God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati

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The devotional poems of Annamayya, who lived in the fifteenth century, are perhaps the most accessible and universal achievement of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India. Annamayya effectively created and popularized a new genre, the short padam song, which spread throughout the Telugu and Tamil regions and would become an important vehicle for the composition of Carnatic music-the classical music of south India. In this book, Narayana Rao and Shulman offer translations of nearly 100 of Annamayya’s poems, which were inscribed on copper plates and stored in a special vault inside the temple of Tirupati. All of them are addressed to Lord Venkatesvara at Tirupati-Annamayya’s personal deity who is sometimes referred to as ‘god on the hill’ or ‘lord of the seven hills’. The poems are couched in a simple and accessible language invented by Annamayya for this purpose. They were meant to be sung in the ragas noted on the copper plates. The poems are traditionally divided into two major categories: the erotic and the metaphysical. Erotic padams explore with the nuances of the god’s love life, and the metaphysical display the poet’s sense of himself as an agonized, introspective human being positioned in relation to the god he worships. The two categories taken together articulate a wide range of human experience in passionate, highly original, and often playful modes. Narayana Rao and shulman’s elegant and lyrical modern translations of these beautiful and moving verses are wonderfully readable as poetry in their own right, and will be of great interest to scholars of south Indian history and culture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Shulman

David Shulman is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of several works on Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit literature and poetics, and on the history of religion in South India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Velcheru Narayana Rao

Velcheru Narayana Rao is Krishnadewaraya Professor of Language and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisonsin, Madison. He is the author of a number of works on Telugu Literature.

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Bibliographic information

Title
God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati
Author
Edition
1s ed.
Publisher
ISBN
0195677099
Length
xii+142p., Index; 22cm.
Subjects