Gidugu Venkata Ramamoorty

“ As the English poets of the sixteenth century were emancipated by the study of Greek and Latin and by the removal of the trammels of the mediæval church, is there not hope that from the mass of noble poetry, lyrical, narrative, descriptive, which England offers to them and which they read with avidity and delight may come some inspiration to experiment in form and language and thought unknown to those who are still in the bonds of our decadent Mediævalism? And prose, written for an artistic or a popular scientific purpose can learn much from foreign models ”

“ We should, therefore, welcome ídiomatic renderings in real Telugu of good English, French or other originals and original experiments in living prose, tales of current life handled freely and with an imagination untrammelled by stereotyped Lakshana, recondite allusions and stale conventional figures and images.
We desire discussion on the art of writing; thus, How may the living tongue be made an artistic medium? What devices in harmony with the genius of the language can we adopt and adapt from English or other writers, whereby variety, emphasis, lucidity, and strength may be attained? ”

“ But I have found that the direct influence which the Calcutta University wields over our language is not strengthening and vitalising but pedantic and narrow. It tries to perpetuate the anachronism of preserving the Pandit-made Begali swathed in grammar wrapings borrowed from a dead language. It is every day becoming a more formidable obsctacle in the way of our boys' acquring that mastery of their mothertongue which is of life and literature. ”

“ We believe in the uplift of the masses. Is there not here in this 'reform' of language the surest means of spreading light among the poor and needy? Is not our beautiful living tongue a true vehicle for our message? Our little ones are starved for good literature; our women hunger for pure imaginative books. Education is not limited to the school-room; good literature which inspires good thoughts is needed beyond in the world. The English have such in abundance ”

“ But our students have not the same opportunity, except in their private studies and according to their private tastes. And therefore, their minds are more liable to come under the influence of some inflexible standard of language manufactured by pedagogues and not given birth to by the genius of artists. I assert once again that those who, from their position of authority have the power and the wish to help our language in the unfolding of its possibilities, must know that in its present stage, freedom of movement is of more vital necessity than fixedness of forms. ”

“ Speech is always in close contact with writing; in time, even slang may become elegant and pass into the recognized vocabulary of literature. Poetical, a specialized branch of the literary language, tends for special reasons of rhythm, ryhme, assonance, solemnity, dignity, pathos, sonority and the like to be more conservative, archaic and formal than the language of prose, but even the poetry of an age reflects its tendencies of educated speech and thought. ”

“ I know this, because I have to connive, myself, at a kind of intellectual infanticide when my own students try to drown the natural spontaneity of their expression under some stagnant formalism. It is the old man of the sea keeping his fatal hold upon the youth of our country. And this makes me apprehensive lest the stamping of death's seal upon our living language should be performed on a magnified scale by our University as its final act of tyranny at the last hour of its direct authority. ”

“ A Pandit whose conception of the nature of language is derived from his acquaintance with Sanskrit, devotes his life to the study of old Telugu and attempts to reproduce the older forms in his writings; he therefore inculcates the belief that a literary language ought to be as uniform as Sanskrit for all time. That some of the graduates of the modern universities follow the doctrines of the Pandit indicates that the study of the science of language is not what it ought to be. ”

“ Admirers of classical Telugu evidently believe that in the twelfth century when Nannaya translated the Sanskrit Mahabharata into Telugu, the vernacular language had reached the acme of perfection and then formed a sort of crystallized linguistic machine with all its parts elaborated and finished; and that succeeding writers have been merely setting it in motion in order to produce their literary works. We know that such beliefs however eminent the persons who hold them may be, are founded on erroneous notions regarding the nature and growth of language. ”

“ In the first place it is necessary to limit ourselves. We do not intend to have anything to do with Religion or Social reform, except in so far as we consider the use of the living tongue to be the greatest, the most embracing 'reform', nor yet with Politics, again except in so far as they hinder or help the spread of true education, the education of the sons of the soil through and in the living tongue. Our sole object is literary regeneration and linguistic research. ”

“ Necessarily the changes in our life and ideas are more rapid than they are in the countries whose influences are contributing to build the modern epoch of our renaissance. And, therefore, our language, the principal instrument for shaping and storing our ideals, should be allowed to remain much more plastic than it need be in the future when standards have been already formed which can afford a surer basis for our progress. ”

