Tyagaraja

01Is wealth happiness?

Born at Tiruvarur in 1767 and raised at Thiruvaiyaru, he learned music from Sonti Venkataramanayya, a singer of the Thanjavur court. He lived by unchavritti, singing through the streets and taking only the rice that householders put in his pot. When the Thanjavur king sent for him with gifts, he answered with a song in raga Kalyani, “Nidhi chala sukhama”: is wealth the greater happiness, or the presence of Rama? He wrote two musical plays, Prahlada Bhakti Vijayam and Nauka Charitram, and by tradition thousands of kritis, of which some seven hundred survive.

02The Aradhana

He took sannyasa near the end and died at Thiruvaiyaru on Pushya Bahula Panchami, January 1847. His samadhi on the bank of the Kaveri became, through the efforts of the singer Bangalore Nagarathnamma in the 1920s, the site of the Tyagaraja Aradhana, where hundreds of musicians sit together on the anniversary and sing the Pancharatna kritis in the ragas Nata, Gaula, Arabhi, Varali and Sri. The fifth, “Endaro Mahanubhavulu”, bows to all the great souls who came before.

Place · Panchanadeeswarar temple of Chola times; Tyagaraja’s samadhi on the Kaveri bankThiruvaiyaruThe town of five rivers on the Kaveri where Saint Tyagaraja lived, sang and attained samadhi in January 1847. Every January the great musicians of the south sit at his samadhi and sing his Pancharatna kritis together.Read →