Sarala Dās#Sarala
A figure from the books
#Sarala Das
Sarala Dās · fl. c. 1440–1470
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Music and poetry — inventor of the Telugu saṅkīrtana, the short devotional song-lyric from which the whole South Indian song tradition descends.
“Twelve thousand of his songs survived four centuries sealed on copper plates in a temple vault — the words intact, the melodies lost with the throats that carried them — so that every "Annamayya song" you hear today is his poetry in twentieth-century music, a duet across five hundred years.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“A song a day to one god, for about eighty years — and inside those songs, sung from the richest temple in India, some of the plainest words ever set down against caste: one Brahman, one and only, in the king and the servant alike.”
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