Srinatha: The Poet who Made Gods and Kings

Velcheru Narayana Rao*, David Shulman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

This book offers a cultural biography of a south Indian poet-Srinatha, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the area of today's Andhra Pradesh and who composed in Telugu, one of the great classical languages of India with a literary tradition of a thousand years. Srinatha is arguably the most creative figure in the entire history of Telugu literature and one of the great voices in South Asian literature generally. He revolutionized the nature of literary composition in Telugu and, in effect, invented the classic format of the sustained, well-integrated, thematically coherent Telugu book. He bridged the gap between oral and written composition in Telugu by creating a "second-order" orality; and he combined in highly creative ways the classical Sanskrit world of erudition and poetic precedent with an entirely local, Telugu reality. A figure larger than life, he is emblematic of a moment of profound cultural change and experimentation in south India, and he lives on in a rich tradition of stories and poetic imitations (discussed at length in the final chapter of the book). Defining himself as an "emperor of poets," he in effect generated a notion of Andhra as a cultural zone as well as a model for the large-scale political empire of Vijayanagara that came into being in the fifteenth century.

Original languageEnglish
PublisherOxford University Press
Number of pages224
ISBN (Electronic)9780199932900
ISBN (Print)9780199863020
DOIs
StatePublished - 24 May 2012

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Andhra
  • Poetics
  • Poetry
  • South India
  • Srinatha
  • Telugu
  • Temples

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