Pantulu’s works have undoubted literary merit, especially his work in the spoken dialect. But among the writers who followed Chinnaya Sun as translators of Hitopadesa into Kavya Telugu, Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu was the worst literary sinner. For years Telugu prose muse could not soar higher than second hand Beast Fable, and Neetichendrikas by Chinnaya Sun, Rao Bahadur K. Veeresalingam Pantulu, and Mahamahopadhyaya Kokkonda Venkataratnam Pantulu were read year after year by pupils in high school classes. To crown all, the versions of Messrs. Veeresalingam Pantulu and Venkataratnam Pantulu appear side by side with Chinnaya Sun’s masterpiece as models of composition to pupils in Intermediate Classes in the list of books submitted to the Committee by Mr. G. Venkataranga Row.
161. The faults which Chinnaya Sun avoided by a coffect taste rare among Telugu pandits, are found exaggerated in Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu. His extravagance transgresses even the bounds of proverbial oriental extravagance. What the Sanskrit Hitopadesa or Chinnaya Sun said in ten words, Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu said in a hundred. Sound fascinated him, and he indulged in fantastic alliteration. Words were let in merely to fill long drawn alliterative schemes. Synonyms were piled up and unfamiliar words were marshalled to express the simplest ideas of a beast fable. Even the example of the Sanskrit original did not save Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu from the besetting sin of most prose writers in the kavya dialect, namely, the frequent use of long Sanskrit compounds. Witness the following from his Nitichandrika.
