“THERE exists among the masses of the people a vast
underground sea of belief totally unconnected with temporal sources of power.
From this sea, occasionally, strange waters work their way to the surface. The
great poets are such springs and they articulate the feelings of the masses in
opposition to orthodox doctrines and vested interests.”
Vemana is such a poet among the Telugus. The
details of his personal history are shrouded in mystery, and the task of
ascertaining them with any degree of accuracy is rendered most difficult by a
large amount of legend, interpolation, and imitation. It seems to be fairly
certain that he lived at one or the other end of the 17th century, that he
lived probably in what is now narrowly miscalled Royalaseema, that he was a
scion of a decadent feudal Reddy dynasty, and that early in life he had sample
opportunities of acquiring cultural contacts with pandits and poets who flocked
around the men of power and wealth. It seems to have been fairly certain also
that like most young men of decadent ruling families, he fell a victim to
youthful lust and avarice, that after a short while he had his inevitable
disillusionment, and that thereafter a deep hunger that no material thing could
satisfy took possession of his soul, and urged him on, till he visited several
men renowned for spiritual power and insight, studied several systems of
philosophy and religion, hoping to find therein a real and helpful clue to the
attainment of salvation. This long and arduous quest did not at all satisfy the
longing of his soul and at last, in sheer disgust, he abandoned all sects,
forsook all gurus. All his journeys were turned within; they became inward
pilgrimages, and he found in the resources of his own spirit what he could not
find in his outward ramblings. All his futile experiments in religion, whatever
might have been their positive achievements, were serviceable to him, for they
opened his eyes to the dangers attendant along the path of religious quest and
questioning, and once for all made him realise the futility and the worse than
futility of all external rites and ceremonies. After this, it is no wonder, he
took to fierce denunciation of external rituals, of sacred scriptures, of priestly
classes, of mere physical disciplines, as not only unavailing for purposes of
spiritual illumination but as dangerously misleading to the earnest seeker
after salvation. And just as he hurls his denunciations with an intensity of
scorn, so does he assert the positive truths of his own finding with an equal
intensity of conviction. It need hardly be said that, not being a profound
scholar or a systematic student, he did not develop a connected system of
doctrine and discipline. It is perhaps not wrong to presume that, as and when
the occasion arose, he threw forth, minted from the flaming furnace of his
burning spiritual experience, sharp and striking truths, some critical, some
satirical, some mystical, some practical, but all arresting by their directness
of vision and statement. The original expression is in the language spoken by
the average Telugu masses; there are no profound learned expressions, there are
not any linked combination of words, called Samasams. But employing the
simple forceful language of everyday usage, he strikes out astonishing truths
with precision and with persuasiveness; we see how in his hands the simple
language has been forged into an instrument of forceful expression, his poetry
itself in fact being a unique achievement of expression unparalleled in the
range of Telugu literature, revealing the potentialities of ordinary spoken
Telugu as a vehicle for the expression of lofty ideas and of uplifting
sentiments. It is a significant thing that so earnest a soul and so profound a scholar
as Mr. Brown of the I.C.S. taking to the study of Telugu a century ago and
enquiring for works popular among people and composed in a style easily
comprehended by a foreigner, first came across the verses of Vemana, carried on
a certain amount of research and published a translation of a selection of
them. The book is at once a monument of the scholarly devotion of Mr. Brown and
an indication also that Vemana strikes an unprejudiced person as a typically
Telugu poet. As we read his verses, we are struck with the directness of
Vemana’s vision, with his power of penetration, with his scorching indignation
at cant and untruth, with his fiery denunciation of futile externals in
religion, but we are also attracted by the sweet and charming manner in which
he directly lays hand on the central core of truth. Directness of vision leads
to force of expression, as reality of experience imparts a convincing character
to it, It is refreshing to find that Vemana does not exhaust himself in
satirical outbursts, but that very often he hits off wholesome truths of
religious practice, pregnant observations on the character of home-life, on the
unavailing nature of outward ceremony, on the healing character of forgiveness,
on the individual human spirit as a supreme Shekinah of the Divine; myths like
the sanctity of books or of Avatars are punctured with little pinpricks and
illuminating truths are shot out with astonishing simplicity of both experience
and expression.
