Telugu Riddles and Enigmas
Familiarity with the language becomes more important the higher the stylization of a folklore genre.—Elli Köngäs-Maranda
Pŏḍupukatha
This essay is about Telugu riddles; the data comes from Telugu sources. In Telugu there are several native forms that correspond to the riddle. One of them—the closest to what folklorists call a true riddle—is pŏḍupukatha.1 As in other cultures, it is used in a contest between two individuals. You hit (pŏḍucu) your opponent with a riddle which he/she has to resolve (vippu, “untie”). The participants are often young, aged ten to twelve, and the riddling sessions, if so they can be called (since they are not consciously organized), are almost exclusively theirs; no adults participate. Adults do have an interest in riddles, but they do not actively show it in a competitive context for fear of being considered childish. Adult interest in riddles of a different kind will be discussed later.
Here is a riddle I heard, or rather overheard, from a young boy at a friend’s family that I was visiting in Hyderabad:
vĕṅkayya pantulu gāḍu
vāḍi muḍḍiki mūrĕḍu tāḍu
vāḍu lepote vūrĕlla pāḍu2
has a cubit of string on his ass.
The village is dirty without him.
Some of the young kids giggle. The riddle respectfully gives Veṅkayya a title, pantulu—Brahmin/teacher/respectable person—but adds an irreverent, insulting suffix, gāḍu. And the rhyme includes the mildly obscene term muḍḍi, “ass.” The texture brings a certain sense of covert satisfaction at the liberty of using objectionable words with impunity. But apparently the riddle is not new. Some of the young people have already heard it. One of them yells, mischievously: “I know,” and he offers an answer: “the scavenger.” No, the answer is not acceptable. Why not? The scavenger has a string on his loins, which resembles a G-string, and he is the one who cleans all the dirt from the village. Another child says: “the crow.” That is not acceptable either. The crow does have a tail and does eat refuse and thus, one might say, makes the village clean. But the real answer is “broom,” a bunch of stalks of straw tied with a string. The boy accepts this solution: he had not known the answer before and was just trying to bluff his way.
You wonder if the accepted answer is logical. It is and it isn’t. It is logical because “broom” fulfills the conditions of the riddle; but the other, equally logical, answers are rejected. The only way you can resolve the riddle correctly is by being informed in advance what the accepted answer is. In other words, you cannot logically arrive at the answer, though the accepted answer does make sense.
The riddlers know the rules of the game; when they do not know the answer, they may try a clever solution—but they are willing to accept defeat. Akundy Anand, today a trained folklorist, reports that as a child in the eighth grade he was posed the following (rather lyrical) riddle:
nallaṭi ceṭlalo tĕllaṭi dāri
ā dārilo nallaṭi dĕyyam vĕḷṭondi
A white path through dark trees,
a dark ghost is walking through it.
The accepted answer was “head-lice.” When Anand suggested “comb,” his answer was rejected.
Here are some more riddles of this kind:
tokaleni piṭṭa tombhai āmaḍa potundi3
A bird without tail flies ninety miles.—(letter)
kiṭakiṭa talupulu
kiṭāri talupulu
ĕppuḍu mūsinā
cappuḍu kāvu4
Tight doors
Cute doors
Close them any time
They make no noise.—(eyelids)
According to Wittgenstein, the riddle does not exist.5 If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. For Telugu people, too, a riddle has an answer. But that in itself does not prevent it from being a riddle. What makes it a riddle is that among the potential answers, the correct one is not known to you unless you are initiated into the community of riddlers. Much effort has been devoted to studying the structure of the riddle and the logic of its answer. It is even argued that the riddle sharpens the logical skills of young people. Thus, Elias Lönnrot wrote: “As mathematics is in the school of the learned, so is the riddle in the home school of the folk. Both exercise the mind to understand the unknown, starting with the known conditions.”6 We might agree that riddles do, perhaps, exercise the mind—though some forms of riddles do so better than others, especially scholarly riddles. These are not, however, pŏḍupukathalu. There are other names for them: trick questions (cikku praśnalu), problem questions (samasyalu), hidden questions (praheḷikalu), and so on. What folklorists call “true riddles” do more than offer mental exercise; they present a situation where there are several logically correct answers, only one of which can be accepted. As E. Köngäs-Maranda says, “The relationship between the riddle question and the acceptable or accepted answers has not been studied enough.”7
Most studies of this question focus on semantic analysis, as in the case of Ben-Amos: “The diverse answers to a riddle, unrelated as they might appear, constitute the semantic set of a riddle.”8 Though this may be true, we still have no dependable way of determining which one of several possible answers is the accepted one. The Telugu example suggests that it is the accepted answer that makes the riddle a riddle. An outsider to the cultural knowledge which produced the riddle will have no way of knowing it. Sometimes, it is true, contesting groups may argue about the correct answer. I have witnessed several riddle sessions where disputes about a contested answer were not resolved logically but ended either with the co-option of the contesting individual by the group that held the “correct” answer or with a complete parting of the ways.
Riddles make communities of people who share common knowledge. In this they resemble conversion through initiation. The age group of ten-to twelve-year-olds constitutes such a community, which shares a special body of knowledge exclusive to its members.
