Source : The Hindu
Eminent litteratuer Peri Ravikumar’s felicitation draws attention to his work ‘Padya Vidya’
Sahithya Surabhi, a literary forum in concert with a few other literary associations warmly felicitated noted litterateur Peri Ravikumar on the premises of Public Library Visakhapatnam. An author of merit, his magnum opus Padya Vidya , a compendium of principles of prosody for composition of metrical verse in Telugu won him wide acclaim including an honorary D.Litt from GITAM University.
Born in a family with rich literary background, he learnt rudiments of Sanskrit from his erudite father Peri Kurmanatha Sarma and later grew up into a savant and an authority on Viswanatha Satyanarayana in his own right. A retired high ranking bureaucrat in Indian Defence Accounts Service, his calling and passion are chalk and cheese all along. However, his passion for prosody superseded everything to such an extent that post retirement he laboriously worked on his magnum opus Padya Vidya for eight years. Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation and is thus a source for literary delight; his work serves that purpose well.
In Padya Vidya , Peri Ravikumar left nothing untouched in the domain of prosody; it deals with the vast canvas of Telugu prosody in exhaustive detail. Each of the myriad aspects like caesura and rhyme scheme of verse stood discussed thread bare with about 4000 examples culled out of literary works of worth from classical works to sathaka sahityam in annals of Telugu literature over a millennium. Intricacies in structural composition of metrical verse in its complex and multiple metres of varied frames are elucidated in great detail.
Terming his work as an engineering of verse, he said that the absence of a standard treatise encompassing the vast domain of Telugu prosody in its totality prompted him to take up this humongous literary enterprise. Contrary to common perception, principles of prosody facilitate flexibility in several ways to compose the verse with an inbuilt craft, Peri added.
(Peri Ravikumar) said that the absence of a standard treatise encompassing the vast domain of Telugu prosody in its totality prompted him to take up this humongous literary enterprise
