• An indepth book review, with suggestions, of ANUBHUTI by Kanniks Kannikeswaran.

"Anubhuti" explores the life of a remarkable individual born in 1775, who passed away in 1835, just shy of his 60th birthday. This book, published in 2025, commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth. The fact that Muthuswamy Dikshitar is remembered through a publication two and a half centuries later signifies that he was no ordinary figure but rather a monumental presence in the world of music. Acknowledging and honouring such a personality is undoubtedly a challenging endeavor.

The book explores various facts about Dikshitar’s life, including his birth, upbringing, and journey as a composer. It highlights the many dimensions of his music and the diverse responses it has elicited from listeners with varying abilities to appreciate and share his work. 

Today, performing musicians interpret his compositions within the traditional framework of classical Carnatic music, while more experimental and eclectic artists incorporate his works into fusion genres, blending elements from Indian music and other global influences.

The author notes in the book that he was trained in Carnatic music and specialises in Dikshitar's compositions. This expertise places him in a tiny subset of the general population. When writing a book, the author communicates his thoughts on a subject to an audience whose prior knowledge may vary significantly. He seeks to contextualise the life and work of Dikshitar, who was both deeply rooted in tradition and unafraid to experiment.

This duality is particularly evident in the passages about the fascinating Nottuswaram compositions, which were inspired by colonial music. Through his own insights and realisations, the author enriches our understanding, as reflected in the book's title—Anubhuti. 

Garuda Prakashan clearly recognised the potential market for this work and has done justice to its contents with the sophistication for which they are known. I would have expected nothing less.

Anubhuti is a natural progression from some of the works on Dikshitar that have attained distinction as standard references on the matter, and which are captured with the retrospective discretion they warrant. Amongst them, one can trace the starting point of modern scholarship in Justice T. L. Venkatarama Iyer’s biography on Dikshitar, which was published in 1968 under the auspices of the National Book Trust’s National Biography Series. For its short length, it gave an admirable description of this composer’s life and work, although one must admit that to a person who is not familiar with at least the basic rubric of Carnatic music, much of that book would have posed a challenge in understanding and a struggle to establish its relevance. It is, shall we say, the official biography of Dikshitar sanctioned by the Government of India. 

Justice Iyer’s book was followed by V. K. Narayana Menon’s work, published around 50 years ago, on the 200th anniversary of Dikshitar's birth. Published by the National Centre for Performing Arts, it was what could be called a semi-glossy commemorative work and went further than Justice Iyer’s biography by interspersing the author’s professional and personal comments. Another point of departure from Justice Iyer was the structure of the book itself; rather than limiting itself to a biographical work, Menon focused on a few songs, or kritis, of Dikshitar’s and provided commentary on the music itself. 

Compositions or kritis are a combination of literature or sahityam, and music or sangeetam, along with layam, which are the beats and pace to which the kriti is set. The kriti is then sung with the distinct personal flourishes of a performer, called manodharma, which completes an elementary framework of compositions in Carnatic music. The kriti, at least from a composer’s viewpoint, expresses the raga, tala, and the indescribable attribute known as bhava. As the composer affirms when he addresses Goddess Balambika as Bhava Raga Tala modineem, there is no distinction between what is worshipped and how worship is performed, and this harks back to the Lalita Sahasranamam, a recurring theme in the composer’s works.

Bhava is not a simple concept and has been the subject of significant intellectual focus in Indian aesthetics at least since Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra. Bhavas, to grossly oversimplify are the emotive states overtly conveyed and induced in a listener by a composition, such as amorous playfulness through sideward glances. Bhavas are essentially via medias to trigger the flow of rasas, or experience, in the listener; the use of the overt to awaken the inert.

Thus, while the experience of rasa itself is deeply personal and an emergent phenomenon that is filtered through prior memories, experiences, and personalities, a bhava is more of a social or group phenomenon, where a performer lays the emotive foundation for their work for the collective.

Anubhuti, meanwhile, is personal like rasa but substitutes spontaneous dissolution of a calculating ego into pure emotion with the discretion of experience, knowledge, and observation over the senses. Anubhuti goes beyond words and music; it is a person looking at himself in a somewhat detached fashion, and analysing what he feels and experiences. For someone to want to write a book called Anubhuti, a full 250 years after the subject composer was born, his music must have stood the test of time.

To make a more reasoned comparison, one could compare Dikshitar with Western composers beginning with, say, Haydn and ending with the period of Beethoven and Brahms. Analogies with Bach, however, are more robust, since both composers were unabashedly religious in their motivation and execution of music. While it is said that a lot of Bach’s music was also secular, like the Art of Fugue or the Goldberg Variations, if one only hears the religious part of Bach’s corpus, the similarities become apparent. All of Dikshitar’s compositions are religious in nature, yet there are many passages of his that one could listen to the music, devoid of its lyrics. 

