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OCTOBER, 1902.) SOME MILE STONES IN TELUGU LITERATURE.
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Vêmana is the greatest popular poet of the Telugu people, and his fame extends thronghout the length and breadth of the Teluga country. There is hardly a proverb or any pithy saying which is not attributed to him. He is to Telugu literature what Avva is to the Tamil. In consequence of his vast popularity, and the almost fabulous fecundity of less important poets of a later age, who have tacked their own brain-products on to Vêmana's, it is hardly possible now to say what particular verse is his and what not. There are nearly three thousand verses of such doubtful authenticity, and the manuscripts in wbich they have been handed down to his disciples so considerably differ from one another, that none of them can be considered a really authenticated collection of the poet's verses. There has been a good many bazaar-editions of these verses procurable for a few annas in almost all the market towns in the Telugu districts. They are very badly printed and badly edited, and contain a glorious medley of incongruous parts. An attempt has been made three score years ago to restore order out of chaos by the late Mr. O. P. Brown of the Madras Civil Service, an erudite Telagu scholar, who has placed the whole Teluga community under very great obligations by his two monumental lexicons - the Telugu-English and the English-Telugu Dictionaries - not to speak of his other by no means less valuable works. He has carefully edited the work, supplemented by his invaluable notes and an admirable English prose translation which gives a tolerably fair idea of the poet's style.
Vemana has not trodden the beaten track of poetic routine, and exhibits poine originality. His descriptions are to a great extent true to nature, though his metaphors are to a certain extent odious. He was emphatically & poet of the people. An unlettered rastie himself he wrote for the rural population in a colloquial nursery dialect, setting at Daught the rules of classic verse. Classical poetry, indeed, can never be popular in any country, unless the people who inhabit it, one and all of them, are fine scholars, Vênana's diction bears the marks of his early life. It is an unlettered un pretentions farmer who speaks, and his words bave a breezy freshness suggestive of his own wild windswept hills, with their scanty vegetation and huge boulder masses. There is no attempt at ornament, no straining after effect. His illustrations Bavour very much of his rural life. He owed much of his popularity to satire, to his pictures of the vices and follies of men in all their meanness and absurdity. When in his more cynical inoods, he sees in human life nothing which is not mean and ridiculous, and wastes his satire upon the mere physical infirmities incidental to our material circumstances. But it is drunkenness and licentiousness, covetousness and pride, and empty vanity boasting of its good looks and fine clothes and great possessions, the despicable meanness that despises the poor and flatters and fawns upon the rich, it is these and similar vices that in better woods he holds up to our contempt. He directs his satire chiefly against caste distinctions and against women. Had he had the power, he would have put down all caste distinctions and converted the whole human population into universal caste and introdnced the old Spartan legislation, where there would be nothing like private property. He maintained that the absence of any statute to regulate the accumulation of capital, the awful monopoly which capital 80 accumulated constitutes, and the tremendous tyranny which it engenders, are the springs of that pauperism, which sits like an incubus on the bosom of virtuous India. He says, 'When a man has wealth, people look on him as the fairest of the gods; when brought low by want and unable to raise himself, though he be a very Cupid, they look on him as an outcast." He speaks so bitterly of women that it seems as if he doubted the possibility of any woman being capable of truth and fidelity. As the track of a ship on the sea, as the path of a bird in the air, so is the way of a'woman." In time of wealth wife looks to her husband. In time of want she will not even riso at his approach; she looks on him as dead, though he is still alive. It is in his references to women that Vêmana fails most conspicuously to rise above the conventionalism of Hindu society. There are passages in his writings it is true, in which he describes the true and faithful
The tenth oanto of Bammora Pothana's Bhagavata may be taken Man exception. This poem, though closionl, is studied among the homes of the Telugu people and assimilated by thom.
