April 15, 2009, marks the 150th anniversary of the earliest printed work in Car natic music, an art

which till then had largely relied on oral tradition and to a lesser extent on palm-leaf manuscripts. The Sangita Sarvartha Sara Sangra hamu in Telugu, was the work of Vina Ramanujayya of Tirunagari, who as the name suggests w as a veena artist. Interestingly, he was a resident of Tiruvallikeni. Ramanujayya came from a great music lineage. One of his ancestors was Bobbili Ke savayya who had the title of Bhooloka Chapa Chutti (the man who rolled the world into his mat) and who is said to have roamed hither and thither challenging mus icians to duels and defeating them all until he met his match in Syama Sastry. U nderstandably, several of his descendants have gone to great pains to deny this not very edifying story. But there is no taking away from the fact that he was a great musician. A descendant of Kesavayya was Vina Varadayya who composed with the mudra Vijaya Varada. His descendant was Vina Ramanujayya and he lived under the patronage of Suri Chetty Govindaraja Chetty, a businessman of George Town, Madras. It was wit h the latter s encouragement and financial support that Ramanujayya embarked on his book which was printed at the Jnanasuryodaya Press, Govindappa Naicken Street, a nd was released on April 15, 1859. In terms of content, it used a format that was to be followed by many others. Be ginning with theory of music wherein it describes the seven notes as divinities and has slokas dealing with each, it then discusses ragas and talas with slokas on them also. Interestingly, the emphasis on ragas is not matched by that on tal a, a bias that exists in music discussions even today. Rather uniquely, the swara exercises, the sarali and jhanta series have notes an d lyrics. The latter were composed by Ramanujayya himself. In addition there are alankaras by Vina Varadayya. Following this there are forty-six gitams, nine pr abandhams, chitta tanams in nineteen ragas, fourteen varnams, two swarajatis, 15 7 padams of eighteen composers and 192 kritis of nine composers including Tyagar aja, Syama Sastry and Subbaraya Sastry. A few of Tyagaraja s pieces have been single d out for some rudimentary notation as well, perhaps the first time Carnatic mus ic notation appeared in print. The Sangrahamu made quite an impact on the music world. Not only did musicians b egin bringing out their own works, several worked on fresh editions of the Sangr ahamu itself, with at least six appearing between 1859 and 1917, and quite a few made no mention of Ramanujayya at all! Subsequently, the work faded into obscur ity with the writings of the Tachur Brothers, Subbarama Dikshitar, K.V. Srinivas a Iyengar and others gaining attention. Ramanujayya, however, remained a revered name with Subbarama Dikshitar and Abraham Pandithar referring to him with respe ct in their works. Copies of the earliest edition are hard to come by today. How interest in the book resurfaced is an interesting story. Tiger Varadachariar taugh t music to Kanakammal, the wife of Dr. T. Sitapati Ayyar, Director of the King I nstitute and was a patron of the arts. Tiger drew his disciple s attention to the bo ok. Kanakammal s daughter Savitri Rajan who also learnt music from Tiger as well as Veena Dhanammal wrote about the book for a Sabha souvenir. This was read with in terest by Michael Nixon, a scholar who did much work on Carnatic music and whose lasting contribution to Madras is the setting up of Sampradaya, the archival ce ntre. Nixon and Savitri Rajan, with the encouragement of Dr. S. Ramanathan presented a paper on the Sangrahamu during the Annual Conference of the Music Academy in 19 80. Subsequent researchers have largely based their work on what Rajan and Nixon presented.