Kshetrayya: The Slowest Songs in the Language

They are love songs, and they are explicit.

This needs stating plainly rather than avoided, because a guide that pretends otherwise is useless.

The situations the padams describe:

• A woman waiting for a man who has not come
• A woman who has just spent the night with him, describing it to her friend
• A woman refusing him because he has been with somebody else, and the evidence on his body
• A friend acting as go between, arguing his case, or warning her off
• A woman negotiating over money, because in many of the padams the nayika is a courtesan and the man is a client
• Jealousy, sulking, reconciliation, and the whole apparatus of an ongoing affair
• Physical description, direct and unembarrassed

And the man is always Muvva Gopala, which is to say Krishna.

How to hold that

Two things are true at once and both need saying.

One. This is a recognised devotional mode with a long pedigree.

The nayika bhava, in which the devotee speaks as a woman in love with the deity, is old, continuous and central:

• Nammalvar, in Tamil, writing in the voice of a girl
• Andal, writing as herself, wanting to marry him
• Jayadeva's Gita Govinda, twelfth century Sanskrit, which is explicit
• Vidyapati and Chandidas in Maithili and Bengali
• The Vaishnava padavali and the Bengal Gaudiya tradition, where madhurya bhava, the mood of the lover, is held to be the highest
• Akka Mahadevi, in Kannada, addressing Shiva as her husband
• Annamacharya's sringara sankirtanas

Kshetrayya sits in that line, and the theological framing is that the soul's relation to god is best expressed in the one human relationship that involves complete exposure, complete dependence and complete desire.

Two. The padams are also, in plain terms, courtesan songs.

Many of them are written from inside the world of professional courtesans, using its vocabulary, its economics and its negotiations. Payment appears. Rival clients appear. The friend's advice is often practical and mercenary.

The scholarship is direct about this, and the standard English volume of translations, by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, is titled When God Is a Customer precisely because that is what the poems say.

And this app's position: both readings are correct, they are not in tension, and pretending the poems are only abstract allegory is a nineteenth century sanitisation rather than a faithful account.

What is not appropriate: reproducing explicit content here, which this entry will not do. The translations exist, they are scholarly, and readers who want them can find them.

Why the poems are good

Setting aside the framing, the reason they survived is that they are extremely well observed.

The emotional detail is precise. The woman's positions shift within a single song. She is angry and then not, or says she is finished with him and immediately asks where he is. The friend's interventions are recognisably how friends actually talk.

And that precision is exactly what abhinaya needs, because a dancer performing one line four times needs four things in it.

Where the padam sits in a performance

In a Bharatanatyam margam, the traditional concert sequence:

• Alarippu, Jatiswaram: pure movement, no text
• Shabdam: the first piece with words
• Varnam: the central piece, long, combining pure dance and abhinaya
• Padam: slow, almost entirely abhinaya, and the emotional core
• Javali: lighter, faster, also erotic
• Tillana: fast, pure movement, the close

The padam is where the dancer stops moving and starts acting.

What abhinaya on a padam looks like:

A line is sung. The dancer performs it. The line is sung again. The dancer performs it differently, having found another reading. Again, and another.

One line, several minutes, four or five interpretations.

The technique is called sanchari bhava: the dancer elaborates a line by acting out a whole small story that illustrates it, then returns.

Why Kshetrayya's texts are the standard material

• The emotional situations are specific, so there is something to interpret
• The positions shift within the song, so there is movement to find
• The language is ordinary, so it can be gestured
• They are short, so a dancer can spend a long time on very little
• And there are 330 of them, covering nearly every situation the classical nayika typology recognises

The nayika types

Classical Indian aesthetics classifies the heroine into eight ashtanayikas by her situation:

• Vasakasajja: dressed and waiting for him
• Virahotkanthita: distressed by his absence
• Svadhinapatika: the one whose man is entirely hers
• Kalahantarita: separated after a quarrel she caused, and regretting it
• Khandita: angry because he has come from another woman
• Vipralabdha: deceived, he did not come
• Proshitabhartruka: her man is away travelling
• Abhisarika: going out to meet him

Kshetrayya wrote in all of them, and dancers learn the typology through his padams.

Where to see one

Any full Bharatanatyam or Kuchipudi recital includes a padam. Look for the section where the dancer sits or stands almost still and the music slows to almost nothing.

That is the hardest part of the performance and it is what senior dancers are judged on. Anybody can be taught the fast footwork; the padam is where the years show.

This section is necessary and it is the hardest part of the entry.

Who performed the padams

For most of their history, Kshetrayya's padams were the repertoire of devadasis and courtesans: women professionally trained in music and dance, attached either to temples or to courts.

What the devadasi system was

Stated plainly, without romance and without dismissal.

What is true about the art:

• Devadasi communities held and transmitted an enormous body of music and dance across centuries
• The women were highly trained professionals, often literate, often composers, and often the only women in their society with property rights and without the constraints of marriage
• The entire surviving repertoire of Bharatanatyam abhinaya, including Kshetrayya, came down through them
• Some were figures of great standing: Bangalore Nagarathnamma, who restored Tyagaraja's samadhi and fought for women's participation in the Aradhana, was one

What is also true about the system:

• Girls were dedicated as children, without consent
• The dedication carried an expectation of sexual availability to temple officials, patrons or a designated man
• It was overwhelmingly caste bound, drawing from specific communities
• The women could not leave it, and their daughters were dedicated in turn
• Whatever standing the exceptional individuals had, the ordinary condition was hereditary sexual servitude attached to a religious institution

Both of those are true. Any account that gives only the first is a romanticisation and any account that gives only the second erases the women who made the art.

