handling of threadbare romantic topics. Few writers display any knowledge of technique. Such a low level of literary workmanship is a matter for wonder after fifty years of University Education and domination of Western Culture, and it can be attributed only to the defective teaching of English Literature in our Colleges. A better state of things cannot perhaps, be expected until a strong sense of duty impels English Professors and Educational Officers to cultivate the vernaculars.
The Telugu intellect is also seriously handicapped by the tyranny of authority - of a highly artificial literary dialect, a rigid system of alliterative versification, and literary types which have long played out. I shall say a word here about the Literary Dialect. Since I wrote the preface to the first edition, the spoken Dialect has, gained ground. My friend, Principal P.T. Srinivasa Iyengar recently started a Telugu Teaching Reform Society among the aims and objects of which the cultivation of Vernacular Telugu holds a prominent place, and Mr. Yates, whose name will always be remembered in the Telugudistricts for the introduction of rational methods of teaching into our schools, has lent weight to the movement by accepting the Presidentship of the Society.
I cannot understand how modern writers fail to see the merits of Spoken Telugu, its softness which elicited the admiration of foreigners, and its range of expression. At this moment, the best prose in the language is in the Spoken Dialect. Strange as it may sound, Telugu prose owes its origin and development not to the patronage of kings or to the influence of foreign literatures, but to the exertions of a curious Englishman who stimulated compilation of local histories in the vernacular during the early years of the last century. The Mackenzie Collections, no doubt, comprise tracts of unequal merit but for rythm, flow and directness some of them beat the best work in the Literary Dialect ! and, what is rare in Telugu literature, they reflect the mind of the people and bear impress of the times. Unconsciously possibly, Raj Bahadur K. Viresalingam Pantulu garu rendered great service to Telugu by issuing as the first volume of the collected works adaptations of English acting plays and farces of Indian Life written in vernacular of various degrees of purity; and the choice does credit to his shrewd common sense, because that first volume contains his very best work, in fact, his only work that took the public by storm. The credit of deliberately introducing the vernacular into Telugu drama in keeping with Sanskrit tradition belongs to my friend V. Venkataraya Sastri garu whose Prataparudriyam owes not a little of his charm to dialogue in the dialects. I believe my play is the first ambitious work in the Spoken Dialect and, certainly, it has not failed, but success or failure of individual authors is no test of the capacity of a language.
గురుజాడలు
214
కన్యాశుల్కము - మలికూర్పు
