month. He naively admits that he had taken the historical material for the frame work of the story from Mr. Lakshmana Row’s Brief History of India where the events treated in the novel are rapidly summarised in haifa dozen pages. This is the sum total of the author’s research into the history of the period in which he laid the scene of the novel. He had not even read mr.Sewell’s “Forgotten Empire”. His ignorance of even the broad facts of history is astounding. The author kills in the battle of Talikot Tirumala, the first king of the third dynasty, brother of Rama Raju. If the novelist had read even Mr.Lakshmana Row’s history less carelessly he would have found there the statement that Tirumala ruled the kingdom of Karnatic for some years after the battle. Ignorance of this fact is inexcusable in a person who pretends to possess even a superficial acquaintance with Telugu literature, because a classic poem which is acknowledged to be at the head of one school of Telugu poetry and has set the type for the modern artificial epic was dedicated to king Tirumala after the battle of Talikot.
I shall touch only two topics — the novelist’s account of the battle of Talikot and his delineation of the three principal characters in the political drama.
The account of the battle is amusing by its puerile unreality. That the author deviates from Feristha’s account is the least of his demerits. He does violence to common sense. Kings and commanders engage in single combat like epic heroes. They abandon their commands on the battle field and appear whenever the novelist wants them for dramatic effect. The disposition of the armies is confusion itself. Mr. Sewell himself, while professing to follow Feristha, gives an incorrect account of the dispositions which the Editor of the Vijnana Chandrika adopts without referring to Feristha. The Editor has embellished this novel with a fancy sketch of the dispositions and Ramaraju’s main army occupies the right wing there instead of the centre. The novelist places Venkatadri’s army in the centre (Vide.p.290 of the novel). 1’• 5ex 957 My Own Thoughts
