Text · Telugu prabandha · India
Āmuktamālyada
Also known as Amuktamalyada, Vishnuchittiyam, Goda Devi poem
Krishnadevaraya's own Telugu poem, in six cantos, retelling the life of Andal — Goda Devi, the one woman among the twelve Alvars — and her marriage to Vishnu at Srirangam. It is one of the major works of Telugu literature, and its author was the reigning emperor of Vijayanagara.
- Date
- 1509–1529
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
Its fourth canto contains a long passage of advice on kingship — on forts, frontiers, irrigation, Brahmin settlement and how to treat merchants — which historians read as the nearest thing to a statement of Vijayanagara policy from the top. The emperor says in the preface that Andal appeared to him at Srikakulam and told him to write it in Telugu.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textKrishnadevaraya
Krishnadevaraya says in the preface that Andal appeared to him at Srikakulam and told him to write her story in Telugu. The poem's fourth canto then breaks off into advice on kingship — forts, frontier policy, irrigation works, the settlement of Brahmins, the treatment of merchants — which is why a devotional prabandha is cited as a source on Vijayanagara administration.
- Devotional corpus onShrīvilliputtūr
Andal was a Tamil Alvar of Srivilliputtur in roughly the eighth century; the Amuktamalyada is a sixteenth-century Telugu poem about her, written by a Kannada-country emperor at a capital on the Tungabhadra. The temple's twelve-tier gopuram is now the Tamil Nadu state emblem. One saint's life crosses three languages and eight centuries inside this repository.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Amuktamalyada”. Krishnadevaraya, Āmuktamālyada, with the kingship passage translated in Phillip Wagoner, Tidings of the King (1993).
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