Telugu history

[Bapa Rao]

In my posting I  implied that the last king of the Golconda Bahmanis was
Quli Qutb Shah, aka Taneshah. My memory now says that this is an error :
Quli Qutb Shah was the founder of the dynasty of which Abul Hassan Taneshah
was the last king. My apologies.

The anecdote about the contest between the scholars Sarva-varma and
Gunaadhya that I alluded to is quite an engaging one: the two were members
of the court of Haala, the last of the "great satavahanas." Acc. to the
story, Haala was sporting in the swimming pool with his ladies; when he
playfully splashed one of them with water, she squealed in Sanskrit,
"mOdakaistaaDaya," which parses to maa+udakai:+taaDaya, don't strike [me]
with the water. (I make no claim as to the correctness of any of the
Sanskrit here, I am only telling the story as I recall it from reading it
long ago). The king mis-parses this as "mOdakai:+taaDaya", strike [me] with
mOdakaas (sweet edible balls similar to today's laDDUs), and,thinking this
to be a novel form of love-play, orders a plate of the desserts and proceeds
to attack the sweet young thing with them. The lady, on recovering from her
astonishment, says, mockingly, "O great scholar! What I meant was, do not
strike me with the water." Stung, the king leaves in a huff, summons his
court scholars, and demands a crash course in proper Sanskrit. Only the
aforementioned pair of scholars are up for the challenge; GunaaDhya offers
to make the king a scholar in six years' time; Sarva-varma counters with an
offer of six months. GunaaDhya vows to give up Sanskrit as well as Prakrit
and write only in paizaaci thereafter if Sarva-varma were to succeed in
making the king a passable scholar in such a short time, which does ensue,
leading to the fulfillment of his vow by the latter. As I remember, the opus
of GuNaaDhya was called the "Brihat-katha" (don't know why a paizaaci work
would have a sanskrit name).

I don't claim any authenticity or accuracy to the legend, even qua legend.
However, it does indicate that even the Sanskritic Haala wasn't all that
comfortable in Sanskrit.

Bapa Rao