Early Telugu Poetry-Tikkana to Srinadha

In an age of religious strife Tikkana remained an Advaitin, and his work was a strong plea to his countrymen for abandoning the barren path of sectarian animosity and realising the oneness of the Divine Being. To emphasise this lesson, Tikkana rose above the practice of the time and dedicated his Muse to Hari-Hara-Natha–the God who is Siva and Vishnu at the same time. Apostrophising his inspiring ideal he said: "The garland of bones (of Siva) or the Kaustubha (breast-jewel of Vishnu); which is more acceptable to you, O Lord? The deadly black poison (drunk by Siva) or the milk at the breasts of Yasoda (foster-mother of Krishna), which is more palatable to you, Lord? Tell me." "Away," said Tikkana, "with wrangling in the name of God." If the Andhras of the present day are generally Advaitins (Monists), Tikkana’s Mahabharata, more than any philosophical disquisitions, made them what they are.

Tikkana’s Advaitism does not obtrude in his poetry. He was above everything a poet and an artist. The perfume of his religious tolerance is wafted from afar. He felt that he was divinely inspired to undertake the great task of completing the work of Nannaya. Poetic expression was a divine mission, and a means to reach the goal of eternal beatitude. Rather, the urge to launch upon the noble task came to him from the Divine Monitor who appeared to him in his dream, and, as if to favour him, asked him to dedicate his work to Himself. Tikkana was in ecstasy, and, with tears flowing begged of Him eternal bliss free from the round of births. Like Milton he would exclaim, "Sing, Heavenly Muse!" Thus inspired and divinely blessed, Tikkana vowed that he would render the story of the Mahabharata in such a way that the Andhra world should be fascinated–every part of it must be carved out into an artistic piece by itself. The whole would thus be a series of cut-stones erected into a grand structure. He was as good as his word. Every single portion was so dressed by him with a view to unity of plot, chronological sequence of events, development of character, speech and actions appropriate to the speaker, that an artistic effect is produced at every stage. His work is a marvelous edifice where every stone is there not by accident but by design and the whole gives us an insight into his genius.

Tikkana’s title to be reckoned amongst the great poets of the world, is based on his masterly analysis of the human mind and its workings,–the motives of men and the passions that sway them. He searches the hearts of his characters, the ebb and tide of their feelings, and associates them with physical gestures appropriate to the mood. In this we see Tikkana the dramatist. The dramatic treatment of epic material is his supreme achievement. He withdraws himself into the ground and allows his heroes and heroines to speak for themselves and lay bare their innermost hearts to us. He is at his happiest in giving appropriate speeches to the characters, and, as in a stage direction, never omits the gestures and facial expressions they have to display. The delineation of character is his forte. Nannaya contents himself with the march of the story, and his men and women just play over the surface like fish in a rivulet. He has his eye mainly on narration, and art only comes next with him. With Tikkana, art is everything. Heroes and heroines in his hands assume an individuality of their own, and each character is a study in human nature. The flux and reflux of their emotions are the subjects of special attention to the art of Tikkana. Krishna and Yudhishtira, Draupadi and Kunti and a host of others, all stand out pre-eminently as examples of types and individuals, and Tikkana probes deep into them and sets forth with minute detail the motives of their life and actions. In this masterly search of the human heart Tikkana has few compeers. Valmiki is a great story-teller. Milton has a sublime imagination, but the human in his poetry is only of the second best. Kalidasa and Shakespeare alone, as far as we know, seem to share with Tikkana this divine insight into the innermost chambers of the human heart.

Tikkana the dramatist is seen in the realistic nature of his vision which "rolls forth from heaven to earth and earth to heaven." He sees his characters in his imagination as living human beings, erring and sinning, and not as mere wooden idols. Draupadi with him is not the passive queen of the five Pandava brothers but a passionate and valiant woman who can stir men to great action; Krishna, not a shady diplomatist but an ideal hero, warrior and statesman, In writing an epic as if it were a drama, Tikkana was a greater success than Milton. His characters do not make long and undramatic discourses, however well-worded and imaginative. They engage in brief combats of the wit and short repartee. One does not feel one’s time heavy in listening to them. And Tikkana’s characters seem to vie with one another in the art of speech and diplomacy. With him they are all consummate actors and diplomats. Herein is reflected Tikkana, the statesman. He gave us three masterly pictures of the stalesmanship of his conception: Krishna, Sanjaya, and the eldest of the Pandavas. The utterances of these remarkable men would be fit study even for the politicians and statesmen of today. Sanjaya, the Minister of the Kauravas, sent on a peace mission to the Pandavas, offers an example of the supple politician. He would give nothing to the opponents but tries to wean them away from the war path by cajolery and fulsome praise. The eldest of the Pandavas, with consummate mastery over his own mind, would put the opponent in the wrong and show him as aggressor to the world by his masterly inactivity. But the greatest in importance is Lord Krishna, the ideal statesman of India. His is a straight fight for righteousness and the preservation of one’s rights, and he would not hesitate to sound the war bugle if only to end war for the future.