An examination of a large corpus of riddles published by several collectors in Telugu brings out additional features. Most riddles have a poetic quality to them. They are structured metrically, often with some kind of rhyme. The style of the riddles, the language used, is irreverent and often obscene. Even when they are not explicitly pornographic, their texture and diction have a coarse and disrespectful tone. I am referring not only to the overtly obscene meanings found in many riddles, which vanish like fog the moment the correct answer is given. Even when the surface meaning is not obscene, the choice of words tends to be crude, as in the riddle about the broom given above. Here are several examples of overt obscenity:
ŏttŏtti pĕṭṭaṅga
ŏyi ŏyi anaṅga
cālu cālu anaṅga
santoṣa paḍaṅga
Pressing pressing pushing
saying oyi oyi
saying enough enough
feeling very happy.9
The diction, the style, and the tone of the riddle point to sexual intercourse, while the answer is fixing bangles on a woman’s hand. This was a common sight in premodern Andhra: a male bangle seller brought bangles to the house; he sized up a woman’s hand by holding it, chose the right-size bangles, and pressed her hand tightly to slide the bangle onto her wrist. The woman often felt the pain of squeezing as he slid the bangle on. This rather painful experience led to a happy ending, with the woman pleased with her new bangles.
Similarly:
Kāllu paṅgabĕṭṭi kāma cetula paṭṭi
pŏkka sūṭi cūci poṭu pŏḍici
potuk’ŏkka pilla nīṭugā dīyarā
dīni bhāvamemi tirumaleśa?10
Widen [your] thighs and hold the shaft
aim at the hole and hit it
take out a child each time you hit
What does this mean, Lord of the Tirumala hill?
The answer to the riddle is the potter, who works on his wheel by rotating it with a stick. Again the texture of the riddle, its diction and style, indicate a pornographic surface meaning. The riddle is composed in a meter used in literary texts, with the last line borrowed from literary riddle verses.
Handelman, commenting on a suggestion by Ramanujan, says, “Riddles are not indexical, for their structures are directed to answers and not to meaning … [They] are concerned primarily with effect (i.e. answers) rather than affect (i.e., meaning).”11 However, a look at the texture of adolescent riddles, as well as some adult riddles, in Telugu suggests that they may also have an affective role to play. After examining a large corpus of Telugu riddles, I conclude that riddle as a genre is irreverent in style and culturally defiant in attitude. Scholarly riddle collectors in early twentieth-century India either cleaned up some of the obscenities or simply excluded whatever was too objectionable.12 A recent study of Telugu riddles by Kasirĕḍḍi Veṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi includes a number of overtly pornographic riddles, but avoids commenting on their texture by giving them the respectable aesthetic label śṛṅgāra (erotic), one of the nine rasas or sentiments of classical Sanskrit aesthetics. Literary riddles—a different genre—generally have a less objectionable texture, though even a little obscenity often appears there as well (especially in the literary samasyas).
Adolescents as a group are located on the boundary between adulthood and childhood. Adults treat them as children, while they think of themselves as adults. As children they are discouraged from using proverbs, which are clearly demarcated as an adult genre. Proverbs are strictly hierarchical in use. Even among adults, persons of lower status do not generally use proverbs, unless the one chosen reinforces humility before persons of higher status. Boys and girls are discouraged from using proverbs. By and large, proverbs maintain the status quo.13 Riddles, by way of contrast, question the established cognitive order.14
There seems to be a certain pride these young people take in being free to violate family conventions in the context of a riddle. This process appears to have two aspects. The adolescents are defeating the adults and their rules. Often an adult may not even be able to answer the riddle if confronted with a group of adolescents playing with this form. Adults are visibly embarrassed because they see only the surface obscenity of the riddle. By the time the answer is supplied, the adult’s embarrassment is doubled because of his inability to answer the riddle himself. This gives the adolescents an opportunity to make their own communities distinct from, and in some sense superior to, those of the adults. If there is a sufficiently large group of adolescents who know the answers to the riddles, they form a riddle gang ready for battle with other adolescents uninitiated into the world of correct responses. Perhaps riddles offer adolescents a particular kind of opportunity in a world that does not entirely accept them as individuals.
Riddles are generally thought to be the property of the young, as has been repeatedly stated by editors of riddle collections. But Kasirĕḍḍi Veṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi reports several intriguing instances where riddles are used in villages by adult men and women both at work and at leisure. His ethnography is often unclear, inadequate, and faulty. It is difficult to see from his book whether he is recording a riddle performance from a real occurrence, remembering it from his past experience, or just imagining a possible event and writing it up. Despite these defects, the riddle texts he presents are compelling even if we discount the contexts he describes. Here is an example. An old man sitting at the public place at the center of the village is accosted by a younger man who “hits” him with a riddle:
tātā tātā tai bŏmmalāṭa
bāṭalunnādi baṅgāru mūṭa
mūṭa muṭṭicci mūḍigaṭṭu tāta
tātā tai bŏmmalāṭa15
Grandpa, grandpa, play of dolls
A heap of gold lies on the path
touch it, pick it, tuck it into your bag
O grandpa, grandpa, play of dolls.
