Velcheru Narayana Rao, the doyen of Telugu studies in this generation, recently published a grammar of modern Telugu — the fruit of decades of teaching Telugu to non-Telugu speakers. This book is a happy and unusual combination of a comprehensive reference grammar and a graded primer for students. It is user-friendly and inviting, including for students who want to teach themselves Telugu. Most important, it is packed with insights about the Telugu language, its structure and specific linguistic features, its very rich modal system, and many colloquial and idiomatic usages that are almost never specified in the existing Telugu grammars.
First let me emphasize how important it is for speakers of other South Indian languages to learn Telugu. Since the language-based definition of State boundaries in 1956, an epidemic of monolingualism has spread through all the south Indian States. The result is significant cultural attrition and a narrow parochialism, in striking contrast to the earlier multi-lingual reality that was current throughout the south. Not so long ago, Telugu was a part of the normal curriculum for Tamil speakers studying Tamil literature and language, as we know from the autobiography of U. V. Swaminath Iyer. Today, I have friends in Hyderabad and Rajahmundry who are trying hard to learn Tamil and who understand the huge benefits of doing that, but I know hardly anyone, apart from specialized linguists, in Tamil Nadu or Kerala who is eager to learn Telugu. This book facilitates that much-needed goal.
As its title states, the book is a grammar of modern Telugu — by which the author means, first, a basic standardised version of the spoken language, but also a similarly regularised form of written Telugu (or formal speech, as in the public media, including what might be called the prevalent, sometimes peculiar and always accelerated cinema dialect). Telugu speakers often like to say that the “war of the language” that took place in the early twentieth century, in which the old, rather stilted pandit’s language was forever vanquished, did away with the stark diglossia that we find in all the other major south Indian languages. In my own experience, this notion of superseding diglossia in Telugu, whether in the Godavari Delta or in Telangana, is simply wishful thinking. The gap between spoken dialects and formal, written language is still enormous, no less so than in Tamil or Malayalam; and even the belief in a still emergent, by no means universal “standard Telugu speech” is remote from the linguistic reality of a wide, and robust, dialectical range. Some dialects are largely unintelligible even to native Telugu speakers. That said, there is a great beauty in the language Narayana Rao’s grammar analyses and exemplifies — indeed the example sentences and longer prose texts are unfailingly lovely to ear and tongue, in marked contrast with some earlier attempts at a modern teaching grammar of the language (one exception is Dr. G. Indira’s Functional Telugu).
Narayana Rao begins by stating, in his preface, that Telugu is a verb-based or verb-driven language, unlike the nominal default of, say English (and other Indo-European languages). This statement has important implications. Among them is the crucial differentiation between tense and time: “Tense is linguistic and Time is universal,” to quote the preface to the grammar. Narayana Rao goes on to say that Telugu has only two tenses — one for action past and completed, the other for action still in process or to take place in the future — and a progressive mode that can be applied to both of them. What is usually seen as present tense in Telugu grammars is a particular, progressive extension of non-past. In fact, this categorical division, linked to but not isomorphic with what linguists call aspect, is characteristic of all Dravidian languages (if I may use a term that Narayana Rao himself dislikes). In Tamil, as in the other southern languages, the present tense forms are relatively late developments, perhaps partly under the influence of classical Sanskrit with its distinct present tense forms (as in other Indo-European languages)—although the verbal system of post-Vedic Sanskrit, including tense, is very much like Dravidian; the verbal morphology we find in the textbooks is misleading. I think the disjunction of tense and time in Narayana Rao’s grammar is a profound insight, with a history going back to Bhartṛhari, that could be further elaborated.
The Telugu verbal system is, in general, remarkably regular — so much so that in the early days of computer programming, some people advocated making Telugu the default paradigm. There are, nonetheless, occasional surprises, lucidly presented in this grammar. Telugu, like the other southern languages, mostly uses verbal adjectives/participles instead of the complex relative clauses we have in Sanskrit and in Sanskrit-derived languages. A long section describes these forms and their flexible usages. The graded conversational lessons are full of discoveries. The always tricky topic of reported speech — “I asked my friend if she was planning to come to class tomorrow,” or “Are you inviting me to dinner tonight?” — gets an excellent chapter of its own.
Some of the example sentences are remarkable, both far more interesting than one tends to find in the available Telugu primers and also entirely natural in everyday speech. For example: “Believe me when I say that there isn’t a movie he has not seen.” (The Telugu sentence is simple — a good example of the classical figure “litotes”, a double negative — but it takes a very experienced and imaginative teacher to see the need for drilling students to say this.) Or: “He read so much he went crazy.” Or another useful sentence: “I slept in a mosquito net so that mosquitos wouldn’t bite me.” Think what a beginning Telugu student needs to say upon arrival in Andhra. Another graceful colloquial model sentence: “No matter how hard I try, I am unable to recall his name.”
Much of the book is, with good reason, devoted to presenting with precision and sensitivity Telugu’s elaborate modal forms. These forms are the key to achieving fluency, and they are interesting in their own right. Thus there are sections on non-volitionals, on total negation, on “services” (the complementary contrast to reflexives: that is, verbs that describe a service performed for others), on facilitatives, on past habitual, on irrevocables (here a strong affinity with aspect), on prospectives, and — throughout the volume — on a remarkable range of Telugu idioms and colloquial expressions, entirely absent from the traditional, medieval grammars. A person immersed in teaching herself Telugu, or in studying this book with the help of a teacher and structured classroom drill, will emerge with a solid basis for the moment when she or he begins to live in Telugu, or to speak the language “with your mouth, not with your head,” as Narayana Rao once wisely said to me. I wish there was an appendix on the morphology and lexis of Telangana Telugu — it would be a real help to many of us.
This book can initiate speakers of Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and also of north Indian languages, not to mention foreign students, into the delights of Telugu speech. Rasikas of Carnatic music might also enjoy expanding their knowledge of the exquisite language in which so many kirttanas are couched. But Narayana Rao was also thinking of Telugu families in which there is some erosion, particularly among children in English-medium schools, of their own mother tongue. I hope this book finds its way into such homes. This is a modern, descriptive grammar, non-prescriptive, thus free from claims to hyper-normativity and linguistic purism. But it does aim at inculcating good Telugu. Like all spoken languages, Telugu is a living organism that continually grows and changes, as one sees in some of the model sentences — so much the better. There is much to be grateful for in a grammar produced by one of the great masters of modern Telugu style, in all its forms and usages, its levels, its diverse living contexts, and its tremendous expressive range. Narayana Rao has seen deeply into the heart, or the hidden self (svarūpam) of Telugu, revealing that inner core to us.
