Purandara Dasa: The Nose Ring and the Poison Cup

Where he went: to Vyasatirtha, also Vyasaraja, the great Madhva teacher, at Hampi, the capital of the Vijayanagara empire.

Vyasatirtha was the rajaguru of Krishnadevaraya, the head of the Madhva monastic order, a formidable logician who wrote the Nyayamrita and Tarkatandava, and the organiser of the Haridasa movement. He has his own entry in this app.

What he gave him: initiation, and the name Purandara Dasa, and the ankita Purandara Vittala, which signs every composition.

The Haridasa movement

What it was: a devotional movement in Kannada, within the Dvaita or Madhva tradition, centred on Vishnu as Vittala and on singing.

Its features:

• Composition in Kannada, not Sanskrit
• Sung, not recited
• The devaranama as the standard form: a devotional song, with a pallavi, anupallavi and charanas, set in a raga and tala
• Wandering with the tambura, singing in public
• Signing with an ankita, as the vachanakaras did
• Sharp criticism of ritual formalism, caste pride and hypocrisy

The lineage: Naraharitirtha, Sripadaraja, Vyasatirtha, Purandara Dasa, Kanaka Dasa, Vijaya Dasa, Gopala Dasa, Jagannatha Dasa, and many others, each with their own entry in this series.

What Purandara did in it: he made it a system.

And that system is Carnatic music.

Life at Hampi

He lived at Vijayanagara under Krishnadevaraya, in the period of the empire's greatest prosperity, and composed and sang there.

The Purandara Dasa mantapa at Hampi, on the bank of the Tungabhadra near the Vitthala temple, is identified as where he lived and sang.

And the timing is worth noticing. He died in 1564. In 1565, at Talikota, Vijayanagara was defeated and the city was destroyed.

He died a year before the world he composed in ended, and the Haridasa movement carried his songs out of it.

He is called the Karnataka Sangeeta Pitamaha, the grandfather of Carnatic music, and the title is literal rather than honorific.

What he actually built

He designed the teaching syllabus, and it is still in use.

Every child who begins Carnatic music today, anywhere in the world, starts with:

One. Sarali varase, also svaravali: the basic ascending and descending patterns.

Two. Janti varase: paired note exercises.

Three. Dhatu varase and Melasthayi varase: leaping and upper octave patterns.

Four. Alankaras: the seven basic tala patterns applied to the scale.

Five. Geetams: simple complete songs, the first pieces with words.

Six. Then svarajatis, varnams and kritis.

That sequence is his, and it has been the standard for around five hundred years.

And the raga he chose: Mayamalavagowla.

Why that raga. It is a genuinely clever choice and worth explaining.

Mayamalavagowla has symmetrical intervals: the gaps between notes in the lower half of the scale mirror those in the upper half. It contains both the flattened second and the flattened sixth, which are difficult intervals, and it makes the student's voice work at them from the first day.

Beginning with an easy scale would produce students who could not sing the hard intervals. Beginning here produces students who can sing anything.

A five hundred year old pedagogical decision that has never been improved on.

His compositions

The traditional claim: 475,000 songs.

What survives: a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, with attribution problems as everywhere.

The traditional number is not meant literally; it is a statement about scale, and the honest position is that we have a fraction of what he made.

The forms he used:

• Devaranama: the devotional song, his main form
• Ugabhoga: a short free form piece, without fixed tala, functioning like a prelude or an aphorism
• Suladi: a longer composition moving through several talas

The songs everybody knows

• Jagadoddharana, in Kapi: Yashoda playing with the child who holds up the world. Sung everywhere, including by every major Carnatic vocalist and in the famous M. S. Subbulakshmi recording
• Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma, in Madhyamavati: welcoming Lakshmi into the house, sung on Fridays and at Varamahalakshmi
• Tamburi Meetidava: the one who plucked the tambura is the one who found the way, an ugabhoga on the sufficiency of song
• Aadisidalu Yashoda: Yashoda making the child dance
• Kereya Neeranu Kerege Chelli: pouring the lake's water back into the lake, on the nature of offering, which is one of the most quoted ideas in Kannada
• Ee Pariya Sobagava: on the beauty of the lord
• Rama Nama Payasakke: the name of Rama as the ingredients of a sweet dish, which is a household song

Kereya neeranu kerege chelli is worth expanding. The image is of taking water from a lake and pouring it back into the same lake as an offering. Everything you could offer already belongs to the one you are offering it to, and the offering is therefore not a transaction. What you are actually giving is the act.

His subject matter beyond devotion

He wrote a great deal of social criticism, and it is direct:

• Against caste pride, and specifically against people who are proud of birth while behaving badly
• Against ritual performed without understanding
• Against greed, which he had the standing to write about
• Against hypocrisy in religious people
• On money and what it does to a household, again from experience

A section for the person the story turns on.

Saraswathi Bai

She is not a footnote in this story and the tradition does not treat her as one.

What she did: gave away the only thing she owned outright, to a stranger, knowing exactly what her husband would do about it, and then prepared to die rather than face the consequence.

And what that means about the household is the part the story does not soften. She had no money of her own. She had no way to be generous except by giving away a piece of her own jewellery. And her expectation of what would happen when he found out was that death was preferable.

The tradition's judgement: she is the one who was right.