For example, his compositions may be played on the Veena. If listened to by someone devoid of a priori knowledge of Sanatana Dharma, the temples, the deities, the society of South India, and of Dikshitar himself, the indescribable connection with faith and religion will still be discernible. When Bach says Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott or “our God is a mighty fortress”, you could hear Dikshitar sing Hiranmayim Lakshmim Sada Bhajami, where he proclaims Lakshmi to be his sole refuge in times of financial distress. I would go so far as to argue that all great music globally, especially from the classical era where faith would permeate all aspects of life indelibly, is religious in nature. At the same time, the quotient of religiosity may be greater or lesser.

To make an anubhuti of Dikshitar, I am trying to look at him dispassionately, as he looked at his music with clinical detachment. An obvious comparison in the book is presented vis-à-vis Syama Sastri and Tyagaraja, the other two constituents of Carnatic music’s trinity. The music of these two oozes with emotion, with bhava. 

Meanwhile, in Dikshitar’s music, emotion is nigh impossible to detect, with bhava having been refined with such technical finesse that it becomes imperceptibly ethereal, leaving only its consequential rasa to bear. One of the factors contributing to Dikshitar's greatness is that he approaches the higher divinity beyond the deities to whom he addressed his music without a trace of emotion—a form of rasa so sublime that it slips through the lens of the anubhuti process itself. Paradoxically, this means that while in Dikshitar’s case the listener has anubhuti that he is experiencing a torrent of rasa with hardly a trace of bhava. In the case of the other two greats, the footsteps left behind by bhavas are for all to see, making the anubhuti of the rasa so perceptibly induced, even forced. In this respect, academically and theoretically, Dikshitar scores substantially over his two brothers.

The range of people who are somewhat affected by Dikshitar’s music is also greater. In South India, cutting across socioeconomic lines, most people have heard of a composition Vaathaapi Ganapathi Bhajeham. These include people who probably know nothing of Carnatic music as such and have never entered its halls. Kannikeswaran rightly talks about this song, but does not venture into an analysis of its broad familiarity, if not popularity. I was left somewhat wanting in terms of not finding the role of this composition, set in raga Hamsadhwani, in seizing the imagination of Hindustani classical musicians, when Pandit Ravi Shankar adapted the composition, or at least its opening lines, in the form of a khayal, leading to the gradual emergence of this raga in Hindustani classical music.

At its highest levels, Dikshitar’s music will appeal to the cognoscenti. His various groups of kritis, such as Kamalamba, Nilotpalamba, and Tyagaraja kritis, are appreciated by people having a more comprehensive knowledge of Carnatic music in general and finer points of ragas specifically. Further, the esoteric imprimatur of Dikshitar’s Sri Vidya practice, while pervasive, is not universal; there are compositions in which the Sri Vidya content is less prominent. The bhava of these kritis is subtle and free from any generalisable anubhuti, as both the perspective and the findings of the anubhuti process, as well as the rasa experienced, will vary significantly across listeners with varying understandings of Sri Vidya, ragas, talas, and other features of the sahityam. The composition, thus, becomes a multidimensional, testing muse in its own right, revealing and whispering its secrets differently and with varied loquaciousness to the people who court her.

While all three composers of the trinity were ritualistically adept, with at least Syama Sastri known to be a Sri Vidya upasaka as well, the incidence of Sri Vidya-related reference is not as marked or vital as it is in Dikshitar’s work.

When I opened the book and started reading it, I recalled Justice Iyer and Menon’s books. I also reminisced of an excellent chapter on Dikshitar penned by R. Rangaramanuja Iyangar in the book History of South Indian (Carnatic) Music, published in 1972. Iyengar was particularly well equipped to write this chapter because he was a manasika shishya of Veena Dhanammal, an exceptionally adept proponent of Dikshitar’s music, and who was a vainika. 

I mention the veena specifically, since Dikshitar too was a vainika, the impact of which is all too present in his music. The majestic, elephantine gait of his kritis that provides sufficient time for the raga to seep through the kriti as well as the listener follows from the fact that beyond a point, the veena does not lend itself to being played at a fast tempo. I would even recommend readers to revisit Iyengar’s chapter for themselves.

When approaching the final pages of this book, the feeling that wafted through me was that I was glad that this book was published. Fifty years is a long time for a book on a composer to appear, with the last major work having been Menon’s. If nothing else, several newly uncovered facts that might not be widely known are presented to the general reader. 

Yet, who exactly would be the general reader for this book?

Would it be someone who has just been exposed to Carnatic music? An acolyte who is inculcating some sort of learning or methodical study? A concert-goer, likely a South Indian, who has a diffuse affinity for Carnatic music yet cannot distinguish between more than half a dozen ragas, and does not necessarily know these composers but enjoys the music nonetheless? What about a musically proficient person who might not perform, but has a grasp of the theoretical and historical aspects of Carnatic music? Would a performing musician, junior, intermediate, or senior, buy the book? There seems to be something useful for everyone in this book, though what that something is varies from person to person.

