Muthuswami Dikshitar, the youngest of the Trinity of Carnatic music, died on 21 October 1835 at Ettayapuram in present-day Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu. It was Deepavali day. His samadhi at Ettayapuram still draws musicians who gather there each year to sing his compositions.
He was born in Tiruvarur, near Thanjavur. Sources give his birth date as 24 March 1775 or 1776. He is credited with about 500 compositions, most of them kritis. Tyagaraja and Syama Sastri, the other two members of the Trinity, wrote mainly in Telugu. Dikshitar composed largely in Sanskrit. He signed his songs with the mudra “Guruguha”, a name of Murugan.
Training in Varanasi
As a young man he travelled to Varanasi with the ascetic Chidambaranatha Yogi. He studied music, philosophy and yoga there before returning to the south.
His kritis read like guides to the temples they praise. They name the deity, the shrine, its architecture and its rituals in detail.
The five elements in five temples
His best-known engagement with nature is the set called the Pancha Bhuta kritis. Each praises Shiva at one of the five South Indian temples associated with the five elements of Indian thought.
Ananda natana prakasam, in raga Kedaram, is for Chidambaram, where Shiva is worshipped as space. Sri Kalahastisha, in Huseni, is for Srikalahasti, associated with air. Arunachala natham, in Saranga, is for Tiruvannamalai, where the hill itself is treated as a column of fire. Jambupate, in Yamuna Kalyani, is for the Jambukeswarar temple at Tiruvanaikkaval near Tiruchirappalli, where a spring flows through the sanctum and the lingam is associated with water. Chintaya ma kanda mula kandam is for Kanchipuram, where the lingam represents earth.
Writer V Sriram has noted that it is unclear whether Dikshitar intended the five songs as a set. Performers and scholars now treat them as one group. Together they map the elements of the physical world onto specific places a listener can visit.
Songs for the planets and the rain
His Navagraha kritis, a set addressed to the nine celestial bodies of Indian astronomy, draw on jyotisha and mantra. They place the sun, the moon and the planets inside a musical cycle.
Ettayapuram is also the setting for the best-known story about him. According to tradition, he sang Anandamritakarshini, in raga Amritavarshini, to bring rain to the town, and rain followed. The story comes from musical tradition and is told as a belief. The raga’s name means “one who causes a shower of nectar”, and many musicians still associate it with rain.
Western tunes in a Carnatic frame
Dikshitar also wrote about 40 short songs that adapt Western folk tunes to ragas such as Shankarabharanam. The body of songs is called nottuswara sahitya. It shows a composer who listened widely and absorbed what he heard.
What remains
Dikshitar’s kritis are a core part of the Carnatic concert repertoire. The Pancha Bhuta kritis tie each element of the physical world to a named temple, a raga and a text. They give listeners a fixed route from music to the earth, water, fire, air and space the songs describe, 191 years after his death.