What happened in the twentieth century

• The anti nautch movement from the 1890s campaigned against the system, on grounds that mixed genuine reform with colonial and middle class disgust
• Muthulakshmi Reddi, herself from a devadasi family and the first woman legislator in India, drove the legislation
• The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act 1947 abolished the practice in the Madras Presidency; Karnataka followed in 1982, Andhra Pradesh in 1988, and dedication is now illegal across India
• At the same time, the dance was revived and reconstructed as Bharatanatyam, and taken up largely by women of upper caste families for whom it became respectable

And the honest consequence: the art was saved and the communities that carried it were dispossessed. The women whose families had held the repertoire for generations were legislated out of their profession, and the repertoire was taken up by people who had campaigned against them.

That is not a settled question and it is still argued about, and a guide should say so rather than present the revival as an unmixed success.

The legal position now

• Dedicating a girl to a temple is illegal across India
• Where it persists, it constitutes trafficking and child sexual exploitation, and is prosecutable under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956, the POCSO Act 2012, and the state devadasi prohibition acts
• Childline 1098 for anybody under eighteen; police 112; women's helpline 181; anti human trafficking units operate in every state
• If somebody tells you a religious tradition requires the dedication of a girl, they are describing a crime

And Kshetrayya's poems are not implicated in that. They are seventeenth century songs about desire, they were carried by women whose situation was what it was, and they are now performed by dancers who chose the art freely. All three of those facts belong in the same account.

One. Slowness as a technique.

The padam's entire method is to take a small amount of material and give it far more time than it appears to need, so that what is in it has room to come out.

That is a transferable practice and it is more or less the opposite of how anybody reads or listens now.

Try it once: take one line of anything devotional, one verse, one name, and stay with it for as long as a padam would, which is several minutes, and see what turns up on the fourth reading that was not there on the first.

Two. The nayika bhava is a real devotional mode and it is not decorative.

The claim underneath it is that the relationship between a person and god is best described using the vocabulary of the one human relationship that involves complete exposure, complete dependence, jealousy, waiting, anger, and desire.

Every major Indian devotional tradition contains it, and it is generally held to be the most advanced of the moods rather than the most elementary.

Three. The poems are honest about wanting things.

The nayika complains, negotiates, sulks, demands, and does not pretend to be serene. Neither did Akka Mahadevi, or Syama Sastri, or Kanhopatra, or Chokhamela.

A tradition that only preserved calm devotion would have lost most of its poetry.

Four. And the part that must not be skipped.

The repertoire came down through women who were dedicated as children into a system they could not leave, and the twentieth century revival saved the art and dispossessed them.

Both halves of that belong in any account, and dedicating a girl to a temple is now a crime: Childline 1098, police 112, women's helpline 181.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Krishna Krishna or Gopala Gopala
• Watch one padam performed, with the text translated, and notice what the dancer does with the same line the second and third time
• If you attend dance, sit through the padam instead of waiting for the tillana. It is the part that took the dancer twenty years

A closing thought

A man from a village in Andhra spent his life travelling between the courts of Hindu Nayaka kings and Muslim sultans, writing love songs in Telugu, all of them in the voice of a woman, all of them addressed to the Krishna in his village temple.

He wrote them so slowly, and left so much space in them, that a dancer could take one line and turn it over four or five times and find something different in it each time.

For three hundred years they were sung and danced by women who had been given to temples as children and could not leave.

Then the law ended that, and the dance was rebuilt by other people, and the songs are still the hardest thing in the repertoire.

Who: Kshetrayya, also Kshetrajna, seventeenth century, roughly 1600 to 1680, of Movva in Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh. His signature is Muvva Gopala, the Krishna of his village temple, and his name means roughly the one who goes to the sacred places.

Where he worked: at Thanjavur under Vijayaraghava Nayaka, at Madurai, and at Golconda under the Qutb Shahi sultans, where Telugu poetry was patronised alongside Persian.

His form: the padam. Slow, in ordinary Telugu, short, spoken by a woman or her friend, addressed to Muvva Gopala, and set with sustained phrases rather than movement. The slowness is the point: the padam is the vehicle for abhinaya, the interpretive part of Indian classical dance, in which one line is performed several times with a different reading each time.

The scale: 4,000 padams by tradition, around 330 surviving.

Their content: love songs, explicit, in which the woman waits, refuses, complains, negotiates over money and describes the night, and in many of which the nayika is a courtesan and the man a client. The standard English translation volume is titled When God Is a Customer for that reason. The nayika bhava is a recognised devotional mode running from Nammalvar and Andal through the Gita Govinda to the Bengal Vaishnavas, and both readings are correct.

In dance: his padams are the core abhinaya repertoire of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, covering all eight of the classical ashtanayika situations, and the padam is the section of a recital senior dancers are judged on.

Who sang them: devadasis and courtesans, until the Madras Devadasis Act 1947 and the later state acts ended dedication. The art was saved and the communities that carried it were dispossessed, and both halves belong in the account. Dedicating a girl to a temple is now a crime: Childline 1098, police 112, women's helpline 181.