TEMPLE POETS: POTANA, ANNAMAYYA, DHŪ RJATI

Kāvya, of the kind we have been exploring, belongs to the royal courts, or to a courtly mode. It presupposes a highly educated, elite audience of connoisseurs and a sustained network of patronage (or a merging of poet and patron-king, as in the case of Ksnadevarāya, just discussed). Patronage of this sort also reveals the latent structure of power relations between these figures: although it looks as if the poet were dependent upon his patron, in effect it is the poet who creates the latter as king.

[57] See our essays in Barbara Stoller Miller, ed., The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

In stark contrast to this pattern and to the poetic works it produced stands the parallel and contemporaneous tradition of what we have called "temple poets," whose only patrons are the gods they worship. Such poets conventionally look with contempt at the court poets and their presumed sycophantic compulsions. The temple poet proudly refuses to dedicate his book to anyone but the god himself. Prototypical in this respect is śrīnātha's contemporary Potana, the author of the Telugu Bhāgavatamu, who says explicitly:

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	I, Bamměra Potarāju, did not want to give my poem
	to those wretched human kings in return for a few villages,
	vehicles, or gold—all cheap pleasures. I didn't want to suffer
	God's hammer blows after death. So I give my poem freely to God, for the good of the world. [58] Potana, āndhra-mahābhāgavatamu 1.1.11. (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sahitya Akademi, 1977) Some have suggested that this verse is a later interpolation into Potana's work. On the opposition between court poets and temple poets, see the afterword by Narayana Rao in Hank Heifetz and Velcheru Narayana Rao, trans., For the Lord of the Animals, the Kālahastīśvara śatakamu of DhŪrjati (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 143–62.

Potana's text, though couched in the campŪ idiom with its conventional range of meters and prose, is entirely permeated by the tone of devotional surrender. His textures are soft, fluid, and relatively simple, though lexically often erudite.

[59] See discussion in David Shulman, "Remaking a Purāna: The Rescue of Gajendra in Potana's Telugu Mahābhāgavatamu," in Purāna Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts, ed. W. Doniger (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 121–57.

Often one senses that this work of passionate devotion, like so many of the earlier Tamil bhakti texts, is meant to evoke, or actually to conjure up fully and realistically—that is, to create—the latent or hidden presence of the god. A line leads directly from this foundational text of Telugu Vaisnava devotion to the rich developments at the great Tirupati temple in the fifteenth century, where Tāllapāka Annamacarya (or Annamayya) produced his corpus of songs for Venkateśvara-Visnu.

Here is an example of one of Annamayya's poems:

	Anyone obsessed with making love
	would become like him.

	He's addicted to both his wives.
	That's why he needs four hands.
	He's done it thousands of times
	in all kinds of ways.
	No wonder he has so many forms.
	Anyone would become like him.

	He especially likes love after quarrels.
	That's why at times he turns his face away.
	He's handsome beyond compare. Playful, too.
	Notice his long fingernails.
	Anyone would become like him.

	Because he likes pleasure to last forever,
	he's come to live on this solid mountain.
	Bound to life in this world,
	he lives inside everyone.
	Anyone would become like him. [60] Annamayya, Adhyātma-sankīrtanalu, Vol. 11, ed. Rallapalli Ananthakrishnasarma (Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanan, 1955), 243 [copperplate 17, from the long plates].

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Annamayya uses a different register than the kāvya poets—a register developed for singing, in immediate and intimate tones. There is less aesthetic distancing than in the courtly works: Annamayya's songs are meant as direct communications to the god he worships, Venkateśvara, for whom he is said to have composed a song a day for many decades. These songs can be celebrative, playful, erotic, meditative, and contemplative, sometimes all at once. There is an old classification (attested already in the generation after Annamayya) of all the surviving poems as either adhyātmika ("metaphysical") or śrngāra ("erotic"). However, this broad division can be deceptive: the above poem, for example, is classed as metaphysical. The poems, known as padams, were engraved on copper plates in the Tirupati temple in one of the most expensive publishing ventures of all times. Tradition says there were over 30,000 such poems, though the surviving corpus is roughly half that figure.

[61] See Veturi Anandamurti, Tāllapākakavula kr.tulu: Vividha sāhitī prakriyalu (Hyderabad: Veturi Anadamurti, 1974), 93. The devasthānam at Tirupati has 2,701 copperplates containing works by the Tāllapāka family (Annamayya, his sons, and his grandchildren). The corpus is still in a somewhat chaotic state, and no more precise figures are available.

These poems were apparently lost for some centuries and rediscovered only at the beginning of this century, in a locked room of the temple, although there is some mystery about this story.

The padam genre in Telugu began with Annamayya, in the temple setting, and was continued in the works of his sons and grandsons there; later poets, such as Ksetrayya in the seventeenth century and Sārangapāni in the eighteenth, produced padams for courtesan-singers outside the temples. Each such poem was set to a rāga and meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. The sheer inventiveness of the poets is evident in the amazing spectrum of themes and imagined situations (often lovevignettes of every possible variety). This is a poetry of what we might call "moods," in the sense that each poem calls up a wholly unique and irreducible emotional coloring, resistant to any typologizing, and each poem stands alone, a single experienced moment, unconnected formally to any of the others.

