Viswanatha Satyanarayana: The textbook definition of a street intellectual

The word intellectual is usually applied to someone who thinks and knows about the world more than others in lieu of his academic prowess but experiences and observations from life can also breed an intellectual.

The Street Intellectual himself; Image Source- dailyasianage,com

Viswanatha Satyanarayan was an intellectual, who did not need the help of thick books and complicated scholars. He lived his life, felt every inch of it and experienced every moment – qualities which were enough to make him the classic street intellectual.

Hailing from the Madras presidency, Viswanatha was had Veedhi Badi as the first to educate. These were street schools which were unrecognised informal institutions at that point. It was the nature and people around him that truly educated him. The several art forms which came out of various social backdrops were the true institutions that educated him. He mindlessly included the folk dance, music, poetry, stories and extempore that surrounded him.

He did receive a formal English education later which was a great drain on his father’s wealth but by then his surroundings had already played its charm on him and he viewed the world around him in a way that was completely different from his contemporaries.

The most significant contribution of Viswanatha Satyanarayan was his work Ramayana Kalpa Vrukshama. This was the first time a distinct teluguness was added to epics. He made the Ramayana, which was an epic strictly restricted to north Indians accessible to the vast majority of south India. It was this work that won him the Jnanpith Award.

Viswanatha Satyanarayana was a man of culture, not the elite culture practised by people swimming in luxury but the mass culture that were stoked, nurtured and experienced by the masses at large. This was the true popular culture and it told humane stories of everyday life, not courtly drama. Throughout the huge corpus of his works, he always reflected on preserving the culture of the people and protecting the nature and habitat that inspired those cultures.

His historical novels are a lesser-known facet of his variegated body of work. Viswanatha always took a bottom-up view of history and his works reflected that. He was opposed to history being limited to the kings and deeds rather it should reflect the lives of the people and provide enough political and social context to understand their zeitgeist. Purana Vaira granthamala, Nepala Rajavamsa caritra and Kashmira Rajavamsa caritra are the three series of novels written by him that expound on this belief.

If this wasn’t enough, Viswanatha spoke, critiqued and authored a number of speeches and analysing a variety of complex subjects such as spiritualism, history, political science, sociology, linguistics and psychology. He wrote both as a modernist and as a classicist on complex modules which made him the most versatile writer at that point.

Just as a person’s fame increases, so does his critics. Around his time, there was a parallel wave of free-verse Telegu writers who did not wish to abide by the conventional norms of writing. This group criticised Viswanatha for abiding by the conventions of rhythm and meter whilst composing his poems. However, they blatantly disregarded the fact that he was both a modernist as well as a classicist whose writings covered a vast multitude of topics.

Although Viswanatha Satyanarayana left for his heavenly abode in 1976, his works still continue to inspire a generation of writers who truly wants to master the art of thinking and writing tersely and poignantly.

A man of many talents; Image Source- Twitter