“Meenakshisutha” Nagaraja- A Gifted Composer from Karnataka

 “Meenakshisutha” Nagaraja- A Gifted Composer from Karnataka

V.S. Ananthanarayanan

(Published in Sri Thyagaraja Aradhanai Souvenir, Apr 2014, Bharathi Kala Manram, Toronto) 

 

”Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” 
- Thomas Gray in Elegy written in a Country Churchyard

Quite a while back in 1985, during one of my trips to India,  I was introduced by a friend and an erstwhile colleague of mine at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, to an extraordinarily talented musician and teacher, Sri Ramakrishna Bhagavathar. Although he had been one of the senior students of the maestro G.N.Balsubramanian, this vidwan was, for some reason, relatively less known to many and was living in oblivion in a very small rented house in Malleswaram when I met him. He was also suffering from severe asthma. In spite of his handicaps, his devotion to music and his earnestness to teach were still aglow in his heart. I spent most of the six weeks of my Bangalore visit learning music from this great scholar. It is at that time, I was introduced to the stunningly beautiful ‘Meenakshisutha kritis’. They were compositions of one Sri.Nagaraja who had lived in Bangalore during 1922-1974. His musical compositions are referred to as ‘Meenakshisutha kritis’ based on the mudra he used in them. Nagaraja is a remarkable vakgeyakara but is, unfortunately, not as well known to the Carnatic music world as he richly deserves to be. 

In this article, I will give a brief account of the life and contributions of this great musical personality who, in the short span of his life, left a veritable treasure of musical compositions as his legacy.  

Nagaraja’s father, Eswara Iyer was a great Sanskrit scholar who lived initially in Kerala but moved later to Bangalore where Nagaraja was born and brought up. After studying engineering for two years, Nagaraja secured a job in the State Bank of Mysore in Bangalore. He was married in 1949 and had four daughters. He was initially known mainly for his regular Friday bhajanai-s held in his house which attracted many of his friends and relatives. Nagaraja’s ishta devata was Goddess Meenakshi but his bhajanai-s included songs on other gods as well. He is said to have taken part in the bhajanai-s conducted by the doyen of sampradaya bhajanai, Sri. Pudhukkottai Gopalakrishna Bhagavathar. He is also said to have composed songs on this saintly personality but these are not available now. Although it is known that Nagaraja had acquired a sound knowledge of Sanskrit from his father, no clue is available about his formal training in music. A sudden transformation in Nagaraja’s musical ability seems to have occurred during one of these Friday bhajanai-s when, in a moment of ecstasy, he started composing his own songs on the deities he was worshipping and sang them blissfully. It took a while for those attending the bhajanai-s to realize Nagaraja’s authorship of these songs. When Nagaraja was told by others in the bhajanai-s about his spontaneous composing and singing of kritis, he requested one of his daughters to pen them down thereafter along with their ragas and swaras. Many more persons, including some musicians, started attending the Friday bhajanai-s to experience the divinity as well as musical exquisiteness of  Nagaraja’s creations. It is a pity and great misfortune for the musical world that Nagaraja did not live long and passed away prematurely in 1974 at the age of 52. 

Nagaraja is known to have composed over 200 kritis in Sanskrit and Kannada languages.  However, for a long time, the only composition which was widely known was ‘RakshamAm caraNAgatham’ in gambeera nAttai (in praise of Lord Guruvayoorappan) which was popularized by the great Chembai Vaidhyanatha Bhagavathar and his disciple, Jesudas. It is said that, at one time when the Bhagavathar was suffering from a sudden loss of voice, he went to the Krishna temple in Guruvayoor where he received a mysterious call to sing, upon which he sang the above kriti and thus got his voice back. Chembai’s singing of this piece, which has several charaNams and two madhyama kAla passages in it, brings out the majestic beauty of the ragam and the brisk array of phrases in the lyric. Several of the Meenakshisutha kriti have similar madhyama kAlam parts in them which embellish these compositions. This and the skillful use of Sanskrit words might remind one of the kritis of Muthuswamy Dheekshithar. However, as mentioned earlier, there is no information about Nagaraja getting a formal training in the compositions of the Carnatic Trinity or other composers. In kritis like ‘bAlam chinthayE’ in bilahari, the elaboration of a key word with successive qualifying phrases (such as nanda bAlam, gOpAla bAlam,  rAjagOpAla bAlam and santhAna rAjagOpAla bAlam) adds to the musical and emotional aspects of the song. In the kriti ‘charaNam caraNam caraNam’ in kApi ragam, Nagaraja pays glowing tributes simultaneously to the three mathAcharyas, which reinforces his broad religious outlook. An ecstatic composition, ‘nigama niyamEna natana gurO’ in karaharapriya describes the cosmic dance of Lord Nataraja in its full glory, . The lyric ends with the inclusion of the names of the pancha gathis, which provides the singer and percussionist ample scope for elaboration of the different beats.  

