Tamil Nadu

What lives here

The Carnatic music tradition is inseparable from Tamil Nadu. Its compositions were written in Telugu, Tamil, Sanskrit, and Kannada by composers who lived and worked in the Cauvery basin and the Thanjavur court. The sabhas, the music societies that organise the December season, have been meeting since the early twentieth century and have grown their own culture: audiences who know the repertoire, critics who follow lineages, families who attend certain musicians across decades.

The Thanjavur bronze tradition, the Chola bronzes, the nataraja, the temple processional images, is a living craft. The families who cast these objects in the traditional method, using lost-wax casting unchanged from the ninth century, still work in and around Thanjavur and Kumbakonam. What they make continues the line rather than copying it.

The temple tank tradition of Tamil Nadu is a devotional system: the tank holds sacred water, the rituals are performed at the tank, the musical traditions were developed for the tank and the gopuram that face it. To understand Carnatic music without understanding the temple context is to misunderstand it.