Person · Carnatic composer · India

Muthuswāmi Dīkshitar

Also known as Muthuswami Dikshitar, Muthuswamy Dikshitar, Dikshitar, Guruguha

Date

1775 – 1835

Function

Arts & performance

Tradition

Carnatic kriti corpus; Guruguha mudra

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

He studied Hindustani music at Banāras for five years and brought its rāgas and a slow, weighty tempo back south; he also set European tunes to Sanskrit words in the nottu svaras, after hearing British regimental bands at Fort St George.

Connections (5)

• Devotional corpus onThiruthani / Thiruttani

  Muthuswāmi Dīkshitar is said to have had a vision at Thiruttani in which Murugan put sugar candy in his mouth, after which he composed the first of his kritis. He took Guruguha, a name of Murugan, as the signature in every song he wrote thereafter, so the whole corpus carries this hill in it.

• Life routeTiruvarur

  Dīkshitar was born at Tiruvārūr in 1775, in the same street and within a few years of Tyāgarāja and Śyāma Śāstri — the three of the Carnatic trinity came out of one Kāveri-delta town in one generation. His Kamalāmbā navāvaraṇa cycle is written for Tiruvārūr's goddess. Tiruvārūr's Tyāgarāja temple has the largest chariot in Tamil Nadu, and all three composers grew up watching it pulled through streets laid out around the temple tank.

• Samadhi atEttayapuram Dikshitar samadhi

  Dīkshitar spent his last years under the patronage of the Ettayapuram zamindars and died there in 1835. The samādhi is in the town, and the Carnatic world still goes to it — the one of the trinity whose grave is far from the delta he came from. Ettayapuram also produced the poet Subramania Bharati a century later, so one small Tirunelveli zamindari holds the graves or birthplaces of two of the most consequential Tamil figures.

• Life routeKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras

  Dīkshitar spent about five years at Banāras with his teacher Chidambaranātha Yogi, learning Hindustani music. He brought back rāgas and a slow, weighted tempo unlike anything then in the south, which is why his kritis sound heavier than Tyāgarāja's and why some carry Hindustani rāga names. He signed every song Guruguha, a name of Murugan, after a vision at Thiruttani, so a corpus of five hundred Sanskrit kritis carries a Tamil hill's name in each of them.

• Court associationTyāgarāja

  Tyāgarāja, Dīkshitar and Śyāma Śāstri were born within five years and a few streets of each other in the Kāveri delta, and between them made the repertoire that Carnatic music still performs. There is no record that they ever met. They wrote in three different languages — Telugu, Sanskrit and a mixture — to three different deities, and each solved the problem of what a South Indian devotional song should be in a different way.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Muthuswami Dikshitar”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Muthuswami Dikshitar