The old man misidentifies the answer as a bag village men carry, containing a flint stone, a piece of steel, and a piece of cotton rope for making fire to light up their cigars. The young man ridicules the old man for his inability to resolve the riddle and supplies the answer: feces—a valuable manure. Farmers gather them, pack them in a bag, and put them in their fields. (The first line and the last line of this rhyming riddle are formulaic.) The old man laughs it off: “Every farmer does that, doesn’t he?”
Kasirĕḍḍi Veṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi also offers the following, from adult use:
siṭuku siṭuku maṭṭĕlu vĕṭṭuka
mañcinīḷḷa bāyikostĕ
kŏṇṭĕmuṇḍakŏḍukŏcci
kŏṅgu vaṭṭi guñjĕ16
Rings jingling on my toes
I was going to the water well
A naughty bastard came
and pulled the end of my sari.
Answer: thorny regu bush (that grows on the edges of farmland).
And one more:
ḍĕbbhai rūpayilu vĕṭṭi
ḍibbila raika dĕstĕ
ennu vagili
sannu gānoccĕ17
bought this blouse of beads
It ripped on the back
and the breast is exposed
Answer: sītāphalam, a fruit which cracks open when it is ripe to reveal its meaty interior.
According to Kasirĕḍḍi Veṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi, the above two riddles are used exclusively by village women working in the field.
Other Riddle Forms
Other forms of riddles have separate names: they are not pŏḍupukathalu. One such genre is a trick question that tests a person’s intelligence. These questions occur in folktales and legends. Often there is a king in search of a minister, or a beautiful maid looking for a suitable husband. Here is a legend about Timmarusu, minister of King Krishnadevarāya. The king took a piece of paper with a line drawn across it and sent it around his kingdom with an announcement that anyone who could make the line shorter without erasing any part of it would be chosen as his minister. No one thought it was possible, until a young boy took the paper into his hands and drew a longer line next to it.
There is the story of a young and beautiful woman who made a vow that she would not marry any young man unless he could make three statements about her which she could not controvert. Many tried, but she denied every statement they made about her. Finally a young man came and said:
Your mother is not a barren woman.
You are not ugly.
You are a chaste woman.18
Unable to deny any of these statements, the woman married the young man.
Literary Riddles
Often listed in the category of riddles, literary riddles test the intellectual skills of adults, their wit and wisdom, and, above all, their ability to play with language. Used in royal courts of medieval Andhra as demonstrations of cultural excellence, there is a variety of forms of literary riddles: they include śleṣa padyamulu (punning verses), citra kavitvamu (picturesque verses), garbha kavitvamu (verses including other verses within them), camatkāra cāṭuvulu (riddling verses), and samasyalu (tricky statements). Among them, camatkāra cāṭuvulu look most like pŏḍupukathalu. These are verse-riddles composed by known poets and circulated among educated adults as a scholarly pastime. Hundreds of these verses are often included in riddle anthologies. They are always in proper verse form, in chaste literary style, with no crude obscenity or irreverence. These riddles require no more than common sense and a good knowledge of mythology to answer them. In structure, they look like the riddles adolescents use, but they differ from the latter in that they can be solved logically. As Dan Pagis suggests, “The text of the literary riddle, in order to fulfill its social role, must pose a challenge which can be met through reasoning alone and does not require extraneous or esoteric information.”19 Often the riddle itself includes clues to its answer, which is always singular. Here is an example:
It moves in the sky; but it is not a bird.
It has a tail, but it is not a goat.
It has a rope, but it is not a bull.
What is this, Lord of Tirumala Hill?
Despite being in a verse form and literary in style, this riddle is almost similar to a pŏḍupukatha. However, there are literary riddles that play complex language games.
| rāmuḍĕvvari gūdi rāvaṇu mardiñcĕ | (to ka mū ka to) |
| paravāsudevuni paṭṇam’ edi | (raṅ ga na ga ram) |
| rājamannāruce rañjillu śaram’ edi | (la ko ri ko la) |
| velaya gānuga vaṇti vitt’adedi | (jam bi ra bi jam) |
| sītanu cekona cĕracina dhanuvedi | (pañ cā stru cā pam) |
| sabhavāri navviñcu jāṇa ĕvaḍu | (vi ka ṭa ka vi) |
| ala rambha kŏppulon alaru mālika edi | (man dā ra dā mam) |
| śrīkṛṣṇuḍ’ eyinṭa cĕlagucuṇḍĕ | (nan da sa da nam) |
anniṭiki jūḍan aidesi yakṣaramulu
onaran iru desa cadivinan ŏkka tīre
cĕppa galgina nen ittu cinni mada
cĕppalekunna nagdu ne cinni nagavu
Who helped Rāma kill Rāvaṇa?
What’s the name of Krishna’s city?
What is the weapon held by Vishnu?
What is the seed that looks like kānuga seed?
Which bow was broken to win Sītā?
Who makes people laugh in the court of the king?
Which is the flower-garland in Rambhā’s hair?
Where did Krishna grow up?
All these answers have five syllables each.
