BY M. V. N. SUBBA RAU, M. A.

Thikkana is one of the greatest of the world-poets. But it is a matter for considerable surprise that he is not known beyond the Telugu country though the Telugus themselves consider him as the greatest Telugu poet. The reason for this, it seems to me, is a twofold one and must be sought in the nature of his work and the character of the Andhra race.

The greatest work of Thikkana is his translation of the Mahabharata. This is one of the reasons why Thikkana's fame as a poet has not spread far and wide. A mere translation, however good, cannot be as great as an original work; and this common belief has obscured from the general view the transcendent greatness of the poet. Every excellence in the Andhra Mahabharatam¹ is supposed to be merely a reflection of the excellence of the Sanskrit original. So Thikkana is considered as a mere translator and not a creative poet. But a careful reading of the Telugu poem will reveal the creative genius of Thikkana. The fables and the episodes, the characters and the sentiments are all taken from the Sanskrit poem. The language for the most part is a translation (if a free translation) of the Sanskrit of the original. The great triumph of Thikkana is that in spite of all these, retaining the general appearance of his book as a translation of the time-honoured epic, he has managed to make this work a creative poem of unsurpassed beauty.

The Andhra Mahabharatam is not a translation of the Sanskrit epic in any accepted sense of the term. It is not even a free paraphrase. It would be more true to say that it is an adaptation of the original work. Though there are no serious deviations from the original, the poet has ordered the whole material and constructed the poem on a definite plan with an artistic view, pruning a bit here and adding a little there, heightening the colour in one place and developing a portrait in another. He has in fact recreated the poem. To take only one instance for illustration, I may mention the omission of the famous Bhagavat Gita. The knife of the artist has been ruthlessly applied here. This is not the place to enter into any lengthy discussion regarding this point. Suffice it to say that Thikkana felt that the introduction of a long philosophic treatise on the battlefield just before the commencement of the war would impede the action, and therefore he boldly omitted it. It must have required extraordinary courage to omit this famous and popular discourse. But no poet has become really great who has not had the courage of his artistic convictions. Sincerity is the first condition of greatness in poetry as elsewhere. Thikkana had this sincerity and courage to a remarkable degree, and the omission of the Bhagavat Gila is due to this artistic sense in him. However that may be, this omission indubitably proves my contention that Thikkana conceived of his work as an original creative poem and not merely as a translation. It is the hand of the artist and the creative poet that is in evidence throughout and not that of a mere translator. Unless we recognise this point clearly we shall not be able to appreciate the greatness of Thikkana adequately.

The second reason why Thikkana’s reputation is not bruited outside the Telugu country is to be found in the character and temper of the Andhras. The Andhras are a queer people. Once they were very great: they were the rulers of the Earth and masters of every art and craft. Their kings were poets and their poets were philosophers. Even today the vestiges of their greatness may be seen in a curious kind of solution: they are kingly in spirit and demeanour, poetic in expression and aspiration, and philosophic in out-look and conduct. The Andhra has the intellect of the Tamil, the emotion of the Bengalee, the valour of the Mahratta, the simplicity of the Malayalee, and the open-heartedness of the Punjabi. But he lacks industry perseverance, and ambition. Both his virtues and defects conspire to make him unambitious.

He is no hero-worshipper. He does not care to advertise the great men of his race. He takes them for granted, much as he takes the radiance of the sun and the daily loveliness of the world. He almost considers it a vulgarity to praise them too loudly. He is as shy of lime-light as the jasmine is of sun-light. That is why the great men of the Andhra country are not known as well, as they should be. Even today, for instance, there are great philanthropists who give away in abundance but whose left hand does not know what their right hand gives away; there are silver-tongued orators whose eloquence moves the hearts and sways the wills of thousands but whose names are unknown outside their province; there are leaders of thought who take delight in hiding their light under a bushel; there are poets who are as great as any that India can boast of but who deliberately seek obscurity; there are martyrs in the cause of country and religion whose righteousness and sacrifice are really marvelous but whose reputation has not spread beyond the Andhra country.

Their racial realisation of the deep truths of life is so great that the Andhras are subconsciously influenced by it to a remarkable degree. It seems to me that this deep philosophical temper, this complete indifference to fame, this utter lack of ambition, this absolute disinterestedness is largely the legacy of Thikkana. His Andhra Mahabharatam has entered into the very life-blood of the Andhra race. It is not like other epics of the world which are honoured but never read. It is as great and honoured as any other epic, but it is at the same time as popular as the English Bible, and its influence in all spheres of Andhra thought and action is as great, if not greater.

Considered deeply the Andhra Mahabharatam is an exposition of, and a commentary on, the life of Thikkana. Active in body but passive in spirit, heroic in deed but contemplative in mood, expert in the affairs of this world but other-worldly in attitude, practical and yet idealistic, he was a true Karma Yogi. His life was rich in experience. He came into contact with the many-coloured dome of life at innumerable points. On the religious side he was a ceremonialist, a Bhakta, and a philosopher; on the cultural side a scholar, an artist, and a poet; in the practical region a statesman, a diplomat, and a warrior. He belonged indeed to the race of heroes whom he has described with such marvelous beauty and power in his work. He lived a full life, a complete life–not a compartmental or partial life. Milton, the great English epic poet, said that he who would aspire to be a great poet ‘ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things’. It is profoundly true. The greatest poems of the world have been written not by the mere men of letters, not by those who are supposed to have the pure artistic temperament and live far from the madding crowd, not by mere dreamers and idlers, but by those who have lived strenuous lives, by those who have had an ideal before them and striven to achieve it with all the vigour of their body and soul, by those who have taken active and heroic part in the battles of life. Dante and Milton, Aeschylus and Sophocles, to name only a few, are instances in point. Thikkana belongs to this class. His life is an epic poem in itself. The life of no other poet, ancient or modern, Occidental or Oriental, can equal that of Thikkana in its manifold beauty, in its unsullied purity, in its many-hued splendour.

