment of efficient colleges in different parts of the country where English could be taught, a new force, a new life had been introduced into the country. The Telugu students were naturally influenced by the ever-refreshing thought of the English literature they were studying. They saw at once the poverty of their own literature which did not possess even one single original work, in prose, of any importance. They observed the tremendous amount of literature Bengal, which had received the first impact of western culture, had produced within the last few decades, and they found that if they were to keep pace with the progressive countries of the world, the old order of things must change. They must leave off old ways of thinking. A retrospective survey of the past may have its own allurements to those philosophically minded, but it would be utterly futile, hopelessly inefficient, nay, even positively mischievous if brought in to solve the various and varied problems that owe their origin to the ever-increasing complexity of life and civilisation.

So they thought if anything was to be done for the growth of their mother tongue, their inspiration must be derived from the vigorous and dynamic English literature. They began to study the classics of English literature with enthusiasm, and in some instances with some amount of discretion. They were acquainted with the beauties of the English lyric intimately. Their admiration for the English dramatists was unbounded, even if sometimes it was not intelligent. The influence the critical essay exerted on their ways of thought was considerable and healthy though at times perverted. Some of them even studied other languages, both European and Indian, but their influence could be felt only later. The efforts of these devoted and patriotic young men, who wanted to contribute what little they could to the development of their mother tongue, began to express itself in various ways.

Reference has been made previously to some of the literary savants who had enriched the language with their valuable contributions. Though some of them had an appreciable acquaintance with the English literature, (Mr. Venkataraya Sastri was an F. A.), yet their literary productions as a rule do not contain any traces of the western influence. They tried to base their works on the model of the Sanskrit classics. They wanted to make popular the Sanskrit idiom. While these Pandits strove to emulate our ancient culture, the new group of scholars who drew their inspiration mainly, if not solely, from the fountain-head of the English Classics, struggled to create new types of literature on the model of the western ones. Thus the novel, the lyric, the short story and the literary essay owe their origin to the enthusiasm and the creative genius of the first products of University education.

1 It is the boast of the people of Nellore that their speech is the prose of Tikkana and that they still talk the language of the Mahabharata of Tikkana.

2 But there has been change. It is rather difficult to understand the language of some of the old ‘Sasanams.’ Nannechoda, probably a contemporary of Nannaya, is too archaic to be intelligible.