You can read them backwards, they will be the same.
If you can tell them, I will give you money.
If not, I will give myself a little smile.
The answers given in parentheses next to each line of the verse indicate that all of them are palindromes carefully crafted to fit the conditions of the answer.
A different kind of literary riddle is samasya, which is presented to a poet who wishes to be tested in his skills of extempore versification. Samasyas of this kind are presented as a line of an unfinished verse; the poet is supposed to use the line and compose a verse around it, thereby making the verse meaningful. The following samasya was often used to test the skills of poets in śatāvadhāna (a mnemo-technic) performances. The famous twin poets and extempore versifiers, Tirupati Veṅkaṭakavulu, known for their wit and phenomenal skills of memory, completed scores of samasyas like this one:
sati sati gavayaṅga putra santati galigĕn
A woman slept with another woman and gave birth to a son.
On the face of it, the samasya is nonsense. The poet’s trick is to let the third line of the improvised verse end in a va-. Read together, the first word sati (woman/wife) of the samasya now changes to vasati (house). The nonsense samasya is rendered sensible by this change and is contextualized by the rest of the verse: a certain young man who had no male children had a new house built in harmony with his astrological signs; he slept with his wife in this new house and she gave birth to a son. Samasyas like this are a favorite pastime of poets, who enjoyed being tested for their versifying and problem-solving skills. Often mildly obscene overtones of the samasya line disappear when the rest of the verse is elaborated around it.
Literary riddles play with language. It is as if language itself becomes an area of endless playfulness, replete with enigmatic modes, opening up labyrinthine possibilities to explore. Where the answer is logical and undisputable, the process of finding it becomes a game. For the true riddle, the pŏḍupukatha of adolescents and of adults of nonliterate low castes, where the process of finding the answer is not logical, the answer itself is enigmatic. Here the play is with meaning, not with the language.
Forms similar to the literary riddle are reported from non-literate traditions, too. One such form is sung in groups of playing or working men and women. The examples I have found are overtly erotic and lead to only one logical answer, which is predictably nonerotic. Here is a woman singing:
I am going, I am going, on my way to cārkamān
I gave my feet to one and my hands to another
and now I am going for yet another.
I gave my feet to the goldsmith, my hands to the banglesmith,
and now I am going for money to pay them.
I am going, I am going
I have one guy on top of me and another under me
and I am going for yet another.
I have bŏṭṭu on my forehead, betel in my mouth,
and I am going to find a mirror.
I am going I am going
I hid one and killed the other
and one more I have fanned with my sari.
I covered the pot and put out the fire
I blew out the lamp with the breeze from my sari20
The first part of each of the segments describes what appears to be the behavior of a brazen and promiscuous woman. The answer reveals a very ordinary woman busy with her household work. There are several variations on this theme, suggesting that this type of song is a genre by itself, though there is no native name for it.
Riddles with Stories
Sanskrit has a name for riddles with stories: prahelikā. Literary Telugu borrows the word, but folk Telugu has no name for this genre, and the available reports suggest that this is also called pŏḍupukatha. However, each of these riddles has a long story to explain it. Here is an example given by Kasirĕḍḍi Veṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi:
katalanni ĕtalāyĕ
kāpural rĕṇḍ’āye
āḍu sacci ar’nell’āyĕ
ad’esina kundelu iyyala mapati kūr’āyĕ
saccina magaḍu saṇḍlamīda
manunna magaḍu mañcammīda21
Stories are sad
Two lives, two men
He died six months ago
The rabbit he killed
Is dinner tonight
The husband who died is on my breast
The husband I married is in my bed.
A certain woman loved a man. Her parents did not approve of him and got her married to another man. The broken-hearted lover hung himself on a tree in the nearby forest. The woman visited the tree every day and poured water on the feet of the dead body. Gradually a thick shrub of grass grew under his feet, and a rabbit lived in it. In course of time, the rope holding the body—now only a skeleton—fell on the rabbit and killed it. The woman collected the rabbit, made dinner, and served it to her husband.
An extended version of the story adds that the woman skinned the dead body of her lover and made a blouse from it and wore it. A variation on this theme says the husband suspected his wife’s relationship with her lover, killed him by hanging him to a tree, had his body skinned, and hung the skin on a peg in his home. The wife, who knew all this, quietly collected the skin and made a blouse from it.
Another instance is built around a Sanskrit verse, not different in tone from any other verse advising good conduct. The story associated with it makes it an enigmatic projection of events that happen later. A certain rich Sanskrit scholar had two sons. At the time of his death, the scholar called his sons and asked them to choose either his texts or his wealth. The elder one chose the wealth, while the younger one chose the texts. One day a prince visited the young man and bought, for a vast sum, “a single stanza” from his texts. The king was furious with the prince for wasting his money on a stupid Sanskrit stanza. Here is the verse:
bhojanaṃ bali-bhuktam ca
śayane hasta-mārjanam
paradeśe ca jāgaram
prathamakopanivāraṇam
Eat after feeding animals.
Sleep after tidying the bed with your hand.
Be watchful in a foreign country.
Avoid impetuous anger.
