The Contemporary Telugu Poetry

VASANTA KUMAR PARIGI
Lecturer in English, Annamalai University

Though dates seldom serve as cornerstones to indicate the beginning of a period or movement in literature, 1910 may be regarded as the year when new voices were heard in Telugu poetry. It was in 1910 that Sri Sri, who was later to become an avantgarde poet, was born. In the same year Gurajada was evolving a new diction and a new idiom for Telugu poetry. Ten years later, in 1920, the Kavikumara Samiti came into being as an expression of the new movement already in evidence in the writings of Gurajada, Abburi, Sivasankara Sastri, and Rayaprolu. But it was not till 1930 that a cohesive impact was made by the modern poets. The events that led to the birth of the New Poetry had so much in common with the movements in other parts of the world that Muddukrishna in his anthology (presenting for the first time six thousand lines from twenty-six poets), published in 1935, remarks: “Gandhi, Aurobindo, Tagore, Ibsen, Marx, Tolstoy, Shaw, Romain Rolland have all had a profound influence on our society and our ways of living. It is of this change and revolution the thinking of these men has brought that the modern Telugu poets sing. This is a new creation. There is a newness in it.”

Feudal oppression, economic inequality, and social injustice are the subject matter of the New Poetry. The contemporary poets affirmed that art is sterile if it does not contribute to the well being of our fellowmen. They declared that what is passed on by one generation to another is not the original sin but a perpetuated lie. Men have been listening too long to false prophets and worshipping faked gods. To redeem ourselves from the marass of statism and stagnant thought was the urgent need. The New Poetry was an expression of such redemption. It was a new force which would wake us from the deep slumber and accelerate us to a new dynamism and vitality to give us a complete life.

With the turn in thought and content, too, went a departure from diction and form. Effete metrical traditions were buried along with the flabby and ornamental diction in which the older poets revelled. ‘In poetry superfluity of words is a sin worse than nationalism,’ remarked Chalam in his preface to Sri Sri’s Mahaprasthanam. ‘For our electrified thoughts we need an electrified metre’ wrote Dasaradhi. However, by free verse the poets did not mean an escape from the discipline essential to poetry as a literary form. Diction underwent a sea-change to follow the new subtleties in thought and imagination. New symbols were found in the creation of science and technology. The rail engine, the motor-car and the factory–all found a place in the imagery of the poets.

Gurajada’s Mutyala Saralu and Dr. C. R. Reddy’s Musalamma Maranamu heralded the coming of a new age in Telugu poetry. Rayaprolu and Abburi in their poems showed a command of the new idiom and experimented with new metrical forms. Both the writers were greatly influenced by the literary revival in Bengal. Duvvuri translated, in free verse, Omar Khayyam from the Persian. Devulapalli’s Krishna Paksham created a furore in the literary scene of the period. The attack by the older school on the modes of the New writers was soon in evidence and it reached a new dimension with the publication of Sri Sri’s Mahaprasthanam in 1941. Nanduri Subba Rao in his Yenki Patalu (songs of Yenki), for the first time in the history of Telugu poetry, portrayed a rustic village-belle, raising her to the eminence of the great heroines in Telugu literature. A child of nature and reared by innocence, Yenki is a confluence of beauty and simplicity.

Sri Sri belonged to the new generation which in its search for beauty and justice saw only the grinning futile faces of slaves and economic barbarism. His youthful idealism was everywhere met with cruelty, oppression and deceit:

Sulphurous fumes strewn over our eyes
False frankincense burnt in our hearts
Thorns on our way, and whenever we think
thousand devils dancing before us.
Is this what the world has done to us?
asks Sri Sri. He was, however, hopeful. Life, no doubt, was a veritable hell where we are cudgelled for being alive. But the pain can be overcome. We can live in joy. Like the lotus that shoots up from the gorge? the sweat on the brows of the working class would evolve a new order where justice will be denied to none. ‘Let us all unite and march’, is the clarion call of Sri Sri. To him the Socialist revolution appears to be inevitable:

This world is yours
This dream will come true
This heaven will stay.

Devulapalli sings of the inexplicable grief that shrouds our lives. ‘I shall walk alone into the void,’ he says felicitously. The theme of Sivasankara Sastry and Vedula also is ‘the tears that make men happy’. More mellowed is the voice of Abburi:

Why this fondness for
The fading dew?

And Sri Sri, like a child lost in its search, asks:

Where, where are the snows
Of yesteryear?

Arudra, Pattabhi, and Tilak are the apocalyptics. All of them, like their contemporaries, read Eliot, Pound, Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas, and a host of other modern English poets. ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understoed,’ quotes Arudra in his Twamewaham, a poem woven with rich symbols and allegory. His better work is Cine Wali. Its theme is a wasteland littered with lost men. The sun is a silent spectator watching the defeated and the dead. After agony and strife, peace appears on the scene. Harmony is sought. Tilak’s poems are more esoteric. His images have a rare clarity and are deeply significant. He is at home with all forms, and achieves a grandeur with ease:

A little virtue and some vice
Occasional tears, a little happiness later,
Abandon, kindness, and joy.
Lord, give us these.

Narayana Reddi, Kundurthi, and Dasaradhi look to the future when science would liberate us from misery, squalor, and bondage. Narla Chiranjeevi joins them in their universality and pleads for international outlook and catholic culture. Anisetti and Byragi speak of kindness and charity that make life congenial. A salient feature of the contemporary Telugu poetry is its ardent appeal for a Commonwealth of nations and a federation of the world. Parochialism and regionalism are alien to the thinking of the Telugu poets. ‘Let all nations unite’ sings Narla Chiranjeevi. Gurajada hopefully looks forward to an age when Christian love would unite us all in one heaven where differences among men would dissolve and where religion and communalism would disappear.

As Dr. Raghavachari, speaking of the contemporary Telugu poets, has observed, “They show the urgent need for attaining a new balance in life and a wholesome healing of the shattered personality of man in the new environment. The poets are the prophets of social change and are already making eager anticipations of a hopeful future lit up by a landscape of plenty and happiness:

Mines are found and work is found
Factories have sprung and towns have smiled;
Lustily today the Godavari swerves into Visakha,
Full of smiles, too, the Krishna will accost Anantapur.
…………….
And look! What is left in your hands? the gay
festoon of leisure!”                                                        –Arudra.

Yet, with all the semantic nuances in thought and bold experiments in form, one misses in the contemporary scene the sustaining tradition and talent which determine the ultimate destination of Telugu poetry. When we ask ourselves whether the age has sought its true image in any of the poets, the answer would be that a true measure of ourselves is yet to be found. The garishness and the bewilderment that the poets portray is inconclusive. Anisetti’s poser, “Where is the ship that can sail across the oceans of darkness and defeat,” still remains to be answered by the poets.