The Man And The Encyclopaedic Range Of His Interests

R. Appalaswamy

R. Appalaswamy was a lecturer in English at the Maharajah’s College, Vizianagaram. Regarded as a maverick philosopher and reputed to be a scholar in several Indian and European languages including, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Telugu, he was a literary critic and writer.

In my boyhood days, already during my middle school years, Narayana Das had established himself as the inventor of a new species of serious entertainment called ‘Harikatha’, which combines poetry, music and dance for the production of intensity which is the very soul of art in all its magical manifestations. He was a name to conjure with throughout the length and breadth of Telugu land and it was not unoften that I saw the stalwart’s portrait in printed pamphlets of his Harikathas in the hands of village readers. I had not the good fortune, however, of having witnessed a Harikatha performance by him until I came to Vizianagaram for my college studies when he was already past the prime of his life and was working as principal of the Music College under the Maharaja’s management. It was during the late twenties of the century that I first saw him and he was then already a sexagenarian but still possessed a physical beauty and an abundance of vigour, which drew forth the admiration of both old and young of either sex. I remember having been present at two Harikathas in those days and his megaphone bass voice which needed no mike for an audience of several thousand still rings in my ears over a stretch of thirty long vicissitudinous years. He had a very well preserved body, which was a miracle in itself. He had stones to his ears that lighted up his face, a fine turned moustache that enhanced his lion-like elegance and a pair of eyes that had at once the depth of waters stilled at even and the quicksilver sparkle of stars of the first magnitude that seemed to engage all celestial bodies in a cosmic dance and made the beholder gape in all the wonder of the Yeatsian exclamation-interrogation:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance!

How can we know the dancer from the dance? He was frequently to be met with in those days of an evening along the main road with half a dozen disciples in his company with his arms thrown over his walking stick laid across the back of his neck behind his capacious shoulders, all absorbed in a peripatetic lesson in music and a difficult dance step. At a certain point in his low-toned discourse he would go into a spin and, as he pirouetted like a teenage girl, his voice would go mounting up and execute a spellbinding Raga that transfixed the passers by in a tableau of exceeding self-transcendence. There were then no radio receiving sets and no cacophonous amplification of cinema music that wears out our nerves in these days of universal electrification. With his uncompromising red canvas shoes, with his dhoti front tucked over one leg and his gold anklet of victory glinting challenge on the other, he was a tower of strength for purposes of offence and of defence for the Telugu-speaking people in sister realms of poetry and music.

Narayana Das had a force of personality, which marked him out as an institution among his people during his lifetime. He was a man of intensive scholarship both in Telugu and Sanskrit, and his knowledge of Persian, Hindi and English was of quite a high order. While he could write Sanskrit fluently both in prose and in verse, he deprecated over-Sanskritization of the mother tongue and demonstrated how accessible and expressive Telugu could be in an allegorical poem like ‘Batasari’ (or the Traveller) which is an original poem and not a translation of Goldsmith’s Traveller. It was for this very reason that he refused to accept any Sanskrit title and compelled a certain organisation that honoured him to call him “Ata patala meti”. He disagreed with music critics who still hold that the ‘marg’ tradition in music as represented by Thyagaraja is superior to the ‘Desi’ or folk tradition. According to Narayana Das the ‘marg’ tradition is somewhat different from that of Thyagaraja and was in use for chanting Vedic Hymns in times gone by. He was strongly of the conviction that the true musician should purify and refine the musical sensibility of his time and achieve correspondence with the dormant psychic strivings of his generation. He put the theory into practice and clicked admirably with his public, which was ready to respond to his suggestions. And he was thoroughly versed in Natyasastra both in theory and in practice. His skill in ‘Tala’ or rhythm was unrivalled and he was the only man in his own day who could execute the ‘Shanmukha’ or sextuple ‘Tala’ with his hands and his arms against the sides and his right foot beating five orders of sounds to synchronise with a prescribed tag sung in Sanskrit.

