Syama Sastri: Whom Else Do I Have, Mother

What makes him different from the other two.

Tyagaraja addresses Rama as a devotee addresses a lord: with love, with complaint, with argument, but across a distance.

Dikshitar describes the deity: attributes, iconography, temple, doctrine.

Syama Sastri talks to his mother.

That is the whole register, and it is completely consistent across the seventy pieces.

What that sounds like:

• Marivere gati evaramma: whom else do I have, mother? There is nobody else. Who else is there for me?
• Talli ninnu nera nammiti: mother, I have trusted you completely
• Ninnu vina gati galada: is there any refuge apart from you
• Brovavamma: protect me, mother
• Mayamma: my mother
• Devi brova samayamide: mother, this is the time to protect me
• O jagadamba: mother of the world

And the tone underneath it is a child's.

He complains that she is slow. He points out that other people's mothers help them. He asks what he has done. He says he has nobody else so she has no option. He reminds her of things she has done for other devotees and asks why not for him.

In one famous kriti he tells her that if she will not come, people will say she is not what she is said to be, which is a child's argument and works on exactly that basis.

Why it lands

Because it is unguarded. There is no theology being demonstrated, no temple being described, no philosophical position being taken. There is a man asking his mother for help, in the vocative, seventy times.

And because he was the priest. He was performing the goddess's daily worship, opening the shrine, dressing the image, and doing that for decades, and the songs come out of that daily proximity rather than out of pilgrimage or study.

The Ahiri kriti

Mayamma, in the raga Ahiri, is worth naming specially.

Ahiri is a raga surrounded by superstition, and there is an old belief that singing it in the morning brings misfortune or that it should not be sung at all. That belief is folklore and this app does not endorse it, but it means the raga is performed rarely.

Syama Sastri's Mayamma is the piece that keeps it alive, and it is one of the saddest and most direct things in Carnatic music.

Anandabhairavi

His signature raga. He is credited with giving Anandabhairavi its present form, and several of his best known pieces are in it: Marivere Gati, O Jagadamba, Himachala Tanaya.

It is a raga of a particular emotional colour, and the tradition associates it with him the way it associates Hamsadhwani with the Dikshitar family.

The Ratnatrayam

Three swarajatis, called the three gems, and the works he is technically most admired for.

What a swarajati is: a form with a pallavi and a series of charanams, in which the sahitya, the words, and the swaras, the note names, run together. It had been a dance form and a teaching exercise. Syama Sastri turned it into a concert piece.

The three:

• Kamakshi Amba, in Bhairavi, in misra chapu tala. The longest and the most celebrated
• Kamakshi, in Yadukulakambhoji
• Rave Himagiri Kumari, in Todi

Why they matter: each is a sustained development of a single raga across many charanams, each charanam exploring a different region of it, and the Bhairavi swarajati in particular is treated as a complete statement of that raga.

Rhythm

This is his technical specialism.

He is the trinity's rhythmic master. His pieces use complex talas, and misra chapu, the seven beat cycle, is particularly associated with him.

What he does with rhythm: the sahitya is placed against the tala in ways that create deliberate tension, resolving at unexpected points, and singers describe his pieces as the hardest of the three to place correctly.

The Kesavayya episode

The story most told about him.

Bobbili Kesavayya was a celebrated musician from the north of the Telugu country who came to Thanjavur and challenged the musicians there. He had, by the accounts, defeated musicians in several courts, and the Thanjavur establishment was worried.

Syama Sastri was asked to answer him.

What he did, in the version most told: he composed and sang Devi Brova Samayamide, in the raga Chintamani, which Kesavayya did not know.

In another version he set a pallavi in an extremely complex tala, Sarabhanandana tala, which Kesavayya could not follow.

And the challenge ended.

How to hold the story: musical challenge contests were real, they were a normal part of court life, and reputations were made and destroyed in them. The details of this one are not verifiable.

But the shape of it is worth noticing. The temple priest, the quietest and least public of the three, the one with the smallest output and no court position, is the one who was sent out to deal with a professional challenger.

Other well known pieces

• Palinchu Kamakshi, in Madhyamavati
• Sarojadala Netri, in Sankarabharanam
• Himachala Tanaya, in Anandabhairavi
• Ninnu Vina, in Ritigaula
• Brovavamma, in Manji
• Talli Ninnu Nera, in Kalyani
• The Navaratnamalika, nine kritis on Meenakshi at Madurai, composed on a visit there

One. Seventy pieces.

