Narayana Tirtha

Narayana Tirtha was born in the Guntur country of Andhra, by most accounts at the village of Kaza near Mangalagiri, and given the name Govinda. He was a scholar of the Shastras and of music. The accounts agree that he took sannyasa as a young man and walked south, though they differ on how: one says he took the vow while crossing a river in flood, believing he was about to drown, and kept it when he survived.

In the Thanjavur country he was struck by a pain in the stomach that would not leave him. The tradition says that Bhagwan told him in a dream to follow the first creature he saw in the morning. It was a white boar, a Varaha, and it led him to the Venkatesha temple at the village that is now called Varahur, and there the pain left him. He stayed in that region for the rest of his life.

There he composed the Krishna Leela Tarangini, the river of Krishna's play, in twelve tarangas. It follows the tenth skandha of the Bhagavata from Krishna's birth to his marriage with Rukmini, in Sanskrit songs called tarangams set to ragas and talas and joined by verses and prose. It is a dance-drama as much as a song-cycle: Kuchipudi dancers dance its tarangams balancing on the rim of a brass plate, and the bhajana sampradaya of the Kaveri delta sings them through the night. He left the body at Tirupoonthuruthi on the Kudamurutti river, where his samadhi is honoured every year.