Srinivas Reddy

K K Thaplyal
Srinivas Reddy is a scholar, translator and musician. He studied classical South Asian languages and literatures at UC Berkeley and currently teaches at Brown University and IIT Gandhinagar. Srinivas is also a concert sitarist and studied in the traditional guru-śiṣya paramparā with Pandit Partha Chatterjee, senior disciple of the late sitar maestro Pandit Nikhil Banerjee of the Maihar gharana. Srinivas’s books include Raya: Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara (2020), Meghadutam: The Cloud Message (2017), Malavikagnimitram: The Dancer and the King (2015), and Amuktamalyada: Giver of the Worn Garland (2010). www.srinivasreddy.org

Abstracts of the lectures

Sweeter than Honey: The Advent and Rise of Classical Telugu Literature

This lecture will survey the first five centuries of classical Telugu literature from Nannaya’s landmark Āndhra-Mahābhāratamu in the eleventh century to Pĕddana’s celebrated Manu Caritramu written at the Vijayanagara court in the sixteenth century. The brief review of poets and texts will focus on the multifaceted process of South Indian vernacularization and its relationship to Sanskrit literary and cultural prestige.


Conquest of the World: Krishnadevaraya’s Āmuktamālyada

This lecture will take a focused look at one of Telugu literature’s most remarkable texts: the Āmuktamālyada of the sixteenth century Vijayanagara monarch Krishnadevaraya. This unique text, written by a king of Karnataka in ornate classical Telugu about a female Tamil saint, brings together several themes relating to vernacular literatures, courtly power and religious devotion.


About this talk

Read this article on Medium.com that conveys the gist of this talk.


Readings

  1. Rao, Velcheru Narayana. 1995. “Coconut and Honey: Sanskrit and Telugu in Medieval Andhra”, Social Scientist, 23 (10/12), pp. 24-40