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 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 Vijayanagara Empire, where Telugu was one of the empire's official languages.

Telugu split from Proto-Dravidian between 1500-1000 BC. Telugu became a distinct language by the time any literary activity began to appear in the Tamil land, along with Parji, Kolami, Nayaki and Gadaba languages.

Telugu is a Dravidian Language native to India. Poets from both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states of India have contributed immensely to Telugu literature.

There are various sources available for information on early Telugu writers. Among these are the prologues to their poems, which followed the Sanskrit model by customarily giving a brief description of the writer, a history of the king to whom the book is dedicated, and a chronological list of the books he published. In addition, historical information is available from inscriptions that can be co-related with the poems; there are several grammars, treatises and anthologies that provide illustrative stanzas; and there is also information available from the lives of the poets and the traditions that they followed.

Early Telugu literature is predominantly religious in subject matter. Poets and scholars drew most of their material from, and spent most of their time translating epics, such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata and the Puranas, all of which are considered to be storehouses of Indian culture.

From the sixteenth-century onwards, rarely known episodes from the Puranas would form the basis for the tradition of Telugu-language kavya. Literary works drawn from episodes of the Puranas under the name Akhyana or Khanda became popular along with depictions of the fortune of a single hero under the title of Charitra, Vijaya, Vilasa and Abhyudaya. Such titles are examples of what would become the most common subject matter of poetry.

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