muttusvAmi dIkshitar (was Re: navagraha worship ...)

[S Krishna]

Vidyasankar Sundaresan says:

<<In the Ahiri navAvaraNa composition, the portion "brahmamaya
prakASinI,nAmarUpa vimarSinI, kAmakalA pradarSinI, sAmarasya nidarSinI"
has to be connected with the sentence kamalAmbA jayati (in the pallavi),
so the I-kArAnta is justified. It is effectively a final return to the
prathamA, in order to round off the composition.>>


I very much doubt this; my experience with the sArvavibhaktitkam style
is that they rigidly adhere to the rule of prathama followed by dvitIyA,
go onto tr*tIyA... and end it with "sambOdhana prathamA". The best proof
I can see of this lies in a poem that was sent to me some time ago by Dr
Paliath NArendran. This zlOka  authored by Melpattur Narayana Bhattatiri
starts off as "kr*SNo rakSatu mAm" and illustrates all the vibhakti
endings of "kr*SNa" and ends with "he kr*SNa! tubhyam nama:" . This is
really peculiar,since in Kerala , the rUpAvatAram was authored by
dharmakIrti was used as a standard grammatical text placed
sambOdhana prathama after prathamA and ends the zabda declension with
the saptamI. The fact that a formidable scholar like Narayana Bhattatiri
did not tamper with this( inspite of a different local tradition)
suggests that the rule is  sacrosanct and cannot be violated. I
therefore do not think that the I-kAram  in the ending( suggesting
prathamA vibhakti) was the way dIkshitar intended the kr*ti to be sung;
it should be the shortened i-kAra form. This seems to be an example of
incorrect transmission.

<<The sambodhana is present in the word cinmAtre, which occurs in the
sentence which uses the dative case - SrI mAtre namaste cinmAtre.>>

I doubt this since :

1.the correct sambOdhana prathamA should be mAta:( can become mAtar.h)
but making mAta: or mAtar.h  "mAtrE" is too much of a jump.
2. mAtrE is the caturthi of mAtr* and makes sense in the sentence.
3. If the sambOdhana prathamA is used here, again the correct order  of
the vibhaktis gets violated. This would  then have the same status as
that of the Paraj kr*ti.




>>  I remember reading some place that Dikshitar composed this krti
>>in the raga Paraju,

>Well, mythology can be used in myriad ways. But we must remember that
>Pharas is mentioned even in the cilappatikAram (if its identification
>with the takkeSi paN is correct), so it is not all that foreign to
>Carnatic music. In any case, UttukkADu venkaTasubbaiyar, a
pre-dIkshitar composer has also composed in Pharas.

May I ask which composition of UttukADar are you refering to? SambamURti
says very clearly that Paraj is a dEsya rAga ; it was borrowed from the
north but may have had a counterpart in the south which nearly matched
it. All the kr*tis listed by him start off from the time of dIkshitar,
tyAgarajA and zyAma zAstri. I therefore think that UttukADar may have
composed in a carnatic raga that was close to
Paraju but not Paraju itself.( like jhinjhoTi and senjurutti). Of course
the identification with takkeSi paN is also debatable and I'm setting
that aside. I therefore believe that dIkSitar was the one who
used the paraju rAga as is now known to us.

REgards,
Krishna

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