The language I have used may appear to be exaggerated, but I claim that it is bare unvarnished truth. Consider for a moment the life and work of a late contemporary of Thikkana in the West who is praised and honoured as the epic poet of Roman Catholicism, as the spokesman of the middle ages–Dante. Both are epic poets. Both have written in the vernaculars of their countries rather than in the learned languages. Both are men of action as well as poets. Speaking of Dante’s portrait Carlyle says: ‘I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. . . . A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful one!’ Now no authentic portrait of Thikkana has come down to us. But to the eye of the imagination informed by the known facts of his life and a proper understanding of his works, he appears to be royal and dignified, calm and collected, balanced and benignant. His face beams with spiritual and physical heroism, with the wisdom of both the worlds, with the peace that passeth all understanding. He is a man of action as well as of vision, of achievement as well as of words. He is an artist in life as well as an artist in letters. What a contrast between these two figures! One sorrow-stricken, mournful, pathetic, scornful, and screaming; the other dignified, calm, peaceful, tolerant, and serene!

Their works justify these portraits. The root idea of both the Divine Comedy and the Andhra Mahabharatam is the same—that ‘life is based on judgment’. And yet the treatment is so different that the difference in their characters is fully brought home to us. The Divine Comedy reflects the narrowness, the violence, the intolerance of its author. It is in the words of Carlyle, ‘deep, fierce as the central fire of the world’. It is full of fanatic, scathing denunciation. He condemns, for instance, the great Greek Philosopher Socrates to Hell. Socrates in Hell! Socrates who said to his judges,

In Hell on the gates of which are inscribed according to Dante the terrible words

What can be a more absurd, a more perverse judgment than this? But this is only one instance out of a multitude of its kind. Burton Roscoe in his Titans of Literature condemns both the man and his Book in strong language. Of the Book he says: -

‘The Divine Comedy, like the Holy Roman Empire, which Dante admired which was neither Holy nor Roman nor yet an empire, is not an epic; it is not divine; it is not a comedy; nor except in a few isolated passages, is it poetry.’

He describes Dante as violent and hysterical, as deceitful and debauched, as a turn-coat and a traitor; It seems to me that, without agreeing with Roscoe in all that he has said, we yet must concede that there is considerable truth in his criticism. There seems to be little doubt that Dante was bigoted and spiteful, narrow and intolerant, and that his Book betrays his personal and parochial outlook, his spirit of revenge, his want of balance, his lack of charity and catholicity.

The Andhra Mahabharatam is entirely different. There is nothing personal, hysterical, or fanatical about it. It represents cosmic vision. ‘As a man sows so shall he reap’ is the fundamental idea of the poem. It describes on a grand scale the inexorable working out of the moral law, the law of cause and effect, the law of Karma. But there is no undue violence, or soul-revolting cruelty, or inhuman torture, as there is no weak sentimentality and no cheap pity. There is perfect correspondence between cause and effect, between crime and punishment, between sin and suffering. The perfect proportion achieved in this epic shows the well-balanced nature Thikkana. I admit that much of the sanity of the moral judgment is due to the original Sanskrit epic; but the perfect proportion wrought in the artistic construction of the Andhra Mahabharatam, which is entirely Thikkana’s achievement, indicates the pattern of his character.

One could easily guess to what purposes Dante would have used this theme of the Mahabharata and to what unutterable tortures of Hell he would have consigned its heroes. Though Dante concludes his epic with reference to the Love

there is very little evidence of it in large tracts or the poem. As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch points out it is based on hatred rather than on charity. But the whole of the Andhra Mahabharatam is lit up with the enchanting love-joy of the most magnetic of all God-men–Sri Krishna. Even as the rainbow in the sky lends a weird beauty to the stormy landscape, Sri

Krishna’s smile playing upon the gloom and horrors of war sheds a strange charm and a novel beauty on the poem and converts it into a real Divine Comedy–a cosmic drama revealing the mysterious and yet marvelously attractive leela of the Divine Player. As there is more charity and more balance in Thikkana’s poem there is also more exquisite poetry and truer philosophy in it than in that of Dante. The reason is that in addition to the vision of the poet, Thikkana had the chivalry of the hero, the impartiality of the judge, the deep purposefulness of the prophet, the wisdom of the seer, the serenity of the philosopher, the artist’s sense of proportion, and the disinterestedness of the Yogi. He is one of the very few men of the world to whom the words of Shakespeare may without exaggeration be applied:

His vision was deep and penetrating. He looked into the very life of things and discovered the balance, the equilibrium, and the harmony of the universe. That is why he was able to present the drama of life in all its enthralling beauty, in all its lyrical sweetness, and in all its epic grandeur.

My friend Pingali Lakshmikanta Kavi, who is a great Thikkana scholar, tells me that there is an implied similarity between the architectonics of the Andhra Mahabharatam and the architecture of the South Indian temple. Undoubtedly the Andhra Mahabharatam is a glorious temple of poetry built by the genius of Thikkana in whom was incarnate the spirit of the Andhra race. It is at once a national, a racial, and a universal temple.

The empire of the Andhras has vanished like a splendid dream; but this poetic Taj Mahal will stand for ever as an eternal monument reflecting the imaginative splendour, the heroic grandeur, the poetic glory, and the philosophic serenity of the Andhra race. And Thikkana represents at their highest the Andhra achievement, the Hindu genius, and the human aspiration. It is not parochial partiality but a due recognition of the fact that he is a master-singer of cosmic harmonies, that has prompted the Andhras to honour him as Kavi Brahma.