The output of Narayana Das as a writer, to say the least, was considerable. In his twentone Harikathas, seventeen in Telugu, three in Sanskrit and one in Atcha-Telugu, he treats Puranic themes in an original and personal way and his interpretation comes home to the business and bosoms of all conditions of the population. He won renown for his Sanskrit Harikathas in Bengal and Uttar Pradesh through Hindi as his medium. He received the praises of the great Tagore himself who was in the habit of corresponding with him in matters relating to music. Seven Sathakams in Telugu and two in Sanskrit of especial fluency, all deserve a high place in modern literature.

He tried his hand at Drama too and his plays ‘Sarangadhara’ and Dambhapura Prabasanam have to be popularised by being given due publicity. ‘Batasari’ his Telugu kavyam, has become a classic and his kavyam in Sanskrit entitled ‘Tarakam’ has elicited unstinted praise from Professor Geldner of Marburg University who has expressed his homage in Sanskrit verse of remarkable purity.

Narayana Das had a versatile genius and his translations should be closely examined in juxtaposition with their originals in order to be struck with their unique beauty and their closeness to the text that is sought to be rendered into Telugu. He composed music for his Telugu renderings of some famous passages from the Rigveda, which he held, was sung to tunes very much like his own in ancient times. Who can deny that his translation of Omar Khaiyam ("Rubaiyat of Omar Khaiyam") into Sanskrit and pure Telugu side by side is a ‘tour de force’? What concision and what trenchancy meet the reader in every verse and how favourably does a Persian-knowing reader react when he compares Dasu’s renderings with those of Fitzgerald. ‘Navarasatarangini’ brings into juxtaposition all most all famous passages from Shakespeare and Kalidas and the translations are a perennial source of delight to the discerning reader considering their closeness to texts and their limpidity. It may be noted in passing that, in his introduction to this compilation, the translator makes no bones, according to his lights, about placing the English poet higher than the Indian though this opinion might clash with that of the majority of his countrymen. It is a pity that the Telugu public has not seen fit to bring out a de Luxe edition of Aesops Fables by Narayana Das - which he entitled Nuru gnati - for the delectation of children. He also translated the Bhagavadgita (Velpu mata), Lalita Sahasranamam (Talli vinki) and Vishnusahasranamam (Vennuni veyiperla vinakari) into pure Telugu for the average reader. He has compiled a compendium of Ayurveda (Manki minku) for the general use. He set great store by the Dictionary of pure Telugu (Seema palku vahi) which he laboriously compiled as he believed in reviving the old vocabulary which possesses such expressive magic.

‘Melubanti’, a travelogue preserves the most delightful of his memories, and the Sanskrit work, Sarvapuranasaram reveals the range of his encyclopaedic attainments. Jagajjyoti and Purushardha sadhanam, above all, crystallize his deep understanding of scripture and his outspoken views on the corruption that has overtaken our religious and social institutions. Narayana Das had no hypocrisy in him and he condemned hypocrisy wherever he found it with all the emphasis at his command. He had no patience with barriers of caste and of creed, and he is all out for social justice both in Jagajjyoti and Purushardhasadhanam. Readers of his autobiography which was serially published in Bharati though it has not yet been brought out in book form cannot have failed to come to the conclusion that concealment is not in the man’s nature and that the man stands revealed in all his massive grandeur and draws forth our love and affection for his qualities as well as the defects of those qualities.

We in Telugu land have every reason to be proud of leaders of humanism like Veeresalingam, Gurajada and Narayana Das whose centenaries have been celebrated in succession. It is a matter for humiliation for the Telugu speaking people, or that at any rate, is the strong feeling of the writer of this essay that we have not been able to move the centre to issue postage stamps in their honour in connection with their centenary celebrations. We need have no doubt at all that Narayana Das will be remembered for all time as one of the luminaries of Indian art and literature.

Reproduced from the "Harikathapitamaha Srimadajjada Adibhatla Narayana Dasa Satajayantutsava Sanchika" (1967), the souvenir published by the Samskruthi Samithi, Chirala to commemorate the great man's birth centenary.

