Reading and re-reading the Vasu-caritramu

Bhaṭṭumūrti’s mid-sixteenth-century masterpiece, Vasu-caritramu, is a tour de force of linguistic and poetic experimentation. Its complex verses, many of them paronomastic (śliṣṭa), require decoding by the adept listener of reader; but such decoding never exhausts their expressive potential, much of which depends upon powerful sonic, musical and rhythmic effects. This essay attempts to reconstruct the (lost) protocols of reading for this complex work, including the pervasive links to earlier intertexts, the magic of combining syllables to work upon both the world and the reader’s mind, and the focus on conspicuous themes such as the processes of perception (always informed by language) and the domain of the natural world seen as rule-bound and autonomous. These features appear to belong to a specific Rāyalasīma sensibility evident not only in poetry but also in graphic arts such as the great temples of Lepakshi and Tadipatri. We find them operative throughout the second wave of Telugu prabandha composition, for example, in Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s narrative novel, the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, also composed in Rāyalasīma.