The domain of Telugu scholarship over the last three generations, like the cultural and physical world of Andhra itself, has often generated and favored mavericks—brilliant, unconventional individuals, often, indeed usually, outside the academic establishment and its standard modes, with the gift of unexpected, creative insight. Many names come to mind—among them Rallabanda Subba Rao of Rajahmundry, the outstanding philologist and manuscriptologist Manavalli Ramakrsnakavi, and the great historian Mallampalli Somasekhara Sarma, to name but three. This clear pattern reflects, in my view, not the vagaries of institutional appointments in twentieth-century Andhra but rather a deep, perhaps diagnostic feature of Andhra culture itself, although it is by no means limited to Andhra and Telugu studies (there are many parallel examples from twentieth-century Kerala and Tamil Nadu). Perhaps in general, creative insight is born somewhere on the edge, in the shatter zones or the periphery or in some unexpected site of cross-fertilization and intellectual mixing.

Velcheru Narayana Rao is undoubtedly the most radical, unconventional, subversive voice in modern Andhra. He has always been fiercely independent in his opinions (and prepared to change them when something new turns up). From long experience I can attest that he never, truly never, accepts a scholarly statement about a work of literature on faith; he has to read the work himself, establish some personal relation to it, and then pronounce on the interpretative theses about it that he has encountered. A powerful and enduring skepticism infuses his way of reading and thinking. He is suspicious of received wisdom of any kind and of the intellectual authority structures that tend to dominate scholarship, whether they come from classical Sanskrit alankara-sastra or from modern historians and philologists in India or the West. He seems always to speak from a place of stubborn personal intuition, rooted in long experience. There is something restless and mercurial about this mode, which tends to produce surprise in the listener. Surprise, however, is only the first reaction, because the initial, usually very rapid response tends to crystallize immediately into an integrated, systemic argument demanding a deeper engagement on the part of the audience. These flashes of insight have a way of emerging, meteoric, late at night, though not only then. Maybe I’ve dreamt a few of them.

We can state some of the primary intuitions that recur regularly in Narayana Rao’s way of reading. Note that they are not idiosyncratic in the standard meaning of the word; they are based on comprehensive knowledge of the tradition, both in Telugu and Sanskrit. Thus: some major literary works may well precede their alleged authors, whose role is to authorize, not to create in the modern Romantic sense. In any case authorship is a negotiation, not a “fact,” with a strong collective, social basis. We must never forget to ask: Who is using this text, and to what end? What community generated it? What were the canons of reading that made sense of it to its primary audiences? Such questions apply no less to the courtly kavi who takes responsibility for a fixed text of his own invention than to the pauranika who creates his text interactively with his listener (both internal and external to this text). Authorship is a community enterprise. To understand its forms, we need a new textual ecology, sensitive to the conditions of emergence and the poetics of usage. Such an ecology must be developmental and historicized, and it will naturally stand apart from the classical canons of South Asian poetics, especially the Kashmiri rasa-dhvani school (probably of relatively limited relevance to any classical Telugu text). Within the typological range of classical texts and their collectively created milieux, the oral and aural dimension of poetry normally has a kind of primacy (though not in the way modern folklorists tend to use these words). At the root of the poem lies the living sound, śabda. You need at least two human beings, in two living bodies, to hear it and recognize it, interactively. Given this primacy, we can begin to think about first-order orality, as in the bards who sing the Palnati virula katha, and second-order orality, as in a highly learned poet such as Śrīnātha, who produces fixed texts that sound like oral verses and that mesmerize the listener by their music. And what about a third-order orality, such as we may find in the catu world that is organized systemically to provide meta-poetic commentary on all major poetic voices?

