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 THE MODERN SCHOOL CARRIES ON THE LITERARY AND LINGUISTIC TRADITION

154. In one of his brilliant paragraphs in the Illustrated London News, Mr. Chesterton noticed a vagary of conservatism. He said that revolutions sometimes continued the old order of things under new names, but it was the curse of conservatism, to change the old order of things without changing names. That is precisely what has happened in Telugu. The Neo-Kavya or Pseudo-Kavya School, deliberately broke away from tradition on a wrong track, and yet succeeded in securing acceptance all these years as the classical school, and the school of orthodox tradition. It was sailing under false colours.

155. In his pamphlet Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu taxed me, as examiner and as member of the Text-Book Committee with “approving books written in accordance with the rules of accepted usage and grammar as well as books which contravene those rules” and that I would leave the candidates “choice either to conform to or violate the rules of grammar.” Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu and his school have a new English of their own. In that English, Mr. Ramayya Pantulu’s remarks mean that I give writers and students option to write in the Kavya dialect or in polite modern Telugu. I insist on the observance by writers of either dialect of the grammar peculiar to it, but Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu knows only one grammar. As for candidates, unfortunately, they generally write ajargon which is neither this nor that.

156. It is Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu and his friends who have all these years, given license to authors and students to write the Kavya dialect ungrammatically. This option was, from every point of view, harmful and did permanent injury to Telugu prose literature and to vernacular education.