Looking beyond Swati Tirunal

Kerala has produced several brilliant composers, but their works remain neglected in the Carnatic repertoire

Three-and-a-half decades had passed since Puthucode Krishnamoorthy’s death when the musician’s daughter Uma Parvathy put together a collection of five compositions. “This is Devi Pancharatnam, penned and notated by my father. It would be nice if you could sing them,” ,” she told vocalist Baby Sreeram during the monsoons last year. Within weeks, Carnatic music lovers got to hear the well-tuned Malayalam kritis. The online event organised last year to pay tribute to Krishnamoorthy had five artistes singing the Devi Pancharatnam. Like the Nattai-to-Sri raga sequence of the famed Tyagaraja Pancharatnam, Krishnamoorthy’s kritis stick to the format of swara patterns subsequently finding expression in words. “But unlike Tyagaraja’s Pancharatnam where all the songs are in Adi tala, here each is set in a different tala,” points out Santhala Raju, who performed at the event.