Why a 19th-century king’s music still provokes doubt and dispute in the Carnatic world

Daubed with a protective layer of lemongrass oil and isopropanol, the antiquated treasures of the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library are stacked ceiling-high at the Karyavattom campus of Kerala University in Thiruvananthapuram. But even amongst these riches, one collection stands apart in a low, glass-fronted almirah, with a brass lamp in front.

Inside are around 12 palm-leaf manuscripts and 23 old notebooks, bound in faded green velvet with titles stitched in silver thread. The notebooks are watermarked with the names of London stationers, dated between 1837 and 1846. In them, handwritten in tidy, curvilinear old Malayalam, and occasionally Devanagari, are music compositions, essays and a history of the Padmanabha temple. The collection spans Carnatic varnams, padams, keertanams, swarajatis and festive songs as well as Kabir’s dohas in Malayalam script and one volume titled “Hindusthani Sahityam”.

These yellowing annals are at the heart of a quest to clear an acrimonious debate around the authorship and artistry of the 19th-century composer-king of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal. In his short 34-year life, he is said to have emerged as a skilled polyglot and an eclectic creative genius who crafted at least 300 compositions in five languages, spanning mostly Carnatic but also Hindustani traditions. His efforts created an alternate centre for Carnatic excellence in Kerala, edging out its indigenous music system, the sopanam.

Questions around these claims have roiled the Carnatic world especially since the 1970s. Were these compositions actually the work of the king? Did he write only the lyrics and leave the music to his legendary court musicians? Did royalists manipulate his status as a genius in the early decades of the 20th century? Can he be rightly placed in the same league as his contemporaries, the revered Carnatic Trinity? And, finally, did he even exist?

It was a singular dispute and the scepticism was mostly met with outrage, passion and accusations of regional bias – until a computer scientist, academic and musician decided to respond with research and science.

For 40 years, A Achuthsankar Nair has been dissecting manuscripts, historic documents from across the globe – and, more recently, used stylometry – to establish the authenticity of Swathi Thirunal’s contested oeuvre.

“As a king, almost every event in his life tended to be documented, and this included accounts of the British authorities, institutions and travellers,” said Nair, a scholar and researcher. “So it is possible to use meticulous research methodology to settle all these arguments.”

Nair’s explorations have yielded both a PhD and an unusually titled book, Swathi Thirunal: A Composer Born To A Mother. And now, a state-run website dedicated to the composer that lay dormant for around two decades has been relaunched to use these arguments to establish Swathi Thirunal’s authorship of the works attributed to him. It is the only such public initiative, backed by the Vyloppilli Samskrithi Bhavan, a state culture centre, and operated by the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology, to create a digital repository of an Indian composer’s works.

For Kerala in particular, and the Carnatic world at large, Swathi Thirunal’s turbulent life and music have been a subject of enduring fascination. The story of the boy king who remained passionate about music and dance amid terrible tragedies has yielded enough drama to be the subject of several books, doctoral theses, academic presentations, a feature film and a documentary. Yet this same legacy has ignited waves of heated debate – one of which became so high-profile in the 1990s that it reached the desks of the prime minister and president, and eventually, the halls of a High Court.

Creative genius

To navigate the many strands of this dispute, one must step back 250 years.

Born in 1813, Swathi Thirunal – his official name and title run into three lines – was a long-awaited male heir to the throne at a time when the British had already established control over Travancore state. Multiple accounts cited in Nair’s book describe him as a precocious teen.

“The elder boy, now thirteen, seemed greatly improved in mind though rather diminutive in person,” wrote Colonel James Welsh in Military Reminiscences: Extracted From a Journal of Nearly Forty Years’ Active Service in the East Indies, published around 1830. “He read a chapter of Malcom’s central India; the governor general’s Persian Letter, on the capture of Rangoon; a passage in Sanskrit; another in Malayalam, and seemed equally clever at each. He then took up a book of Mathematics, and selecting the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, sketched the figure on a country slate.”

Three years after impressing Welsh with his math skills, the teen inherited the kingdom. Throughout his life, he struggled with British paramountcy while simultaneously grappling with personal loss and chronic illness.

“He had a really anguished personal and professional life – he dealt with the deaths of his child and two wives and then a Thanjavur dancer he loved deeply,” said vocalist and veena exponent Rama Varma. “He realised early that he had lost the battle for administration with the British. But for all that, he is the only poet composer whose poetry never begged or pleaded for divine mercy.”

Varma belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Travancore and has been listening to his ancestor’s works at the annual Navaratri music festival in Thiruvananthapuram since childhood. Until the pandemic, he even hosted a January music festival dedicated entirely to the composer.

The strongest musical influence in Swathi Thirunal’s early life was perhaps his uncle, the much-loved poet and composer Irayimman Thampi. But likely the most emphatic cultural shift in his life occurred in 1832 with the arrival of the celebrated Thanjavur Quartet in his court. Trained by Muthuswami Dikshitar, and credited with formalising Bharatanatyam, the brothers Chinnayya, Ponnayya, Sivanandam and Vadivelu were masters at both music and dance.

Of them, Vadivelu stayed at the Travancore court the longest, and collaborated the most with the monarch. Swathi Thirunal’s vast repertoire came to include every musical genre – krithis, varnams, thillanas, javalis, swarajathis and padams. “He was a complete artist, wrapped in ‘geetam-vadyam-nrityam’ or an interest in everything from literature to dance – soup to dessert, in a sense,” quipped Varma.

The other singular thing about him was that he acknowledged the greatness of other artistes, art forms and cultures, says Varma.

