Vijaya Dasa: The Man Who Started It Again

What had happened to the movement

Purandara Dasa died in 1564. Vijayanagara was destroyed at Talikota in 1565.

The empire that had supported the Haridasas was gone, along with the court, the patronage and the city. The tradition did not die, but it went quiet, and the two centuries between Purandara Dasa and Vijaya Dasa are comparatively thin.

What Vijaya Dasa did: he rebuilt it.

The Dasa Kuta

Kuta means a group or a school. The Dasa Kuta is the branch of the Madhva tradition that works through song in Kannada, as opposed to the Vyasa Kuta, which works through Sanskrit scholarship and formal philosophy.

The distinction matters:

• Vyasa Kuta: the sannyasis, the mathas, the commentaries, the debates. Sanskrit. Vyasatirtha and Jayatirtha belong here
• Dasa Kuta: the singers, in Kannada, mostly householders, mostly outside the monastic order. Purandara Dasa, Kanaka Dasa, Vijaya Dasa belong here

They are two wings of the same tradition, and the Dasa Kuta is the one ordinary people encountered.

Vijaya Dasa organised it. He gathered disciples, established the practice of the annual aradhana observances, connected the scattered dasas, and made the movement institutional again.

His disciples

This is what he is really remembered for, because the next generation is remarkable:

• Gopala Dasa, of Mosaralu, his principal disciple
• Jagannatha Dasa, author of the Harikathamrutasara, the greatest single work of the tradition
• Mohana Dasa
• Venugopala Dasa
• Helavanakatte Giriyamma, a woman composer
• Timmanna Dasa, Krishna Dasa and others

Each of them has their own entry in this series, and the group is called the Dasa parampara, the succession of dasas.

The Gopala Dasa story

The most famous episode in this lineage, and it links three of them.

Jagannatha Dasa, before he became a dasa, was Srinivasacharya, a proud Sanskrit scholar of the Vyasa Kuta who looked down on the Kannada singers.

He fell seriously ill, with what the accounts describe as a stomach affliction, and was told he had little time.

He went to Vijaya Dasa, who sent him to Gopala Dasa.

And Gopala Dasa gave him forty years of his own life.

That is the tradition's account: a transfer of lifespan from one man to another, at cost to the giver.

What Jagannatha Dasa did with the forty years: he wrote the Harikathamrutasara, in Kannada, which is the summary of the entire Madhva system in verse and is recited daily across Karnataka.

How to hold that story: the transfer is hagiography. What is historical is that a Sanskrit scholar who despised the vernacular singers became one of them, wrote in Kannada, and produced the tradition's central Kannada text.

And the shape of the story is the point: the man with the learning had to be sent to the man with the songs.

The traditional claim: 25,000 compositions.

As with Purandara Dasa, that is a statement about scale rather than a count. A large body survives, in the thousands, and it is the largest surviving corpus of any single Haridasa.

The forms he used

One. The suladi.

This is the form he is most associated with, and it is worth explaining because it is unusual.

A suladi is a multi section composition in which each section is set in a different tala, a different rhythmic cycle, moving through a sequence of them, and ending with a jate section.

The seven talas of the suladi system are Dhruva, Matya, Rupaka, Jhampe, Triputa, Atta and Eka, and they are called the suladi sapta talas. They are the foundation of the Carnatic tala system.

So a suladi is a rhythmic tour. It is technically demanding, it is long, and it holds a sustained argument across its sections in a way a short song cannot.

Vijaya Dasa composed an enormous number of them.

Two. The ugabhoga.

A short free form piece, without fixed tala, functioning like a prelude, an epigram, or a summary. He composed thousands.

Three. The keertana or devaranama: the standard devotional song.

What his songs are about

• Poverty, directly. He knew it, and his songs about want are not decorative
• Humiliation and how to survive it
• The guru and the succession, which he was consciously building
• Purandara Dasa, whom he treats as his guru and praises repeatedly
• The name, and its sufficiency for people who have nothing else
• Madhva doctrine, put into Kannada verse
• Pilgrimage and the tirthas, since he travelled a great deal

Well known compositions:

• Dasa dasara mane dasanaagi: let me be the servant of the servants of your servants
• Hyange maadidanayya: how did he do it
• Enu maadidarenu: what does it matter what you do
• His Purandara Dasa songs, which are among the sources for what we know of the earlier saint

His travels: he went repeatedly on pilgrimage, to Pandharpur, Tirupati, Kashi, Rameshwaram and the Madhva centres, and organised group pilgrimages of dasas, which is part of how he rebuilt the network.

His end: at Cheekalaparvi, in 1755. His aradhana is observed on Kartika Bahula Dashami, generally in November or December, and his brindavana at Cheekalaparvi is a pilgrimage site for the Dasa tradition.

One. He had nothing that is supposed to be required.

No money. No education. No literacy. No family standing. No monastic position. No Sanskrit.

And he produced the largest surviving body of Kannada devotional composition and led the tradition.

That is the single most useful fact in this entry, and it is the reason the Dasa Kuta exists as a separate wing from the Vyasa Kuta: the tradition deliberately maintained a route that required none of the qualifications.

Two. He was humiliated and it did not decide anything.

He was mocked in his wife's household for being poor and ignorant, and he left because of it.

The tradition does not present that as a spiritual opportunity. It presents it as what happened, and then it presents what he did afterwards.

And the practical form: humiliation is information about the people doing it. It is not information about you, and it does not settle what you are capable of.

Three. He rebuilt something that had gone quiet.

