R. R. Sundara Rao

Rayi Ratna Sundara Rao (born 1934; died 1992) was a prolific writer, theologian and comparative religion scholar who once was the principal of the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai, affiliated to India's first university, the Senate of Serampore College (University).

Some of his writings are kept in digitized versions at the National Library of India and the Indian Institute of Science.

In a 2014 study, Katherine C. Zubko of the University of North Carolina at Asheville highlights that Sundara Rao's assumption of bhakti was a more inward expression for concern for others cutting across religious boundaries. In fact, Sundara Rao's treatise, "Bhakti Theology in the Telugu Hymnal" had struck new ground in finding the origins of the bhakti element in Christian hymns in the Telugu language. The missiologist, Roger E. Hedlund, asserted that along with the Bible, the Christian Hymnal in Telugu also formed the main bulwark of Christian spiritual life for the Telugu folk and of equal use to both the non-literates and the literates as well. In such a setting of the importance of the Telugu Hymnal, Sundara Rao's study reiterated the fact that bhakti had been a binding factor for the early Christians in the Telugu-speaking states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. While this has been so, new studies in 2014 by the Harvard scholars, Ch. Vasantha Rao and John B. Carman indicate that the element of bhakti had little inroad into the otherwise rural India which in their study wholly depended on folk element.