guNDakriyA - Thyagaraja

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SrinathK
Posts: 2477
Joined: 13 Jan 2013, 16:10

guNDakriyA - Thyagaraja

Post by SrinathK »

At last, after a long hiatus (again due to work pressures, falling ill twice, travelling and a lot of certification exams and training to blame), I've managed to find a weekend to spare and some time to resume writing from where I left off. And today, I am going to focus on a rarer raga going by the name of guNDakriyA. As it turns out this raga has a complex history, and in today's times, the name of guNDakriyA is shared between 2 very distinct and different ragas.

I am very grateful here to Dr. Arati Rao, who has written the definitive article on the various forms of guNDakriyA both past and present. On the TLM whatsapp group by Dr. Aravind, she was kind enough to let me read it and know about the different ragas all identified as guNDakriyA across history. Around the same time I had also been planning to write about guNDakriyA, had looked up the version sung today vs the version in the SSP and come to a similar conclusion, but I was unaware that there were many archaic versions of the raga.

guNDakriyA is a raga which has taken many forms since the name appeared in musical texts from the time of Annamacharya onward. It finds mention in the ragas he used. It is also found in the Madhva Sampradaya, where Sri Vadiraja Tirtha has composed a kriti in it. In fact, Legendary stories talk about Hanuman being the first one to have played this raga on his veena. So in the distant past, it had quite a reputation!

It is also mentioned in texts dating from the late 16th onward. All these archaic versions have long gone extinct. But the name of guNDAkriyA has survived to the present day. The old guNDakriyA of Dikshitar is still found in the Sangeetha Sampradaya Pradarshini, a phrase based complex raga, unknown on the present musical stage, but I will of course be covering it in the next thread.

Despite all the changes over the centuries, one thing never changed - guNDakriyA has always been a janya of mela 15 (mAyAmALavagauLa) and has always used its parent notes.

Currently, in popular musical practice, guNDakriyA is known only in its modern form as a very scalar raga that can be traced back to Thyagaraja as one of his apoorva rAgas. At the end, I will raise a question as to how this apoorva rAga could have gained this name and whether it was a good idea to name it as guNDakriyA. Today, any mention of guNDakriyA only refers to this scalar raga, whose arOhaNam and avarOhanam are as follows :

Aro : S R1 M1 P N3 S
Avaro : S N3 P D1 P M1 G3 R1 S -- as a corollary, D may be occasionally skipped. So SNPMGRS and PNP and PNPDP are also possible and are in fact used. SRMPD, SRMPDPNS are also possible. These are still possibilities within the scale of the raga only.

I'll start with an essay of the modern popular version of this raga played on the violin by Sh. Jayadevan : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj67wmBdvc4

Thyagaraja has composed only one kriti, intanuchu varnimpa taramA. Curiously, there is more than one version of this song out there. Here's the more popular version, starting from the upper S, coming down to P, and ending on M on the opening line :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c3zGzHH5RI - Abhishek Raghuram. Coincidentally, the very first time I heard Abhishek in a live concert, the first piece I ever listened to in that concert was intanuchu varnimpa in guNDakriyA. So a nice find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anOv4Mwk8ts - Mani Krishnaswamy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppEFozSoO1s - Any fans of K B Sundarambal? Here's a rare one.

However, there is another, rarer version, one which was sung by BMK, which is very different, even though it uses the same scale. This version starts from the lower S and goes up. Here it is :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ahay2Nc8UA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TFGcEV8KY

Now based on my experience with old versions of Thyagaraja kritis, I am not sure if either of these versions are actually how he composed it. :mrgreen: So far, what I have come to know is that intanuchu varnimpa exists in both Walajapet and Umayalpuram manuscripts with similar notation, but which I am told differ from the current concert versions.

The raga however has been identified with the same arohanam avarohanam in the Walajapet notation and the swara prayogas are also the same. So one thing we can definitively say is that the raga has not changed, but the versions of intanuchu aren't consistent with each other. (Credits to Dr. Arati Rao for this finding). Hopefully Dr. Aravindhan will bring out the manuscript version one day.

The closest raga to the modern guNDakriyA is the rAgA pADi, an older long running raga that is almost identical except that it doesn't have a G. Just for comparison, the arohanam avarohanam of pADi is :

Aro : S R1 M1 P N3 S
Avaro : S N3 P D1 P M1 R1 S -- there is some evidence that maybe Thyagaraja was inspired by the prevailing organic ragas of his time to create scalar ragas based on those ragas (ex. pUrNachandrikA and janaranjani). Maybe this raga might have been inspired by pADi?

