19. Ksetrayya

Seventeenth century

This great master of the padam form belongs primarily to the Tamil country under the so-called Nāyaka kings. Nothing solid is known about him. His signature line usually refers to his god as Muvvagopāla—perhaps "Krsna from the village of Muvva" (often identified with a village near KŪcipŪdi in Krsna District, though there are also other Muvvas further south, in North Arcot and in CittŪr near Kārvetinagaram). But the name could also mean something like "Gopāla of the jingling bells" and have nothing to do with any village.

One of Ksetrayya's padams refers to Vijayarāgahva Nāyaka of TañjāvŪr, Tirumala Nāyaka of Madurai, and the Golconda Padshah; this locates him clearly in the mid–seventeenth century. Unlike Annamayya, he is not firmly associated with any single shrine but seems to have wandered through south India—hence, by popular etymology, his name (from ksetra, "temple site" in Sanskritized form, he is Ksetrajña). It is more to the point, however, to imagine him in the courtesans' quarters of the temple towns; he sings of courtesans and their lovers, usually in a female voice, and his compositions were probably meant for performance by courtesans themselves. In the dance tradition, these songs were sung orally by the male teacher (nattuvaār) while the courtesan danced—a male voice singing in an adopted female persona a song composed by a male poet for a woman. Here the courtesan's lover or patron is addressed as the god Muvvagopāla, and the intimacy of feeling and knowledge between god and devotee is explicitly sexual in text and texture. Only an apologetic, post-Victorian sensibility has managed to mask the eroticism and tone in modern contexts of performance by offering spiritual or allegorical readings of these utterly uninhibited songs.

COURTESAN SONGS ^[2]

[This padam is said to have been composed in two stages. When the court poets of Vijayarāghavanāyaka at Tanjavur complained to the king that he was elevating Ksetrayya—an "unlearned" singer, more at home with courtesans than with scholars—to an undeserved status, Ksetrayya sang all but the last two lines of this padam and went away, leaving the king's poets to complete it. They were unequal to this task and eventually begged Ksetrayya himself to complete the poem upon his return to Tanjavur. The story attempts to assimilate Ksetrayya to the familiar status of a court poet—despite the obvious inappropriateness of this category for a peripatetic devotional singer of love songs addressed to the god.]