Talk by Nagaraj Paturi on Indic decolonizing and colonized and anti Indic approaches to Telugu Literature

[Nagaraj Paturi]

An introduction to Telugu literature

There is a growing interest and a recent greater focus on the 'shift' from Sanskrit and later Sanskrit-Prakrit literary activity to the same in 'vernacular languages' in India.

A concept of all regional Indian literatures being a single Indian Lterature articulated through different languages was floated and was in vogue during the early days of the field of Comparative Literature in India.

Telugu literature is one such regional expression of Indian Literature.

Telugu is one of the languages which has been accorded 'Classical' status by the Government of India. It is spoken by around ten crore population in the two Telugu states Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Its first extant literary work is dated to eleventh century AD though inscriptional evidences indicate the emergence of the language, style and format of these works being available at least by the eighth century AD providing credence to the popular legends and academic theorizations proposing at least a few centuries older but now partially or fully extinct literary works in the language. Spanning more than a thousand years, the history of Telugu literature is a history of Marga [Classical with its Sanskrit bent ] and Desi [folkish local with its folk bent ] streams and streams of ,narrative poetic works and technical works both during premodern and modern periods. Histories of Telugu literature have been written right from the late nineteenth century till date. Very few of them are in English. Most of them are in Telugu. These works of histories of literature are part of and closely connected to a huge activity of Literary Criticism that has been strongly rooted in Alankara shaastra and equally strongly influenced by western poetics and English literary criticism. Like in all the academic history of modern Indian academics, there are colonial, colonised and anti colonial and decolonizing approaches in the field of Telugu literary criticism in general and historical study of Telugu literature in particular. The talk is an attempt to present a discerning analysis of these Indic and anti Indic perspectives in a nutshell.

My talk on the 6th of October will be focusing on Indic and anti Indic approaches in the works on histories of Indian literatures. Literary Historiography is an interesting subject. In Hindi, they published works on साहित्य इतिहास लेखन. In English, there are concepts like Literary History focusing on Intrinsic as opposed to Extrinsic history of literature. All such discussions did not take off well in other regional Indian literatures. My teacher Prof. G V Subrahmanyam tried to lay foundation of that in Telugu literature.

I will be introducing the Telugu Literature through English covering from the beginning till date, highlighting the colonized and decolonizing approaches in the modern Telugu literature and the present works on Telugu literature.

The issues raised could be relevant to other regional Indian literatures and even Sanskrit literature.

Link for registration

https://indicacademy.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-4YEvKVrRWGLtUFsh6Hm4Q?fbclid=IwAR3GRkLJ5JX_TYiif__oZYMYUI8C49AkOrhKjdnvX8bRtl7DLjwspcYeIUw