Hullaki Bhaskara

Hullaki Bhaskara was a Telugu poet of the Kakatiya period.¹² He was the chief author of the Bhaskara Ramayanamu, a Telugu Ramayana in champu, a mix of verse and prose.¹³ It is one of the two Telugu Ramayanas of the 13th century, with the couplet Ramayana linked with Ranganatha.¹ P. T. Raju, in 1944, wrote that it was still popular.²

A Ramayana written by a team

P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, in their history of Telugu literature (1928), wrote that the book “was obviously written against time”.³⁴ In their view it was “a joint product of Bhaskara and his disciples, written with record speed”.³⁴ They guessed that it was hurried “to overtake a rival in the race”.⁴

Raju names the authors.⁵ Besides Bhaskara, they were his son Mallikarjuna Bhatta, his friend Ayyalarya and his pupil Rudradeva.⁵ Raju thought Bhaskara guided the others.² He wrote that the poets did not just translate Valmiki, but added descriptions and even events of their own.⁵ He placed this Ramayana and the couplet Ramayana in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.²

The dedication to Sahinimara

The poem is dedicated to Sahinimara.³² His name means a horseman.³ A popular story explains the dedication, as Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao tell it:³

• the chief Buddha Raju asked Ranganatha to write a Ramayana, and his minister Bhaskara set his own poet, Hullaki Bhaskara, to write a better one
• the king promised to accept whichever was brought first, but both arrived on the same day
• the king took Ranganatha’s poem with his right hand and Bhaskara’s with his left
• the insulted poet said he would rather dedicate his book to a horseman than to so rude a king, and the king’s horseman asked him to keep his word³

Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao called the story “no doubt a later invention”.³ Ranganatha, the minister Bhaskara and the poet Bhaskara did not live at the same time.³ And Sahinimara was not a coachman, but a son of Buddha Raju and a cavalry commander.³ Still, they thought the story kept two truths.³ The dedication looked like an afterthought, and the book had clearly been written in a hurry.³⁴ The couplet Ramayana is discussed on the page Gona Budda Reddi.

Where the sources disagree

• Who Sahinimara was. Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao call him a son of Buddha Raju and a cavalry commander in the imperial army.³ Raju notes two views: some take him for a son of Buddha Raju, others for a Niyogi Brahmin who commanded horse under Prataparudra II.²

Footnotes

1. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 54 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Raju, Telugu Literature (1944), p. 24 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 57 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

4. Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 58 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. P. T. Raju, Telugu Literature (1944), p. 23 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³