About the Author

మంగు కోనేటి రావు

Mangu Koneti Rao and his wife Mangu Subhadra, seated portrait
Mangu Koneti Rao, with his wife Mangu Subhadra

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
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.