To paraphrase an earlier, very well-known (!) book, this book is a bunch of thoughts. In this sense, the title Anubhuti is very accurate—it is Kannikeswaran’s personal anubhuti of Dikshitar. Within the intricately intertwined bundle of thoughts the book represents, it is up to the reader to identify and choose for himself what may be important to him. In a book of this sort, a very significant lacuna is unfortunately a limitation of the medium itself. There are no audio recordings of the music itself that the author writes about so eloquently. 

When one refers to, for example, Mayuranatham in the raga Dhanyasi, what happens to the reader who does not know what raga Dhanyasi is? He will be at a loss to understand the true importance of the discussion. What if the reader does not know that Mayuranatham is a reference to Lord Shiva presiding over the town of Mayilatudurai, formally called Mayavaram, where Lord Hayagriva initiated Rishi Agastya in the Lalita Sahasranamam, one of the pillars of Sri Vidya? The general reader may feel stranded in a maelstrom of what he may take to be obtuse facts.

Meanwhile, for someone who is already aware of the relevance of the term Mayuranatham, the raga Dhanyasi, the presiding deity, and the connection with Sri Vidya, what additional value could one add through the book to such a person’s repertoire? For those who do not know much of Muthuswami Dikshitar and Carnatic music, much of the book is not understandable. For those who know something about music, most of the book would already be known. 

Yet, there are facts that even I, someone with a somewhat extensive knowledge of the subject, was introduced to by the book. One example that stuck with me was that the kritis dedicated to deities in the northern part of India do not have details of what we call sthalapurana, or the history of the temple, its geography, and the gods and goddesses presiding there–a picture that Dikshitar painstakingly paints for temples in the South. Take, for instance, two kritis in the raga Shivapantuvarali, one on Vishnu, Sri Sathyanarayanam Upasmahe, dedicated to Badrinath, and another on Shiva, Pashupathishwaram. Both kritis are taken as textbook examples of Hindustani classical influence on Dikshitar, actually to the point of boredom.

Intriguingly, the physical and contextual details of the temples in Badrinath and Kathmandu are absent in the kritis themselves. Points like these may be pretty useful and thought-provoking for others as well. It is in this light that I could see novelty in this book.

Kannikeswaran undoubtedly knows his Dikshitar, as he has expressed through Anubhuti. However, for neophytes and the lay reader, the book demands a lot of searching, data mining, and roving inquiry for it to make sense-an endeavour that may be all too forbidding for a significant number. As a structural chemist with a strong interest in metallurgy, I would draw parallels to refining a metal from its ore. There are indeed things of great value in this book. Yet, it demands a very resourceful, curious, and persistent reader to coax usefulness from a bewildering number of what may seem to be a smorgasbord of unrelated facts. The metal is of high value, but the ore is of lower grade, and this is always a challenge for the metallurgist.

Readers with intermediate knowledge of Carnatic music may listen to specific ragas and kritis to view compositions in a new light, provided they are willing to undertake sizeable homework. The book does not provide any guidelines or roadmaps for how one may do so. A digital version of this book with interactive links to the actual music should be given to do justice to the book. After all, music of any form must be heard.

Veena Dhanammal, whom I have referred to earlier, when informed of the establishment of the Music Academy, Madras, sometime in 1927-28, enquired as to the purpose of this new organisation. When told that the academy was to facilitate people in meeting and talking about music, her spontaneous, instinctive response was to question why a place must be provided to discuss music, when, in fact, music is to be performed and listened to.

While writing about Dikshitar, couldn't we have listened to him alongside? This is indeed not a particular criticism of this book; is there a need to write about music itself? There are only a few books of this kind, and none in India—though one could mention The Spiritual Heritage of Tyagaraja by Dr V. Raghavan. Even these books require a great deal of knowledge to approach. Thus, I leave the readers of the review with a question: Is a book on Dikshitar even required? If it were required, could it have been taken up in a form other than the bound and printed form of Anubhuti?

As I stated before, I am glad that this book was published, for it will provide something of value to whoever the reader may be. I am sure that whoever the reader is, Anubhuti will provoke questions in their mind. I must commend Kannikeswaran for authoring this book and sharing his own anubhuti. In some ways, the work is also autobiographical, for in articulating his anubhuti, the author has shared with us elements of his own personality, musical or otherwise.

Finally, the price, especially in INR, is well worth it. To use the Hindi expression, it is definitely paisa vasool. Thus, I urge the interested reader to buy the book with a sense of curiosity and a feeling that he may learn something new about a topic he knows very little about. Thus, I feel very positive about this book and congratulate the author for putting down his thoughts and feelings in this volume.

Gautam R. Desiraju is in the Indian Institute of Science and UPES.

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Also read

1. A Tribute to Muthuswami Dikshitar – born on March 4, 1776

2. Comparing Carnatic and Hindustani Music

3. Thyagaraja, Musican par excellence

4. Thiyagaraja Temple Album