Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a close reading of parts of the autobiography of Chellapilla Venkata Sastry, to explore its multiple voices and individual identities, and investigates questions of self in a person who believes in astrology.

Paper long abstract:

Writing an autobiography is usually considered a modern development in India, under the influence of English education. But there is one important exception to this generally accepted idea. Sometime around 1900 Chellapilla Venkata Sastri (1870-1950), a famous Telugu poet, not formally educated in English, wrote his autobiography in verse, entitled, jataka carya, (Acts of a Horoscope). A significant aspect of this autobiography is that it was written in the third person, as the life-story of a person born on the same day, to the minute, as the author, known intimately to the author, but at the same time other than him. This Borgesian twist gives Jataka carya, a strangely post-modern quality, a bit of a surprise to occur in Telugu poetry, earlier than the emergence of what is usually called the modern period.

Venkata Sastri, along with his friend Tirupati Sastri, invented a literary performance of skill and memory called satavadhana. The two poets took questions from a hundred scholars assembled to challenge them and answered them in verse, one line at a time. One poet spoke one line and the other poet gave the next until the verse is completed. At the end both the poets recited from memory, all hundred poems they had orally composed. With this amazing feat of memory and skill of extempore versification, the twin poets who operated as if they had one mind between them amazed their audiences and took the literary world by storm.