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SRI TYAGARAJA

Sri Tyagaraja, the most celebrated Carnatic Music saint was a great devotee of Lord Sri Rama. Tyagaraja lived to the full extent that God realization is best achieved through Nadopasana (music with devotion). His songs are filled with an intimate devotion to Rama, all through revealing his deep understanding of the tenets of the Vedas and Upanishads.

Saint Purandaradas is considered as the grandfather of Carnatic Music. Sri Tyagaraja, along with Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri are considered as the "Trinity of Carnatic Music." Sri Tyagaraja has composed more than 800 songs in his long devoted life to Lord Rama, most of them written in his Mother tongue Telugu, but a few in Sanskrit, including the masterpiece "Jagadanandakaraka" composed of 108 names describing Lord Rama's attributes. But, his songs are well loved in Tamil Nadu, the seat of South Indian (Carnatic) Music scholarship and performance.

Sri Tyagaraja was born in Tiruvaiyaru, near Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu on May 4, 1767. His parents were Smarta Telugu Brahmins, who had moved to Tamil Country during the Vijayanagar period (early 1600's). Tyagaraja's father Rama Brahmam taught him to worship Rama daily and initiated him in Rama taraka mantra. Even as a boy, Tyagaraja composed his first song on Rama, Namo Namo Raghavaya when he was only 13 years old. Sri Tyagaraja continued to recite the Rama Nama every day and had many darsans of Sri Rama, which inspired him to write songs on his beloved Lord, Sri Rama.

At 18 years of age, Tyagaraja married Parvati, who died when he was only 23. He then married Kamalamba (sister of Parvati). They had a daughter named Sitamahalakshmi, through whom he had a grandson, who died progeniless. Thus we do not have any descendant of Saint Tyagaraja. But, his tradition is kept alive by his musical disciples and their followers.

Being a great devotee of Lord Rama, the only things that mattered to Tyagaraja were Music and Bhakti. In fact, they were synonymous to him. "Is there a sacred path than music and bhakti?". "O Mind, salute the gods of the seven notes". "The knowledge of music, O Mind, leads to bliss of Union with the Lord". Music was to him the meditation on the Primordial Sound:

"I bow to Sankara, the embodiment of Nada, with my body and mind. To Him, the essence of blissful Samaveda, the best of the vedas, I bow. To Him who delights in the seven swaras born of His five faces I bow".

Sri Tyagaraja had the highest reverence for great bhakthas like Prahlada, Dhruva, Hanuman and Narada. Sri Tyagaraja's life is an illustration to the dictum that music and devotion combined make the best path to the understanding of the Supreme Brahman.

The Origins of Aradhana

Tyagaraja passed away in 1847. After his death his remembrance ceremonies every year were performed by his grandson but was discontinued by the family after the grandson's death.

As to the disciples of Tyagaraja, the Umayalpuram brothers continued the Aradhana in their native village. But it was the Tillaistanam brothers (Narasimha Bhagavatar and Panchu Bhagavatar) who were disciples of Tillaistanam Ramu Iyengar (a direct disciple of Tyagaraja), who carried on the Tyagaraja Aradhana at Tiruvaiyaru (the place where Tyagaraja passed away).

The Factions

The Tillaistanam brothers had continued the Aradhana tradition by performing the religious functions as well as organizing music concerts at Tiruvaiyaru. Around 1910 differences cropped up between the two brothers and separate invitations were sent out thereby splitting the Aradhana celebrations.

Thus was born the Peria Katchi and Chinna Katchi (Bigger and Smaller factions) led by the elder Narasimha Bhagavatar and the younger Panchu Bhagavatar respectively. The Peria Katchi had the support of musicians like Malaikkottai Govindaswamy Pillai, Pudukkottai Dakshinamurthy Pillai, Azhaganambia Pillai and Thanjavur Panchapagesa Bhagavatar. The programmes by the Peria Katchi were held at the Kalyana Mahal. After the death of Narasimha Bhagavatar the programmes were headed by Govindaswamy Pillai and subsequent to his death in 1930, it was conducted by the Tiruveezhimalai Brothers (Nadaswara Vidwans). The Chinna Katchi's members included Soolamangalam Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar, Sabesa Iyer, Rajagopala Bhagavatar, Palladam Sanjeeva Rao and Mangudi Chidambara Bhagavatar. The Chinna Katchi conducted its programmes at a local choultry or at the Tiruvaiyaru High School. The Chinna Katchi concentrated more on the religious functions and had for itself the sole rights for performing daily pooja etc at the shrine of Tyagaraja. In the year a committee was formed by this group called the Shri Tyagaraja Vybhava Prakasa Sabha to conduct the Aradhana celebrations.

