Shatavadhanam

My grandmother’s uncle, Veluri Sivarama Sastry was born around 1900, I think, and when he was 10 years old he participated in and won a game that is a unique part of Telugu and Indian tradition.

It’s essentially a 24-hour poetry jam with tons of interludes in between. The poet who is participating has a hundred questioners who each ask a question. The poet must compose a poem in response, but only reveal the first line before moving on to the next questioner. The poet does this 4 times to complete the whole verse for each questioner, generating 400 lines of poetry. Once the whole verse is composed the poet must recite it all without missing a beat.

But wait, there’s more! As the poet circles and recites the poem-answer, another questioner wil interrupt the poet’s flow and demand answers for new questions that are purposefully crafted to be unrelated to the current context the poet is focused on. This new disjoint topic poem-answer must rhyme with the last line the poet recited.

The game is brilliant in the number of mental skills it tests - focus, short-term memory, long-term memory, linguistic flexibility. It is an incredibly important part of the revival of Telugu literature and Indian national identity within Telugu lands.

Naturally, one starts by only having 4 questioners and scales up from there - it takes a true prodigy to be able to play this at 10 years old and my grandmother’s uncle was apparently one of those people. He also had quite a prodigious temper. The story that is passed on in the family is as much about his genius as his anger at being talked down to by adults after he had completed the 100-person exam. He had passed and had become one of the extremely elite Shatavadahanis. But since the adults had laughed at him as they congratulated him, he walked the 10 kilometers back home without breaking fast with them. Which feels like a pretty strong spiteful energy I recognize within myself, sans poetic ability.

The Avadhanam has elements that remind me of rap battles and chatushkas - often composing poetry is a folk tradition of the people at the periphery of political power. At the time of my grandmother’s uncle’s competition, Telugu people had little political representation - kings were mostly Urdu-speaking, or Tamil-speaking. While the literature was still patronized by these kings, it was often secondary and a far cry from the golden age of Telugu literature during the Vijayangara empire where outsider kings such as Krishnadevaraya overflowed with praise for the language’s poetic expressions and sought to compose some of the finest literature in Telugu.