Is Wealth Sweeter than the Lord?

The Saint Who Sang His God

On the banks of the Kaveri at Tiruvaiyaru lived a devotee who changed how a whole civilization prays. Tyagaraja composed many thousands of kritis to Rama — calling him friend, child, beloved, king, thief of hearts — until devotion itself learned its modern grammar from him. Of the Carnatic Trinity he remains the most purely devotional voice.

The Bags of Gold

Fame carried his name into royal courts. The Mysore durbar sent word: come, be our composer — with treasure to seal it. Tyagaraja refused, but he refused in his own art form, in a kriti that has outlived every treasury that offered it: Nidhi Chala Sukhama — which is sweeter, wealth, or Rama's company? Later, when even his own household pressed him over money, he took his deities — the little Rama images he sang to daily — and buried them in the river's sand, saying the Ram who refused kings could not be lost to household quarrels. The story ends with Rama returning of himself, and the family falling at the saint's feet.

The Samadhi and the Song

In 1847 Tyagaraja walked one morning into the Kaveri and was not seen again. On that spot stands his samadhi — and every January, on his anniversary, thousands of musicians travel there from across the world to sing his five Pancharatna gems together, in unison, led by the greatest voices of each generation. It is possibly the largest congregation of musicians on earth, and its entire liturgy is that single refusal, renewed annually: wealth or the Lord — sung again, answered again.