every year to help Telugu students through the public Examinations and for the inability of a Telugu graduate to understand "literary" Telugu? If Telugu has been "fixed for so long a period as nine centuries, why do Telugu Pandits avoid that 'fixed language' when they discuss literary and linguistic questions in public? This conclusively proves that Telugu has changed; but, thanks to a delusive ideal, the Pandit disowns his own language and attempts, not always successfully to reproduce the old language of the "classical" poems, in order that he may be counted among the elect and find admission into the classic Valhalla. This explains the Pandit's statement that literary Telugu has been fixed for nine centuries. Even though the leaders of the Telugu Academy and 'ten thousand Telugu Citizens' have vouched for its accuracy, it is none the less absurd and false; facts belie it; no one who knows what language is will ever believe it. The "classic ideal" has, however, led to a culpable neglect of the genuine vernacular and deprived the community of the means of acquiring knowledge and cultivating literary taste. "If" as Babu Syamacharana Ganguli says in his interesting pamphlet on Bengali, "the object were to confine knowledge to a caste, there could not be a cleverer contrivance than to make the written language diverge widely from the spoken. Such a contrivance would carry with it its own Nemesis." What this is most
