[Lt_Apple]

I am in the middle of a trip and in any case I live abroad. I cannot give too many referencess but can only say that Vemana is one of my favourite Telugu thinker/poets. I remember a scholarly volume of essays on Vemana by Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sarma based on lectures at Andhra university following C.R.Reddi's request. These are in Telugu and may be available in some of the digital libraries. There is also a volume edited by Narla Venkateswara Rao; "Vemana, Pachatyulu". The title means "Vemana, foreigners" and this may be avaialble both in Telugu and English. It is a collection of essays by foreigners on Vemana. My understanding is that even though Vemana was popular with working class folk, particularly farmers, his agnostic and some times anti-religious sayings were not popular with the pundits. When Brown translated some of his poems and made them a part of a school syallabus, there were boycotts. About 450 copies of the book were lost. I used to have Telugu versions of both the above books but not any more. To this day that bias seems to continue and in some anthologies of even old Telugu poetry, Vemana does not appear. My impression is that he is the tradition of independent thinkers like sidhars of Tamilnadu. Probably such thinkers appeared in various regions of India though out the centuries but Vemana is remembered more among Telugus because of his economy of thought and poetic abilities.
swarup
Swarup