He is one of the three composers the whole tradition rests on, and around seventy of his compositions survive, against Tyagaraja's seven hundred.

And it made no difference to his standing.

The useful form of that: output is not the measure. Somebody who produced seventy things that were exactly right is in the same rank as somebody who produced seven hundred, and the tradition never argued about it.

Two. Four months of training.

A wandering sannyasi taught him for four months and moved on. That was his entire formal education in music.

Everything else was worked out at the temple, in the course of doing the daily job.

Three. He kept the job.

He was the priest of the Bangaru Kamakshi temple at Thanjavur his whole life, opening the shrine, performing the worship, and composing around it.

No renunciation, no court, no wandering. Of the three great composers, the one whose songs are most intimate with the deity is the one who was doing her daily worship as employment.

And that is the pattern this whole series keeps finding: the practice sits inside the work rather than replacing it. Janabai at the grinding stone, Gora at the wheel, Savata in the vegetable plot, Syama Sastri at the shrine door at four in the morning.

Four. Marivere gati evaramma.

Whom else do I have.

It is not a rhetorical question in his songs and it is not resignation. It is an argument: I have nobody else, therefore you have no option, therefore come.

As a practice, it is the simplest form of prayer there is, and it does not require you to have anything to offer, to be qualified, or to have been good. It requires only that you have nobody else, which is a condition rather than an achievement.

Five. He complained to her.

His songs point out that she is slow, that other people's mothers help them, that she has helped other devotees, and that her reputation will suffer if she does not act.

The tradition kept every one of those, in the concert repertoire, and nobody has ever suggested they are disrespectful.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Om Shri Matre Namaha, or the name of the goddess as you know her
• Marivere Gati or Mayamma, listened to once, with a translation
• On Navaratri, the Navaratnamalika or any of the Kamakshi kritis
• And the honest version of his question, on a day when things are bad: not what have I earned, but whom else do I have

A closing thought

His family had carried a goddess out of Kanchipuram to keep her safe, and had gone on carrying her, and eventually set her down in Thanjavur.

He was the priest of that temple. He opened it in the morning, bathed and dressed the image, did the worship, and closed it at night, every day, for most of sixty years.

A sannyasi passing through taught him music for four months.

And he wrote about three hundred songs, of which seventy are left, and nearly all of them say the same thing in different ragas, which is: mother, I have nobody else, so you will have to come.

A summary of the trinity, since this series treats them separately.

Syama Sastri, 1762 to 1827. Eldest. Temple priest at Bangaru Kamakshi, Thanjavur, all his life. Around 70 surviving pieces, almost all to Devi. Telugu mostly. The rhythmic master, and the intimate voice: whom else do I have, mother.

Tyagaraja, 1767 to 1847. Middle. Lived by unchavritti, going door to door singing for alms, at Thiruvaiyaru. Around 700 surviving kritis, almost all to Rama. Telugu. The melodic developer, who invented the sangati, and the one who refused a court appointment.

Muthuswami Dikshitar, 1775 to 1835. Youngest. Trained at Varanasi, travelled from temple to temple. Around 500 surviving kritis, in Sanskrit, on every deity in every shrine he visited. The formal architect, of the Navavarana sets and the grammatical case sequences.

What they have in common:

• All three born in or near Tiruvarur, within thirteen years
• All three composed in the Thanjavur region under Maratha rule
• All three worked in the kriti form and effectively fixed it
• None of them wrote for a patron, and only Syama Sastri had regular employment, and that was as a priest
• Between them they produced the core of the concert repertoire, which has not changed much since

What is worth resisting: ranking them. They were contemporaries doing three different things well, and the modern habit of asking which is greatest is a concert hall question rather than a musical one.

Where to hear them

• The December season in Chennai, which is the largest music festival in the world by number of concerts
• The Tyagaraja Aradhana at Thiruvaiyaru in January
• Recordings, which for all three are extensive and mostly free to find
• Any Carnatic concert anywhere, since the three of them are most of the standard repertoire

A note on approaching Carnatic music with no background: start with a kriti with the text in front of you, not with a full concert. The improvisational sections are where the difficulty is, and the compositions themselves are direct.