Sanskrit Studies

Samskŗtasarasvatī Araņyalakșmīśca

The richness and variety of India’s natural landscape is probably matched only by the richness and diversity of her classical literature. And the two have a deep symbiotic relationship.  Our literary canon is deeply embedded in the environment – be it the Sangam classics of Tamil literature, whose very poetics are set in ecologically distinct zones called the tiņais, or the gems of the Prakrit and Sanskrit literary tradition which are replete with close observation of natural phenomena, of birds and beasts and insects.

The Sanskrit poets haven’t merely noticed the flora and fauna to furnish sonorous lists, or to fulfill a requirement of the poetic tradition spanning from the Ŗg veda to the Mahākāvyas. We find from our readings of a variety of texts, that the kavi’s natural habitus was central to the poetic and communicative success of her text. The kavi shared an eco-aesthetic universe with the sahŗdaya, in a fashion that spans space and time. This selfsame ecouniverse is exploited by every premodern artiste – the painter and sculptor (and the poet) to establish an instant connection with his audience.

The truly great poets’ descriptions of Indian flora isn’t just a literary ritual, they have shown great sensitivity and accuracy in observing ecological details, while retaining the eye and ear of poetry. The kāvya canon is indeed an important and useful source material for the environmental history of the subcontinent, along with the more predictable sources like say, the Āyurvedic catalogues and nighaņţus.

This talk will present samples from across the Sanskrit literary landscape to illustrate the many ways in which the vegetal bounty of India has percolated the literary-poetic consciousness of Sanskrit.

This talk is a discussion of the literary and musical genres known as prabandhas; as nodes of knoweldge production and circulation in Premodern India. Using the Sriranga prabandha and the 'pada' as examples, I trace the genealogies of these two forms in the musicological texts, as well as in practice.

This is a response to Prof. Madhava Menon's query regarding the reference to 'many Ramayana's ' in Tuncatt Ramanujan Ezuttaccan's Malayalam Ramayana.

The response draws on the Puranic exegetic device of Kalpabheda, and adduced material from the Sanskrit Adhyatma Ramayana and Ananda Ramayana-s in support of the explanation.

The exercise of mapping the semantic domain of candraka, while simultaneously translating the passages where it occurs; will be discussed as a metaphor for the interlinked processes of translation, paraphrase and interpretation in Sanskrit kāvya literature.

The term prabandha simultaneously means very many things in the context of premodern Indian literature and music. The prabandha as a musical meta-genre has occupied the attention of musicologists from Mataṅga (8 th c. AD?) to Veṅkaṭamakhin (16 th c. AD). There is much variety in the number, description and details of the various types of prabandha songs found in the musicological sources, and it is fortunate that there are a few examples of prabandha-s available, even if they are from the late medieval period. Here, a specific sub-category – the Śrīraṅga Prabandha is considered, its genealogy through the musicological literature studied and also an example to understand the life trajectory of the concept of a prabandha is examined. By studying the structural, textual and musical content of the two songs, it is tried to sketch the identity of the musical prabandha vis-à-vis its literary namesake, its literary sources, and its successors in the history of musical genres. Also, the essay explores the overlapping yet distinct spheres of production, reception and circulation of the musical and literary prabandha-s. The available examples are used to discuss the methodological issues of studying genres that straddle the categories of the literary and the performative.

Most of the prevalent musical genres in South Indian Classical music and dance can only be traced to the 18th - 19th centuries, and their earlier history is unknown for a want of textual sources [Sathyanarayana, 2004]. One novel compositional form that emerged in this period is the noṭṭusvara [or the noṭṭusvara sahityam]. While these compositions have received a measure of scholarly attention, they are rather marginal in the realm of contemporary performance and pedagogy of South Indian classical music. This set of compositions is a fascinating symbol of the musical experiments and syntheses that emerged in 18th century South India as a consequence of the interaction of practitioners of indigenous and European music. The largest and best known set of these noṭṭusvara –s, is the one composed by Muttusvami Diksita (1775-1835 CE); and we have it primarily from two sources – the manuscript written out for Colonel Brown (Madras GOML ms # D2536, 1833) and Subbarama Diksita’s Prathamā’bhyāsa-pustakamu (1905). So far, scholarship on the noṭṭusvara-s has been limited to the songs represented in these sources, ignoring the relevant compositions of even Tyagaraja (1757-1847) a senior contemporary of Diksita’s. The recent discography for these is represented by Shankaramurthy (1990), Kanniks Kannikeswaran (2008) and T.M.Krishna (2015).
However, it appears that Muttusvami Diksita’s experiment was not an isolated instance of the emergence of the noṭṭusvara as a genre. There are many other examples to be found of the noṭṭusvara  genre beyond Diksita’s oeuvre, right down to  20th century texts such as the Gānendu-śekharam (1912), Saṅgīta-sudhāmbudhi (1917) and the Gīta-muktā-kalāpa (2nd ed. 1922).
The present work will aim to discuss four aspects of the noṭṭusvara phenomenon. One, we attempt to take stock of the full set of Diksita’s noṭṭusvara-s, tracing European predecessors and other Indian successors of his noṭṭusvara melodies. Two, we examine the continued prevalence of the noṭṭusvara (or the English noṭṭu) as musical genres in India, relying on lesser known publications and some hitherto unpublished sources. Three, we use these data about this relatively ‘new’ genre to conceptualise the emergence and canonisation of musical genres in South India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lastly, we use the idea of a melody as a meme– a self-replicating cultural artefact, to understand and track the proliferation of the noṭṭusvara, which is found to have enjoyed widespread circulation in many forms – as far as Calcutta and Lahore.
It appears that there is great variety and richness in the adoption of several tunes and airs from the military bands, by South Indian musicians who encountered them in various religious, courtly or social settings. These tunes have been incorporated and adapted into the indigenous music practice by different strategies – sometimes a local,  devotional text (sāhitya) is framed over the tune, sometimes the lyric is dropped. It is illuminating to consider the place of these compositions and the entire genre in the performance and pedagogy of Indian classical music – both past and present.

Reading the Mahiṣaśatakam - Kuṭṭikavi’s Bovine Poetics
A talk on Kuṭṭīkavi’s [Vāñcheśvara yajvan] Mahiṣaśataka.
12th January, 2021. National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.



A member of an elite circle of tenured scholars from 17th century Kumbhakonam, Vāñcheśvara Dīkṣita wrote a poem called the Mahiṣaśataka (MS) – a hundred verses ostensibly in praise of his buffalo. Composed in literary Sanskrit, often deploying complicated puns and other figures, the text is a mine of details about the social and administrative climate of early modern Tamil Nadu. While such a text is of obvious value for cultural historians, the Mahiṣaśataka (and some of its congeners) poses peculiar questions within the received framework of Sanskrit poetics. The talk will reflect on the poem, its congeners, and their aesthetic salience.

The Saṅgīta‧samaya‧sāra (ca 1245 CE) by Pārśvadēva is an important source-text for the history of Indian music and dance. It is a particularly rich source of the regional (dēśya) vocabulary pertaining to vocal music, instrumental music and dance that was prevalent in the Deccan. Using this treatise as a key, this article attempts to interpret a verse describing a music performance from the twelfth century Kannada poem Hariścandra‧cāritra of Rāghavāṅka. The shared idiom of the scholarly worlds of poetry and musicology between two texts that were not too far separated in space and time is interesting, and may indicate the critical value of kāvya literature in editing and interpreting śāstra texts.

ಸಂಗೀತಸಮಯಸಾರದ ಹಿನ್ನೆಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹರಿಶ್ಚಂದ್ರಕಾವ್ಯದ ಒಂದು ಪದ್ಯದ ವ್ಯಾಖ್ಯಾನ

This article in  Kannada interprets  a  verse describing a music performance from the twelfth century Kannada poem Hariścandra‧cāritra of Rāghavāṅka, using the Saṅgīta‧samaya‧sāra (ca 1245 CE) by Pārśvadēva as a guide.