Though there were two factions the Aradhana was carried out smoothly with one faction doing the festival doing it 5 days preceding the main day and the other, on the succeeding five days. Also musicians did participate in both the Aradhanas.

Bangalore Nagaratnammal was a lady musician who was a great devotee of Tyagaraja. In 1924 she visited Tiruvaiyaru and was not allowed to participate because women singers were not allowed on stage in those days. Stung by the insult and spurred on by her own devotion and the dilapidated condition of the Samadhi she collected money and built the present concrete structure and installed an idol of Tyagaraja. The Kumbabishekam of the shrine took place in 1925 and she started organizing a separate festival of her own at the site where women musicians were also allowed to participate. Thus from 1927 to 1940 three organizations conducted the Aradhana at three different places in Tiruvaiyaru. Between 1935 and 1938 Bangalore Nagaratnammal purchased a lot of land in and around the Samadhi and made it feasible for holding the festival properly. Her intention being to unite the three factions and hold a joint festival.

Tyaga Brahma Mahotsava Sabha

In 1940, because of the joint efforts of people like Shri S.Y.Krishnaswamy (ICS), Musiri Subramania Iyer, Bangalore Nagaratnammal and the Tiruveezhimalai Brothers, The Tyaga Brahma Mahotsava Sabha was formed. This Sabha was entrusted with task of organizing the Aradhana Celebrations of Tyagaraja every year and the separate festivals by the factions was thus discontinued. This Sabha is now primarily responsible for the conduct of the musical celebrations every year in Tiruvaiyaru. Thus the various factions got finally united under a single body and the Aradhana has been going on in this fashion ever since.

The Religious aspect

The Chinna Katchi headed by Panchu Bhagavatar from the beginning has retained the right to perform the religious functions associated with the Aradhana. It was only the musical celebrations that were united under the Sabha. Today there are actually three different groups that perform the Abishekam at the Samadhi site on Aradhana. The first is by the current survivors of the erstwhile Chinna Katchi, which goes under the name of Sadguru Shri Tyaga Brahma Aradhana Mahotsava Kainkarya Committee. The second is the Bangalore Nagaratnammal trust which is the legal owner of the land and the adjoining areas where the shrine is lodged. The third is the Tyaga Brahma Mahotsava Sabha that organizes the music festival.

Understanding Tyagaraja

An interesting controversy in the columns of Sruti, a magazine devoted to classical music and dance, focuses on the real musical achievement of the great composer Tyagaraja, freed from obfuscating mythology.

UDAY KRISHNAKUMAR

AMONG the inherent contradictions of musical creation, the dislocation between the inspiration and musical realisation of a work often poses a challenge to any confident historical perspective. Two examples from Germany illustrate this. Beethoven's Third ("Eroica") Symphony was first dedicated to Napoleon. The dedication was withdrawn after the composer became bitterly disillusioned with Bonaparte's betrayal of Revolutionary ideals. The music, however, remained unchanged. A composer's intentions canals o be more questionable. The operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), which were conceived partly to establish the supremacy of German art and carried strong anti-Semitic undertones, were taken up by the Nazis as cultural propaganda. The stain of German supremacies and anti-Semitism remains, but in distancing oneself from Wagner's political purposes, it is impossible to ignore his enormous contribution to the literature of Western classical music. His many technical advances in the nature and treatment of t he orchestra as well as the unprecedented scale on which he was able to develop his motives provided future composers with bearings to explore then undreamed-of territories.

The music of Tyagaraja (1767-1847) represents a great historical turning point in the evolution of Carnatic music and the relationship between his bhakti and his music has led to much confusion. For the introduction of sangati-s (variations) into the kriti form as well as many other personal contributions, he is regarded as having advanced the kriti form to an unsurpassed coherence. Although it is remarkable that Tyagaraja and the other members of the Trinity never seem to have met in their lifetimes (both Syama Sastri and Muthuswami Dikshitar lived in Tiruvarur), it is also instructive that all three felt, independently, the historical necessity of developing the kriti form. A clear appreciation of Tyagaraja's achievements, however, has been prevented by a haze of mythological stories surrounding his life.

