Being childless till he was 40 years old, Sri Ramaswami Dikshitar and his wife went to the Vaidyeswaran temple in Tamil Nadu in South India to offer prayers to Lord Muttukumaraswami and Goddess Balambal for some time. With the divine blessings, a son was born to them on the star of krittika in the month of phalgunam in the English year 1775. He was aptly named Muthuswami (more accurately, Muddusvami), after the deity’s name. Later, the couple had two more sons, Chinnaswami, and Baluswami, and a daughter, Balamba.

Hindustani music and befriending the Vina

Muthuswami Dikshitar spent his early days at Manali, a small place near the delta of the sacred river under the tutelage of his illustrious father. The saint Guru, Sri Chidambaranatha Yogi, later took him to Kasi (Varanasi) in North India where he spent five years learning rigorously the various systems of knowledge, such as the Vedanta, Jyotisha, Mantrasastra, and musical theories. In this short period, Dikshitar was exposed to the Hindustani system of music and the dhrupad style of singing. It is believed that at the time of bidding farewell, the Yogi, his guru, instructed him to take a holy dip in the River Ganga and accept whatever he found there as the blessings from his teacher. What Dikshitar found was the divine instrument, the vina bearing the inscription ‘Rama’ in Sanskrit (this vina is still said to be preserved in the Dikshitar family). Inspired by this incident, he adopted the vina as his favourite instrument and later became a prolific composer, with all his creations reflecting the vainika (veena based) style of singing

Temples and travels

On his return from Kasi, Dikshitar went to Tiruttani near the city of Madras, where he had the blessings of the temple deity, Lord Subrahmanya (guruguha). Dikshitar incorporated the phrase “guruguha” as a mudra (signature) in his compositions and the kriti, “Srinathadi guruguho jayati” in the Raga Mayamalavagoula was his first composition- of course, in praise of the deity at the Tiruttani temple.

Muthuswami Dikshitar was a zealous pilgrim with an insatiable thirst for visiting sacred places and singing the glory of the deities present in those holy shrines. From the collection of his compositions, it is clear that he visited a good number of kshetras (Hindu temples) from the southern tip of India in Rameswaram to the far north. After Tiruttani, his next destination was Kanchipuram. He traveled to many important shrines in the nearby cities of Mayuram, Chidambaram, Vaidyeswaran Koil and Kumbhakonam to name a few. He also frequently visited Tiruchirapalli where his daughter lived. He then moved to Tiruvarur and spent many years there composing numerous kritis on deities in the temple there and in areas around. Since this town was the main center of his activities, we naturally find a large number of his compositions dedicated to the presiding deity, Lord Thyagaraja (Siva), Goddess Nilotpalamba, Goddess Kamalamba, several Sivalingams in the temple complex, Navagrahas, numerous forms of Ganapati, etc. in the huge temple complex there. There is hardly any shrine in the temple, major or minor, that was not praised in Dikshitar’s compositions.

He continued his ambition to visit many shrines, and compose songs in praise of them, and reached Tanjavur, the seat of South Indian culture. Here, he worked on several kritis to explore and illustrate the immense scope of the scheme of 72 melakartas (parent scales), referred to as raganga ragams propounded by the musical grammarian Venkatamakhin, and so, we find many Dikshitar compositions in rare and difficult ragams. He then moved south to visit the shrines at Sattur, Tirunelveli and Rameswaram. At the village of Ettayapuram, around the time of the festival of Deepavali, an ominous incident occurred in the form of a wild elephant running amuck through the village, as if foreboding some calamity- this was around the time of Dikshitar’s demise. Though the last song he composed was “ehi annapurne” in Ragam Sama, he breathed his last as his disciples were singing “Meenakshi Me Mudam Dehi” in the Ragam Gamakakriya, specifically the phrase, “Meenalochani Pashamochani” referring to the Goddess as the remover of all worldly bondage.