Everything is not yet said of Tikkana when we picture him as a poet and diplomatist. He was, more than anything, a man of action and herein lies his strength and greatness. Tikkana was a great soldier too, and this makes his treatment of the great war between the Kurus and the Panchalas an awe-inspiring study in warfare. The pitched battles and individual Contests, the mass tumult and the war din, all must have marched forth before his mental vision and reverberated in his ear, for him to have presented us with such realistic descriptions of war. Tikkana knows the manouvres of the commander, and we are left wondering whether they are his manouvres or those of his heroes. He describes them with the precise attention to technicalities worthy of a soldier by profession, and this leads us to infer that Tikkana must have actually taken the field sometime as a commander. Tikkana the master-manouvrer is seen in Drona; Tikkana the hero and fighter is exemplified in Bhishma and Arjuna. As we go on examining Tikkana, he seems to yield an ever increasing harvest of points of study about his art and life. If we were to see Tikkana in everything he describes, we will have no end to the list of his achievements in life. His intimacy with the subtleties of wrestling and the use of the terrific mace of Bhima and Duryodhana, is so telling in effect that we must see the wrestler also in Tikkana. But we will be nearer the truth if we ascribe the multifarious achievements of Tikkana to his supreme vision as a poet, and to his capacity to range his vision from the atom to the universe and body forth the objects of his imagination into the realm of ordinary experience, so that he who runs may see the sublime and the beautiful.

As an architect of the word, Tikkana is easily in the first rank of poets. An examination of his great poem in the light of Indian principles of literary criticism, is of great value. According to this view, the suggested meaning is the touchstone of the Kavya of the highest order. Tikkana is a master of this type of composition. Even Nannaya falls behind him somewhat, in this respect. Later poets could but weave out patched-up imitations of Tikkana’s dhvani style. Another excellence of Tikkana is his success in developing the rasa or sentiment in poetry. Happily for the colossal nature of his genius, he had a subject wide as the world; and situations which demanded a worthy treatment were innumerable. An artist sometimes is unlucky in the choice of the material and his genius may be wasted on the trivial. Like the Iliad the Mahabharata is a mine of heroism and pathos. Tikkana the conscious artist is seen in the selection of his material. He says:

"The story is of gripping interest and is delightful. The incidents are sublime and capable of suggesting all the passionate moods (rasas). It is well worth writing these portions of the Mahabharata in Telugu that the wise may be gratified."

Now Tikkana is highly suggestive in the reeti (style) he adopts in setting forth these sentiments. For the erotic sentiment he selects short words of few syllables, of purely Telugu origin (desi), and groups them into the garland of love. His considered view seems to be that it is the desi element in Telugu that supplies the music of the language, while the Sanskrit element makes for vigour and strength. For passionate moods like anger, terror and rage, he seizes upon guttural sounds, highly Sanskritised diction, and compounds. Scenes wherein he describes the storms raging in the breast of Bhima, the apostle of the mighty, are an apt illustration of this. For these situations Tikkana requires a larger mould in which to crowd his teeming ideas. The first four lines of the verse pile similes of an awe-inspiring nature one upon the other, and when the climax is reached Tikkana over-whelms us with a reverberating compound to make the whole resound as in a deep cave. This side of his art and genius were so unearthly that no later poet dreamed of imitating him. They took the clue from him in presenting the erotic sentiment, but they lacked the refreshing originality and natural flavour of his similes.

Heavy as the burden of Tikkana’s thought is, he delights to load it in tiny vessels. He has an abhorrence of the discursive and the tedious. He likes to express great sentiments in brief words and let the reader’s imagination supply the details and missing links. He is very fond of the tone of the statesman, not saying much but saying enough, not being ruffled in spirit but giving an unmistakable indication of his mind. The speeches of Sanjaya and Krishna are the best illustration of Tikkana’s style. Herein he makes them speak in enigmas and short verses which can be made to interpret for and against the enemy. Tikkana makes the largest use of the indigenous short-metres that are in the nature of couplets. It is only for descriptions of natural scenery and for elaborate portraiture that he has recourse to the Sanskrit vritta and long Telugu metres. His passion for economy of expression is on a par with that of Shakespeare in Hamlet and Lear, and Kalidasa in Shakuntala. This accounts for the modern dictum that his style is of the narikela variety. Like the cocoanut, it presents a slight obstacle on the outer side, but when once it is laid bare it is sweet and delicious.

There is yet another reason which makes the poetry of Tikkana less easily understood at the present day than that of Nannaya. Tikkana makes an abundant use of the purely Telugu idiom and vocabulary, which, either on account of the march of centuries or owing to the heavy grafting of Sanskrit on later day Telugu, is slightly out of the way to the modern reader. Nannaya, true to his scholarly bias, made free use of the tatsama and he must have had a better vision of the trend of the rising Telugu. Later poets imitated him in this and rather outdistanced him. Nevertheless, Nannaya’s style, with an apt mingling of tatsama, came to stay and holds the field at present. Tikkana on the other hand was thoroughly conversant with the men and manners of his age, and must have felt it a duty to use the native idiom and proverb as far as possible, if his poem was to appeal to one and all and not cater to the taste of the scholar only. But time seems to have reversed his judgment; and yet, if we want to rehabilitate Telugu and make it a rich instrument for the expression of subtle ideas with our own material, we have to turn to Tikkana and explore in his mine of native idiom. This will surely save us the awkwardness of borrowing from other mediums for wealth and variety of expression.

