The classical tradition in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India, is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. In this volume, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, providing an authoritative volume overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. An informative, engaging introduction fleshes out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.

"An amazing book . . . There is nothing remotely like it anywhere in the world. I am in awe at the skill with which the many different voices in this collection have been kept alive. It is a terrific and stunningly interesting read."—Wendy Doniger, author of The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade "This is a superb collection, which presents to the English reading public for the first time a literature of great beauty and importance. There is no similar or comparable anthology for any Indian language let alone Telugu. All of the translations of the poems are exquisite and learned. The introduction is both a much needed history of Telugu poetry and also a guide to the aesthetics of Telugu poetry and the art of reading it."—Phyllis Granoff, translator of The Journey: Stories by K.C. Das

The devotional poems of Annamaya (15th century) are perhaps the most accessible and universal achievement of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India. Annamaya effectively created and popularized a new genre, the short padam song, which spread throughout the Telugu and Tamil regions and would become an important vehicle for the composition of Carnatic music - the classical music of South India. In this book, Rao and Shulman offer translations of 150 of Annamaya's poems. All of them are addressed to the god associated with the famous temple city of Tirupati-Annamaya's home-a deity who is sometimes referred to as "god on the hill" or "lord of the seven hills." The poems are couched in a simple and accessible language invented by Annamaya for this purpose. Rao and Shulman's elegant and lyrical modern translations of these beautiful and moving verses are wonderfully readable as poetry in their own right, and will be of great interest to scholars of South Indian history and culture.

"Composed in the mid-sixteenth century, ...[this] could be considered the first novel written in South Asia...Employing the poetic style known as campu, which mixes verse and prose, Pingali Suranna's work transcends our notions of tranditionl narrative.... [This novel] is both a gripping love story and a profound meditation on mind nd language."--Back cover.

This volume forms a part of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series which deals with schools, movements and discursive practices in major South Asian languages. It offers crucial insights into the making of Telugu literature and its critical tradition across over a century. The book brings together English translation of major writings of influential figures dealing with literary criticism and theory, aesthetic and performative traditions, re-interpretations of primary concepts, categories and interactions in Telugu. It presents 32 key texts in literary and cultural studies representing thoughts, debates, signposts and interfaces on important trends in critical discourse in the Telugu region from the middle of the 19th to the end of the 20th century, with nearly all translated by experts for the first time into English. The volume covers a wide array of themes, ranging from a text by Kandukuri Veeresalingam on women’s education to Challapalli Swaroopa Rani on new readings of the oral literature of the marginalised communities. These radical essays explore the interconnectedness of the socio-cultural and historical developments in the colonial and post-independence period in the Telugu region. They discuss themes such as integrative aesthetic visions; poetic and literary forms; modernism; imagination; power structures and social struggles; ideological values; cultural renovations; and collaborations and subversions. Comprehensive and authoritative, this volume offers an overview of the history of critical thought in Telugu literature in South Asia. It will be essential for scholars and researchers of Telugu language and literature, literary criticism, literary theory, comparative literature, Indian literature, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, performance studies, history, sociology, regional studies and South Asian studies. It will also interest the Telugu-speaking diaspora and those working on the intellectual history of Telugu and conservation of languages and culture.

This book offers a groundbreaking cultural biography of Srinatha, arguably the most creative figure in the thousand-year history of Telugu literature. Their study, which includes extensive translations of Srinatha's major works, shows the poet's place in a great classical tradition in a moment of profound cultural transformation.

A Poem at the Right Moment collects, and preserves, poems—called catus—that have circulated orally for centuries in South India. The poems are remarkable for their wit and precision, their lyrical insight on the commonplace, their fascination with sensual experience, and their exploration of the connection between language and desire. Taken together the catus offer a penetrating critical vision and an understanding of the classical traditions of Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Each poem is presented in a contemporary English translation along with the Indian-language original. An introduction and a concluding essay explore in detail the stories and texts that comprise the catu system. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

How is it that this woman's breasts glimmer so clearly through her saree? Can't you guess, my friends? What are they but rays from the crescents left by the nails of her lover pressing her in his passion, rays now luminous as the moonlight of a summer night? These South Indian devotional poems show the dramatic use of erotic language to express a religious vision. Written by men during the fifteenth to eighteenth century, the poems adopt a female voice, the voice of a courtesan addressing her customer. That customer, it turns out, is the deity, whom the courtesan teases for his infidelities and cajoles into paying her more money. Brazen, autonomous, fully at home in her body, she merges her worldly knowledge with the deity's transcendent power in the act of making love. This volume is the first substantial collection in English of these Telugu writings, which are still part of the standard repertoire of songs used by classical South Indian dancers. A foreword provides context for the poems, investigating their religious, cultural, and historical significance. Explored, too, are the attempts to contain their explicit eroticism by various apologetic and rationalizing devices. The translators, who are poets as well as highly respected scholars, render the poems with intelligence and tenderness. Unusual for their combination of overt eroticism and devotion to God, these poems are a delight to read.

The first English translation of a thousand-year-old story of Krishna and his wife Satyabhama, retold by the most famous court poet of the Vijayanagara Empire. Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband’s affections. Timmana based his work on a popular millennium-old Krishna tale. Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the wish-granting pārijāta tree from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna takes the tree to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, he plants the pārijāta for Satyabhama—but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. This is the first English translation of the poem, which prefigures the modern Telugu novel with its unprecedented narrative unity.

Manucaritramu, or The Story of Manu, by the early sixteenth-century poet Allasani Peddana, is the definitive literary monument of Telugu civilization and a powerful embodiment of the imperial culture of Vijayanagara, the last of the great premodern south Indian states. It is the story of Svarochisha Manu, who ruled over the previous cosmic age and who serves here as prototype for the first human being. Peddana explores the dramatic displacements, imaginative projections, and intricate workings of desire necessary for Manu's birth and formation. The Story of Manu is also a book about kingship and its exigencies at the time of Krishnadevaraya, the most powerful of the Vijayanagara rulers, who was a close friend and patron of the poet. The Story of Manu, presented in the Telugu script alongside the first translation into any language, is a true masterpiece of early modern south Indian literature. The Murty Classical Library of India makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia in the most authoritative and accessible formats on offer anywhere.