Mangalagiri Anandakavi

Mangalagiri Anandakavi was a Telugu poet of the 18th century.¹² He wrote the Vedanta Rasayanamu (the elixir of Vedanta), a life of Jesus Christ in classical Telugu verse.²³ He is one of the two early Telugu poets known to have written on Christian subjects.²

The poet and his patron

P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, in their history of Telugu literature (1928), place him “about the middle of the eighteenth century”.² They describe him as a Brahmin, attached to a well-to-do Brahmin family.² He dedicated his poem to Nidimamilla Dasayamatya.² Dasayamatya belonged to an influential family that had become Christian.² He also wrote a second work, the Anuruddha Charitramu.²

Charles Philip Brown listed the poem in his Telugu dictionary of 1852.⁴ He called the author “a Roman Catholic Christian named A’nanda, son of Mangalagiri Timmaiia”.⁴

The Vedanta Rasayanamu

The poem has four cantos.²⁴ Brown called it “a summary of the life of Our Lord, selected from the Gospels: with an Introduction”.⁴ “The style of this poem is greatly admired”, he added.⁴

Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao give a fuller account.³ The poet says little of the teaching of Jesus.³ He chooses a few miracles, such as the raising of Lazarus and the healing of the blind.³ He tells the stories of the birth and of the last week of Christ’s life in detail.³ The poem opens with a discussion of the nature of God, and ends with a discourse on the means of grace.³

They praised the way he put Christian ideas into Indian words.³ He did not translate “the lamb that taketh away the sin” word for word.³ He wrote instead kalmasha paritrana, “remover of sins”.³

They also noted that the poem is plain where most poems of the age were ornate.³ In their view its “language is chaste and the imagery chastened”.³ They reported that Kandukuri Veeresalingam judged Anandakavi “worthy to be placed among the best poets of his century”.³

Where the sources disagree

• His date. Brown placed the poem “about A.D. 1700”.⁴ Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao gave 1750.¹²
• His faith. Brown called him “a Roman Catholic Christian”.⁴ Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao doubted whether he and the earlier poet Pingali Ellanarya were “formal members of the Christian Church”.² They thought it “probable that they were followers of Christ from within the Hindu community”.² K. Sitaramaiya, in 1943, wrote only that his poem shows “distinct signs of Christian influence”.⁵

Footnotes

1. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 90 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

2. Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 105 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

3. Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 106 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

4. Charles Philip Brown, A Dictionary, Telugu and English (1852), p. xiv (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

5. K. Sitaramaiya, A Hand Book of Telugu Literature (1943), p. 59 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