The king drove his son out of his kingdom; the prince wandered into a nearby city. A courtesan saw him, was taken by his princely appearance, and invited him into her house. But he was not attracted by her, and the rejected courtesan tried to poison him. The prince remembered the verse he had bought and gave the first morsel of his food to a cat passing by. The cat died at once. The prince, realizing the danger he was in, went away without showing anger. Soon another courtesan found him and invited him to her house. The prince was not attracted by this courtesan either. Angered by his rejection, the courtesan made a bed for him over a deep well, carefully covered up. The prince remembered his verse and tidied the bed, firmly pressing it with his hands; it sank into the well. Realizing the treachery of these courtesans, the prince went off to another country—again without showing anger.
The princess of that land suffered from a strange curse: anyone who married her died on the nuptial night. One after another, many princes married her and died; no one knew why. The prince decided he would find the secret of these mysterious deaths. He married her, and on the first night was duly shown into her bedroom. He found his bride deep in sleep. Unable to understand this strange behavior, the prince waited for a while. The room looked rather inhospitable. He remembered he was in a foreign country; the verse he had bought prescribed wakefulness, so he kept awake. Right at the stroke of midnight, two snakes came out of the two nostrils of the princess. The prince swiftly hacked them with his sword. Soon there was a demon who stood before him, about to throttle his neck. The prince cut off the demon’s hands. The handless demon ran out of the room and disappeared.
When the princess woke and saw the dead snakes and arms on the floor, her bridegroom consoled her and told her what had happened while she slept. She was relieved to discover that she had been freed from the demon who possessed her. And the prince ruled the kingdom and lived happily with the princess.
Here a seemingly straightforward Sanskrit verse turns out to be proleptically potent, capable of offering protection from unforeseen dangers, hence well worth the enormous investment in acquiring it.
There are ritual parallels to this kind of story. Riddles and riddle-like forms employing tricky or enigmatic language are often used in weddings. The Telugu wedding ritual includes an expressive moment when the new couple enters the bridegroom’s home: at the doorway, the young man is asked (mostly by members of his own family) to divulge his bride’s name. The bride is similarly asked to state her husband’s name. Normally, husbands and wives do not mention the name of their spouse; it is considered immodest to do so. (Originally, perhaps, naming was felt to expose the person to the dangers of black magic.) Here, the bridegroom either boldly mentions his new bride’s name or he makes an intriguing, riddle-like statement, the answer to which would be her name. Thus P. Nāgarāju, a Hyderabad folklorist, reports that he composed the following riddle at his wedding to encode his wife’s name—Veṅkaṭa Nāgarāmarājyalakṣmī: “The political slogan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (= Ramarājya) has entered my name (= Nāgarāju). The deities of our houses (= Veṅkaṭa) united and began the story. At the end I found the goddess of wealth (= Lakṣmī).”22
The Enigma of the Future: A Telugu Nostradamus
There is a genre of songs extensively used by mendicant singers in Andhra called tattvālu (philosophical songs), authored by the prophet-poet Potulūri Vīra Brahmam. Telugu classification does not see these songs as riddles, but it does consider their language secretive (mārmika bhāṣa). That there is something riddle-like in these songs is clearly perceived by both the singers and the listeners. But first let me present the context of these songs.
A group of men, dressed in soiled ochre robes stuck to their perspiring bodies, sit in an open space on the street corner on a hot summer evening. One of them has a beard and matted hair. He holds a lute with one string; several others have cymbals. A pipe of ganja is being passed around, and as each one of them takes a deep puff, the group becomes quieter. A few passers-by watch them from a distance. The man with the lute starts tuning it, and his humming explodes into a song in his loud and clear voice. The people with cymbals follow the last line. They are singing a song popularly known as a Brahmam song.
Don’t say, I didn’t tell you.
Listen, if you reach the guru and bow to him
you will live.
The guru’s word never fails.
The spirits will chew up all those who go the wrong way.
In youth you fail to know.
In pride you fail to see.
You can’t say when—now or tomorrow.
Someday, sometime no one knows but
you will clearly hear the sounds of his horse’s hoofs.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you.
Your mind is filled with foul thoughts
but you will learn to see if proof is shown.
Mothers and children will be separated,
walk in the wilderness eating roots and berries,
They scream for help and give up their life-breath,
cry as if an army of demons had attacked them.
The sky turns red.
Six religions are mixed up.
People of the world die by fire and water.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you.
They see smoke bellowing from the earth,
stars in the middle of day.
The sky makes frightening sounds,
and people fly like helpless birds.
Sinners die, but those with merit are saved.
Those who do not chant “Rāma Rāma”
will drop dead, watch out.
You do not see what will come to pass.
The guards of Yama will force you to the city of death.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you.
After these strange events
the golden age of truth will begin.
Vīrabhogavasantarāyalu will rule with pleasure
the seven islands, with a single wheel.
