Women Poets of the Nayak and Vijayanagara Courts: Madhuravani to Tirumalamba

The Court That Paid for Learning

• A court that kept poets on its rolls produced scholars, and at Thanjavur under the Nayaks and at Vijayanagara several of the most accomplished were women. The record of what they did survives in the works themselves and in the prefaces attached to them.
• The column that prompted these notes makes the wider claim plainly: the Vijayanagara empire celebrated women more than any other, and even in the period when the Mughal empire stood strong against it, women were held in high regard in public life.
• The measure of literary skill in that period was not volume but speed and memory. A poet was judged by whether verse could be produced on demand, and by how much could be held in the head at once before an audience.
• Raghunatha Nayak ruled Thanjavur from 1600 to 1634, and three of the women named below belong to his court. The fourth belongs to the Vijayanagara court of Achyuta Devaraya.

Madhuravani and the Title Asu Kavitharani

• Madhuravani was one of the court poets of Raghunatha Nayak. She was a scholar in three languages, Prakrit, Telugu and Sanskrit.
• Raghunatha Nayak himself composed a Ramayana in Telugu, the Ramayana Tilakam, and Madhuravani translated it into Sanskrit. Her own achievements are recorded in the preface to that translation, which is how they are known.
• She had mastered Panini's grammar, the foundational Sanskrit grammatical treatise, and she was accomplished in music and in playing the veena.
• Because she could compose a verse the moment it was called for, the scholars of her time praised her as Asu Kavitharani, the queen of extempore poetry.
• She knew ashtavadhanam and satavadhanam. Avadhanam is the feat of attending to several matters at once before an audience; in satavadhanam the poet holds a hundred matters in mind and answers questions on each of them.
• The king himself composed a verse in her praise, which is the court's own acknowledgement of her standing.

Satalekhini, and the Two Poets Who Held It

• Satalekhini was a title, and it had a precise test behind it: the ability to compose a hundred verses in eight languages within one kadikai, a kadikai being a period of 24 minutes.
• Rangajamma, the daughter of Pasupuleti Venkatadri, held that title. She wrote several works that brought her fame, among them the Ramayana Saram, the Bhagavata Saram and a Yakshagana Natakam.
• In recognition of her scholarship she was honoured in the royal court with a kanakabhishekam, a ceremonial anointing with gold.
• Ramabhadramba was another Satalekhini. She composed in Sanskrit the Raghunathabhyudayam, a historical kavya in twelve cantos describing the political and military events of Raghunatha Nayak's reign.
• The work is read as literature and also as an important source for the history of the Vijayanagara empire, which is the rarer of its two uses.
• Its last two cantos list the accomplishments of the women of Thanjavur. The record there says they could compose songs easily in eight languages, and that some among them were highly skilled in expounding Vaisheshika philosophy and grammar.

Tirumalamba and a Word of 195 Letters

• Tirumalamba was one of the court poets of Achyuta Devaraya of Vijayanagara, and she was accomplished in Sanskrit.
• She wrote in the form that mixes verse with prose, the champu, and it was this mixed form she was drawn to.
• Her best known feat is a single word of 195 letters. Sanskrit allows long compounds to be built by joining words, so a compound of that length is possible only for a writer with wide reading, an exact command of Sanskrit grammar and a deep sense of the language.
• In 1999, a search for the longest word in literature for the Guinness World Records brought Tirumalamba's name back into view, and with it the standing of the Vijayanagara court that kept her.
• The poet Bharati described this kind of woman in his line beginning puthumaip penn ival sorkalum seigaiyum, the new woman whose words and deeds are her own.