Shyama Shastri — Kanchi Kamakoti and the Carnatic Trinity

Shyama Shastri

The composer-priest of Kanchi

Shyama Shastri (1762-1827) is the third of the Carnatic Trinity with Tyagaraja and Muthuswami Dikshitar, and he is the only one of the three who was a temple priest. That single fact shapes his whole output. Tyagaraja was a court musician with a household of dependents; Dikshitar moved through Tanjavur court and pilgrimage; Shyama Shastri held office in the Kamakshi Amman temple at Kanchipuram, and the goddess of that temple is the presiding presence throughout his work. He signed his compositions with the mudra DrSyam — Dr, for the deity at Kanchi, and Syam, for himself — an accurate description of what the music is.

The Navaratna malika, the garland of nine jewels, is the cycle by which he is remembered. The Kāmākṣi Kāvalyam in Saveri is the best known, but the nine include pieces of very different character — Śarasijakṣulu for the lotus-eyed, Svarūpam lēdē in Kalyāṇi for a meditation on the self that is the most intellectually substantial thing he wrote, Kanularakkam in Kāmbhojī for its dance, and the Nannu paḷimpā addressed to his own guru. The Svarūpam lēdē is the one to know: it is a poem about knowledge of the self, set to a raga whose ascent he uses to carry the argument, and the piece on which any serious account of his achievement should rest.

He composed in Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil, in a more formal and Sanskritised Telugu than Tyagaraja's colloquial idiom, and the difficulty of the language is a real feature of the music. He was trained by Adiyappayya, a Tanjavur court musician, and served at the Tanjavur court as well as at Kanchi — the previous entry's claim that he "never left Kanchipuram" was incorrect.

Sources and what is still unverified

The previous version of this entry contained several errors that a guardian should know about. It gave Kāmakṣi Kāvalyam the raga Kambhoji when it is Saveri; it described the Navaratna malika as being "in praise of Kamakshi" as though all nine kritis were goddess-hymns, which they are not; and it listed Purandara Dasa as a fourth member of the Trinity alongside Tyagaraja and Muthuswami Dikshitar, which is wrong — Purandara Dasa is the great bhakti poet of the Vittala hymn tradition, not a member of the musical Trinity. The frontmatter is also structurally broken, with undefined: keys and a truncated value inside the songs block, and needs a repair by a guardian rather than another automated pass.

What a reader with the sources should check: the composition dates, which are conventional rather than documented; the per ṣaḍ jaṭi claim in some scholarship, which is a live critical question; and the Navaratna membership itself, which varies slightly between printed lists. The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India and the standard Sambamoorthy biography are the works to use.