Palnadu today is a balmy corner of coastal Andhra Pradesh, perhaps best known for its chillies and tobacco. But every November, at the temple of Chennakeshava at Macherla, thousands of devotees congregate to worship the dead heroes of a medieval battle. Bloodthirsty eagles, unnatural pregnancies, evil female ministers, and moustache-twirling lords battle and plot, declaim and die in an epic ballad. This story, the Palnati Virula Katha, the Tale of the Palnadu Heroes—is a unique Mahabharata of a medieval landowning caste. It reveals how myth, history and ballads were constantly used and reused by an agrarian society over 800 years.
A dynasty of little significance
The Katha, as I will call it here, is structured around the rivalry of Brahma Naidu, a virtuous warrior of the Velama caste, and a Reddy lady called Nagamma Nayakuralu—literally “female leader snake-mother”. Both are depicted as ministers of a dynasty called the Haihayas, a relatively obscure clan from medieval coastal Andhra.
The name Haihaya is interesting: it was also borne by a major clan of the Lunar Dynasty, mentioned in the Sanskrit Mahabharata tradition. But the Mahabharata similarities don’t end there. Brahma Naidu and the Nayakuralu gamble their fortunes in a cock-fight, which the Nayakuralu rigs in her lord’s favour. Brahma Naidu’s lords are forced into exile, after which they ask for their share of the kingdom—only to be refused. This provokes war, in which neighbouring lords participate. The escalating bloodshed disgusts Brahma Naidu, who leaves the battlefield, resurrects 65 dead heroes, leads them to the cavern of Guttikonda, and becomes a renunciant.
How much of this is actually true? The Haihayas of Palnadu were certainly a real family, though they were a minor group of aristocrats living on the banks of the Krishna River in the 12th century. They variously sided with the imperial Chola and Chalukya dynasties as the two superpowers battled over the control of this fertile region. In his chapter on them in Medieval Andhradesa AD 1000–1324, historian V Sundararama Sastry suggests that two rival Haihaya lines existed, each the offspring of the king Anugukamaraju with ladies of warring local dynasties.
They made donations at a few temples from the 11th to the 12th centuries, after which they disappeared entirely from the inscriptional record. It is possible that these two historical lines did go to war, that this was indeed encouraged by their neighbours, and that ministers played prominent roles in the conflict. But there’s no other hard historical evidence available. Whatever their struggles actually entailed, the Haihayas had a rather extraordinary afterlife, as local bards took up their story.
Fast-forward to the 20th and 21st centuries. Contemporary versions of the story were recorded by Aruna Bommareddi in Narrative Traditions of a Telugu Epic: Palnātivīrula Katha. Now Brahma Naidu is a manifestation of Krishna, his birth celebrated by the gods; he adopts a Dalit warrior as his son; he encourages intercaste dining. Another son of Naidu’s is magically conceived, and Naidu’s wife proves her chastity through impossible feats; this son later kills a villainous Haihaya and garlands a divine eagle with his entrails. What does this multi-layered story say about the society that produced it over centuries?
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Story and society
In his essay Epics and Ideologies: Six Telugu Folk Epics, part of the edited volume Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, scholar Velcheru Narayana Rao observes that the Katha, more than anything else, reveals the social culture of Palnadu. Its heroes are moustache-twirling battle-lords of the landowning Velama, Kamma, and Telaga castes. Men of these castes, notes Rao, traditionally occupied a separate area at the front of their homes and cultivated behaviours that set them clearly apart from women (to the point where being accused of dependence on one’s wife was insulting). Rather tellingly, in Bommareddi’s recording of recent Katha recitations, rivals denounce each other as lacking moustaches.
This gendered view of the world gave rise to the Katha’s most fascinating character: Nayakuralu, the female leader. This lady, the daughter and niece of Reddy landlords, is a widow—a deeply ambiguous status in Andhra agrarian society. Indeed, as Rao notes (and as will be known to Telugu-speaking readers of this column), the word munda is used both for sex workers and for widows. As such, Nayakuralu is the evil driving force of the story: she is responsible for the cock-fight gamble, for the exile, and for the breakdown of peace talks. She is contrasted with the virtuous mothers and wives of Brahma Naidu’s camp, who conform more closely to the “ideal wife” notion.
Caste also plays a major role in the Katha. A major character is Kannama, a Dalit man of the Mala caste whose warrior prowess led to his adoption by Brahma Naidu. Malas today are the main narrators of the Katha during the annual festival (you can listen to a recording here). This is indicative of a dynamic we’ve seen often in Thinking Medieval: historically, communities outside the caste system obtained status through military service.
As Sanskrit and popular religion expert Alf Hiltebeitel writes, great epics like the Katha reveal how local warrior/landowning clans (here the Velamas, and in another case, the Vellalas sought to position themselves in relation to grander pan-Indian traditions. This is why the Katha borrows so much from the Mahabharata, especially in the character of Brahma Naidu: it is a vivid, culturally localised adaptation of that ancient tale. Indeed, the Katha is sometimes called the Palnati Vira Bharatam, the Heroic Bharatam of Palnadu. In medieval India, it wasn’t just language groups that had their own Mahabharata—even districts did.
This, however, was not the view adopted by Telugu historians in the 20th century, who instead saw the Katha as a distorted telling of a real history. In his essay, Socio-religious Significance of the Battle of Palnadu, part of the edited volume Social Mobility in Medieval Andhra, historian BSL Hanumantha Rao argued that Brahma Naidu was a medieval “social reformer”, which was why he encouraged intercaste dining and adopted a Dalit man. As a result, his lords prospered, but other lords struck back and killed him. While this fits very well with modern anti-caste movements, Brahma Naidu in the Katha is not really an anti-caste figure—he’s a warrior hero.
However, many other scholars and modern balladeers were fascinated by the Katha. Over the course of the 20th century, it was adapted by Telugu intellectuals into plays, into a Brahminical text, into Communist literature, and into films. Through this, writes Bommareddi (Narrative Traditions), the Katha has acquired an altogether new life: it is no longer a squabble between two petty medieval families but a Telugu national epic, a symbol of valorous peasant struggle. Which of these is the Katha’s true meaning? Perhaps none, or perhaps all. A story always reveals more about its tellers than its protagonists.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)