The man, his music and miracles

Along with his musical contemporaries, Saint Thyagaraja (1764 – 1847 A.D.), and Sri Shyama Shastri (1762– 1827 A.D.), Muthuswami Dikshitar (1775 – 1884 A.D) is regarded as one of the musical “trinity” of the Carnatic music system. Among the three, Dikshitar was the youngest and was widely traveled. The real value of his kriti s lies in the fact that his compositions described various aspects of archeological, iconographic and literary heritage of South India. Literary beauty, as well as the Vedanta (ancient Hindu philosophy emanating from the Vedas), run parallel in his compositions. His kritis, which are the essence of kshetra mahatmyam (glorification of temples), contain architectural details of the temples he visited.

Legends surrounding the temples appear side by side with the musical grammar of the particular ragam in which the composition is set. It can be aptly said that Dikshitar’s music furnishes the fullest and the most integral manifestation of the values specific to Carnatic music. His work can be described as an epitome of the spiritual record of South India. For students of music, Dikshitar was a lakshanika- a grammarian of musical theories.

An outstanding musical feature of his compositions is that they present a vivid and accurate delineation of the ragam employed. To him, a ragam was not a mere assemblage of swarams (musical notes), but a divine form, beautiful and adorable. Most of his compositions are in the classical Sanskrit language, and he did not fail to exploit the many literary and figurative beauties this language has to offer. He was a master of alliterations and his kritis, mostly in chauka kala (middle-tempo), abound in such literary and artistic ornamentations such as the adiprasa, antyaprasa, swarakshara, swarasahitya, gopuccha yati, srotovaha yati and so on. He was also adept at weaving the name of the particular ragam into the text of the kriti (the raga mudra). Dikshitar followed this practice in a many of his compositions, without having to sacrifice the lyrical beauty of the sahityam (text of the composition), many a time using the art of “slesa” (double meaning or pun).

Sometimes the name of the ragam appears as a legitimate phrase in the text directly, as in the kriti “ardhhanarishwaram” in the ragam kumudakriya, where the phrase “kumudakriyaraganutam” is found. In many instances, the name of the ragam is concealed cleverly between words, (whenever the name of the ragam is not in Sanskrit language, or it cannot be employed as a legal phrase!), for example, the name of the Ragam Arabhi in his kriti “sri sarasvati namostute”, is hidden in the phrase “samsarabhityapahe” (the meaning is: remover (apaha) of the fear (bhiti) of the worldly cycle of life and death (samsara)). His kritis invariably contain the word “guruguha”, which he adopted as the vaggeyakara mudra (signature of the composer), in reverence to Lord Subramanya of Tiruttani who is said to have miraculously appeared before the composer and blessed him with musical talent, divine knowledge and scholarliness.

Dikshitar- a kriti for every deity and for every festival!

Among the Musical Trinity, Saint Thyagaraja sang mostly in praise of Lord Rama (the hero of the epic poem, the Ramayana) and Sri Shyama Shastri chose to sing on Goddess Kamakshi of Kanchipuram, while Dikshitar, an advaitin (a believer in non-dualistic system of philosophy) and a jnani (possessed of supreme divine knowledge), composed kritis glorifying almost every God in the Hindu mythology. Most often, the text of his compositions contain a detailed picture of the shrine, the idol, the puranic (mythological) associations of the place, the sthala vriksham (the sacred tree associated with the place), the holy tank in the temple courtyard, special offerings relevant to the deity, associated temple festivals, or even the particular form of its worship. He has compositions that are suited for every occasion, for pilgrims to sing at any shrine, before any form of the personal God. For those who had the dosha (impact, or evil effects) of the stars, he gave the popular navagraha kritis in praise of the nine planets. There are a variety of kritis for use on festival occasions, at special annual worship, and on occasions to mark special vows taken to please Lord Ganesha, Goddess Varalakshmi and so on. There are about 485 compositions of Dikshitar that are currently available in print. They span over 192 ragams and are in praise of numerous deities present in more than 50 temple locations. From one perspective, as a saint, he could be easily regarded as a 64th nayanar for the ´shaivaite school of thought, and the 13th azhwar for the vaishnavite system, for while the nayanars sang exclusively on ´Lord Siva and the azhwars sang only in praise of Lord Vishnu, Sri Muthuswami Dikshitar sang on every God of the Hindu pantheon!