The Greatness of Māhātmya as Poetry: Observations from the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu (The Greatness of Pāṇḍuraṅga), a sixteenth-century Telugu poem narrating the greatness of Pāṇḍuraṅga kṣtera (Pandharpur, Maharashtra). In modern histories of Telugu literature, the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu and its author, Tĕnāli Rāmakṛṣṇa, are always linked to the court of Kṛṣṇadevarāya (r.1509-1529) whose reign is considered the golden age of Telugu literature. This period is commonly referred to as the age of prabandha and texts produced in this context,including the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu, are understood as Telugu equivalents of the prestigious Sanskrit court poem (mahākāvya). This generic classification is so powerful that, despite its māhātmya title and conventional māhātmya narratives, the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu is read primarily as mahākāvya—a prime example of Telugu poetry at its best. Consequently, the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu’s engagement with and indebtedness to pan-Indian and regional māhātmya texts is ignored and its devotional elements are attached to the “saintly” poet rather than the text.  I argue that reading the Pāṇḍuraṅga-māhātmyamu with emphasis on its māhātmya aspects is essential for better understanding what the text’s poetic program and for more accurately situating it within a complex web of textual, linguistic, geographic, and religious connections. These, in turn, complicate our understanding of regional māhātmyas and of genre and generic classification in pre-modern South Asia.