The whole of Purandara Dasa's life afterwards follows from her act, and Karnataka's devotional song tradition and the Carnatic teaching system with it. Every child doing sarali varase is downstream of a woman giving away her nose ring.

She went with him when he gave everything away, and lived the rest of her life as the wife of a wandering singer, which was a materially much worse life than the one she had.

And she is worshipped alongside him.

The sons

Four sons are named: Varadappa, Gurappa, Abhinavappa and Madhvapati, and all four are said to have become dasas, with compositions attributed to them.

His end

At Hampi, in 1564, on Pushya Amavasya.

Purandara Dasa Aradhana is observed on that day, generally in January or February, and it is one of the major days in the Carnatic music calendar. Concerts and group singing of his compositions happen across Karnataka and wherever Carnatic music is performed.

Places

• Hampi, Ballari district, Karnataka: the Purandara Dasa mantapa on the Tungabhadra near the Vitthala temple, and the whole Vijayanagara site
• Purandaragada near Pune, one of the two claimed birthplaces
• Kshemapura in Shivamogga district, the other
• Pandharpur: the Vitthal connection runs through the Haridasa tradition too, and Purandara Vittala is that deity

The connection to Pandharpur is worth noting. The Haridasas of Karnataka and the Varkaris of Maharashtra are separate traditions in different languages, and they are both singing to the same figure standing on a brick at Pandharpur.

One. Kereya neeranu kerege chelli.

Pour the lake's water back into the lake. Everything you could possibly offer already belongs to the one you are offering it to, so the offering is not a transaction and cannot buy anything.

What that rules out, practically:

• The idea that a larger donation produces a better result
• Paid remedies, paid poojas sold as outcomes, and anybody charging for a blessing
• Keeping a ledger with the divine

What it leaves: the act, done because doing it is the point.

Two. He learned it the hard way and late.

He was around thirty when the nose ring episode happened, and the first half of his life was spent as a man his own wife was afraid of.

The tradition does not hide that, and the useful part is that the change was possible and complete.

Three. The syllabus.

He took the thing he cared about most and made it teachable.

That is a rarer and more generous act than composing. Anybody can produce work; designing the ladder that lets other people climb up to it is a different kind of contribution, and it is why he is called the grandfather rather than the greatest.

And the specific brilliance of it: starting beginners in the hardest useful scale, so that the difficulty is absorbed at the beginning rather than being an obstacle later.

That principle is transferable to anything you teach.

Four. Sing.

The Haridasa position, stated in Tamburi meetidava, is that the person who picked up the tambura and sang is the one who found the way.

No qualification is required. No training, no initiation, no correct pronunciation, no permission.

Five. And the household point, which this entry has already made.

Controlling a household's money is a form of abuse, it is named as economic abuse in the Domestic Violence Act 2005, and it is not resolved by the controlling person eventually having a change of heart.

Women's helpline 181, police 112, One Stop Sakhi Centres, free legal aid 15100, Tele MANAS 14416.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Jagadoddharana or Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma, listened to or sung. Both are widely recorded
• The kereya neeranu principle, applied the next time you are tempted to treat an offering as a purchase
• On Pushya Amavasya, his aradhana, listen to his compositions
• And if you have ever wanted to learn Carnatic music, the first lesson is five hundred years old and is free everywhere

A closing thought

A rich pawnbroker turned away a poor man asking for money for his son's thread ceremony, for six months.

The man went to the house and asked the wife, who had no money of her own because her husband kept all of it, and she gave him the diamond stud out of her nose.

When her husband found out, she went inside and made a cup of poison, because that seemed better than the conversation.

He gave away nine crores, took the name of a servant, spent the next thirty years walking around with a tambura, and designed the exercises that every child learning Carnatic music has begun with ever since.

Who: Purandara Dasa, 1484 to 1564, born Srinivasa Nayaka, a wealthy gem merchant and pawnbroker nicknamed Navakoti Narayana, the lord of nine crores, who gave everything away and became a Haridasa singer.

The nose ring: a poor brahmana asked him for money for his son's upanayana and was put off for six months. He went to the house and asked Saraswathi Bai, who had no money of her own and gave him her diamond nose stud. The brahmana pawned it at the shop, the merchant recognised it, and went home and demanded she show it. She prepared a cup of poison rather than face him, and found the nose ring in the cup.

His guru: Vyasatirtha at Hampi, who gave him the name Purandara Dasa and the ankita Purandara Vittala.

What he built: the Carnatic teaching syllabus, still in use worldwide. Sarali varase, janti varase, alankaras, geetams, then svarajatis, varnams and kritis. He set the beginner exercises in Mayamalavagowla, a raga with symmetrical intervals containing the difficult flattened second and sixth, so students work at the hard intervals from the first day.

His title: Karnataka Sangeeta Pitamaha, the grandfather of Carnatic music, which is literal rather than honorific.

His songs: Jagadoddharana, Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma, Tamburi Meetidava, Kereya Neeranu Kerege Chelli, Aadisidalu Yashoda, Rama Nama Payasakke. Tradition claims 475,000 compositions; a few hundred survive.

His central idea: pour the lake's water back into the lake. Everything you could offer already belongs to the one you are offering it to, so the offering is not a transaction.

His end: at Hampi in 1564, on Pushya Amavasya, a year before Vijayanagara fell at Talikota. Purandara Dasa Aradhana is one of the major days in the Carnatic calendar.