Now Thyagaraja is not the only composer to have used this raga. After him, Tiruvottiyur Thyagaraja, Harikesanallur Muthiah Bhagavatar and Maharaja Jayachamraja Wodeyar have also composed in it. Being post Trinity, all these composers have used only the modern form of guNDakriyA

Maharaja Jayachamraja Wodeyar's composition, pAhimAm SrI varalakshmI kAmAkShI, is in fact available on record :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egn5m3QaAOk

And coming back to BMK, he actually has set composition of Annamacharya to tune in this raga (kaDupenta ThA kuduchu) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MESkDwRMYF4 - with some trademark romantic BMK esque glides. The singer is N C Sreedevi

I should point out that in the list of Annamacharya sankeertanams published by TTD, guNDakriyA is one of the 90 odd ragas he used in his days. In fact the name guNDakriya may be a derivative from goND or "konDa", which stands for hill, so the raga itself may have originated in Andhra. But we do not know what version existed in his days.

Some more interesting information confirming that the raga in its original form seems to have been quite popular across South India in the 15th century comes from some more googling : http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2018 ... urusa.html

Sri Vadiraja Tirtha of the Madhva Sampradaya has composed a 40 stanza kriti called "guNDakriyE" in guNDakriyA.

I am unable to find any rendition of HMB's kriti out there (kindly help), nor the kriti of Tiruvottiyur Thyagayya. The TT kriti might be there in his published book.

That's it for this form of guNDakriyA. Now the old guNDakriyA of SSP, which is a phrase based raga coming from Venkatamakhin, is a very different and more complex raga. It will be the subject of its own thread. But before I stop, I'll leave you with something to think about.

One interesting thing I have observed is that Thyagaraja did not name his apoorva ragas, the special ragas he created. These names appear in manuscripts of his parampara so it is clear that they were named from his disciples onward. However, there has been a tendency to give those names to these ragas which were actually names of older, established classical ragas that were extant during the Trinity period, or which had different lakshanas in texts. These names seem to have been fitted based on finding the nearest similar raga in modern manuscripts like Sangaraha Chudamani or Sangeetha Sarvartha Saram.

As a result, two things happened. 1) Many of the old classic ragas were replaced by the apoorva ragas by using the same name, causing the old versions of these ragas to fade out of existence. 2) Quite a few apoorva ragas and the kritis composed in these ragas were themselves changed to fit the descriptions of whichever lexicon was used by later musicians to name Thyagaraja's apoorva ragas (According to KSR, most of this was the work of the Tacchur Brothers). These things appear from a study of notated manuscript versions of Thyagaraja's kritis. Some of these include, sAlaga bhairavi, kalyANavasantam, saraswati manOhari, AbhEri, manOhari, kalAvati, dEvakriyA, the ragas for which I have been giving separate versions. All these ragas were old school ragas different from Thyagaraja's creations, but today all of them are only identified with his ragas, and some of them have changed again since then. guNDakriyA is also among them.

Therefore, notwithstanding the universal popularity of this version, was it actually a good idea in the first place to name this raga as "guNDakriyA" at all? When there was already a guNDakriyA out there, what would be the reason for naming an original creation after it, and thereby unwittingly ensuring that down the road, the old guNDakriyA would be lost to manuscript? The same thing is true for all the apoorva ragas of Swamigal that have been named after existing ragas of his day. Should kalyANavasantam have been named as such? This has led to the loss of the original raga created by Swamigal and his kritis have been retuned based on texts. Could one not have named them differently, with more original names, recognizing their uniqueness? It's too late to change anything now, but at least, when we come up with new ragas or scales, we should go through all the sources now publicly available to make sure of what we're naming.

Lakshman
Posts: 14019
Joined: 10 Feb 2010, 18:52

Re: guNDakriyA - Thyagaraja

Post by Lakshman »

Here is the song by TT:

taruNamidE nannu. rAgA: guNDakriya. Adi tALA. Tiruvettiyur Tyagayya.

P: taruNamidE nannu brOva tAmasamEla jEsEvura
A: parama dayAnidhi nIvanucu palumAru golici vEDina
C: nI pAdamulE neranammukoni E proddunu dhyAnincucunna nA
pApamulanniyu pAradOli gOpAladAsuni paripAlimpa

SrinathK
Posts: 2477
Joined: 13 Jan 2013, 16:10

Re: guNDakriyA - Thyagaraja

Post by SrinathK »

@Lakshman Many thanks for sharing this, as always. Is it found in the book of TT's compositions?

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