Don’t say I didn’t tell you.23
Potulūri Vīra Brahmam, believed to be an incarnation of Viṣṇu, foretold the future and promised rebirth of the golden age. Probably belonging ·to the late eighteenth century, this guru, worshiped by artisan castes in Andhra Pradesh, composed a number of songs (kīrtanas) sung by mendicants. These songs present, in enigmatic language, a picture of a deteriorating world and its ultimate doom. According to the chapbooks describing his biography, Vīra Brahmam is the ultimate brahman, who came to teach the world that the present Brahmins are impostors usurping the position that truly belongs to the Viśvabrāhmaṇas, or artisan castes. Here is a brief summary of his story.
When the wheel of time moves on, and the age of Kali begins—the fourth in the ages of progressive deterioration—human beings fall into bad ways. Dharma grows weak, and people lose their knowledge. Chaste women become rare. The goddess Earth goes to Brahmā and cries: “I cannot bear this burden. Even one sinner is heavier than all the cardinal mountains. Save me.” Brahmā asks her to be patient. “The Kali age has hardly begun,” he says. “There is still a long way to go. The Mahābhārata war has only recently ended.”
King Parīkṣit comes to rule. Even during his rule, the cow of dharma loses three of her legs and is left standing on one. The evil Kali, taking a low-caste Shudra form, kicks her leg. Three thousand years go by. Harihararāya of the Vijayanagar dynasty rules the earth. His dynasty ends, and then come the Muslims. Viṣṇu decides it is time to help the human world: he calls for all the gods, asks Śiva to take birth in a Kshatriya family in Benares with a human name, Ānandabhairavayogi. Śiva sends Brahmā to be born in a Viśvabrāhmaṇa (goldsmith) family as Ānanda, while he (Viṣṇu) himself decides to be born in another goldsmith family as Vīra Brahmam.
In the Nandikŏṇḍa monastery, sage Vīrabhojayāchāryulu has no male children. One day, when he is absent from home, a hermit comes to his house. His wife Vīrapāpamāmba receives the hermit, but he refuses the honors because she has no children. When she begs for a blessing, the hermit says that she will not have a child of her own but will receive a male child from a sage. The boy will be no ordinary child, for he is the very avatar of God. She should go on pilgrimage to look for that child. The couple set off on pilgrimage. Meanwhile another goldsmith couple, Paripūrṇācāryasvāmi and his wife Prakṛtimāmba, have no children. In response to their prayers, God appears in the wife’s dream and says: “I will be born as your child: but your husband will die soon after that.” That night, a light enters her womb, and soon she is pregnant. Nine months later she gives birth to Vīra Brahmam. Just before his birth, a star appears on the sky. Ordinary people fear that the star indicates calamities, but sages know that God has been born on the earth to save the world. Soon after, Paripūrṇācāryasvāmi dies. Prakṛtimāmba then finds a sage to whom she entrusts the child, and she leaves the world in peace. The sage gives the boy to Vīrabhojayācāryulu and Vīrapāpamāmba, who come to see him on their pilgrimage.
Vīra Brahmam grows up in their house; one day he teaches divine knowledge to his mother. He shows her his cosmic form and informs her how the goldsmiths lost their ancient status of priesthood to the Brahmins. This is how it has happened.
Vyāsa Deceives His Teacher Viśvakarma
The great author of sacred texts, Vyāsa, serves Viśvakarma, the divine architect, who is born out of Maya, the Viśva-brahma. He studies with him for twelve years with great devotion and learns from him all the Vedas, Vedāṅgas, Purāṇas, and Itihāsas. He writes them all down, with one change. He substitutes the word “Brahmins” wherever the word “Viśvabrāhmaṇas” occurs in the original texts. He writes that only Brahmins shall be worshiped, only they shall have the right to perform rituals, and so on. Then he performs penance for long years. When his guru appears and offers to give him his wish, Vyāsa asks that the books he has written, the Vedas, the Vedāṅgas and all the Purāṇas, be regarded as authoritative in the Kali age. The guru, having given his word, realizes his error, but says that is how it shall be for five thousand years of the Kali age during which time the caste order will deteriorate.
Vīra Brahmam Announces that he will Come as the Savior
At the appropriate time, Vīra Brahmam will come as Vīrabhogavasantarāyalu to protect the good people and punish the sinners. Assuring his mother of the future, Vīra Brahmam leaves for the village called Hariharapuram, where he performs penance under a tree. Ānandabhairavayogi, the incarnation of Śiva, comes that way hunting animals. He sees a tiger about to kill a cow. Aiming to kill the tiger and save the cow, Ānandabhairavayogi shoots an arrow, which misses its aim and hits the cow instead. Ānanda is distressed that he has unwittingly committed an evil act. He approaches Vīra Brahmam, asking for help to get rid of his sin. Vīra Brahmam reminds Ānanda that he (Ānanda) is Śiva himself who has taken human birth. But since human life has to be lived, he will suffer the consequences of the sin he committed. For this reason, Ānanda will be reborn in a Muslim family. However, that should not matter: even as a Muslim, Ānanda will retain knowledge of the brahman and will rule his people justly.
Vīra Brahmam himself goes to another village and serves a woman called Accamma. Every day he takes her cattle out into the field, draws a line around the herd and sits at a distance, writing a book. That book is the famous Kālajñānam, the knowledge of time, in which all that is going to happen is foretold.
