Saluting the feats of peripatetic feet

Prof. M Adinarayana from Andhra University has wanderlust in his blood, and true to his passion, he has a knack of finding travel stories lurking in works of Telugu writers from the past and the present.

To discover these stories, he travelled on the string of time and looked into the writings of Telugu people whose peripatetic zeal has taken them to many places in the ancient idea called India. In the process, he referred to and consulted some seventy-nine books of the Telugus, selected travelogues, and compiled them into a digest, entitled ‘Teluguvari Prayaanaaalu’.

Our professor starts this multi-travelogue at such a point and place in the history. People then, like us in the present times, had a deep sense of aspiration to travel to places, and only a few of them could transform the zeal into reality.

In the earlier days we had an adage which said, “One who travels to Kasi, and the one goes to the burial ground are same”. This evolved mainly because of the non-existence of travel infrastructure, which remained unchanged for centuries.

This also indicates how difficult it was to travel in those days, around the 1830s, when there was not a single transport facility like roads, vehicles, routes, railways, bridges, all of which appears quite natural to us at present, and we are a generation who take all these things for granted, before we set forth on a journey.

Just two centuries ago a commoner at best knew a few villages in and around his own, as there were no roads to go anywhere, and transportation is purely a horse for traders and enterprises, or a palanquin for the rich and royal.

Pilgrimage to Kasi once in the lifetime at least remains an ardent wish of all Hindus. Ordinary folk and the privileged travelled to Kasi since many centuries; the records of such travels, remained nonexistent.

In those days with no transportation worth mentioning, crossing Vindhyas to enter northern part of India, or vice-versa to the southern India remained a gigantic task. Such times continued up to 1830s. Adinarayana has a studious devotion to both Vennelacunty Subrow, and Enugula Veerasvami, who undertook the Kasi travel in the years 1823, and 1830 respectively.

While Vennelakanti’s version is part of his autobiography, (The life of Vennelacunty Subrow) and therefore only a skeletal detail of the travel, Veeraswami’s work of recording the travelogue is vastly different in size and enterprise as well.

The book as a manuscript contained 419 pages of voluminous information and this was submitted to CP Brown, with a request to consider publication, stored under the acknowledgement and notes of Brown, in the year 1832 itself. This book was posthumously published by the East India Company in 1838, two years after the death of Enugula Veerasvami.

While Vennelacunty Subrow’s travel to Kasi appears more or less an individual initiative, and the route he took to travel is presently the Eastern flank leading to Kasi through Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, crossing the forest tracks, and rivers, by both foot and boats as well.

His observations are mainly on the difficulties he faced in the travel, due to his failing health, and dwell mostly on the pilgrimage significance of visiting Kasi.

Thus, Vennelacunty remains the first writer of autobiography in English, the work of Enugula Veeraswamy, has a grandiose purpose from the beginning i.e. to record every experience, and also one more significant fact is that he travelled to Kasi via central India, crossing Hyderabad,

Nagpur etc, and while returning he came by the Eastern flank, and by this circuitous mode of journey, he had more to say on the diverse parts of the country, and his exhaustive work leaves us with a mass of information and traveler’s experience in an India that is totally unknown to us.

In that way, Enugula Veeraswamy emerges as the father of travelogues, as far as Telugu is concerned, and for that matter, before the 1830s, in entire south India, no other traveler has recorded his travel to Kasi, therefore, with less argument, one can safely state that Enugula Veeraswamy is the first south Indian who recorded his travelogue as early as 1831.

Thus Prof. Adinarayana, saluting these two great grandfathers of the genre of modern Telugu travelogue, did a valuable work of listing the other contemporaries of the above duo, and etched a large footprint of these zealots, divided in time and space, mostly unknown to one another, to come together as a significant entity in the section of Telugu travelogues.

Adinarayana has an eye to pick up a travel, patiently gleam at the bulk of writing by many, and select the relevant portions from them. Otherwise, it would not have been possible to pick up Gurajada’s visit to and description of Velagada Hills, very close to Vizianagaram.

The peripatetic professor who travelled footloose more than 25,000 km in India and other continents since the 1990s, and made more than twenty-five such travels by foot, has neatly arranged the work he compiled into eight sections. Pilgrims, poets, artists, aesthetic worshippers, scholars, writers, globetrotters, and public leaders among the Telugus, in the last eighteen decades, who travelled and recorded their experiences, are listed herein.

The travel accounts of the distant decades, reflecting in the writings of Mandapaka Parvateesvara Sastry of Bobili Samsthan, Chellapilla Venkata Sastry, Adibhatla Narayana Dasu, Kola Seshachala Kavi, Kandukuri Veeresalingam, Sripada Subrahmanya Sastry, Chilakamatri Lakshmi Narasimham, and Kota Narakesari give us diversified glimpses of the conditions in the period the 1830s to 1920s from the eyes of a traveler.

Modern writers like Sri Sri, Arudra, Basavaraju Rajyalakshmamma, public leaders like Mandali Buddha Prasad, Yarlagadda Lakshmiprasad, writers like Tirumala Ramachandra, Nayani Krishnakumari, Ravuri Bharadvaja, actors like Akkineni Nageswara Rao,

Bhanumati, writers more near in time to us like Kavanasarma, Dasari Amarendra, aesthetes like Sanjeeva Dev comprise a part of formidable line up of sixty-four persons, who chose to record their travel experiences and the world they have seen, and they greet us from between the pages of this robust book ‘Teluguvari Prayanaaalu’.

By:Rama Teertha