Since Nagaraja’s compositions were extempore, there was no systematic effort to preserve them for posterity until the advent of a lady musician by name Abhayam Raju on the scene. The gods in the heavens seem to have played a role in making Abhayam Raju return to Bangalore along with her husband Professor T.A. Raju in 1973 after their long stay in the U.S. Hearing about the musical genius of Nagaraja and his regular Friday bhajanai-s, Abhayam Raju soon started attending them. Mesmerized by the lyrical beauty, musical quality and devotional fervour embedded in the Meenakshisutha kritis, Abhayam Raju wasted no time writing down the songs as they were sung by the composer himself and also setting the swara notations and, in some cases, adding chittaswaras to them. Some of the kritis were also tape-recorded directly as sung by the composer himself. This yeoman service of Abhayam Raju becomes all the more valuable when we realize that, within about a year after her return to Bangalore, came Nagaraja’s premature end. It is due to the enormous effort taken by Abhayam Raju that we have today at least 60 Meenakshisutha kritis with swara notation. After Nagaraja’s demise, Abhayam Raju took it upon herself to make the gifted composer’s work known to a larger audience. To this effect, she created a musical group in Bangalore in 1976, called Sruti Ranjani, with the sole aim of training students in learning the glorious compositions of Nagaraja and propagating them. Through Sruthi Ranjani, Abhayam Raju trained over 300 young musicians to sing over 50 Meenakshisutha kritis before she passed away in 1984 due to illness. 

Abhayam Raju’s husband, Prof. Raju, lent continuous support to his wife in her heroic efforts including the running of the Sruti Ranjani group. He also helped her publish 41 of the Meenakshisutha kritis in Tamil during the period 1975-1982. These appeared in three separate parts. They were later translated into Kannada by Ananda Rama Udupa who set the notations in this publication according to the way they were recorded on tape by the vAgkeyakAra himself. This Kannada version was published in 1989. A fourth part containing an additional 18 kritis which were similarly notated using the tape recorded version, appeared first in Kannada and later in Tamil as a Sruti Ranjani publication in 1994 with Udupa as the editor; the songs were typeset in this edition with Udupa’s beautiful handwriting. The initial 41 songs, which earlier appeared in three parts, were collated and published by Sruti Ranjani as a single volume (Vol. I) in 1995 with Abhayam Raju as editor and was released by the then editor of Sruti magazine, Mr.N. Pattabiraman. (It may be mentioned in passing that Ananda Rama Udupa, who passed away in 2010, was a senior musicologist and had compiled all Muthuswami Dhikshitar kritis in Kannada in two volumes, writing and printing all the 1200 pages in his own handwriting!).

As a tribute to the great vAkgEyakAra, the Sruti Ranjani troupe released five cassetes containing Meenakshisutha kritis around 1995.  These are now available as a series of five albums entitled ‘Naadhasudha Varshini’(Sangeetha Cassettes) and contain 37 kritis of Meenakshisutha Nagaraja. These albums are available online for preview and buying: see: http://www.sangeethamusic.com/album-details.php?album_id=2000 and http://www.sangeethamusic.com/album-details.php?album_id=2004

It is indeed regretful that today’s senior Carnatic musicians have not woken up to the excellence of Meenakshisutha Nagara’s kritis which, in addition to their lyrical and metrical elegance, are rich in bhava infused into them by their inspired composer. It is, however, gratifying to note that some of the younger artistes are now including Meenakshisutha kritis in their concerts. Examples are: Amrutha Venkatesh (‘Vishweshwara Priya Kaamini’, in sindubhairavi, in the album ‘Ksetra Devi Kritis’); Ganesh and Kumaresh (Balakrishna dhevam in yamunakalyani in their violin album ‘Santham’). There is also a recent Youtube clip of Meenakshisutha songs by Smt.Girija Ramachandran and her students (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csnA6aZMueU&feature=youtube_gdata ).

Let me conclude by translating in Tamil an appeal made by Sri Jayarama Sarma in his forward to the third part of Meenakshisutha Nagara’s kritis published in 1982: “Do not we hear complaints from critics that new sAhityas are not being published? To fill this lacuna, I request all musicians to sing the Meenakshisutha sAhityAs on stage and obtain the blessings of Goddess Meenakshi.” For my part, I have requested several of the local and visiting artistes to include kritis of this gifted composer from Karantaka in their concerts. I had also given a lecdem about his compositions at a MACA-Music meeting some years ago.