Velcheru Narayana Rao taught Telugu and Indian literatures for 38 years at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also taught at the University of Chicago, and is currently ‘Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka’ Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, USA. He has written more than 15 books, many of them in collaboration with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
Mr Shulman is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages of India. He is also a poet in Hebrew, and Professor of South Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Girls for Sale, Kanyasulkam: A Play form of Colonial India, is one of Prof Narayana Rao’s, popular works and “How Urvasi was won”, a translation of Kalidasa’s Vikramorvasiyam in collaboration with Mr Shulman is one of his recent works. Prof. Narayana Rao even co-authored a book with Indian English Poet A.K Ramanujan.
Talking to The Hindu, he said that Telugus who had grown in Andhra Pradesh could not teach their language to a foreigner who had to learn it from scratch. “The Telugu children know how to speak the language and have a good vocabulary even before they learn the letters of the language. But foreigners have to be taught letters first. The methods used to teach Telugu here cannot be used to teach Telugu outside. Nobody in Telugu land knew how to teach the language to outsiders. It was easy for Telugus to teach other Indians the language because of similar syntax and semantics, but it was difficult to teach foreigners whose languages were quite different, he said.
“Even illiterates learn to speak four or five different Indian languages because of their similarity, but when it teaching the script difficulties begin to crop up,” he said.A centre that did research on language, teaching of language and training teachers of language was essential. Such a centre does not exist for Telugu. Universities that had a rigid structure could not fill the void. An institution with a different structure and flexibility was required for it, he said.
“For a university a Ph.D is the ending, but for these institutions the creation of pundits should be the goal. The Ph.D should be just the beginning for them. There should be an institution that funds scholars to do research and write books,” he said.
There were several such centres all over the world. There was a very good centre at Princeton and there were other such centres at Stanford, Yale and Duke, in the USA, and in Jerusalem and Berlin. A model could be developed from studying any one of them or all of them, Prof. Narayana Rao said.
Besides doing research on teaching of Telugu as a second language these institutions could also help people with location of various works in the language and even help with translation of the works into world languages and with the copyrights for publishing them.
‘Go to place’
It should be the ‘go to place’ for Telugu language. People come to me from all over the world and ask me where should I go to learn Telugu and I do not have a place to send them, he said.
The methods used to teach Telugu here cannot be used to teach Telugu outside. Nobody in Telugu land knows how to teach the language to outsiders
Prof. Narayana Rao
Litterateur
