A People’s Literary History: Progress and Liberal Pedagogy in the Writings of Gidugu V. Ramamurti, 1863–1940

This paper examines Gidugu V. Ramamurti’s reflections on Telugu literary history in the early decades of the twentieth century. Literary history as a new flexible genre provides Ramamurti a way to reconstruct past literary efforts to indicate the larger role that literature plays in society rather than concede literature as the exclusive property of poets. His expansive conceptualization of literary history as the documentation of literary and linguistic change over time carves out space not only for literary innovation but also an increasing emphasis on the broader uses of literacy in a democratizing society. This orientation to a broader conception of literary history is an explicit attempt on Ramamurti’s part to make language and its literary forms accessible to everyone regardless of their level of education, caste status, gender and vocation. Ramamurti’s reconceptualization of Telugu literature in history contributes to his larger concerns with a liberal pedagogy shaping the new citizen-subject. This paper is part of a larger project tracing the expansion of the Telugu public sphere in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth to reveal a broader cultural discourse on reason, reform, and the anticipation a new society. Elsewhere, Ramamurti speaks of being on the threshold of a new society. This anticipation, I argue, pushed Ramamurti to articulate a new universalism where Indian society can participate on an equal footing with the temporality of a global universalism.