Three Born Poets & Nine Rasas

R. M. Challa is a man of many parts. He is a scholar in the Vedas, various oriental and occidental languages including English, German, Persian, Sanskrit and Telugu, a literary and music critic, essayist and poet. “Let’s tune in R. M. Challa”, his literary column in the Indian Express in the sixties through the eighties used to be a piece of masterly erudition and educative to readers on diverse subjects from literature to philosophy and linguistics to phonetics. The column ran for about a quarter of a century, which is a first in Indo-Anglican journalism. “Three Born Poets & Nine Rasas”, is his review of Pandit Narayana Das’ “NAVARASATARANGINI”.

Body's Soul & Earth Is Heaven

R. M. Challa is a man of many parts. He is a scholar of the Vedas, various oriental and occidental languages including English, German, Persian, Sanskrit and Telugu, a literary and music critic, essayist and poet. "Let's tune in R. M. Challa", his literary column in the Indian Express in the sixties through the eighties used to be a piece of masterly erudition and educative to readers on diverse subjects from literature to philosophy and linguistics to phonetics. The column ran for about a quarter of a century, which is a first in Indo-Anglican journalism. “Body’s Soul & Earth’s Heaven”, is his review of Pandit Narayana Das’ “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khaiyam.

Biographies

Over time a number of biographies of Pandit Narayana Das were published. They are, in chronological order, Naa Eruka his autobiography in Telugu, Life of Narayana Das (1956) in English by Vasanta Rao Bramhaji Rao, Narayana Dasa Jeevita Charitra (1959) in Telugu by Maruvada Venkata Chayanulu, Sri Narayana Dasa Jeevitacharitramu (1967) a biography in the form of a Yakshaganamu in Telugu by Peddinti Suryanarayana Deekshita Das, Purnapurushudu (1979) in Telugu by Yamijala Padmanabhaswamy, Monarch of Rhythm (1980) in English by G. Srirama Murthy and Narayana Darsanamu (1983) a Ph. D. thesis in Telugu by Gundavarapu Lakshmi Narayana. 

Naa Eruka was an incomplete story abandoned by Narayana Das. A characteristic feature - or quirk - of Narayana Das’ psyche was his compulsive urge to excel in everything he did. He began writing what would have been the first autobiography in Telugu and sent the initial chapters, narrating his life story from birth to the age of about thirty, to the printers. There was a delay at the printers due to pressure of work and in the meantime another famous writer’s autobiography came out. Narayana Das called off the project because of his obsessive desire to be ‘second to none’. Thus was lost to the public not only an opportunity to read the great man’s life story told in his own words with remarkable candour, but also his perspective of his literary output and the literary and cultural zeitgeist of his time.

Pandit Narayana Das’ grandson, Upadhyayula Suryanarayana Rao, had a mind to edit, update and extrapolate the autobiography-biography to its natural culmination. He could have done justice to the great man’s literary odyssey for two reasons: firstly owing to his proximity, he was able to observe the genius at work. Secondly, an essayist, playwright and journalist known for his biting satire, Suryanarayana Rao, (Upadhyayula or USu for readers) was a writer of no mean talent. A chip of the old block, he too had introduced to Telugu journalism and letters certain innovative genres. His 'Nakamlo Gurazada Jadalu' was a tongue-in-cheek imaginary interview with the ‘Mahakavi’ in which he satirized the politicization of literature. The 'interview' was a first of its kind and many writers adapted this genre since. His adaptation of Tagore’s ‘Kabuliwallah’ as a shadow-play was a first in Telugu theatre. His play 'Viyanagara Vibhavam' was broadcast on All India Radio in its 'For the Universities' programme. He translated Somerset Maugham's 'Penelope' into Telugu as 'Pankajakshi'. However, Suryanarayana Rao could not fulfill his cherished desire to pay a literary tribute to his "great" grandfather owing to his untimely death at an early age.

