Telugu Literature

Telugu literature or Telugu Sahityam (Telugu: తెలుగు సాహిత్యం) is the body of works written in the Telugu language. It consists of Poems, Novels, Short stories, Dramas and puranas. Telugu literature has a rich and long literary tradition, that can be traced back to the early 11th century period when Mahabharata was first translated to Telugu from Sanskrit by Nannaya. It flourished under the rule of the Vijayanagar empire, where Telugu was one of the languages spoken in the royal courts.

Telugu separated from proto-dravidian around 1 BCE along with parji, kolami, nayaki and gadaba languages. Even though it still retains some of the primitive Dravidian characters, it is heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Prakrit. Another school of thought is that Telugu is Vikruti - that is a language formed by modification of Sanskrit and Prakrit.

Apparently Andhras adopted a form of Prakrit which, in course of development, became the immediate ancestor of Telugu literature. Literary texts in Telugu may be lexically Sanskrit or Sanskritized to an enormous extent, perhaps seventy percent or more and every Telugu grammatical rule is laboriously deduced from a Sanskrit canon. Hence Sanskrit and its vocabulary influenced Telugu literature a great deal.

Sanskrit and Telugu alphabets are similar and exhibit one-one correspondence. Best Sanskrit pronunciation can be heard from scholars residing in the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh as a result of huge influx of Sanskrit in language and literature and is quite evident in Carnatic music compositions of Telugu songs.

There is no known Telugu literature prior to the eleventh century CE: all of the inscriptions before this period are written either in Sanskrit or Prakrit.