Thread by @Anuraag_Shukla

telugu caduv'atanna telikaga jucu
t'aangla pathalsalal'andu galadu.

That's how it is, they take Telugu lightly
In all those English schools.

~ Chellapilla Venkata Sastry

When all of his contemporaries were quoting Shelley, Keats, and Eliot, Vishwanadha Satyanarayana garu spoke of Indian aesthetics of rasa, aucitya, vakrokti and dhvani and quoted from Abhinvagupta, Mammata, etc., in defiance of every modern literary convention.

Sanjay Subramanyam describes how by the turn of the 20th century, the life of a Telugu teacher became miserable. "His general image was of a fossilized, unimaginative individual who somehow had instant access to old books, but lacked the intelligence to study any modern subject."

Interestingly, the Telugu pandit lost the status at a time when Telugu was being extolled as a great language and the Telugu middle class agitated for a distinct identity from Tamils, says Sanjay Subrahmanyan.

Marginalization of Sanskrit and Telugu, argues Subrahmanyam, created a new class of intellectuals who thought that the old texts belonged to an age of ignorance. Instead, they started a practice of quoting such texts with a sprinkle of English from their orientalist translations.

Satyanarayan garu met the criticism of his contemporaries with his formidable scholarship, mixed with monumental imagination. He even argued that it was the English education, that had made Telugu poets and intellectuals lose their heritage and traditional excellence.

This is what Satyanarayana garu wrote to answer his critics who had questioned him on writing his six-volume Ramayana Kalpavrkshamu (Ramayana, The Heavenly Tree).

Vishwanadha Satyanarayana, writes Sanjay Subrahmanyam, was too modern to be outdated and too outdated to be modern. For a half-century, he walked the Telugu literacy scene like a four-hundred-pound gorilla in the living room who could not be ignored.