Nottusvara Sahityas

It is a pleasure to share the playlist for the Nottusvara sahityas of Muttusvami Dikshitar (1775-1835) on Children's day. It was wonderful to render them along with the students of Sudha Raja and my own students in the year 2014. On the violin is R K Shriramkumar, K Arun Prakash on the mrdangam and B S Purushotham on the Kanjira. Below is a note on the nottusvaras and the various sources for this recording. Nottusvara sahityas occupy a distinct place in the history of compositional music. Since the genre developed in his hands, he is their generic originator. Living for a while in Manali, on the suburban fringes of Madras, Dikshitar’s ears caught the notes of bands playing the tunes of Scottish, Irish, English songs around the garrisoned quarters of the British Raj on Madras’ beachfront, Fort St. George. The result was a magic of sorts: the melody was exotic, the text, indigenous – a fusion before ‘fusion music’ had even been dreamt of. The first document that gives us information about nottusvara sahityas is a paper manuscript Jatisvara sahityamulu that was written just two years before Dikshitar died, by Kuppayya Seshayya in the year 1833. In this manuscript twelve nottusvara sahityas are published and for nine the titles of the original British melodies are mentioned. This was presented to Charles Philip Brown, the author of the Telugu -English Dictionary in 1820.Later sources include, A.M. Chinnaswami Mudaliar’s Oriental Music in European Notation (1893) where six nottusvara sahityas were notated and Prathamabhyasa pustakamu (1905) of Subbarama Dikshitar in which thirty-three nottusvara sahityas were published. After these three sources in A. Sundaram Iyer’s Dikshita Kirtana Mala (a series published over many years beginning from 1941 and with multiple editions) thirty-five nottusvara sahityas were published. Two nottusvara sahityas ‘Santatam Govindarajam’ and ‘Rajivalocanam’ published in the Dikshita Kirtana Mala are not found in any other publication. If we add up all the nottusvara sahityas published in these publications, with or without notations, we arrive at thirty-nine nottusvara sahityas attributed to Muttusvami Dikshitar. I reconstructed two of nottusvaras sahityas ‘Shauri Vidhi nute’ and ‘Subrahmanyam’, which are published only in the Jatisvara sahityamulu manuscript using the melody of the original tunes upon which they were structured - ‘O Whistle And I'll Come To Ye’ and ‘British Grenadiers’ respectively. I did not reconstruct ‘Cintaye Citta’ since we do not know the original melody upon which the sahitya was composed. In this series we recorded thirty-six nottusvara sahityas on the whole.