“He was an extraordinary composer for his time,” said Nair. “He remained open to multiple influences and styles and understood 250 years ago the need to communicate to a wide audience. He did this by reaching out to musicians and scholars across the Deccan and Varanasi, Ayodhya, Punjab, Bengal and Maharashtra and even Lahore.” The only other contemporary composer whose art absorbed such myriad experiences was Muthuswamy Diskhitar, but then, he had the advantage of travelling extensively in the north.

Notwithstanding his prolificness and his station, it was only around 100 years ago, with the establishment of Chennai sabhas in the late 1920s and the burgeoning alternate broadcast platforms such as the radio and the gramophone technology, that Swathi Thirunal’s music truly arrived on the concert stage.

Fame and controversy

When Carnatic music’s “Swathi moment” in the 1930s, it was irrefutable. His fame surged in Chennai, the Music Academy added his portrait to its hallowed walls alongside the Carnatic Trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri, there were thematic concerts and discussions around his music, and multiple books appeared on his life and art.

“Three years ago people had not even heard of Swathi Thirunal,” Tamil writer and journalist Kalki Krishnamurthy said in 1940. “Now his songs are all the rage…How did this happen?”

There were allegations that the royal family had mounted a concerted campaign to position the composer as a genius, aided by the influential greats Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer and Muthiah Bhagavathar, both heads of the Swathi Thirunal College of Music in Thiruvananthapuram.

The first time these accusations were recorded was in 1982. Veena guru KP Sivanandam claimed that it was his ancestor Vadivelu – of the Thanjavur quartet – who had composed the works attributed to the monarch and he had the palm leaf manuscripts to prove this. A wave of condemnation followed, but the controversy eventually ebbed, only to be revived a year later by veena maestro S Balachander, who was known for his fiercely rebellious streak.

A comprehensive retelling of the dispute is laid out in Vikram Sampath’s 2012 biography of Balachander, Voice of the Veena. Balachander’s indignation was aroused mostly by a biography written by Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Maharaja Sri Swathi Thirunal, which he said was full of “gross exaggerations, blatant bluffs, fanciful imaginations and blasphemous lies”. He demanded that the publisher, the taxpayer-funded National Book Trust, withdraw the book, and that the monarch’s portrait at Music Academy be removed from the side of the Trinity and added to a new gallery of less revered composers.

“The musical image of Swathi Thirunal is a mere product of sheer propaganda, a hoax, a myth, a fraud, a planned deception,” he raged, says the biography. The controversy flared wildly in the media and in music circles.

In 1985, Sampath recounts, Balachander held a press conference to release a booklet compiling press coverage and correspondence on the issue, which was framed as an open letter to musicologists, vice chancellors of universities, principals of music colleges, All India Radio and Doordarshan, government ministers, and even to the president and prime minister. Soon after, he declared that Swathi Thirunal was a cooked-up historical figure “not born of a mother” – which explains the strange subtitle of Nair’s book – and the product of a scam that rivalled Bofors. Finally, he turned to the Madras High Court, filing a writ petition to force the National Book Trust to verify the book’s contents and accept or reject his allegations.

“The campaign remained his obsession for at least eight years,” Sampath writes. “He wrote to the president and the prime minister of India, screamed and shouted in the press.” A year later, he passed away.

Pedants, however, did not lose their fascination with the Swathi story and the debate arose again in 2013.

Search for evidence

In the early 2000s, while he headed the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology, Achuthsankar Nair collaborated with Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan to set up a website dedicated to Swathi Thirunal. In those nascent days of the internet, the technology was limited and the 250 compositions were uploaded in MP3 format. “But it was still the third most-visited site in Kerala, just behind the government one and the public services commission,” said Vyloppilli Bhavan’s Secretary S Mankesh.

Over the last 25 years, as the internet evolved, the website became as good as unusable. There were also the new findings on Swathi Thirunal from Nair’s research and book. So three years ago, the website was pulled down. When it was revived recently, it included the findings.

Nair points to a bibliographical trail to confirm the authenticity of Swathi Thirunal’s work. He notes that as early as 1853, a mere seven years after the monarch’s passing, nearly 100 of his songs were published in Malayalam by Kanakku Kumaran Marthandan. Apart from this, he says, the first compilation of Tyagaraja’s works by Vina Ramanuja, which was published in 1859, includes a Swathi Thirunal composition.

Nair’s research uncovered the king’s works in diverse sources: “I found my grandmother’s book of songs from 1892, Sangeeta Gunadarsham, with some songs, and a 19th-century book for children, Balabodham, had some. By about 1918, a dozen such books could be found, including a 1904 biography by a descendent of Dikshitar. So the allegation that his reputation was an act of promotion in the 1940s simply does not hold.”

Beyond the paper trail, Nair turned to stylometry, a quantitative linguistic tool used to resolve disputes over authorship and authenticity of creative works by identifying unique patterns in vocabulary and syntax. To analyse Swathi Thirunal’s work, Nair extracted 50 words from the monarch’s undisputed compositions, led by frequent terms like shri, jaya and Padmanabha. By applying these markers across the repertoire, including the most contested pieces, he was able to calculate authorship scores and provide a mathematical basis for authenticity.

“It is not a foolproof method but we can conclude from the research that the authorship cannot be confirmed only in the case of 10% of compositions credited to him,” said Nair. “But that is normal for all composers of the time.”

The scores show, Nair concludes in his book, that “their authorship is not in doubt” or that “their music has not been set by Swathi Thirunal is also not in doubt”. But going by the polemics of the last 50 years, this is unlikely to be the last word on the matter.

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.