162. At the time when he wrote this book, Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu aimed at excelling Chinnaya Sun, and no doubt, felt that , he outdid him in the kavya style. He was in his youth and was either imperfectly acquainted with Sanskrit rhetoric or did not appreciate the natural diction of the great Sanskrit classics, and believed that unintelligibility and an exhibition of learning were the chief merits of a prose composition. He must have felt contempt for the brevity and the conversational style of the Sanskrit original.
163. But it must be said to the credit of Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu that he soon discontinued writing in the inflated kavya style of his Neetichendrika. That he has lived to strongly disapprove of it is evident from his subsequent work wherein he discarded alliteration and verbosity to a large extent. In fact, in his later popular prose, Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu went to the opposite extreme, and attempting to simplify his prose, he made it bald and rhythmless.
164. True, Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu discarded the Nitichendrica style. But the scholars who sit in Academies and on text-book committees have discarded neither his Nitichendrika nor its style. They have done more. They have exalted Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu’s worst work in a vitiated kavya style, into a text-book for students preparing for the Matriculation and S.S.L.C. Examination. It is only four years since the latter examination was instituted, and Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu’s Nitichendrika was prescribed as a text for three years consecutively without a word of protest from the self-constituted guardians of the Telugu Language. The Honourable Rao Bahadur Mr. Sarma condemned in the Legislative Council that excellent book of travels in modern Telugu, Yenugula Veeraswami’s Kasi Yatra Charitra, one of the best prose works in the Telugu Language. I wonder what he thinks of Mr. K. Veeresalingam Pantulu’s Nitichendrika.
