tradition - what is worse, the really ungrammatical tradition of the Neo-Kavya school - has grown natural to their tastes and deviation from it sounds like hereby.
190. But the great pandits who lived before modern schoolbooks came into existence felt no such repugnance to the employment of Modern Telugu forms in prose. This prose was the traditional prose dialect which I mentioned in paragraph 31.
191. The question of a prose diction which we seek to re-solve now, was solved long ago in practice by the ancients and the tradition of that practice has continued unbroken to the present day. It is the diction of epistles of popular stories and local chronicles, of light literature and of learned commentaries. It should not be supposed that this blend of poetic and modern forms was the creation of the half-educated. The pandits employed it in learned commentaries on books on grammar, poetics, philosophy and the sciences. In inscriptions this traditional prose blend appears side by side with verse in Sanskrit and in literary Telugu. This fact shows that the writers were scholars.
192. It is essential that we should not lose sight of one material distinction made by the pandits of by gone days. When verse entered into a work, that work was kavya or literature. To a Pandit an epistle, a commentary, an inscription was not generally literature. When he felt that he was not writing kavya or literature, he gave full play to his natural tendencies and employed modern form. This gave to his prose a life and a spontaneity, which is always lacking in later poetry in the literary dialect.
193. What the pandit with his naow literary standards was unable to recognize as literature is literature in the view of advanced western nations. A well-written epistle, a diary or a speech is prose and good literature in English.
