Place · Maratha court music centre · India
Thanjāvūr court music
Also known as Thanjāvūr — the court music establishment
The Maratha court at Thanjavur held the largest musical establishment in the south: the Thanjavur Quartet who fixed the Bharatanatyam margam, the nagaswaram and tavil lines, the palace manuscripts, and the patronage that Syama Sastri and Muthuswami Dikshitar worked within. It is where Karnatik music acquired its concert order and its institutional form.
- Date
- 1700–1900
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Patron dynasty
- Thanjavur Maratha
- Condition
- living practice + historic monuments
- River basin
- Kaveri
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.790, 79.140
Connections (4)
- Life routeŚyāma Śāstri
Śyāma Śāstri was hereditary priest of the Bangāru Kāmākshi temple at Thanjavur, whose image had been carried from Kānchī to escape raids, so the eldest of the trinity spent his life serving a refugee goddess. He wrote almost entirely to her, in Telugu and Tamil, and his rhythmic constructions are held to be the most difficult in the repertoire, which is why he is revered more often than he is performed.
- Companion in the same setKalpathy
Kalpathy in Palakkad is a Tamil Brahmin agrahāram inside Kerala, settled by families who came west over the Palakkad gap, and it holds a concentration of Carnatic musicians unusual for a small town. Thanjavur is where those families came from and where the court sustained the temple, the musicians, the library and the dance masters together. The street-and-temple settlement pattern is what carried southern performance across a language boundary.
- PatronageThanjavur Saraswathi Mahal
Serfoji II of Thanjavur read Latin, English, Marathi and Sanskrit, corresponded with European scholars, ran a printing press and a school, and built the palace library up to some forty-nine thousand manuscripts and printed books. His marginal annotations survive, which makes him one of very few Indian rulers whose actual reading can be reconstructed rather than inferred from the list of what he was given.
- Site adjacencyThanjavur Brihadishvara
The court music of Thanjavur under the Nayakas and the Marathas was patronised from the Maratha palace, the Sangeetha Mahal and the surrounding agraharams of the city rather than from inside the Brihadishvara temple itself; it belongs to Thanjavur's broader urban musical culture.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Thanjavur”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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