Person · Telugu poet-composer
Annamāchārya
Also known as Annamacharya, Tallapaka Annamacharya, Annamayya
Telugu poet-composer of Tallapaka who is said to have written some thirty-two thousand sankīrtanas to Venkateśvara, one a day for most of a long life. He fixed the padam form that later Telugu and Carnatic composers worked in, and wrote in plain Telugu about the god's public and domestic life alike.
- Date
- 1408 – 1503
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Tradition
- Adhyātma and Śringāra sankīrtanas
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
About twelve thousand of the songs survive, engraved on copper plates that were sealed in a chamber opposite the Tirupati sanctum and found again in 1922. The tunes were lost; the words were not, and twentieth-century composers set them afresh.
Connections (2)
- Devotional corpus onTirupati
Annamāchārya wrote some thirty-two thousand songs to Venkateśvara across a life at Tirupati. About twelve thousand survive on copper plates sealed in a chamber opposite the sanctum and reopened in 1922 — the words intact, the tunes gone, so what is sung today is a twentieth-century setting of fifteenth-century verse.
- PatronageHampi / Vijayanagara
The Tallapaka family served Tirumala under Vijayanagara patronage for three generations, and Annamāchārya's grandson Chinnanna wrote the only life of him we have. The court at Hampi is what paid for a resident composer to write a song a day for most of a century. The copper plates were found again in 1922 in a sealed chamber opposite the Tirupati sanctum, with the words intact and the tunes entirely lost.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Annamacharya”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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