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 its 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.
While the Vernacular is thus gaining recognition, the Literary Dialect itself is approximating to the Spoken Dialect in the best modern prose which manifests great freedom of usage. Rai Bahadur K. Viresalingam Pantulu Garu, the most prominent figure in the Telugu World of letters at the present day, has set the example of laxity in the observance of the Law of interchange of soft and hard consonants after a drita nasal. Hardly a modern writer would escape censure if judged by rules of grammar and established usage, and in the school room, Pandits have relaxed insistence on rigid observance of rules of Sandhi. The moral of this tendency to break through traditional restrictions is clear. The old Literary Dialect is felt to be an inconvenient instrument, and there is an unconscious effort to form a new Literary Dialect. My complaint is that the movement is illogically slow.
I view the Telugu Literary Dialect as a great disability imposed by tradition upon the Telugus. Let those who love fetters venerate it. My own vernacular, for me, the Living Telugu, the Italian of the East in which none of us is ashamed to express our joys and sorrows, but which some of us are ashamed to write well. Literature in the Vernacular will knock at the door of the peasant; and it will knock at the door of the Englishman in India. Its possibilities are immense.
No argument in favour of a Vernacular Literature is needed with persons who are conversant with the history of the English Dialects and the Prakrits, and I know it is not arguments that will evolve a New Literary Dialect for Telugu. A great writer must write and make it. Let us prepare the ground for him.