Kālajñānam is a folk genre; several texts of this genre are reported in Telugu folklore. A Sanskrit Kālajñānam is attributed to the sage Vidyāraṇya, the royal guru of the Vijayanagar dynasty.24 Typically, Kālajñānam books describe the events of the past in future tense, including statements that look like predictions.
Every day while Vīra Brahmam writes his book, the cattle stay inside the line and yet get enough grass to graze on. Every day Accamma gives him lunch, but Vīra Brahmam puts it in a ditch. He also puts the pages of the book he has written in a ditch near Accamma’s house, covering them up with a huge rock. One day some cattle thieves see the herd of well-fed cattle standing alone with no herder around, and try to steal them. When the thieves enter the area inside the line, they become blind. Frightened, they run outside the line, and their eyesight returns. The thieves go to Accamma, confess their dishonest intent, and pray to her for forgiveness. Accamma realizes that Vīra Brahmam is no ordinary cattle herder and seeks his blessing when he returns home.
Vīra Brahmam has by now completed his book. He tells Accamma who he is and describes the contents of his book:
Eight thousand eight hundred and eight years after the beginning of the Kali age, dharma perishes. The goddess survives only in sacred places. Untruth flourishes. People lose knowledge. They commit all the five deadly sins. Nations fight among themselves. Planets miss their given path. The Ganges loses its purity. Shudras pretend that they are Brahmins. People steal each other’s wives. Women marry more than once. Gods lose their power. Mantras lose their efficacy. Brahmins cross oceans and eat meat. Castes get mixed up. Epidemics increase. A widow rules over the people. Sexual desire in women increases, and they mate with any man-father, brother, or son. A woman nine cubits tall will be born on Indrakīlādri mountain; she will behead all sinners. A śakti arises from Palnāḍu and ruins all the towns and villages. A strange thing will happen in Bangalore: on the second day after the new moon, lightning will hit the city. Following the lightning, huge persons will descend onto the earth. They will have feet seven times as big as ours. Three hundred and sixty different new diseases grow. No drugs can cure those diseases. New gurus emerge, a dime a dozen. Atheists flourish. Untouchables become kings. The village Kandimallayyapalli grows to be a city six miles long. The Krishna river in Vijayawada swells and submerges the goddess Kanakadurga’s temple on the hill: water reaches up to the nose ring of the goddess. A pathway will be built to Tirupati hill. Thieves enter the temple and steal temple property. Mlecchas study Vedas. New theories appear teaching that all men are equal. It will be argued that the only distinction between humans is that of sex. Temple worship will be taken over by low castes. Kings will have to follow people, instead of the other way around. Brahmins sell Vedic learning for money. Vehicles move without the help of cattle. People grow physically so small that they will need a ladder to climb a vempali bush.
After revealing these prophecies, Vīra Brahmam performs a number of miracles. He takes the Muslim Siddhayya as his chief disciple and teaches him his predictions. Finally he enters samādhi, his final resting place, and, promising to return at the right time, directs that his burial place should be sealed with a rock.
Just before he enters his samādhi, Vīra Brahmam sends Siddhayya away. When Siddhayya returns to find that his guru has entered his final resting place, he mourns the loss and asks his guru to come back to talk to him. Vīra Brahmam returns from his samādhi and briefly speaks to him. His disciples still believe that he will return as Vīrabhogavasantarāyalu to save the world. It is predicted that he will come wielding a sword and riding a horse.
Predictions and prophecies are not uncommon in religious literature. One might view them as riddles—in Vīra Brahmam’s case, riddles in reverse order. As predictions of events that have not yet happened, they are riddles with answers yet unborn. When Indira Gandhi became prime minister of India, Vīra Brahmam’s followers found one of his prediction riddles that a widow will rule the country, confirmed.
Riddling of this variety is similar to finding familiar shapes in clouds. As children we found the entire Mahābhārata battle in the clouds on the evening sky. It is a certain willingness to see things realized that brings the event to happen. You find what you already have in your mind. But there is a difference. Riddling needs a community. A shared acceptance of a world—a world of letters that look like birds without tails, eyelids that appear like doors that do not make any noise, and so on; a world believed to have a prior existence, but actually created in the process of riddling—performs a creative trick. It brings a community into existence, while allowing the members of this community to believe that it existed prior to their creating it. A world which the community has not created is not its world; and a world which does not exist prior to the community’s creation of it is also not a world, for it lacks substance. Riddling performs both tricks: it allows you the freedom to create a reality without interfering with your belief that you have not created it.
Riddling with the future performs a similar task. A feature of all belief in predictions is the conviction that the future exists, already made, only to be revealed in due course. Such a future is actually a “past” veiled by time.
Such a belief needs the authority of a guru who has seen that future before ordinary people have the chance to do so. A firm belief in such an authority requires that the guru perform miracles to prove that he has the power to “see” the future, has lived in the future as well as in the past. Vīra Brahmam’s biography does just that. Here is a guru who is beyond time and who therefore “knows” time. Vīra Brahmam’s biography is thus a part of the whole story, an integral part of the riddle he and his community have created.