Throughout Narayana Rao’s work, there is a tension between the fixed and the labile, with a marked preference for the latter. In this sense, he reminds us of the Kannada vacana mystics—and I think it is not going too far to say that a certain kind of volatile, hard-headed mysticism, profoundly logical given the initial incorrigible intuitions, characterizes his views. “Fiction,” he tells us, “has only one form. True story inevitably has many.” (Paula Richman has quoted this dictum as the motto for her Questioning Ramayanas.) We could paraphrase this statement—I have heard Narayana Rao do this—to apply to modern philological criticism: Critical editions are fictions; true poems exist in many variants, all of them legitimate in some way. There is something wrong-headed about striving to establish a critical text even for Kalidasa—paradigmatic kāvya poet—let alone for the Mahabharata. Mediterranean methods don’t work well in India. And in all cases we have to be aware of the difference between the recorded text, such as one might find in a manuscript or in a library, and the received text, that is, that selection from the recorded text that lives on people’s tongues and in their minds and hearts. Once again, the received text—an oral production for the most part—is privileged. “Written texts are flat and silent; it is their use that gives them the heights and depths, the contours of life….Oral communication ensures acceptance by the community more than written communication does” (A Poem at the Right Moment, p. 10). In an organic, continuous tradition such as Andhra’s, the oral penumbra of a poem tells you how to read it. Once again: our first task is to recover the lost canons of reading.

I would like to report something from my own experience of reading and working closely with Narayana Rao over the last three decades. He has—I have seen it many times—an uncanny grasp of these original canons of reading (in the plural: there is a wide range), as if he were directly in touch with the earlier stages of an evolving tradition that remained, for him, unbroken. In this respect, too, he may well be unique in our generation. But to say this is also to say again that his awareness of the tradition is historical through and through, though perhaps not in a linear, Rankean mode. In particular, he remains remarkably close to one of the great moments of civilizational change in Andhra and, indeed, in south India generally—the sixteenth-century revolution in sensibility that he has called “modern.” For Narayana Rao, the “colonial modernity” that emerged in the nineteenth century is a late, derivative, and largely distorted and superficial phenomenon. A much deeper form of proto-modern consciousness turns up in Annamayya, in Pingali Suranna, and in the karnam historiographers of the seventeenth and subsequent centuries (among others). This organic modernity is predicated on a strong notion of the irreplaceable individual and on “secular” aesthetic ideals that cut right across communal and sectarian divisions and that form the basis of the early-modern south Indian states, from the sixteenth century on. This much earlier and richer modern awareness is far more radical than anything the nineteenth-century reformists were capable of articulating.

Can we trace something of the intellectual background to these perceptions? Yes, I think we can. In my view, there is something here that relates to the particular cultural configuration of northern coastal Andhra—the physical matrix of Narayana Rao’s early childhood and family life (in the village of Ambakhandi). His father was an active pauranika (among other things), and Narayana Rao himself learned this art an early age. His most natural affinity, in a sense, is to the cultural and intellectual world of early twentieth-century Vizianagaram, with its astonishing range of creative figures—foremost among them, Gurajada Apparao, another unconventional maverick. Let me say a little more about this historical matrix. Although many of the major poets, scholars, musicians, and other artists active in Vizianagaram during the last two and a half centuries have been more or less forgotten, the particular cultural world they created collectively has survived in subtle, perhaps subterranean ways.

I am thinking of poets such as Gokulapati Kurmanathakavi, Chatrati Laksminarasakavi, Kakaraparti Krsnakavi, Kotikalapudi Venkatakrsna, Phakki Venkatanarasayya, Phakki Appalanarasayya, Mandapaka Kamakavi Parvatisvarudu (at the Bobbili court), Adidam Suranna, Oruganti Somasekharakavi, and Kallakuri Gaurikantakavi. We also know something about the world of Sanskrit scholarship in nineteenth-century Vizianagaram (including the great pandit Mudumba Narasimhacarya and the court-scholar Kolluri Kamasastri) and the highly distinctive domain of classical music in its northern Andhra sampradaya. Once we reach the twentieth century there is Adibhatla Narayana Das and then the well-known series of modern writers. Apparao and Narayana Rao both belong, each in his own way, to this astonishing set, unparalleled in other south Indian contexts. The northern coastal Andhra tradition that we see crystallizing, for example, at the court of Ananda Gajapati incorporated and reworked active themes and perceptions drawn from highly diverse, still living cultural settings—a particular coastal form of Tantric Yoga with its ritual and alchemical texts (some of this filtered into the Kanya-sulkam) and its lineages of transmission; local performance traditions, including Tiger Dancing and wrestling; regional cultic practices such as we find in the festival rituals of Paidi Talli and the great temple sites of Srikurmam, Arasavalli, and Mukhalingam, among others; esoteric Islam, including the voices of the Urdu poets active in the Vizianagaram court; charateristic regional patterns of political thought and state formation; and, again, the particular musical creativity mentioned above.

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.