The Haridasa movement was not dead in 1682, but it had lost its centre. He gathered the scattered singers, established the aradhana observances, organised pilgrimages, and taught a generation.

That is administrative work, and it is why the tradition survived to the present. Somebody has to do it, and it is less glamorous than composing.

Four. The suladi principle, which is a real technique.

A suladi moves through seven different rhythmic cycles in one composition. The same material is presented at different speeds and in different metres, and it sounds different each time without changing.

As a practice: take one thing you are working on and approach it at different speeds. Fast and slow attention produce different results on the same material.

Five. And the Gopala Dasa story's actual content.

A Sanskrit scholar who despised the vernacular singers fell ill, went to them for help, joined them, and wrote their central text in the vernacular.

The lesson the tradition draws is not that learning is bad. Jagannatha Dasa's learning is what made the Harikathamrutasara possible. It is that the learning had to be put through the songs before it was any use to anybody.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Vijaya Vittala, or any name that is yours
• One ugabhoga, which is short and needs no accompaniment
• On Kartika Bahula Dashami, his aradhana
• And the standing note, since these are songs: no training is required. The Dasa Kuta exists precisely because the other route required qualifications that most people did not have

A closing thought

A poor boy who could not read was married off, went to live at his wife's family's house, and was fed last and laughed at.

He walked out and went to Kashi and worked in a kitchen.

And somewhere in there he began composing songs in Kannada, and kept doing it for fifty years, and gathered the scattered singers of a movement that had lost its city two hundred years earlier, and taught the men who wrote its greatest books.

One of them, a Sanskrit scholar who had thought the singers beneath him, came to him dying and was sent to one of his disciples, who gave him forty years, and he spent them writing the tradition's central text in the language of the songs.

A map, since this series covers several of them separately.

The Vyasa Kuta, the Sanskrit and monastic wing:

• Madhvacharya, thirteenth century, founder of Dvaita
• Jayatirtha, the great commentator
• Sripadaraja, who is the bridge, since he composed in Kannada as well
• Vyasatirtha, rajaguru at Vijayanagara, who initiated both Purandara and Kanaka
• Vadiraja Tirtha of Sode

The Dasa Kuta, the Kannada singing wing:

• Naraharitirtha, thirteenth century, the earliest
• Sripadaraja, again
• Purandara Dasa, 1484 to 1564, the systematiser
• Kanaka Dasa, roughly 1509 to 1609
• the quiet period, after Vijayanagara falls in 1565
• Vijaya Dasa, 1682 to 1755, the reviver
• Gopala Dasa, 1721 to 1762
• Jagannatha Dasa, 1728 to 1809, author of the Harikathamrutasara
• Mohana Dasa, Venugopala Dasa, Helavanakatte Giriyamma, Prasanna Venkata Dasa and many more

What holds it together:

• Composition in Kannada
• The ankita, a signature naming the poet's form of Vishnu, usually ending in Vittala
• Madhva doctrine underneath, though the songs rarely become technical
• Singing rather than reciting
• Householder life rather than sannyasa
• The Vittala of Pandharpur as the deity, which links the whole Kannada tradition to the Marathi Varkaris

That last connection is worth stating clearly. The Haridasas of Karnataka and the Varkaris of Maharashtra developed separately, in different languages, with different literary forms and different philosophies underneath, and both are singing to the same image standing on a brick at Pandharpur.

Purandara Vittala, Vijaya Vittala, Gopala Vittala, Jagannatha Vittala: every Haridasa ankita ends with the name of the deity the Marathi saints were walking to.

Where to encounter the Dasa tradition today:

• Carnatic concerts, where devaranamas are standard repertoire
• The aradhana festivals of each dasa, observed annually
• Cheekalaparvi, Raichur district, for Vijaya Dasa's brindavana
• Hampi, for the Purandara Dasa mantapa
• Udupi, for Kanaka Dasa's window
• Mantralayam, for Raghavendra Swami, who belongs to the Vyasa Kuta side of the same tradition
• Recordings, which are extensive and easy to find

Who: Vijaya Dasa, 1682 to 1755, born Dasappa at Cheekalaparvi in Raichur district, Karnataka, into an extremely poor brahmana family, unlettered and unschooled.

What happened to him: married young, he went as a poor son in law to his wife's family, where he was fed last and mocked for his poverty and ignorance. He left, went to Kashi, and worked as a cook and menial servant.

The turn: a dream or vision in which Purandara Dasa, dead over a hundred years, gave him the ankita Vijaya Vittala and with it the standing to compose. The man who could not read then produced the largest surviving body of Kannada devotional composition.

What he built: the revival of the Dasa Kuta, the Kannada singing wing of the Madhva tradition, which had gone quiet after Vijayanagara fell at Talikota in 1565. He gathered the scattered dasas, established the annual aradhana observances, organised group pilgrimages, and taught the next generation.

His disciples: Gopala Dasa, Jagannatha Dasa who wrote the Harikathamrutasara, Mohana Dasa, Venugopala Dasa and the woman composer Helavanakatte Giriyamma.

The famous story: Jagannatha Dasa, then a proud Sanskrit scholar who despised the Kannada singers, fell fatally ill, was sent by Vijaya Dasa to Gopala Dasa, and was given forty years of Gopala Dasa's own life. He spent them writing the tradition's central Kannada text.

His forms: the suladi, a multi section composition moving through the seven suladi sapta talas that are the foundation of the Carnatic tala system; the ugabhoga, short and free form; and the keertana.

His end: Cheekalaparvi, 1755. Aradhana on Kartika Bahula Dashami, generally November or December.