Ilanit Loewy Shacham, University of Chicago

I first met Professor Narayana Rao in the summer of 2005 at the Summer Academy for Regional Sanskrit Literatures in Jerusalem. At the time, I was fairly new to Sanskrit literature and Indian studies but I was aware of Narayana Rao and had read a few of his articles. I was also in the midst of a long, frustrating and unfruitful chase after a Sanskrit text that I needed for a paper I was writing for a course. Unfortunately, the specific volume that I needed was nowhere to be found in the US or Europe. When my repeated correspondence with the publishing house in India also didn’t produce a copy of the text my professor suggested that I ask Narayana Rao for his help. I was very reluctant; because I was a neophyte in the field and a total stranger to Narayana Rao I thought it might be rude to approach someone of his caliber for favors. But I was also desperate, so I mustered up some courage and approached Narayana Rao. I told him about all of my failed attempts to get hold of the text. Narayana Rao listened attentively, occasionally nodding his head. The first thing he said to me was, “if the text is physically available you will get it”. Two weeks later the book arrived to Jerusalem. And that was that.

Three years have passed since I began working with Professor Narayana Rao; he remains one of my most important and supportive resources on this academic journey. More often than not – though we are no longer strangers and I can no longer claim to be an utter neophyte – I feel that our first encounter foretold our work dynamic, at least in essence. When I come to a point where all the resources I have are not enough, I turn to Narayana Rao and he magically turns the dead end into a passable road -a textual vighnavinayaka if you will. I am currently reading the Amuktamalyada with Narayana Rao as part of my dissertation research, and I think that the most important piece of advice I habitually receive from him is to “just read the text”. This seemingly simple instruction is extremely challenging because in Narayana Rao’s world it means something entirely different than what one might expect. Indeed, Narayana Rao’s total commitment to the texts he reads requires at least three different levels of reading. The first level of reading involves unpacking the individual verse in which meaning is only half (sometimes even less) of the story. At this level, Narayana Rao insists that the meaning, grammar and syntax of every word and syllable (including the dropped endings only he seems to know were there in the first place) are understood and accounted for; here he also examines how sounds, meanings and metaphors fill up and flow over the metrical skeleton in order to create the poetic effects of the verse. At the second level of reading Narayana Rao focuses on the work in its entirety in order to understand the cumulative effect that the individual verses and chapters have. The third and final level of reading involves the world outside of the text. Here the question is the extent to which one should lean on contextual materials, both primary and secondary, for understanding the text at hand. Indeed, particularly with respect to the Amuktamlayada, Krsnadevaraya and the setting of the royal literary court Narayana Rao has shown me time and again that the secondary and related primary sources, while offering potential insight, can also overshadow the text itself. So for now I am trying to heed Narayana Rao’s advice to “just read the text”; I am sure that I will hit many brick walls as I attempt do so, but it is a privilege in the deepest sense of the word to know that Narayana Rao is here as a teacher and guide; a textual vighnavinayaka.

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Emory University

I first heard the name Velcheru Narayana Rao many years before I met the legendary classical Telugu scholar in person. My undergraduate advisor at Emory University, Joyce Flueckiger, was a doctoral advisee of Professor Narayana Rao’s at the University of Wisconsin and constantly mentioned his many wonderful qualities throughout my years at Emory. Although I met Narayana Rao briefly during a summer Telugu program at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, I had the fortune of learning classical Telugu sahityam from him at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007. During the directed reading course I took with him, I had the opportunity to read Nandi Timmana’s Parijatapaharanamu. I would spend several hours each day preparing for our classes, but no matter how much I prepared, Professor Narayana Rao would quickly surpass me. If I prepared ten verses, he would go through twenty; if I prepared fifteen verses, he would go through thirty. During our sessions, which would often last more than two hours at a time, I struggled to maintain my attention, particularly because the complexity of classical Telugu was new to me at the time. Professor Narayana Rao, by comparison, never seemed tired, and his enthusiasm for the subject never waned, despite the extensive time and efforts he put in.

Professor Narayana Rao’s passion for classical Telugu literature is unparalleled and in the years since that University of Chicago course, I have had the fortunate opportunity to read selections of several texts under his guidance, including Bammera Potana’s Mahabhagavatamu, Krishnadevaraya’s Amuktamalyada, Allasani Peddana’s Manucaritramu, Pingali Suranna’s Kalapurnodayamu, as well as padams by Annamayya and Kshetrayya. Professor Narayana Rao has also been integrally involved with my Ph.D. dissertation, which examines the characters of Satyabhama and Krishna in classical Telugu literature and Kuchipudi dance performance. My scholarship is shaped, in many ways, by Professor Narayana Rao’s insights, and I am deeply indebted to him for his guidance throughout the years. In my mind, Velcheru Narayana Rao is classical Telugu literature and I cannot imagine one without thinking of the other.