A Life's Work, Written by Hand
Akṣamāla — the Vedānta Śabdārtha Ratnamāla — was handwritten by Mangu Koneti Rao
across sixty booklets, gathering and explaining the vocabulary of Vedānta as he encountered
it across scripture and commentary — a labor of love that occupied him for nearly three
and a half decades, from around 1960 until he completed it in December 1993. Read his own
account on the Author's Introduction page.
M. V. Srinivasa Rao (left) and M. V. Joga Rao (right), circa 1969–70
This digital edition exists because of his son, the late M. V. Joga
Rao, who took on the task of typing the entire handwritten manuscript into
Telugu lipi — a script with no simple keyboard equivalent — using specialized Telugu
typing software. It was an effort that occupied him for well over a decade and was, by
his own account, no easy task: identifying and correctly rendering unfamiliar Sanskrit
words and ślokas, letter over letter, with only the fragile original registers to check
against. It was a herculean undertaking in its own right, second only to his father's
original labor of nearly thirty-five years writing the work by hand.
His brother, M. V. Srinivasa Rao, was there at both ends of that
journey. Before a single word could be typed, he scanned every page of the handwritten
registers, turning fragile paper into something that could finally be worked from — the
first step that made his brother's decade of typing possible at all. Then, once that
typing was done, he returned to the material a second time, converting the finished text
into Unicode and shaping it into the six Word volumes this site is built from: the quiet
technical craftsmanship that turned a family manuscript into a living website.