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Articles: Arts and Culture | History Of Telugu
- Mr. Ramanjaneya Reddy Annareddy
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Until the advent of the printing press and the school system of education, Telugu was broadly used in four areas: (1) inscriptions, (2) poetry, (3) folk literature, (4) common speech (social and perhaps official). The language of the inscriptions had always been based on the contemporary speech of the educated with an occasional admixture of literary and rustic expressions. Folk literature, which was in the form of songs, drew mainly on the speech of the common people among whom it circulated, basically rural in its character. Both in its appeal and form, the poetic language was confined to royal courts and the elite. Care was taken to keep it insulated from the speech of even the scholars and poets, who used it in other areas of communication. Because of this restriction on the medium, prose never emerged as a form of classical literature in Telugu. Even the sparse scientific writing on prosody, arithmetic, medicine and grammar was cast either in Telugu verse or in Sanskrit slokas. The emergence of popular literary forms like the satakas devotional songs and the yaksha gana necessitated extensive reliance on contemporary spoken language in their appeal and expressiveness. Early commentaries, historical accounts (like Rayavachakam), and the few prose works, which were written for instructional purposes in the first half of the 19th century, were all written in educated speech which was distinct from the language of the literary dialect. In 1853, Chinnayasuri, a Telugu pundit in the Presidency College, first experimented with a prose variety based on the classical poetic language in his book 'Niti Chandrika'. In 1855, he published Bala Vyakaranamu, an excellent grammar of the poetic language, but it was intended for school study and as a guide to `Correct Writing'. These works had, to some extent, given support to traditional pundits, who upheld the Kavya bhasha as primary and the spoken language as its degenerate form. The influence of Chinnayasuri temporarily arrested the growth of creative prose by famous writers until Gurazada Appa Rao appeared on the scene and produced his social play Kanyasulkam in 1897 in a near modern language. The controversy that raged between the two schools, classical and modern subsided in 1919 with a victory for the classic writers to perpetuate the use of the so-called granthikam (or the poetic dialect) as the language of the text-book language and the medium of examination. However, teaching has all along been done only in the spoken variety of the teacher.
For about 90 years (1850--1940), Telugu prose had a stunted growth, although scholars like Kandukuri Viresalingam and Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao used a `liberalized poetic variety' in their writings, which was neither fully classical nor fully modern.
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