GEOGRAPHY AS MELODY IN MUTTUSVAMI DIKSHITA'sINDIAN MUSICAL WORKS*

Lord of the Universe, You who are situated in Kashi [Varanasi], come, bless me.... Like the region of Kashi, You bestow many boons.... O Deity, by the grace of the itinerant teacher, You are seen. Muttusvami Dikshita, quoted Shrinivasan 1996 [our translation] Scant attention has been accorded the intersection of geography and music. The pioneering effort was by Peter Nash, who explored the geography of music across a global canvas (1968). Later, Martin Monkman offered a detailed look at geography and music pertaining to classical and popular Western musical styles (1992), and American country and popular music remain grist for the mill of George Carney (2002). Rolf Sternberg discussed the links of music and geography in the case of the "footloose" composer-conductor Wilhelm Richard Wagner, whose travels saw vivid expression as place experience in his librettos, orchestrations, and opera staging (1998). The paucity of studies that explore the ties between geography and music is even more signal when the music being considered belongs to non-Western cultures. Cultural geographers and anthropologists have long agreed that the spatiocultural symbolisms of integration and harmony, especially in the context of Large, complex non-Western societies, are inherently meaningful, but these cases tend to be little known beyond tight cultural bounds. Such exemplars should instead be part of the collective heritage of global cultural geography, if the discipline is to escape being mired in its currently dominant Western tradition. In this article we examine geographical themes in the musical works of Muttusvami Dikshita (1775-1834), a famous itinerant composer of classical South Indian Karnatak music. Classical Indian music is broadly categorized into the Hindustani (northern) and the Karnatak (southern) tradition or style. Hindustani music is heavily influenced by the musical systems of the Persian and the Central Asian Islamic cultures that ruled India in earlier centuries. The Karnatak musical tradition largely comprises devotional and spiritual themes and has more lyrical content than does Hindustani music. The two systems, though distinct, share technical aspects, such as notes and pitches, and claim a common ancestry in the ancient Hindu texts, the Vedas. To a person, the chief composers in the history of Karnatak music were considered religious figures, and their spiritual experience is intricately joined to their music. Some of these composers, including Muttusvami Dikshita, were itinerant and composed songs in honor of individual deities at temples they visited on their pilgrimages. India's cultural diversity is prodigious. For all that, there is also a conscious "Indianness" that undergirds that diversity and provides a unifying theme for the myriad variations (Mookerji 1960). That a single theme of identity has endured over the long history of Indian culture is due in large measure to the personalities who acted to integrate cultural traditions without impairing the diversity itself. These unifiers made patent--and promoted--an island of unity in a sea of differences. The integrative work was done not on a political or poetical footing but through the propagation of values, beliefs, ideas, and motifs that transcended the narrower identities of caste, creed, and even region. India's integrators were sages, poet-saints, wandering minstrels, and, in some cases, rulers. Examples of past cultural integrators include Sankara (ca. eighth century C.E.), Purandaradasa (1484--1564), Maharaja Svati Tirunal (1813-1846), and many itinerant poet-saints. Themes of cultural integration abound in the life traces and musical works of Muttusvami Dikshita, making him a powerful exemplar of the syncretic Indian cultural paradigm. THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF DIKSHITA'S TIME Dikshita's time was marked by consolidation of the British East India Company's political and economic control of India, after other competing European powers (the Dutch, the French) had been effectively vanquished. …