Lost and found treasure
ARUNA CHANDARAJU
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Annamacharya project aims to research, record and propagate the saint's work.
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It is one real-life story of lost and found treasure where the riches are still spilling out. In the 1920s, copper plates containing 12,000 songs, a Shatakam, Sankeerthana Lakshanam, and other works of saint Tallapaka Annamcharya were found. Later, 2,000 songs of other Tallapakam composers were discovered by Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanam (TTD) officials at Sankeerthana Bhandagaram in the Venkateshwara temple.
With their lyrical beauty, poetic excellence and myriad of emotions depicted, Annamayya's songs have greatly enriched Carnatic music. His prose works reveal Annamacharya as a musicologist too. At first, these plates were preserved in Venkateshwara treasury. They are now displayed in the museum.
Given Annamacharya's colossal output as well its significance, TTD set up the Annamacharya Project in 1978 to research, record, and propagate his works. Project Director Medasani Mohan reveals that TTD has printed and published the 14,000 lyrics in 29 volumes over a 10-year period and issued further reprints on demand. The aim is to publish all 14,000 lyrics with suitable commentary in different volumes and their transliteration into Tamil, Kannada and Hindi. A major activity in the music wing is tuning and recording the lyrics. Tuning was a challenging task given that the lyrics were found with raga names but without mention of thala or any notation.
And unlike Thygaraja or Shyama Shastry, there was no unbroken guru shishya parampara providing an authentic raga, thala and notation, as used by the composer. Also, most of the ragas mentioned were obsolete. A number of scholars and musicians worked on the same - Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sharma, Sandhyavandanam Srinivasa Rao, Kadainallor Venkataraman, Veturi Prabhakar Sastry, Sripada Pinakapani, Nedunuri Krishnamurthy, Malladi Suribabu, Manchala Jagannadha Rao, M. Balamuralikrishna and Balakrishna Prasad. By coordinating with universities across India, the Annamacharya Project supports research activities of doctoral students by awarding fellowships and printing the thesis. About 100 dissertations have been submitted in the last 25 years, reveals Mohan.
The Annamacharya Vardhanti festival was first initiated by Prabhakar Shastry in the 1940s on behalf of TTD and since 1978, the project authorities have taken up the responsibility to conduct the Annamacharya Jayanthi and Vardhanthi festivals. They also organise state-level competitions in Annamacharya compositions, 10 national seminars on his life and works and 300 music programmes monthly, explainsMohan. The TTD also offers financial and other assistance to organisations wanting to conduct Annamacharya concerts, and degree colleges/universities wishing to conduct national seminars on his life and works. However, one feels these activities need better marketing.
But anyone in search of a comprehensive collection of CDs, cassettes and notation-books of Annamayya's lyrics is going to have a hard time. Major music stores in Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Bangalore and Chennai have inadequate stocks. It's a similar situation in city bookstores regarding research-based books like Pappu Venugopal Rao's or translations (by David Shulman and Narayan Rao). In Tirumala itself, there's one tiny store, which is generally under stocked in quantity and range. The rows of stores near Kalyana Katta make a good marketing point but stock nothing. (Call: 0877-226 4500, 223 2278).
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