Conclusion
We have seen that riddles use irreverent and often obscene language, enigmatizing the world of secure meanings; or, if they are literary riddles, they disturb the comforting solidity of ordinary language and open it up as a world of endless double meanings and miraculous rearrangements of syllables which playfully present themselves to our consciousness. The world of everyday experience, the world ordered by rules and rituals, hierarchies, and authority is ingeniously disturbed and mysteriously reordered. All riddles, and especially true riddles, are open-ended. Their answers are not immediately seen; they are adṛṣṭārthas, having a resolution beyond our control. This quality of the riddles underlies their location in problem situations in folk tales, such as weddings and funerals.
Proverbs, by way of contrast, establish an order, respect authority, and confirm convention. They are perceived as wisdom of the many, the knowledge of the ancients.25 In usage, too, proverbs belong only to the elders, who have the authority to use them. They therefore come to be cited in dispute settlements, or folk courts, where order as perceived by the elders of the community prevails. Riddles are the playful tools of the young, of the illiterate, and of those who test and question one’s claims to be eligible. Proverbs establish the order; riddles question it. Proverbs are at the center of community life, in the central space of the village, where adults gather. They flow in one direction from above to below. Riddles are situated at the peripheries, among adolescents or uneducated men and women, and in the boundary spaces of ritual situations such as choosing a bridegroom or a minister. Riddles operate among equals to form a community, often opposed to communities of a higher status. Gurus employ riddles to test the readiness of their disciples or to couch truth in a language accessible only to initiates.
Notes
1.Other words for pŏḍupukatha are: ŏḍḍu katha, aḍḍu katha, māru katha, taṭṭu katha, and viḍupu katha.
2.Recorded from Tarani Teja (age nine years).
3.Reddy: 90. There are a number of printed anthologies of riddles in Telugu. Most of them list the riddles in alphabetical order and give the answers at the end of the book or at the bottom of each page. Almost all these books are poorly printed and full of errors. They are circulated among barely literate people, suggesting that pŏḍupukatha is not a genre of educated adults. Scholarly interest in riddles appears to be an early-twentieth-century phenomenon. Many literary magazines at that time began publishing riddles, especially literary riddles and trick questions. A very early anthology, probably the earliest in Telugu, was compiled by Nandiraju Chelapati Rao (1910?). Andra Seshagiri Rao, a pioneer in the collection and study of oral texts, listed the following riddle collections in Seshagiri Rao 1984: (1) Camatkāra Pŏḍupukathalu, Madras, 1936; (2) Camatkāra Pŏḍupukathalu anu 200 Tĕlugu Sāmĕtalu, Rajahmundry, 1951; (3) Camatkāra Pŏḍukathalu, Vijayawada, 1954; (4) Camatkāra Pŏḍupukathalu, Tenali, 1955. Nedunūri Gaṅgādharam, a pioneering collector of folk materials, published an anthology, Pasiḍi Palukulu, in which he included 135 riddles. A recent study on Telugu riddles is Kasirĕḍḍi Vĕṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi 1990, which includes a number of riddles not published anywhere before.
4.Reddy: 50.
5.Wittgenstein 1961: 148–9.
6.Quoted by Köngäs-Maranda 1976: 127.
7.Ibid.: 129. See also Köngäs-Maranda 1971: 193, observing that both parts of the riddle, image and answer, are coded. In this respect, the semantics of Telugu vippu, often used for riddles, are similar to the connotations of the corresponding English and Finnish terms. Vippu connotes “untying a knot, opening, revealing”; cf. Finnish arvoitus < arpa, “dice, instrument used in divination”; “riddle,” German Rätsel, connoting “advise, counsel, guess, divine.”
8.Ben-Amos 1976: 254.
9.Vĕṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi 1990: 423.
10.Ibid.: 416.
11.See Handelman.
12.Seshagiri Rao 1984: 37 even admits to having censored objectionable riddle-texts.
13.See Narayana Rao 1981.
14.See Köngäs-Maranda 1976: 136, and also Michael Lieber’s critique of Maranda in the same issue, Lieber 1976: 255–65.
15.Vĕṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi 1990: 153.
16.Ibid.: 159.
17.Ibid.: 160.
18.This incident has been used in a 1959 Telugu movie-song: o rūpavatī nen’ avun’ annadi nuvvu kād’ anagalavā? / ne kād’ annadi nuvv’ avun’ anagalavā? nīvu kurūpivi kādu / / kori ninu ganna talli gŏḍrālu gādu, Thanks to P. Subbachari, folklorist from Hyderabad, for informing me of this song.
19.See Pagis.
20.Vĕṅkaṭa Rĕḍḍi 1990: 155. For a similar song, see ibid.: 148.
21.Ibid.: 289–92.
22.My thanks to Nagaraju for this recollection.
23.From Kāla-jñāna-tattvamulu, songs of Potulūri Vīra Brahmam, chapbook, no date.
24.See Wagoner 1993: 165–9.
25.See Mieder and Dundes 1981. See especially Taylor 1981, in that volume. In Telugu proverbs are called śāstras, equating them with great prescriptive knowledge handed down by sages in Sanskrit.
References
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———. 1976. “Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction.” Journal of American Folklore 89: 127–37.
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