It need hardly be said that, when dealing with a poet
like Vemana, translation is impossible, because the man’s ideas are set on fire
with passion and thereby acquire an air of high conviction, and the poet
himself becomes a champion for the directness of personal experience and
vision. He utters, his scorching protests against all staleness and strategy in
religion and from his habit of original thought, and from the heights of one
who has his head in the clouds, he hits off, he dashes forth, he pours out, he
spreads around, illumination in many an epigram. Sometimes he is fantastic, but
at other times he is furious. Often he seems devastating, on occasions he
becomes illuminative. With such a poet, explanation and translation make for
staleness; but we have to give an idea of some at least of the poet’s observations
on life and things. He speaks of tenacity of purpose and single-mindedness of
devotion. He says that where grace and goodness combine in the wife, there is
no heaven higher than a home. He points out that forgiveness is the noblest
vengeance; he ridicules the idiosyncrasies of the reputed incarnations of God
in the Hindu pantheon. Sometimes in a tone of divine flippancy he cries out
like the man who said that if, at the time of creation, God had consulted him,
he might have given him some useful hints; and on occasions he again dashes
forth brilliant truths like that of the essential identity of the human spirit
and divine spirit, or that God-knowledge is the only true knowledge.
As already indicated Vemana represents the triumph
of simple spoken Telugu as against the high-flown Sanskritised diction of the
pandit and the scholarly poet; it is equally true that he represents the
triumph of the common man with natural longings and unrepressed desires as
against the artificial reparations of sacerdotal religion. It is true likewise
also that he represents the truth of natural religion as against artificial
religiosity. One cannot help feeling that in spite of a good deal of
disillusionment, Vemana perhaps had some lingering obscure belief which sometimes
speak through his verses. But the wonder is that coming so early as three
centuries ago, he had shaken off the soul-destroying bondage of so much
formalism, so much superstition and so much of fussiness. One cannot help
regretting that he had wasted time in a good deal of ethical drudgery, of
tantric mummery and of alchemic jugglery. But the wonder is, that despite all
these, passing through and transcending all these, he could attain a loftiness
of vision, and intensity of conviction, a directness of expression and a
forcefulness of persuasion that may well be the envy of the more erudite among
poets. Leaving aside Tikkana, the typical exponent, on the scholarly side, of
the genius of the Telugus, if I were asked to pick out the name of another
among the ranks of people’s poets who stands out typically as an exponent of
the genius of the Telugu man, I would unhesitatingly point out Vemana. He is
unquestionably the most oft-quoted poet in Telugu, and one would not be guilty
of exaggeration in saying that there is hardly any Telugu man who cannot repeat
from memory at least a few of the verses of Vemana. His humour is not of that
variety which, is akin to humanity. It is not, for instance, like the humour of
Srinadha who can raise a smile but leave no sting behind. He is the unrivalled
master of Ata-veladi metre as Tikkana is of Kandam, and has made
of it a magnificent medium for the pithy and pregnant expression of significant
truth. In fact his acknowledged supremacy therein makes others almost despair
of anywhere approaching him. Meaning and metre are completely fused that the
resulting product is a haunting melody which accounts for and explains his
undying popularity. Vemana, like the author of Vasucharitra, stands
through the centuries as an indubitable testimony to the truth that talent of
the supreme type elicits for itself the whole-hearted some of admiring
generations, irrespective of the caste and community affiliations of the poet.
A little more reverent study of Vemana by the Telugus today would be a healthy
antidote to the ill-conceived communalism, the incurable sacerdotalism the
devastating externalism of the present day Andhra life.
But to my mind Vemana is great, more as reformer
than as poet; alone among the poets he is the stout-hearted protestant crying
against all the evils of an external revelation and a specific incarnation, and
pleading for directness of approach and a reality of experience as immeasurably
superior to all the fussiness that now passes for religion. He tears to pieces so
much of cant and self-deception that passes under the name of religion and
philosophy; his fierce denunciations are truely Carlylean in the intensity of
their wrath and his mystic assertions are those which only a seer can have the
courage to assert. He is, in fact, a Kavi among Yogis and a Yogi among Kavis.
He illustrates the grand truth which Rabindranath Tagore, in one of his lyrics
expresses when he sings:
“Thy words are simpler, My Master, than theirs who
talk of thee.”
He shows that where paths are many and confusing,
and guiding voices become bewildering, the native human spirit, by the light of
its own longings and the light of its own questing, is sure to find out God,
because, after all, God and man are sure to find each other out as surely as the
magnet and the iron, despite all the obscurations that priests and churches
have thrown along the path of spiritual quest.
1 By courtesy of All
India Radio, Madras.