Tikkana
Thirteenth century
Nannaya's great successor, who completed most of the Telugu Mahābhārata, was Tikkana, minister to a small king called Manumasiddhi in Nĕllūru (present—day Nellore). We know the names of his parents, Annamâmba and Kŏmmanâmātya, and his title, Somayāji, which seems to reflect a ritual (Vedic sacrificial) role. He plays a major part in later literary tradition, such as in the Pratāparuda caritramu of Ekâmranātha and the Siddheśvara caritramu of Kāsĕ Sarvappa (17th century), where he appears as a deft negotiator and a relentless enemy of Buddhism and Jainism. He is said to have won a victory for his king—in effect to have reinstated him on his throne after Manumasiddhi had been driven away by his enemies, Akkana and Bayyana— by a personal mission to the Kākatīya king Gaṇapati Deva. His image is of an active, imaginative ideologue no less than a sophisticated and innovative poet.
Along with his parts of the Mahābhārata, Tikkana composed an Uttararāmāyaṇamu, popularly known as Nirvacanottara—rāmāyaṇamu because it contains no prose passages (vacanam); the book is dedicated to Manumasiddhi. His Mahābhārata is dedicated to the god Harihara[w10]atha, a conjoined form of Visnu and śiva.
In his colophons, Tikkana calls himself ubhaya—kavi—mitra, “a friend of both schools of poetry. ” It is unclear what he means by this, but it is possible that the reference is to śaiva and non—śaiva streams, which in this context run parallel to deśi (“local, regional, popular”) and mārga (elevated, Sanskritic, classical). Both his syntax and diction were strikingly Dravidian, and never emulated by his successors. Straddling the boundaries of oral/performative and written/monological composition, Tikkana stands alone in the whole history of Telugu literature, a figure of remarkable individual creativity.
The passage chosen for this anthology, from the fourth book of the
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