SANSKRIT AND TELUGU IN MEDIEVAL ANDHRA 25 nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism, as a slogan of superiority for Telugu people. It even appears on a postal stamp released by the government as a recognition of Telugu pride. However, there is no evidence of language serving as symbol of '"national" identity before the nineteenth century. There were Telugu-spealdng people, Telugu land, and even love of one's own language—but no Telugu people whose identity was formed by the "mother-tongue". Indeed, there is no such a word as "mother-tongue" in medieval Telugu.3 The modem matrbhasa is a loan translation from English. Nor there was any opposition between one regional language and the other; the distinction drawn was always between devabhasa (the language of gods, Sanskrit), and de&abhdsa^ (the languages of people). It is necessary to steer clear of the languagenationalism, which has fueled amajor political movement in contemporary Andhra and led to a re-drawing of the map of India along linguistic lines in the post-independence period. Care in distancing premodem language sense from the twentieth-century nationalist formations is especially necessary because modem Telugu intellectuals have read into their literary history a sustaining love of language as a means of establishing national identity and have at the same time erased all existing relationships with neighboring languages. Going back to the words of the god to Kr$nadevaraya makes this point clear. The king had already achieved the status of a poet in Sanskrit by virtue of his having authored several books in that language. Being a master of the language of gods, controlling a language of humans should be easy for him. But then, while there exist a number of human languages, why choose Telugu? It should be remembered that Krsnadev araya was not bom in the Telugu area. He was a Tuluva, from an area of southwestern Kamataka. As the god himself says, he is a Kannada raya—a Kamataka king, though a Telugu speaker all the same. Apparently he spoke more than one language, and found that speaking Telugu made it easier for him to rule what was largely a Telugu area. The politics of the empire were crucial here to the choice of language. Sanskrit is the language of pride and power. It is already enshrined in the hearts of the scholarly world as a language of great glory. All the great books—vedasy Sastras, itihasas and kavyas—arein that language. What is more, it is the only language that can confer on Kr$nadevaraya the status of a ksatriya in the four-varna ideology of the Brahminic/Hindu world. In his own locality, KrsnadevarSya was only a peasant and, if legends are to be believed, a low-caste peasant at that. But he was a peasant-warrior with aspirations to kingship. Outside his language area, his status did not translate into anything intelligible or respectable. One would not know where to place a Tulu Nayaka in the regional hierarchy of an area outside Kamataka. On the other hand, the pan-Indian categories of status are well-established in the four classes: Brahmana, Ksatriya, Vaisya and Sudra. Brahmins^ve obsessivelycamed the learning of Sanskrit books over generations, created a wider viability to S anskrit and the Brahminic ideology. It would thus be possible for KrsnadevarSya to adopt Ksatriya status, which in turn can be conferred upon him by the Brahmins. This dialectic of mutual construction—Brahmins conferring the status ofK$atriyahood