Preface
Under the orders of His Highness the Maharajah of Vizianagarm, a list was prepared ten years ago, of Brahmin sulka marriages, celebrated in the ordinary tracts of the Vizagapatnam District during three years. The lists is by no means exhaustive as the parties concerned were naturally averse to admitting acceptance of bride-money; but such as it is, it forms a document of great value and interest. The number of marriages recorded reached one thousand and thirty four, giving an average of three hundred and forty four for the year. Ninety nine girls were married at the age of five years, forty four at four, thirty six at three, six at two, and three at the age of one ! - the babies in the last instance carrying a price of from three hundred and fifty to four hundred rupees a head. Strange, as it may sound, bargains are sometimes struck for children in the womb. Such a scandalous state of things is a disgrace to society, and literature cannot have a higher function than to show up such practices and give currency to a high standard of moral ideas. Until reading habits prevail among the masses, one must look only to the stage to exert such healthy influence. These considerations prompted me to compose Kanyasulkam.
I clothed the play in the spoken dialect, not only that it is better intelligible to the stage - going public than the literary dialect, but also from a conviction that it is the proper comic diction for Telugu. Dramatic style is, no doubt, determined to some extent by usage, but the absence of any real dramatic literature in Telugu, leaves a writer free to adopt that outward form which he deems most appropriate for the presentation of his ideas. The metres in use in Telugu, with their alliterative restrictions, are incapable of imparting no language conversational ease which is indispensable in a comedy, or continuity in whcih, as Mr. Ward remarks, lies real life. One might invent new dramatic measures - but it would be a superfluous task, so far at least as comedy is concerned, as prose is gaining ground all over the world for dramatic purposes.
It has been remarked that the use of what is wrongly termed the vulgar tongue mars the dignity of a literary production, but that is a piece of criticism which one need not heed at the present day when the progress of the Science of Language has established better standards for judging the quality and usefulness of tongues than the whims of Grammarians of old linguistic strata. The Telugu literary dialect contains many obsolete grammatical forms, an inconveniently, large mass of obsolete words and arbitrary verbal contractions and expansions, necessitated by a system of versification based on allit-
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కన్యాశుల్కము - తొలికూర్పు
