What makes Kshetrayya’s padams a valuable resource for dancers

A legion of composers and poets with a gift of sublime vision and enduring devotion to a chosen deity have breathed aesthetic flavour into compositions that have remained in the popular imagination of pious Indians through the ages. A unifying principle of bhakti ignited their creative spark — indeed, this was unique to Indian poets of yore. That said, a few poets have been able to remain relevant the way Kshetrayya has. Even fewer have captured the waxing and waning shades of romantic love between a man and a woman, quite in the forthright, open manner he had.

A bard struck with wanderlust; a maverick writer of love songs; a friend and a confidante to courtesans and devadasis; a life-long devotee of Muvva Gopala — the charming, flute-playing cowherd deity of Movva — these are just some known facets of the 17th century Telugu poet-adventurer Kshetrayya.

His life was ostensibly full and rich, evidenced by the 4,000-odd sringara padams he is known to have penned, forming a major bulk of his oeuvre. Steeped in madhura bhakti, traversing a whole gamut of sringara bhavas featuring a range of nayakas and nayikas, and layered with varying shades of human emotions — almost all his padams invariably culminated in the feet of Muvva’s Gopala.

Musicologist, scholar and author Kanakam Devaguptapu recently launched a book Kshetrayya Padams, is an admirable effort to not only translate the original ‘Kshetrajnulu’ by Prof. Veturi Anandamurthy into English, but also supplement it with information that serves to make it a valuable resource for dancers. Kanakam’s work covers 35 padams, providing detailed translation and transliteration for each, while also providing a key for difficult and archaic terms. All these padams have been notated making it easier for dancers to adapt them to performance. In addition, the book also provides a quick rundown of nayaka, nayika and sakhi bhedas, nayika avasthas and similar concepts that a novice dancer may find useful.

More than just a manual

There is a serious dearth of dance-related material that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Dancers are often hard-pressed to find suitable compositions with reliable translations or commentary to help them navigate through the intricacies of poetic pieces. This is particularly true of padams, which deal with a spectrum of nuanced feelings in the intractable territory of man-woman relationships. Kanakam Devaguptapu’s book fills this lacuna. Several engaging sections in this book elevate it from being a mere manual. It opens with a short biographical essay on Kshetrayya’s life shedding light on the charismatic nature of his name, for example.

Theories abound on why Varadayya eventually became Kshetrayya. A few scholars suggested that his prolific travels to various temples across the country are a reason he earned this catchy epithet. Here’s a more profound and less prosaic spin. ‘One who knows this body as a vehicle for enjoying pleasures is Kshetrajna’. Having once enjoyed the company of devadasis, and having once been a worldly man, he transformed into a person solely driven by his love of Muvva Gopala. Thus, he became Kshetrayya, ‘the one who realises that this body, the kshetra, is perishable.’

From Varadayya to Kshetrayya

Scholars suggested that Kshetrayya travelled extensively visiting various temples or kshetras across the country, which earned him the epithet Kshetrayya.
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Special Arrangement

The book also makes a mention of Mohanangi, the devadasi with whom he shared a life-long bond. An aimless village bumpkin in his early years, it was Mohanangi, an ardent devotee of Muvva Gopala herself, who tutored him in music and dance. As the story goes, Kshetrayya received a life-transforming ‘Gopala mantra’ from none other than Muvva Gopala. And it is said that overnight Varadayya transformed into song-writer Kshetrayya.

Dancer-choreographer Divya Devaguptapu performing a Kshetrayya padam.
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Special Arrangement

Be that as it may, there is a new breed of scholars who claim that Kshetrayya may be a figment of imagination after all. Kanakam Devaguptagu’s book dismisses these claims remarking that there are more facts and figures pointing to the existence of Kshetrayya.

As for the padams, Veturi Anandamurthy had originally featured 33 poems in his original work in Telugu. Kanakam has included two more poems in her translation: ‘chinna dana’ and ‘nenu manchidana’. Some of the padams had already been notated in the past by legends such as Ranga Ramanuja Iyengar, Sripada Pinakapani, Subbarama Dikshitar, and Manchala Jagannatha Rao. The remaining 16 padams have been composed especially for the purpose of this book by musicians Malladi Suribabu, Neela Ramgopal, and Pantula Rama among others. Yet another special feature of this book is the inclusion of a biographical musical play ‘Varadayya’ written by Sri Anandamurthy in 1959.

Myriad themes

At the launch of Kanakam Devaguptapu’s book Kshetrayya Padams. With the author are S. Sowmya, Malladi Suribabu and Ritha Rajan.
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Special Arrangement

There is a lot to choose from in the array of padams included in this collection: a variety of themes, emotions, nayika and nayaka bhedas, sancharis, ragas and talas find their place here. The first padam ‘Inni vidhamula’, for instance, is male-oriented, where the hero is not Muvvagopala but Kshetrayya himself. This is a male viraha composition — a rare theme in the world of shringara padams. Yet another unique padam, ‘Aligi yela’ depicts the hero’s anxiety over a sullen nayika. The book also features ‘Vadaraka popove’, a padam that Kshetrayya had left incomplete before his travels only to return to finish it since no one in his absence had been able to do so.

“The richness of raga bhava that his music offers and the rasanubhava that can be experienced in the presentation of his padams makes Kshetrayya timeless and matchless”, writes Kanakam Devaguptapu.

Indeed, a dancer who is looking for evocative abhinaya pieces to adapt to performance, needn’t look any further.