Just how this cultural richness and intensity, combined with the whole of classical Telugu poetry and scholarship, reached down to sites such as Bobbili, Razam, Madugula, and Ambakhandi in the 1930’s and 1940’s is hard for us to say; we would need to ask Narayana Rao himself. I would assume that, in terms of the perceptual domain, many elements remained implicit, perhaps entirely unconscious, as is always the case. The fact remains that a highly unusual cultural order, one that privileged unorthodox, often iconoclastic impulses and a powerful, multi-lingual heterogeneity, must somehow have nurtured Narayana Rao from an early age.
I don’t want to exaggerate this claim. Geniuses are no doubt born unique. As the Russian poet Akhmatova said, defining the word “poet”: “A poet is a person to whom you can give nothing and from whom you can take nothing away.” Still, if I had to make an abstract, schematic statement about twentieth-century Telugu intellectual life, seen from a great height or distance, I would say that, within a remarkable series of highly creative and gifted poets and scholars, there were three figures of truly surpassing stature: Gurajada, Viswanatha Satyanarayana, and Velcheru Narayana Rao. Two of them came from northern coastal Andhra. But all three are intricately and intimately linked—so much so that one might even say that they are intelligible, in this particular historical context, only in relation to one another. Narayana Rao has translated and explicated Kanya-sulkam—a masterful translation illuminated by the interpretative essay that accompanies it. Viswanatha is said to have stated after reading an interpretation of his work by the very young Narayana Rao: “This young man understands me.” The implication was that perhaps only that young man truly understood him. One can tell the story of twentieth-century Andhra in terms of these three dominating individuals: two great poets of global stature, and the scholar, critic, and cultural historian who mediated their work to a wider world and made sense of it.

Of course, as I have already said, Narayana Rao’s work deals with the entire range of Andhra culture, from its inception. He has defined the major currents and periods of Telugu literature and characterized the profound innovations and moments of consequential change, as no one before him was able to do. He has outlined the competing models of textuality that we find in classical Telugu in ways that illuminate the sister traditions in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Sanskrit. In this sense, his work transcends by far the boundaries of Andhra and touches on the foundations of our understanding of Indian literature as a whole, classical and modern, local and trans-local. Somewhat paradoxically, the full impact of this enormous body of work, much of it profoundly at odds with more conventional and superficial views, seems to have reached and influenced audiences outside of Andhra before impinging on the awareness of its most natural readership, in Telugu.

For this reason alone, it would be a great gift if a volume of Narayana Rao’s essays of recent years, including the beautiful critical essays in Imata and elsewhere, could be published in Telugu. In the meantime, we will soon be publishing a complete translation of Peddana’s Manu-caritramu in a bilingual Telugu-English edition (Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press) with an essay that will, hopefully, be true to Narayana Rao’s unsettling perspectives.