Person · Telugu court poet · India
Tenali Ramakrishna
A Shaiva Telugu poet of Krishnadevaraya's court and one of the Ashtadiggajas, whose Panduranga Mahatyamu is a substantial prabandha on the Vitthala shrine at Pandharpur. He survives instead as the hero of a four-century cycle of wit stories that has almost nothing to do with anything he wrote.
- Date
- 1500–1575
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Patron dynasty
- Vijayanagara
- Condition
- historical person + living folklore
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — mixed: historical poet; many anecdotes traditional
- Location
- 15.335, 76.460
Worth knowing
The best-known anecdote of the Vijayanagara court is his: asked by the emperor what made the poet Dhurjati's language so sweet, he answered with an obscene pun implying Dhurjati kept the company of courtesans. The cycle moved from oral telling into nineteenth-century printed chapbooks and then into comics, radio, television and film.
About the place
Placed at Hampi, the court the stories attach him to. His own town of Tenali is a separate entry; this marker is the court, not the birthplace, and the historical record for him is thin.
Connections (5)
- Court associationGopal Bhar (traditional figure)
Tenāli Rāmakrishna at Vijayanagara, Birbal at Akbar's court, Gopāl Bhār at the Krishnanagar court in Bengal and Mariyāda Rāman in the Tamil country are the same figure in four languages: the licensed wit who tells the ruler what nobody else can and gets away with it. Three of the four were real courtiers with real works to their name, and all four survive mainly as folk cycles that have almost nothing to do with what they actually wrote.
- BirthplaceTenali
Tenali in the Krishna delta gives the poet his name, and his name has outlived his poem by a very long way. The Panduranga Mahatyamu is a serious prabandha almost nobody reads; the wit cycle is a four-century accretion of oral stories, printed chapbooks, comics and films in which a court poet becomes a trickster who outargues an emperor.
- AnalogueBirbal (Mahesh Das)
Tenali Ramakrishna and Birbal are the two best-documented of the four: a court poet with a surviving prabandha and a mansabdar whose death in battle is recorded in the Akbarnama. Both were then buried under story cycles that grew for four centuries, moved into print in the nineteenth and into comics and television in the twentieth, and that share plots freely between them.
- Court associationKrishnadevaraya
Tenali Ramakrishna was a member of the Ashtadiggaja circle, so the wit and the emperor were patron and client in a documented literary establishment. The best-known anecdote of the court — Krishnadevaraya asking what makes Dhurjati's poetry so sweet, and Tenali answering with an obscene pun — has all three of them in it, which is why it is remembered.
- Devotional corpus onPandharpūr
The Panduranga Mahatyamu is a full-length Telugu prabandha on the Vitthala shrine at Pandharpur, which is a Marathi Varkari centre six hundred kilometres from Tenali and four hundred from Hampi. A Telugu court poet writing the temple-purana of a Marathi pilgrimage site is the kind of thing the Vijayanagara literary establishment did routinely, and it is the surviving proof of his career.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tenali Ramakrishna”. Tenali Ramakrishna, Pāṇḍuraṅga Māhātmyamu; the printed Tenali Rama story cycles from the Vavilla and Battala presses.
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