| Summary/Abstract |
Kavijanāśrayamu, or A Guide for Poets, is the oldest extant text on prosody written in Telugu. For centuries, poets and scholars have debated the authorship, date and geographical location of this text. According to some scholars, the text was authored by Malliya Recana, a Jain scholar of prosody from the tenth century who predates Nannaya, long considered to be the ‘first poet’ (ādikavi) of classical Telugu. In this article, I argue that the contentious epithet of ‘first poet’ ascribed to Recana is intimately tied to the premodern past and the contemporary landscape of the Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
|