Journey
Krishnadevaraya and the Ashtadiggaja circle
The eight elephants of the quarters: Krishnadevaraya's Telugu poets at Vijayanagara, in the reign when Telugu displaced Sanskrit as the language of the southern court. The emperor wrote one of the period's major poems himself, which is not something most patrons of literature anywhere can claim, and one of his eight spent a hundred verses attacking patronage.
Stops (14)
- Krishnadevaraya · r. 1509–1529
The third and most celebrated Tuluva ruler, under whom Vijayanagara reached its widest extent. He took the Raichur doab from Bijapur in 1520, gilded the Tirumala gopuram, rebuilt temples the length of the peninsula, kept eight Telugu poets at court and wrote one of the language's major poems himself. He also visited Tirumala seven times and left a copper-plate record of each visit.
- Hampi / Vijayanagara · the capital
The court these eight men belonged to, on the Tungabhadra: at its height one of the largest cities in the world, with a bazaar street, an irrigation system and a royal enclosure. Their poems were recited in its halls, and the sack of 1565 ended the circle as completely as it ended the city.
- Āmuktamālyada · the emperor's own poem
Krishnadevaraya's Telugu retelling of the life of Andal, the one woman among the twelve Alvars, in six cantos. Its fourth canto turns aside into a long passage of advice on forts, frontiers, irrigation and how to treat merchants, which historians read as the nearest thing to a statement of Vijayanagara policy from the top.
- Allasani Peddana · Manucharitramu
Ranked first among the eight and given the title Andhra Kavita Pitamaha, grandfather of Telugu poetry. His Manucharitramu, on the birth of Svarochisha Manu, is the work that established the prabandha as the form of the period: a single sustained narrative poem in ornate Telugu rather than a translation from Sanskrit.
- Nandi Timmana · Parijatapaharanamu
Presented to the emperor by his wife Tirumala Devi as part of her dowry from Nandyala. His Parijatapaharanamu retells Krishna giving the parijata flower to Rukmini and having to answer to Satyabhama, and it is traditionally said to have been written to reconcile the emperor with a queen he had quarrelled with.
- Madayyagari Mallana · Rajasekhara Charitramu
Author of a prabandha on a king of Avanti, dedicated not to the emperor but to Nadindla Gopa, Krishnadevaraya's governor at Kondavidu. That dedication is the useful detail: literary patronage at Vijayanagara was not concentrated in the capital, and provincial governors ran circles of their own. Almost nothing of his life is recorded beyond the poem's own colophon, which is true of most of the eight.
- Dhurjati · Kalahastisvara Satakamu
The most unusual of the eight: a Shaiva devotee of Srikalahasti whose hundred-verse satakam is addressed to the god and is a sustained attack on courts, kings and the compromises of patronage. He wrote it inside the patronage system he was denouncing, and the court kept him anyway. The emperor's court preserved the poem that denounced it, which is the sharpest fact in the circle.
- Kālahasti / Srikālahasti · Dhurjati's god
Srikalahasti on the Swarnamukhi, the wind element among the Pancha Bhuta Sthalams, where the lamp in the sanctum flickers in still air. It is Dhurjati's subject and the addressee of his poetry, and it is also the home of the pen-drawn kalamkari made for temple cloth rather than for export.
- Ayyalaraju Ramabhadra · Ramabhyudayamu
Author of a Rama prabandha dedicated to Aliya Rama Raya, Krishnadevaraya's son-in-law, and of a digest of narrative material for other poets to use. He came from a family of poets, which is how most Telugu court poets entered the profession, and he is said to have been made to surrender a verse he had borrowed from Peddana.
- Pingali Surana · Kalapurnodayamu
The most technically ambitious Telugu poet of the age. His Raghavapandaviyamu tells the Ramayana and the Mahabharata simultaneously, every verse carrying both, and his Kalapurnodayamu has an invented plot with time travel, a narrative that partly runs backwards and characters aware they are in a story. It is usually called the first Telugu novel.
- Ramarajabhushanu (Bhattumurti) · Vasucharitramu
Known as Bhattumurti and by the title Ramarajabhushanu, the ornament of Rama Raya. His Vasucharitramu is the most elaborately worked prabandha of the eight, built on sustained double meaning and sound patterning, and he also wrote a treatise on poetics and a second double-meaning poem telling two stories at once.
- Tenali Ramakrishna · Panduranga Mahatyamu
The eighth of the circle, a Shaiva poet whose Panduranga Mahatyamu is a substantial prabandha on the Vitthala shrine at Pandharpur. Almost nobody reads it. He survives instead as the hero of a vast cycle of wit stories that accumulated in oral and then printed tradition over four centuries and has little to do with what he wrote.
- Tenali · the poet's town
The Krishna-delta town Tenali Ramakrishna is named for, and the reason a court poet's name carries a place in it. The wit cycle attached to him is now largely told in Telugu and Tamil children's books and comics, and Tenali is the pilgrimage site of a literary reputation rather than of a poet's works.
- Shrīvilliputtūr · Andal's town
Srivilliputtur, birthplace of Andal, whose life the emperor's own poem retells. Its twelve-tier gopuram is the emblem on the Tamil Nadu state seal. A Telugu emperor writing in Telugu about a Tamil woman saint, at a Kannada-speaking capital, is a fair description of what this court actually was. Andal's Tiruppavai is still sung across Tamil Nadu through the month of Margazhi.