The test of a great poet is his popularity, and often it is his only reward. Tikkana enjoyed his full share of it in his own life-time. Contemporary poets were in raptures over his personality and work. One of them, Ketana, honoured him by making him Kriti-pati (patron) of a poem. This is the highest need of reverential love which an Andhra can confer on his living idol. Kings alone could buy this honour by patronising poets, but Tikkana, the poet of poets, had it unsought. He was further deified and was given the title of Kavi-Brahma, the Lord of Poets. His country did not relegate him to the fate of Milton and wring the deep moan from his great heart "fallen on evil days and clime." In rapturous admiration, one of the poets that was trained in his school sang, "If the tongue has to utter the name of a devotee of Siva it will do well to take the name of Tikkana," and so on. And posterity remained true to him, and to this day he is easily the greatest of our poets: Nannaya and Tikkana are celebrated by literary anniversaries.

The ball that was set in motion by Nannaya and Tikkana continued to roll on. The age of the Purana was in full swing and the first instinct of every poet was to seize upon a Purana from Sanskrit and render it into Telugu. The translations were not literal and verbatim, but free adaptations with as much originality and concentration as the poet was capable of. Occasionally a poet selected one of the great Kavyas of Sanskrit and poetised it. Thus Ketana rendered Dandin’s Dasa-kumara-chcirita into verse. The aim of the Puranic age was to combine virtue and instruction with poetry. The verse was simple and charming, though not always of the highest order. There are pre-eminent figures also. Yerrana who was a Court-Poet of the early Reddi Rulers of Kondavidu was the last of the great classic writers. He supplied the portion of the third book of the Mahabharata which Nannaya broke off in the middle and which Tikkana did not take in hand. Yerrana was the author of other Puranas, chiefly of Harivamsa which celebrated the history of Krishna and his race. Yerrana was no mean poet, and he combined the fluidity of Nannaya and the terseness of Tikkana in his diction.

The Andhra country did not possess any central and unifying hegemony during this period. The Kakatiya dynasty dropped the sceptre, and the Vijayanagara Empire did not fly its banner yet. The land was ruled by a number of chieftains noted for war and prowess. The Reddi Kings of Kondavidu in Guntur, and of Rajahmundry in the Godavari district, and the Velama Princes of the Nizam’s Dominions, were noted for their patronage of Telugu poets. The poets dedicated their works to the leading men in return for patronage. It was but natural that they should take an exaggerated view of the achievements of their patrons, and self-respecting men felt that the holy art of poesy was degraded to the level of a profit-making business and lost its divine purpose. This sentiment received the fullest expression in the person of Potana. He belonged to a village named Bommera near Warangal. This is one of the many instances of the Nizam’s Dominions being the nursery of the Telugu people and their language for centuries. Potana was the chosen of the Goddess of Poverty, and Sarvajna Singa of the Recharla family offered him patronage in return for the dedication of a poem. Potana refused proudly and declared to the world through his Andhra Bhagavata:

"Who would barter away the Divine Muse, tender like the young shoots of the mango tree, by dedicating it to vicious men? Who is there that is so mean that he would relish the crumbs so obtained? Better that poets should live as toiling farmers, or fade away in the midst of dense forests, subsisting on leaves, than that they should demean themselves."

He announces to the world in an unmistakable voice that to him (Potana), the luxuries of the world, the villages, the carriages, the ornaments that are obtained by selling his art to kings, are all ‘unsubstantial airy nothings’ and he would lay his art at the altar of the Highest Being. The Bhagavata of Potana is universally popular, and next to the Telugu Mahabharata, it reigns supreme in the hearts of the Andhra people. Potana was a devotee and he pours out his heart to his Lord in impassioned verse. Potana was a self-made scholar and man, and he took upon himself the title ‘Inspired by Nature’ (Sahaja-Panditya).

Quite the contrary to Potana in his exalted conception of his Muse was the poet Srinadha. Tradition has it that he was the brother-in-law of Potana. But there is no internal evidence to this effect. The contrast between them was so pronounced that people instinctively uttered their names together. Srinadha was a lover of this green earth and its variegated life. He could enjoy a good dish as well as a good poem. Life with him was not an arid preparation for the hereafter, and he enjoyed life at its best. He was not worried by any considerations against making his art pay for his luxurious life. He freely dedicated his numerous works to one and all, from the king down to his wealthy merchant. His best works are a translation of the Sanskrit Naishadha of Sri Harsha, and many adaptations of the Puranas. Srinadha was an aesthete, and his life is reflected in his poetry. It is highly rhythmical and polished. He was a great scholar and a master of many languages. This accounts for his great bias towards Sanskrit idiom, and he set the example of highly Sanskritised diction to the poets of the Prabandha period. He considered his poetry the proper field for a full flourish of his scholarly gifts. With his luxurious ways of life, Srinadha fell on evil days towards the end, and suffered at the hands of petty rulers who had scant respect for his erudition and poetic talent.