Rachapalem Chandrasekhara Reddy: Literary criticism, too, is social praxis

Abstract

Rachapalem Chandrasekhara Reddy (1948–) is one of the major literary critical voices from Rayalaseema, one of the regions in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Rachapalem’s groundedness in the region and in the leftist politics and his association with the Progressive Writers’ Association are reflected in his writings. The essay in this chapter is an important link in understanding how the literary discourse in Telugu has always been connected with social discourse. Like his other writings, this essay also closely examines the relationship between the text and the context and the role of a critic. Rachapalem is a critic of literature as well as literary criticism who has countered crucial questions about the development of critical theory in Telugu. His classification of the Indian critical tradition into three groups, that is, Indian traditional rhetoric critical trend, western critical trend and Marxist critical trend comes alive in this essay when he observes that over the decades and ideologies, the arguments might have changed in the examples, tools and conclusions that the critics have drawn, but majority of them have made social relevance the centre of literary criticism. He sums up his argument in a nutshell when he says that if writing literature is a writer’s great responsibility towards society, writing literary criticism is a literary critic’s great responsibility towards literature.