Sandhi cannot certainly act as a bar to intelligibility in the case of readers who can understand Mr. V. Venkataraya Sastry’s archaic Telugu and learned Sanskrit with which his prose abounds.
145. It is unjust, however, to class Mr. V. Venkataraya Sastry, as Mr. K.V. Lakshmana Row has done, with the crowd of writers whose writings carry the hallmark of incoffectness and bad art. To him the diction of the poetic dialect has living associations and when his imagination is touched, much of the drops and his sentences move with the rhythm of the masters. It must be said to the lasting credit of Mr. V. Venkataraya Sastry that he gave the first start to modern Telugu as a literary instrument in his plays. He has little in common with the other writers of the Neo-Kavya school.
146. In his “Greek Myths’ an adaptation of Hawthorne’s Greek Tales, Mr. Chetti Lakshminarasimham of Vizagapatam has avoided many of the blunders and inconsistencies of the Neo-Kavya school, by systematically avoiding sandhi. It was once the fashion to condemn his book as a production in ‘gramya’i.e., modern Telugu, which it was not. His language was no better and no worse than the language of the leaders of the Neo-Kavya school. “Greek Myths” has outlived adverse criticism and has entered the Valhalla of Mr. Venkataranga Row’s models of composition.
147. Mr. K.V. Lakshmana Row admits that option in the matter of sandhi is leading characteristic of the Neo-Kavya prose. He says “this option has proved to be of considerable value in the development of modern Telugu Prose.”
If, therefore, the option was irrational or was exercised without discretion, Neo-Kavya prose will stand discredited.
148. It is sometimes claimed that this option was exercised by leading writers in the direction of making the sandhi of the NeoKavya dialect accord with the laws of sandhi of modern Telugu.
