‘Karpoora Naayakiyae Kanakavalli…’ The song blares from the loudspeakers at an Amman temple situated at the edge of the bridge on the Cauvery leading into Thiruvaiyaru. It is the extension of National Highway 226 and there is heavy vehicular traffic. Preparations are on for the fire-walking ritual. The NH 226 extension runs between the fire pit and the Amman temple; devotional fervour is running high as the time for the ritual nears.
A motley group of visitors to Thiruvaiyaru get down in front of the temple and immediately go into documenting mode — cell phones and video cameras come out as they begin to record.
Once they’re done, they have to walk into the ruins of the Diwan Wada (a remnant of the Maratha Husoor palace) behind the pit and become the audience for the first-day concert of Prakriti Foundation’s Festival of Sacred Music in Thiruvaiyaru. As they settle down in the cleaned up area behind the spruced-up Diwan Wada ruins for a contemporary Carnatic music concert, the speakers blaring ‘Karpoora Nayakiye…’ are turned away from the stage — a gesture of goodwill by the villagers organising the Amman temple festival.
The festival brings high-quality eclectic music to a sacred space. Ranvir Shah’s quest has been to create a sacred space for musical experience beyond the space. Opening up to those more meaningful dimensions of bliss has been a matter of getting sacred value to spaces. The three-day festival begins at Diwan Wada, which is dotted with typical architectural signatures such as the Pura Koondu towers (all pigeon holes have a lit lamp for the festival). Here Thiruvaiyaru has heard Tibetan chants, a father-son Sitar duo, contemporary Carnatic music and soulful ghazals.
On the second day, the venue is by the Pushyam Ghat where steps lead into the Cauvery. The Cauvery has become a trickle in the past few years around the beginning of March and so the audience sits on the river bed looking up at the stars in the sky and listens to talavadyam ensembles, the 52-member Manganiyars from Rajasthan. The festival has also driven the local population into a clean Thiruvaiyaru project. School and college students go on heritage walks to the monuments and temples in the area and the girls from the College of Arts’ hostel, who come from small towns and villages around Thiruvaiyaru, learn that music has no boundaries.
The festival is not just about music; it is also about discovering the restoration of the mural paintings on the roof of the Devashrayam Mantapam at the Thiruvarur Thyagaraja temple, finding beauty in the sculptures of Darasuram Airavatesvara temple, the magnificence of Nataraja bronzes and the mesmerising Vrishbhavahana in the Thanjavur palace museum during the day trips.
One of my favourite spaces in the festival lies nearly 20 km away from Thiruvaiyaru, in the village of Thirupugalur. Year after year, we sit on the tinnai of Mangalam, a traditional house, chewing betel leaves and drinking strong filter coffee after a lunch served on banana leaves in the magical space in front of the Agneeswarar Temple tank. It is very quiet with the breeze from the water tank floating around us. We sit sharing stories from the Puranas ; some profane, others profound. One of the poignant successes of this festival is the way it looks at changing the cultural narrative of Thiruvaiyaru by making the musical experience complete and holistic.