Some of the biographers focused on trivia in the life of Narayana Das and to use a cliché, played to the gallery. Their motives can not be faulted however, the most important being to make the books eminently readable. Admittedly it is an arduous task to condense the life work of a litterateur whom Sir C. R. Reddy described as a University, into a book. In order to do justice to the multifaceted genius, the raconteur must be well versed in literature and languages, music and dance and the scriptures - and of course possess great felicity of expression.

The connoisseur would rather be interested in understanding what impelled Narayana Das to polish his understanding of Persian at the age of sixty in order to be able to translate Omar Khaiyam; what in the first place prompted him to conclude that Edward Fitzgerald’s translations of the Persian poet were not literal; what made a scholar and poet of considerable erudition in Sanskrit to eschew all vestiges of the classical language and write in what he called Atcha-Telugu; what well-springs of artistic urges drove him to perform unprecedented, monumental feats in literature and music.

Was self-actualisation the prime motive of his accomplishments rather than the ‘glories of this world’ as his favourite poet-philosopher Omar Khaiyam put it? Was this the reason why he was indifferent to - or even discouraged - efforts to nominate him for the Nobel Prize for literature? Did he constantly strive to excel standards he set for himself; setting, excelling, upgrading and excelling them in a continuous process, oblivious of and without recourse to the environment?
 
Was "Jagajjyothi", which many consider his magnum opus - really a record of his musings which he wrote to express and propagate his worldview of religion and message about good human conduct (sat-pravartana), a project, curtailed by his abandoned autobiography?

Wouldn't the connoisseur be rather interested in answers to these questions than be told that the boy Narayana Das was caught smoking a cigar in the loft and chased by his father with a crop.

The following are important for connoisseurs of Narayana Das-ana in that they portray his literary and musical accomplishments in great wealth of detail.

Narayana Dasa Jeevita Charita (1956). The author of this biography, Maruvada Venkata Chayanulu was a nephew of Narayana Das. Being of the family he had a grandstand view of the artistic genius from close quarters. He therefore endeavoured to largely focus on this aspect rather than making the biography a catalogue of events.

Harikathapitamaha Srimadajjada Adibhatla Narayana Dasa Satajayantutsava Sanchika (1967), a souvenir published by the Samskruthi Samithi, Chirala to commemorate the great man’s birth centenary. This is a compilation of articles on Narayana Das by his contemporaries, disciples and other literary and music luminaries.

Adibhatla Narayana Dasa Saraswata Neerajanamu (1975) published by the Rachayithala Sahakara Sangham, Guntur. Edited by S. V. Joga Rao, Professor and Head of the Department of Telugu, Andhra University, it is a compendium of articles critiquing the various aspects of Narayana Das’ literary and musical works.

Purnapurushudu (1979) by Yamijala Padmanabhaswamy lucidly tells Narayana Das’ life story in prose tinged with poetry; interesting stories behind his literary produce, peppering it with events that help delineate his personality and sketches of his social intercourse with the literary and musical elite of his time.

Narayana Darsanamu (1983). This is Gundavarapu Lakshminarayana’s thesis on the literary output of Narayana Das, for which the Andhra University awarded him a Ph. D. degree. Although it contains a brief life-sketch, it is in fact an excellent critique of his literature in Sanskrit, Telugu and musical works.

A Monument Of Scholarship

The following is the review of Pandit Narayana Das’ “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khaiayam, by ‘The Hyderabad Bulletin’ published as an editorial in its issue of January 16, 1937. The newspaper obviously felt that the work merited a review in the form of an editorial. 

A Monument Of Scholarship

Pandit Narayana Das' Statue on 
Visakhapatnam Beach

We have pleasure in acknowledging a copy of the “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khaiyam, translated into Sanskrit and Telugu by Pandit A. Narayana Das, retired Principal of Sri Vijayarama Gana Pathasala, Vizianagaram, and a careful perusal of the book fills us with admiration at the astounding scholarship of the learned Pandit.

