Sri Sri

Sri Sri, the pen name of Srirangam Srinivasa Rao, was the Telugu poet whose Mahaprasthanam (“the great journey”) changed Telugu poetry in the mid-20th century.¹² He wrote of the hard truths of his society in a new, forceful style, and turned away from the old bookish language.²³ See Telugu literature.

Prabhava

In 1944 P. T. Raju surveyed Telugu literature for an all-India series of books. He wrote that among the younger poets, “of late Mr. Srirangam Srinivasa Rao with his Prabhava” had come to the front.¹

Mahaprasthanam

In 1980 a London publisher brought out the Mahaprasthanam poems in Sri Sri’s own handwriting, with a cassette of his voice. Sri Sri wrote a short preface for it.⁴ In it he looked back on how the book came about.⁴²

He wrote nearly all its poems in the 1930s.² Two came later: “Garjinchu Rashya” in 1941 and “Needalu” in 1947.² He reminded readers that the 1930s were a decade of world-wide slump and of the Spanish war that came before the Second World War.² Since the first printing, he says, the publisher Visalandhra had reprinted the book about twenty times.²

The first edition carried a long note of praise by the writer Chalam, called the Yogyatapatram (“certificate”).⁴ Sri Sri explains that his friend Jalasutram Rukmininatha Sastri had asked Chalam to write it, and had kept a notebook of where each of the poems had been printed.⁴

Gurajada’s road, widened

Sri Sri saw himself as following Gurajada Apparao. Gurajada, he wrote, had turned Telugu poetry away from the road of chariots and palanquins onto the road of motor cars and trains.³ The old metres in bookish Telugu were like chariots and palanquins. Gurajada had asked poets to write in the spoken language and in rhythms counted by beats, and Sri Sri took this up eagerly.³

He also changed the subject of poetry. He believed that good poetry is found more in a hard truth than in a beautiful lie. So his Mahaprasthanam poems hold up a mirror to the society of their time.³

Where the sources disagree

How great, and how modern. Sri Sri reports that Puripanda called Mahaprasthanam “the one great poem” written in Telugu in that century.² The critic Ketu Viswanatha Reddy, in an essay printed with a later edition, praises his mastery of every verse form.⁵ But he also sets out the doubts raised by later critics: that Sri Sri did not really know Marxism, and that in language and metre he was less modern than Gurajada.⁶

Footnotes

1. P. T. Raju, Telugu Literature (1944), p. 65 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩²

2. Sri Sri, “Na mata” (1980), in Mahaprasthanam (e-text), PDF p. 7. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Sri Sri, “Na mata” (1980), in Mahaprasthanam (e-text), PDF p. 8. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Sri Sri, “Na mata” (preface, 1980), in Mahaprasthanam, e-text of a later edition, PDF p. 6. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Ketu Viswanatha Reddy, “Sri Sri gurinchi” (on Sri Sri), in Mahaprasthanam (e-text of a later edition), PDF p. 102. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩

6. Ketu Viswanatha Reddy, “Sri Sri gurinchi”, in Mahaprasthanam (e-text), PDF p. 104. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