[62] Thus the Telugu padams are remote from the logic of the Tamil devotional corpus of Nammālvār, for example, where the poems are organized in self-contained chains or sets, the final word or phrase of one poem becoming the first word of the next (antâdi), and so on.

From out of this mood-pregnant moment, a whole theology can be suggested. "Anyone would become like him": there is a hint, perhaps, of the goal of assimilation to the god, sāyujya, here somewhat ironically grounded in erotic obsession. And at times the god seems to turn his face away, to become inaccessible; the poet offers a rationale for this movement. What might border on ridicule, on the surface, actually hides a profound philosophical statement about god. He suffers from kāmâturatvamu, an addiction

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to desire; this supposedly underlies his need to have four hands and thousands of forms. Yet just below the surface, we see, without attempting to deeroticize the verse, the god's wish to save his many beloveds, and the infinite variety of experienced personae with which he encounters them. He is truly different each time he makes love. The human truth of this vision, which speaks to the uniqueness of each subjective moment, emerges fully in relation to the divine subject, who is also the subject of the poem—and who is also, as the final crescendo intimates, the inner subject of each of us.

Although the poet is describing his god, the tone is that of coming into contact with a familiar person, intimately known. But this person has unusual attributes: for example, the long fingernails—actually claws—with which Visnu, as the Man-Lion, disemboweled the demon Hiranyakaśipu. These fingernails have here become part of a general depiction of the god's beauty. There is a consistent and subtle progression within the verses, each syntactically completed by the opening pallavi refrain, from the image of the human lover to the slowly crystallizing identification of him with the god of the Tirupati mountain—that is, with an entirely different existential plane—and then, at the culminating moment, with the inner ground of all being. This progression is carried along in a transparently light, even humorous style that manages to articulate the simultaneous distance and intimacy that the devotee feels vis-à-vis the god.

Annamayya was the pioneer of this style, but his direct descendants continued his work, eventually producing an immense Tāllapāka corpus, in various genres, including a hagiography of Annamayya by his grandson Cinnanna. The latter work, Annamâcārya-caritramu, makes the opposition between court poets and temple poets entirely clear: the Vijayanagara king Sāluva Narasimha is said to have asked Annamayya to compose a song for him analogous to one he heard the poet recite to the god;

[63] For this poem, an "erotic" (śrngāra) padam, see Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and A. K. Ramanujan, When God is a Customer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 49–50 (emôkô)

. this request—natural enough in a period in which the king and deity were, in fact, merging into one within the new political culture we call Nāyaka (from the sixteenth century, the time of Cinnanna, on)—is said to have been met with violent scorn by the poet. The king imprisoned Annamayya, but the god freed him from his chains.

[64] Tāllapāka Cinnanna, Annamâcârya-carutramu (Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati: Devasthanam, 1949). On Nāyaka political culture, see Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nāyaka Period Tamilnadu.

This story may anachronistically render the typological opposition too starkly; it remains true, however, that Annamayya's songs reflect a highly sensitized subjectivity, which may require the space of the autonomous relationship between poet and temple deity rather than

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the burdens of relationship between the poet and another human being such as his patron.

Not all temple poets achieved this extremely personal idiom; not all of them used the space and freedom. The other major example, this time from a S context, is DhŪrjati, probably of the sixteenth century. The literary tradition insists that DhŪrjati underwent a transformation from one category to the other. Beginning as a court-poet with Krsnadevarāya, he became disgusted with this life, left the court, and came to reside at the temple of Kālahasti, near Tirupati in southern Andhra. There he composed two works: the Kālahasti-māhātmyamu, a kāvya-work on the foundation and local tradition of the temple, and the Kālahastiśvara-śatakamu, a century of highly reflective poems formally addressed to the god, śiva, at Kālahasti. It is in this latter work, in the productive śataka genre,

[65] See Heifetz and Narayana Rao, For the Lord of the Animals.

that we hear the profound individuality of this poet's voice:

	You make us taste, see, hear, smell,
	touching body to body
	in deep delight.
	So why tell us these acts
	are wrong? Are you playing
	with us for fun, or just
	to pass the time?
	What's the point,
	Lord of Kālahasti? [66] DhŪrjati, Kālahastiśvara-sātakamu, ed. Nidudavolu Venkata Rao (Vijayawada: Emesco, 1990), 75.

Often the rhetorical address to the god is hardly more than a device allowing the poet to explore his own inner landscape—especially the darker reaches of this inner world. In this sense, the communication is really within the poet, between parts of the self. The individual stanzas are crafted in the standard meters; but whenever a depth of inner feeling becomes so intense, language becomes lyrical in the extreme, heartrending in effect. DhŪrjati is unusual precisely because of this set of features, but we find similar trends in the so-called prose-poems (vacanamulu) composed by other poets at other temples, such as Krsnamâcārya and Pěda Tirumalâcārya (at Simhacalam and Tirupati, respectively).

[67] Krsnamâcārya, Simhagiri-vacanamulu (Simhacalam: Sri Simhacaladevasthanam, 1988) and Pěda Tirumalâcarya, śrienkateśvara vacanamulu, ed. Veturi Prabhakarasastri (Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, 1945).