There are, of course dozens of translations of the immortal “Rubaiyat”, the most popular and probably the best known being that of Edward Fitzgerald. Pandit Narayana Das, who frankly expresses the opinion that Fitzgerald’s work is not a literal translation, has gone back to the original Persian in order that the letter and the spirit of Omar Khaiyam may not be missed.

In these degenerate days when scholarship has fallen on evil times, it is incredible to learn that a Hindu, with Telugu as his mother tongue, should have been so filled with admiration for a Persian poet that, after he had passed his sixtieth year, he took the trouble to master so alien a language, and translate the masterpiece not only into Telugu but into another classical language, Sanskrit.

We find in the book that while Fitzgerald’s translation is rendered into Sanskrit and into Telugu of the Kandam metre, the hardest perhaps in the Telugu prosody, Omar Khaiyam’s original text is again translated into Giti and the Bhujangi metres.

We are certainly unaware of any recent instance in India where so much learning has been brought to bear on what is no less certainly a labour of love, for it is evident that there are few persons familiar with the Sanskrit language who are anxious to have a rendering of the Persian original.

Pandit Narayandas’s erudition is enhanced by the fact that even in using his own mother tongue, he has selected what is called Atchha-Telugu, a language that only a handful can understand. The work therefore is not intended for the masses, and the learned author expects no profits out of his scholarship.

But literature transcends the limitation of language, age and country, and it is most gratifying that a Telugu writer of the twentieth century should have paid the most splendid tribute to a Persian Poet of the twelfth century. He has added a most copious glossary at the end of the book to facilitate an appreciation of the original, its translation by Fitzgerald, and the author’s own translation into Sanskrit and Telugu.

In inviting the attention of H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government to the Pandit’s work, we trust that, in consonance with their liberal support of classical scholarship; they will extend their patronage to the Pandit, and thus bring about a sympathetic understanding and interpretation between the two classical languages.

The Hyderabad Bulletin.
16-1-1937.

(Emphasis added)

Narayana Das headed music college founded as tribute to him

'SRI VIJAYARAMA GANA PATHASALA'

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Pandit Narayana Das' name and fame were established from Calcutta to Kanya Kumari, and prominent newspapers of the day like The Hindu, The Mail, Andhra Patrika et al were singing paeans to his literary and musical accomplishments.  Maharajah Vijayarama Gajapathi of Vizianagaram realised with a feeling of guilt that a citizen of his kingdom went unrecognised in his birthplace. In order to make amends for the oversight, the Maharajah set out to establish a college for music studies as a tribute to the great man and requested Pandit Narayana Das to head the institution.

Initially Narayana Das refused the offer on two counts - one he was already fifty five, an age at which people normally retired and two, he did not wish to serve under a mortal. It was for the same reason that he declined earlier a request of the Maharajah of Mysore, to be the court musician. The Maharajah of Vizianagaram however persisted and offered the principal-ship of the music college, and assured Pandit Narayana Das that he could serve as long as he wished and would continue to receive the salary as pension even after his retirement. Pandit Narayana Das finally agreed to head the institution, with the proviso that it be treated as the temple of Lord Rama and he His servant.

After the death of Maharajah Alakanarayana Gajapathi, the Vizianagaram Samasthanam had a succession battle during the pendency of which it was under the ‘court of wards’ administration. The British administration oblivious of the colossal stature of the artiste or the history of his ‘appointment’ decided to retire him without pension. Pandit Narayana Das gracefully bowed out without a murmur. Two years later he casually recounted this to his friend Mr. Bardswell, who was then a member of the board of revenue, who intervened with the British administration and had the Pandit’s pension restored.

A PLAQUE AT THE COLLEGE SHOWING 
THE SUCCESSION OF PRINCIPALS TILL 2000

 
A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON THE OCCASION OF 
THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF SRI VIJAYARAMA GANA PATHASALA - 1920

 
DAIS OF THE OPEN AIR AUDITORIUM