tions with specified ragas and talas, not just a bunch of lyrics found on

palm leaves (Nayar 1997, 24). The absence of exact notation, in Nayars
view, pointed to another, perhaps even more authoritative oral tradition
by which the kritis had been preserved in their pristine form: the court
musicians known as Mullamoodu lihagavatars. In the court of Swan Tim
nal they had sung in a style known as Supau2;n. a style peculiar to Kerali,
characterized by a slower pace and less ornamentation and improvisation)7
Unadulterated versions of these kritis could have been collected with
the help of the last generation of Mullamoodu Bhagavatars. claimed Nayar.
Through an oral tradition preserved by court musicians native to Kerala,
who had no ulterior motives and were permanently bound to Swati Tiru
nals court, the original compositions could have emerged into notation.
Proper musicology, in Nayars 19905 vision, would have required listen
ing to the aging Mullamoodu Bhagavatars and painstakingly recording,
through notation, exactly what they sang, no more and no less.
The Muthith Bhagavatar-Semmangudi team, however, worked with a
decidedly different notion of what it meant to do musicology The Dewan
of Travancore state. C. R Ramaswami Iyer. had proposed in 1937 that the
musical compositions of Swati Tirunal were a great contribution of the
state to culture and should therefore be revived (K. V. Ramanathan 1996,
18). At the request of the royal family, Muthiah Bhagavatar, newly ap
pointed as the principal of the Swati Tirunal Music Academy in 1939,
began the task of collecting and notatingSwati Tirunals compositions, His
son, H. M. Vaidyalingam, who assisted him, recalled the process; he and
his father went to different places in search of elderly people who might
remember songs. Muthiah Bhagavatar reduced the songs to notation and
then polished them (alakupautru: literally, to make beautiful) (ibid.,
19). What was involved in this polishing? Apparently it was a process of

making the kritis conform to the sound of Karnatic music, rather than to
the original Sopanani style. Brigadier Nayar states that instead of pre
serving the songs as they had been sung by the court musicians, Muthiab
Bhagavatar and Semmangudi reinvented them, increasing the tempo and
adding sangatis that were reminiscent of other Kamatic composers, so that
the songs would sound like Karnatic music and please audiences in Madras
(1997,2526). In the case of compositions where onlylydcs were available,

Muthiali Bhagavatar and Semmangudi retuned the lyrics. Their object

seemed to be not recovering an original sound, but instead creating music
that was plausible, and pleasurable, to their own ears.

200 A WRITING LR5SON