Tarigonda Vengamamba

Tarigonda Vengamamba, also called Venkamma, was a Telugu woman poet of the first half of the 19th century.¹² She came from Tarigonda, a village near Vayalpad in the old Kadapa (then Cuddapah) district.¹ She dedicated her works to the god Narasimha of Tarigonda.¹ Kandukuri Veeresalingam knew of no earlier long poem in Telugu verse by a Brahmin woman.²

Life

Veeresalingam wrote about her in the third part of his Andhra Kavula Charitramu (lives of the Telugu poets).¹ He called her a learned woman.¹ He placed Tarigonda four miles from Vayalpad.¹ From one of her verses he judged that she was a Brahmin of the Nandavarika group.²

In her poems she calls herself the daughter of Krishnayamatya of the Vasishtha gotra (family line).² She does not name a husband.² From this Veeresalingam guessed that she was a child widow, who spent her life in the study of Vedanta.² This was his own inference.²

Charles Philip Brown wrote in 1852 that the Telugu couplet Bhagavatam “was written by a poetess who was living in the year 1840”.³ Brown did not name her.³ Veeresalingam took this note in Brown’s dictionary to refer to Vengamamba.² P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, in their history of Telugu literature (1928), dated her from 1839.⁴

Her works

Veeresalingam names these works:¹

• the Rajayogasaramu (the essence of royal yoga), in couplets (dvipada), already printed
• the Venkatachala Mahatmyamu (the greatness of the Venkata hill), in verse, already printed
• the twelfth book of the Bhagavata Purana, in couplets¹

In a verse of that poem, she says she had put the twelfth book of the Bhagavata into couplets and offered it to the god.¹ Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao give the same three works.⁴ So does P. T. Raju, in 1944.⁵

How she was judged

Veeresalingam found small faults in her verse, but thought it gentle and sweet on the whole.² He contrasted her with Muddupalani.² Unlike that poet, he wrote, she kept from frank love poetry, as befitted a woman of a respectable family.²

Chenchiah and Bhujanga Rao wrote that her poems were “full of elevated sentiments”.⁴ In their view they were “an eloquent protest against the debased literary tastes of the day”.⁴ K. Sitaramaiya, in 1943, remembered her as “a great devotee”.⁶

Footnotes

1. Kandukuri Veeresalingam, Andhra Kavula Charitramu, Part III (1911), p. 218 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Veeresalingam, Andhra Kavula Charitramu, Part III (1911), p. 219 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

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

4. P. Chenchiah and Raja M. Bhujanga Rao, A History of Telugu Literature (1928), p. 104 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. P. T. Raju, Telugu Literature (1944), p. 42 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩

6. K. Sitaramaiya, A Hand Book of Telugu Literature (1943), p. 57 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