“ The highest poetry has its roots in the songs of the people; reflection seen in the art of posts is but individual intensification of nature; the popular ballad develops into the literary; the minstrel’s tale grows into the heroic poem, into the epic.
Our Telugu literature, it seems, suffers from an over—rigid theory concerning the relative position of speech and common writing with the art of poets. Modern prose writers assume that the special archaic prose found in ancient Kavyas has set the model for all time to prose of all sorts ”

“ Since the days of the early grammarians no study of the language of the Telugu Country has been made. In recent years the purpose of gammatical study has changed; it has been affected by the ideas of such sciences as biology and anthropology; it no longer prescribes rules regarding language as fixed unalterably but as ever slightly subject to flux, being modified in sound and idiom from generation to generation; the grammar of one age is not that of the next; and in any one age a language may exhibit many different grammars according to class or caste or dialect ”

“ We wonder how educated men who love freedom of speach, wilfully surrender the liberty of using their own speech and tamely submit to the tyranny of pedantocracy, while they complain of the vagaries of bureaucracy. ”

“ If an approximation be necessary, they say, it may as well be brought about by inducing people to speak the literary language as by permitting people to write as they speak; besides, the ancient literary language would thereby be conserved and the spoken dialect purified and ennobled. They contend that all the English men and English women that speak good English do so because they have carefully studied the grammar of the language as well as literaturate and that colloquial English which is spoken at home is as vulgar and as ungrammatical as colloquial Telugu. ”

“ The impression made by fine prose of any age, and not unfrequently also by verse, of the less artificial and elaborate kind, is that the author writes very much as he would speak, if he were conveying the same ideas by word of mouth. It is this quality of vitality, which springs from a mastery of the best spoken form of his age that compels our admiration in the prose of Dryden ”

“ The artificial language of a learned mediocrity, inert and formal, ponderous and didactic, devoid of the least breath of creative vitality, is forced upon our boys at the most receptive period of their life. ”

“ Sounds, vocabulary, idiom change Secularly but the mass of speakers and writers are not more than half conscious of the change. Only in a later age is the metamorphosis seen in its true perspective and the truth appears that the history of men's utterance no less than of their customs and ideals is one long tale of rebirths for better and for worse ”

“ The personalities of various authors, the individualities of their styles, the relation of the living power of their language are constantly and closely brought to their minds and therefore all that they need for their final degrees is a knowledge of the history and morphology of their mother-tongues. ”

“ We appeal to all of our race who have benefited by their education to help us in our small efforts to stimulate the writing of imaginative books and the supply. We likewise appeal to others who are interested in the development of he modern Indian Vernaculars and popular education for assistance. What is wanting in our society is a literature that shall be pure and of good report and such as he who runs may read. ”

“ Some at any rate value highly the birth-right of using one's mother tongue and we are among them and do not hesitate to defy the whole world-pedantocracies and bureaucracies, universities and academies included and exercise our right. ”

“ Moreover the enrichment of a language is mainly a popular affair. Meanings change, are widened, are limited, improve, deteriorate; words are used in various figurative ways and pass into the realm of dead metaphors. ”

“ In the modern European Universities the medium of instruction being the vernacular, the students in receiving, recording and communicating their lessons perpetually come into intimate touch with it, making its acquàintance where it is not slavishly domineered over by one particular sect of academicians. ”

“ Foreign words are imported and reduced to the speech basis of the native tongue; learned words from other sources are invented for special purposes and may pass into the current body of speech and literature, or remain outside as special for the learned to employ in their particular arts and sciences. ”

“ On the linguistic side, we would point to the need there is to study dialects and to gather material for dialectal glossaries. In other countries there is already a mass of work done in this direction and poets and tellers of tales have arisen who have used their dialects with effect in English, for instance Waugh in the Lancashire dialect, Barn in the Dorset, and above all Burns in the Scots. Our superior persons pretend contempt of the simple flok and their utterance ”

“ On the literary side, as we said, we hope to stimulate the search for old songs, tales, ballads etc., which exist in manuscript or in the memories of the people. There is, for instance, work to be done in the collation and critical examination of various versions of certain popular ballads. Further we desire experiments in popular metres, in stories, critical essays, scientific writing and in all other forms of composition. ”

“ Meanwhile our work is the spadework of the pioneer. In the pages of this Journal our object is to discuss and experiment, to educate ourselves for that great time, to lay the foundations for future success. ”

“ Our purpose is not merely to discuss these facts; we hope to attract men to experiment in our pages. Translation and original work will both be welcome. It will be recalled that in the early Elizabethan days there was much practice in adaptation and translation and even the highest geni-uses recast into English mould with an infusion of their own originality romances, legends, dramas. ”