Sanskrit mudras made Dikshitar Carnatic's scholar
Muthuswami Dikshitar, born 24 March 1776 in Tiruvarur, joins Tyagaraja and Syama Sastri in Carnatic music's trinity. About five hundred kritis, mostly Sanskrit, praise deities and diagram temple stone. Every piece carries his Guruguha signature mudra for singers still hunting authenticity.
His father Ramaswami, a veena player trained in the Venkatamakhin lineage, taught him Vedas, poetry, music and astronomy. A zamindar later settled the family at Manali near Madras, and visits to Fort St. George introduced the boys to Western bands and the violin. An ascetic, Chidambaranatha Yogi, then took him to Benares for training in music, philosophy and yoga, where he also heard Hindustani dhrupad, which some scholars think coloured his style. Tradition says the god Murugan at Tiruttani placed sugar candy in his mouth and bid him sing, and Guruguha, one of Murugan's names, became his signature.
Pilgrimages to Tirupati, Srirangam, Chidambaram, Kanchipuram and many other shrines produced songs that describe each temple's deity and architecture. Back in Tiruvarur he composed the Kamalamba Navavarna kritis on the Sri Chakra goddesses, cast in all eight Sanskrit grammatical cases, and the Navagraha set to the nine planets draws on astrology and mantra lore. Vatapi Ganapatim remains his best-known piece.
His songs move at a slow, veena-like pace thick with ornamental gamakas. He wrote in all 72 melakarta ragas under his own scheme, reviving nearly forgotten ones, is the only composer on record with kritis in all seven basic talas, and pioneered a form with a single stanza after the refrain. Some forty nottusvara songs set Western tunes, including one based on Voulez-vous Dancer, to ragas; the story that collector C. P. Brown commissioned them fails, since Dikshitar left Madras by 1799 and Brown arrived in 1817.
His brother Balaswami pioneered the violin in Carnatic music. Dikshitar died at Ettayapuram on Deepavali in 1835, childless, and disciples including the Thanjavur Quartet carried on his style.
Source: Muthuswami Dikshitar
