Chandrababu Naidu’s return as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh with the support of the charismatic Pawan Kalyan (founder of the Jana Sena Party and Deputy Chief Minister) and the BJP is important not just in political or economic terms, but for what they could do together to make India, once again, a cultural pathfinder for the world.
If being Hindi, and more recently Gujarati, has defined the face of Hindutva so far, what we might see now is something most Indians don’t quite know perhaps — and that is what it means to be “Hindu in Telugu.”
For many people in Andhra Pradesh, this election marks (they hope) an end to years of anguish about cultural destruction in AP, through the removal of Telugu in schools, sweeping proselytisation, and even attacks on temples. Earlier this year, I travelled extensively in the region, visiting places associated with my mother, the actor and former member of Parliament, Jamuna. In her childhood village of Duggirala, they spoke of how harshly Jagan had treated Babu. In Mangalagiri, where Naidu’s son Lokesh just won an election, I visited the twin temples of Narasimha Swamy. Near Vijayawada, we joined a group of local devotees in a diya ceremony at the historic Srikakula Andhra Mahavishnu temple, the site of one of the earliest Satavahana kingdoms. That day was January 22, and the reverberations of the Ayodhya pran pratishtha were being felt profoundly in every tiny village we visited.
Academic convention would say this is an effect of “Hindutva” making inroads into the South. But the truth is that the Telugu heartland has also been a Hindu heartland for centuries. One of the earliest records to have documented both “Turushka” atrocities as well as Hindu resistance is the Vilasa copper plate inscriptions of 1325 which were found, coincidentally enough, in what is now Pawan Kalyan’s constituency of Pithapuram.
There is in the Telugu region a thriving diversity of local cultural practices anchored in inherited traditions. How these are managed will have profound consequences for India in the future, especially in the wake of the particularly nasty, divisive rhetoric the recent election campaigns have forced upon us. It is my belief that AP can be one place from where we can find our way forward.
Rather than confine itself to economic “vikas” issues, the new government should invest heavily in education and culture in Andhra Pradesh: A new humanities university, in or near the new capital city of Amaravati would revive the place’s ancient prestige, and also complete what an earlier government had sought less successfully to do with Nalanda.
Indian humanities, as the scholar D Venkat Rao has written, have to account for what he calls “biocultural formations,” or what I have been describing as the “verticals” of intergenerational continuity. In the Telugu regions, with their many sacred institutions, there is a potential for these carefully preserved intellectual and cultural lineages to actually inform modern humanities education, rather than suffer being edged out by ecologically-destructive mega-tourism projects pushed through rashly in sensitive temple kshetras.
The possibility of bright students, artists and writers coming to AP from all over India and the world to learn amidst nature from traditional scholars should make for the kind of civilisational revival many leaders profess but fail to deliver. Add to this the possibility of partnership with the thriving Telugu film industry which has delivered on a global scale with Baahubali and RRR, and we can have a global cultural powerhouse that is both rooted in ancient wisdom and contemporary enough to shape the global youth culture in a time of catastrophic intergenerational collapse.
I truly believe that Telugu culture is at a global crossroads, and its part in the broader cultural revival of India will have to be a part of that too.
There is a sensibility about Telugu-tanam, Telugu-ness, that has left us invisible to the rest of India. Its best symbol was perhaps India’s only Telugu Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, a man renowned for his silence — when he also just happened to be a polyglot!
In spite of this Telugu reticence, somehow, our politics have also been the nation’s politics. It was Potti Sriramulu’s fast unto death in 1953 that led to the linguistic rearrangement of states. It was the great N T Rama Rao’s election as Chief Minister in 1983 on the slogan of Telugu Pride, which fired one of the first salvos at the invincible Congress. It was Chandra Babu Naidu who ignited some of India’s hi-tech success by turning Hyderabad into “Cyberabad”. My father, with his penchant for nicknames, used to refer to him those days as “Shaandaar Babu”!
But then, the nation’s politics also took its toll on us. The festering Telangana-Andhra controversy sent Babu, and his dreams, into a painful exile. After much bitterness over “Andhra settlers,” bifurcation happened in 2010. Since then, the people made their peace, but the newly diminished Andhra Pradesh, and Naidu, as its first Chief Minister, never really found their place. His dream capital, Amaravati, was inaugurated in 2015 but left undone.
Nine years later, it would seem that Andhra Pradesh is eager to resume a journey after an interruption that was thrust on it harshly. There is optimism, again, though mine is that of a teacher and writer rather than that of a politician.
Naidu once spoke admiringly of the peace that he felt while visiting Prasanthi Nilayam. I hope he remembers that now and builds an Amaravati which, through arts and culture education, gives to the world a state of amara prasanthi.
The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco
