Muttusvā M i Dīkṣitar an i Dīkṣitar MuttusvāMi Dīkṣitar D the anD the invention of i nvention of Mo MoDern CarnatiC MusiC: the abhayâMDavibāD s hulvibhakti-kṛtisMan D ern Carnati C Musi C j. gon D a le C ture 21th j. gonDa leCture 2013 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 1 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 © Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Some rights reserved. License, Attribution 3.0 Netherlands. To view a copy of this licence, visit:Usage http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nl/ and distribution of this work is defined in the Creative Commons Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences T +31 (0)20 551 0700 FPO +31 Box (0)20 19121, 620 NL-1000 4941 GC Amsterdam [email protected] www.knaw.nl pdf available on www.knaw.nl Basic design edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Typesetting: Ellen Bouma, Alkmaar Eviatar Shulman] Illustration cover: The Māyūra-nātha temple gopuram tower [photographs: Preferred citation: David Shulman (2014). Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music:The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis. Amsterdam, J. Gonda Fund Foundation of the KNAW. ISBN 978-90-6984-688-0 September 2014 2 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 david shulman Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis 3 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 acknowledgments invitation to deliver the Jan Gonda lecture and to all those who made our stay inMy Amsterdam thanks, first, so to happy the Royal and productive; Netherlands these Academy include of ArtsBernadette and Sciences Peeters, for Pien the Meijman, and Jan van Herwijnen, who has seen this lecture through to publica- tion. I particularly want to thank my good friends Jonathan Silk and Yoko. kṛtis at my suggestion; I was proud to play her beautiful renditions during the lecture, andRoopa they areMahadevan now accessible learned on and her sang website. several I will of neverthe Abhayâmbā forget the September evening in Manhattan when my wife Eileen and I sat with Roopa in the Na- kṛti; I knew at once that Roopa would give us the rich and moving performance I was hoping for. I am delighted atvatman the partnership Studio and that heard has her emerged sing the in Kalyāṇithe course of this venture. Harold Powers and, with a great depth of insight, Emmie te Nijenhuis, who did mePioneering the honor ofwork coming on tothe hear Muttusvāmi my lecture. Dīkṣitar I have learned corpus fromwas thesecarried great out mu by- sicologists and from our wise colleague and friend, Joep Bor; their work made and Osnat Elkabir, for introducing me to the tradition from the inside. My Tamil my own reflections possible. I want to thank my music teachers, Pantula Rama would also like to mention the seminal works of Yoshitaka Terada and Davesh Sonejiguru, John on the Marr, history first unveiledof south Indianfor me, performance. long ago, the miracleTo all of ofthese Carnatic teachers, music. my I debt of gratitude and delight is beyond measure. Ilanit Shacham-Loewy graciously and selflessly plied me with rare texts from the Regenstein Library in Chicago, thus making it possible for me to write my toessay. some Yigal of the Bronner kṛtis and encouraged discussing me their to go intricacies deeper into with the her Dīkṣitar unique world. sensitivity. ForMy this, wife among Eileen, so a manytrained gifts, Carnatic I can onlysinger say herself, the simplest spent time words: listening thank with you. me Jan Heesterman, a life-long friend and source of inspiration, came to hear my lecture. That was the last time I saw him. He died a few months later. I would like to dedicate this short study to his memory. 4 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 contents acknowledgments 4 introductory remarks 7 abhayâmbā, no-fear 9 muttusvāmi dīkṣitar: modern shaman 15 defining the new sensibility (1): āryām abhayâmbām 22 the new sensibility (2) abhayâmbā jagad-ambā 32 conclusion: a grammar of art music 34 select bibliography 47 about the gonda lecture 2013 50 5 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 Abhayâmbā 6 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 Inintroductory the last decades remarks of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nine- teenth, south Indian classical music underwent a revolution, largely re-invent- ing itself as an artistic domain in secular settings removed from the royal courts and the great temples, its primary arenas of patronage before this point. Per- withhaps athe fondness most innovative for composing figure sets in ofthis eight revolution or more incompositions taste, expressivity, on a chosen and goddesscultural contextfrom a major was Muttusvāmi temple in the Dīkṣitar Tamil country.(1775-1835), This lecture a practicing focuses Tantrika on one to read these compositions, taken as a coherent whole, in the light of the new such set, to the goddess Abhayâmbā, "No Fear," in Māyilāṭutuṟai, and attempts- en by principles of radical iconicity with the accompanying verbal text and spe- aesthetic this composer was creating. A musical "grammar of emergence," driv listening to these works, which, it is argued, aim to make the goddess present cific and meaningful musical figuration, can be extracted inductively by careful- through techniques I call "auralization" (in contrast to the more familiar "vis herualization"). presence The in hiscomposer/performer awareness along the sings lines the the goddess artist hasinto carefully being, and put the in place.attuned The listener, pragmatic sitting aspect in a precursorof this process of the of modernmantic listening concert hall,is largely internalizes forgot- ten today, but it informed Dīkṣitar's work throughout and defined him not so- posedmuch as it intothe pious a new, figure highly of personal,current canonical universalist-secular narrative as, mode. in effect, a modernist shaman who detached Carnatic music from its earlier ritual contexts and trans - re-inventingGoddesses, such itself as in Abhayâmbā, the forms we “No-Fear,” know today of Māyavaram, even as Western have their classical ways. Anmusic in explicable synchronicity marks the extended moment when Carnatic music was was creating its canonical core in Vienna and Salzburg. In the early 1780's Mozart was composing his six so-called “Haydn Quartets” in profound conversation with Haydn's Opus 33; in these same years, in the heady atmosphere of Maṇali on the- northern outskirts of the new colonial capital of Madras, the young Muttusvāmi- nancesDīkṣitar comprised was completing the very his stuff education and texture at the offeet composition, of his father, though the maverick we know musi all cal genius Rāmasvāmi Dīkṣitar. In the Tamil south as in Vienna, intertextual reso too little about specific quotations and elaborations by Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar of themes from the works of his slightly elder contemporaries, Tyāgarāja and (in 7 Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar and the Invention of Modern Carnatic Music: The Abhayâmbā Vibhakti-kṛtis – 21th Gonda Lecture 2013 particular) Śyāma Śāstri. These three great composers apparently met in the politicalTo state capital the matter of Maratha in this Tañjāvūrway is, however, and clearly to be were swept aware at once of intoone theanother's stand- emerging oeuvre, the primary modern canon of the Carnatic tradition. in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. This overly familiar sto- ard hagiography that Carnatic music likes to tell about its formative moment Saṅgīta-sampradāya-pra- darśiniry, first, enshrinesfully articulated the three in composers,the Telugu workall born of withinDikṣitar's a few grand-nephew years in the small and adopted son Subbarāma Dīkṣitulu , the monumental temple-town of Tiruvārūr in the Kāveri Delta, as the foundational “Trinity.” Yet even Subbarāma Dīkṣitulu's account is more complex and colorful than what we usually hear today. I think it is time to re-examine the self-image of Carnatic thatclassicism, is, to specify to expand the historicalits cultural circumstances and intellectual that horizons, drove it and theto attempt analytical to featuresdefine the that revolution dominated in thesensibility formation that of wasa new achieved musical at culture that creative in the south. time— In such a wider view, Muttusvami Diksitar will, I argue, emerge as the major in- can be said to have effected the major breakthrough in taste and technique.1 Tonovator, pose thethe problemfigure who, as a rather set of likequestions: Monteverdi What in was seventeenth-century the nature of the transfor Venice,- enabled the transition into new, more modern modes of composition and per- mation that Dīkṣitar wrought within his inherited musical tradition, and what - formance? Who were Dīkṣitar's audiences? What processes were at work at worldthis time? patterned What newand projected?kinds of expressivity emerged as the hallmarks of Dīkṣi tar'sThere kṛtis? are Or, other more questions simply: I whocannot was begin this tocomposer, answer; Iand am ahow cultural was historian,his inner not a musicologist. Others