What Shakespeare is to the English, what Dante is to the Italians, what Dr. Iqbal is to Urdu speaking Muslims, Dr. Umer Ali Shah is to the Hindus of Andhra.
His writings have no other parallel, as I stated before, in any other literature of the world, becase they are the creation of one man. He had to his credit such a vast bulk of written work in all literary forms that no one author in English or any other language could have produced.
But alas! It is confined to Andhra, and Andhra only, and its great merit lies hidden outside the state even in India, not to speak of foreign countries.
Yet his reputation, by a curious twist of fate, soared aloft.
In 1936 the International Academy of America confirmed upon him the degree fo doctor of literature for his thesis in Telugu. For a man with no university education to obtain such a high degree from the new world is certainly a matter of pride to the individual as well as to the province in which he was born
His was no ordinary intellent, thought he knew little English when compared to his ability in Telugu and Sanskrit.
His works in Telugu are clear evidence of what he struggled for, lived for and clied for. He was out and cut a nationalist purposed to reform the people around him culturally, socially, economically and politically, and accordingly, he rendered youngman service to humanity at large during that little span of his meteoric rice.
He did everything in his capacity. His School of thought pervaded all his works and helped remove the dogmatic ideas and beliefs of the ignorant and the illiterate and led them to the supreme path of glory and virtue.
This won for him a saintly honour and he came to be regarded by all Hindus as a saint, His writings spelled the qualities of a great seer.
Though he was a Muslim, the magnanimity of the Hindus could riot deprive him of what he was in truth, nor did they the Hindus leave him in the lunch, but nursed his genius tenderly till it gave them the best of the life they needed. And he did not disappoint them.