The tenacity of these illusions was recently illustrated when a young reader of the Chennai-based Sruti magazine, in a letter entitled "Naive Beliefs" (see Sruti, December 1994), asked why we try to deify Tyagaraja instead of appreciating h is achievement as a man. A mob of angry opinions crowded the letters' page of the following issue, "shocked into disbelief" at the letter's "iconoclastic and rationalistic" message. A heated exchange continued in the following issues, revealing the unwillingness of many Carnatic music listeners to separate Tyagaraja's musical accomplishment from his devotion to Rama.

For the past five years, N. Pattabhi Raman, the editor-in-chief of Sruti, has been speaking about this subject at conferences and festivals. To Pattabhi Raman, the separation between "art music" and "bhakti music" is vital to the understanding of Tyagaraja's work. He defines one of the main characteristics of art music as raga exploration, and shows how Tyagaraja and his contemporaries shifted the emphasis from the text to the music.

"Until the advent of the trinity," Pattabhi Raman writes (see Sruti, October 1996), "the dominant song-form was the prabandha. In this song-form, the emphasis was, by and large, on the text rather than the musical content (Geya prabandha s were important exceptions). But Tyagaraja and the other two... emphasised the musical content. They were really musical explorers.... I cite the fact that Tyagaraja has composed more than 30 kritis in Todi - and bequeathed to us different images of the raga within the same scalar framework." This new strength the kriti form found in the music of the Trinity helped to lead music away from its devotional past (centred on the religious poetry being set to music) and bring about the establishment of m odern concert music through the development of the kriti-suite format.

A 20th century portrait of the great composer Tyagaraja.

HOW did Tyagaraja come to be deified? William J. Jackson, in his book Tyagaraja, Life and Lyrics (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991), suggests that the years following Tyagaraja's death were a period of great uncertainty for the Brahmins of the Cauveri river valley. The encroachment of their territories by the Muslim kings and the British Empire led the Hindu population to look to the near past for people representing their threatened ideals. Tyagaraja was a perfect candidate for Hindu saintho od: having devoted his life to praise of Rama and music, he became a sanyasi shortly before he died. A rapid transformation of his life story into mythology began almost immediately after his death. The first biographies were written by two of his disciples, a father and son. Already we see some of the many myths appearing that form our present picture of the man - the recitation of the Ramanama 96 crore times, the revival of a drowned man with the song Na Jivadhara ('staff of my life') and so o n.

Part of the mythology surrounding Tyagaraja is the belief that his music flowed from his lips through divine inspiration and without effort. The renowned master of the chitravina, Chitravina N. Ravikiran, argues that this view of the composer is incomplete. "Tyagaraja was a brilliant person and composer, his compositions were extremely down to earth and very communicative. He had a wonderful expression." This emotional directness has led many people to believe that composition was facile for him, as Ravikiran further explains: "He had tremendous scholarship, many of the compositions he composed are not merely inspired works, but were also extremely deep, scholarly works."

Ravikiran's other concern is that people tend to overlook Tyagaraja's human side. He points out the several songs where Tyagaraja gives vent to numerous personal frustrations, such as Nadupai palikeru in Madhyamavati where Tyagaraja complains of t he local gossip that he has caused the partition of his family home. A surprising (though understandable) bitterness reveals itself in Vararagalayajnulu in Cencukambhoji where Tyagaraja describes some of his fellow musicians. The poem begins with:

They chatter and blabber
pretending they're topnotch experts
in melody and cadence...

(Tyagaraja, Life and Lyrics, William J. Jackson, OUP, Delhi, 1991)

"Maybe Tyagaraja might not have found the inclination to go and gossip with his neighbours about all the things happening to him," Ravikiran says. "He just preferred to compose these things as poetry and address them to God."

Pattabhi Raman also feels that a deeper understanding of Tyagaraja as a human being will allow many of the intended moods of his compositions to be understood. He is also concerned when people criticise elaborate alapanas and swaraprastaras and claim that such musical devices detract from the bhakti nature of the music. "Simply because Tyagaraja was a great bhakta, his music is not bhakti music. The fact that Wordsworth wrote about flowers does not make him a botanist. If Tyagaraja was a bhakti composer , he would only have written bhajans. I would go so far as to say that if Tyagaraja had not written music, we would not be talking about him today, and he would be remembered as a minor saint."

Ravikiran explains: "There are sides of Tyagaraja that people overlook, or choose to overlook, or start trying to justify. Once you start trying to justify something, then you are really doing injustice. Because that shows insecurity in being able to appreciate him for what he was. So you try to build a wall around him, of stories. They don't need it - Tyagaraja, Dikshitar, Shakespeare..."

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