Person · Telugu court poet · India
Pingali Surana
Also known as Pingali Surana, Pingali Suranna, Kalapurnodayamu, Raghavapandaviyamu
One of the Ashtadiggajas and the most technically ambitious Telugu poet of the period. His Raghavapandaviyamu is a dvyarthi kavya in which every verse tells the Ramayana and the Mahabharata at once, and his Kalapurnodayamu is a long narrative with an invented plot rather than a puranic one.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 15.335, 76.462
Worth knowing
Kalapurnodayamu is usually described as the first novel in Telugu, and arguably the first in any Indian language: it has time travel, a plot that runs partly backwards, characters who are aware they are in a story, and no scriptural source at all. Nothing else in sixteenth-century Indian literature is built like it.
About the place
Placed at Vijayanagara, the court he belonged to; the Ashtadiggaja poets are known by their works and their patron rather than by biographies.
Connections (1)
- AnalogueRamarajabhushanu (Bhattumurti)
Surana's Raghavapandaviyamu and Bhattumurti's Harischandra Nalopakhyanamu are both dvyarthi kavyas — poems in which every verse carries two complete stories at once, held together by pun and grammatical ambiguity. Two of the eight independently attempted the hardest formal problem in Sanskritic poetics, in Telugu, in the same generation and at the same court.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pingali Surana”. Pingali Surana, Kalāpūrṇodayamu, trans. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman as The Sound of the Kiss (2002).
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