Marellu nerellu mamillu jinnulu madiphalmbulu dudinimma
Linedelu medulu jidulu dadimbal anatulu panasulu canupakamulu.
These rhyming words describe some of the plants and trees in the garden of Amin Khan. These are also the lines from the first poetic work in acha Telugu (pure Telugu) by Ponuganti Telanganarya. Now, there are very few traces of Amin Khan’s garden and the name of Ponuganti Telanganarya is largely forgotten.
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As Hyderabad celebrates Telugu language, culture, idiom and identity at the World Telugu Conference it is interesting to remember how the language shaped the cultural world around the city. About 30 km from Hyderabad is the township of Patancheru which has now almost merged with the city. It was not always so. Patancheru was the first stop on the way to Bidar from where Bahamani kings ruled the region. In the 16th century, once Ibrahim Qutb Shah became king, the relationship with Bidar was snapped and Patancheru came into its own.
Here lived the Abdul Qadir Amin Khan one of the courtiers of by Ibrahim’s son Sultan Quli Qutb Shah While Ibrahim asked his court poet Addanki Gangadhara to translate Nannayya’s work on Mahabharata, Amin Khan commissioned Telanganarya to translate another mythical tale. Gangadhara’s work Tapati-Samvarnamu is one of the episodes of Nannayya translated for Ibrahim.
It was in this cultural landscape in Patancheru that the first poem in acha Telugu Yayati Charitramu — without any Sanskrit or Kannada loan words — was composed. Yayati Charitramu tells the mythical story of King Yayati, the father of Puru and Yadu of Mahabharata. How a Sunni Muslim nobleman from Patancheru commissioned a Niyogi Brahmin to write an episode from Mahabharata is another story. Amin Khan asked his aide Appanna Maringanti to sound out the poet and commission the work, thus the first acha Telugu work was created.
Telanganarya naturally penned peans about Amin Khan including his patronage of local Brahmins, charitable gardens, and construction of water tanks etc. In the preface he lists the trees and plants in the garden, Khan’s help to locals in their marriage, and his genealogy. This was not just literary trope without connection to reality. Amin Khan’s name endures in Ameenpur village. Historian Phillip Wagoner thinks: “The cultural landscape was much more variegated than that, and there must certainly have been many more figures like Amin Khan who could move with ease from one part of this complex world to the next.”
This easy interaction and integration of cultures flourished in Hyderabad which was founded by Ibrahim’s son Sultan Quli Qutb Shah a few dozen years after Telanganarya and Gangadhara The kingdom also patronised poets, artists, doctors and writers, irrespective of their creed. And the legacy of Amin Khan endures in Ameenpur lake which attracts birds from across the world.
Now, a noisy hubhub of a vegetable and fruit market surrounds the tomb of Amin Khan. Perhaps this is a fitting tribute to a man who lived with people and wanted to do something for them.
But isn’t it time that the poet who crafted the first acha Telugu work gets his place in the sun?
