Prakriti Foundation’s Festival of Sacred Music (Thiruvaiyaru on the Cauvery), the 12th in a remarkable series initiated by cultural catalyst Ranvir Shah, took place this February in Thanjavur and Thirupugalur in Tamil Nadu. Festivals of sacred music are now popping up all over: there is an impressive annual one in Fez, Morocco; another on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea; and an International Festival of Music and Art in Rome.

India has a few too, including the Sacred Spirit Festival that takes place in March in Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur; Bengaluru’s Fireflies Festival of Sacred Music; and the Sacred River Festival in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh. Some of these have their own idiosyncratic definitions of what “sacred” means; some have unifying themes — ecological, social, meditative, mystical, and so on.

In this expanding and varied landscape, Prakriti’s Thiruvaiyaru festival is unfailingly excellent. The performances are brilliant and wide-ranging, the artists superb; the musical texts come mainly (but by no means only) from the classical Carnatic repertoire.

Reliving past genius

Throughout the 2025 festival, day and night overlapped in a gentle symbiosis — evening performances balanced by daytime adventures. A trip to Darasuram and Swamimalai ended with a veena recital at the Siddhar koyil (temple) in Thirupugalur, across from the temple where the Tevaram poet Appar merged forever into Lord Shiva.

Sikkil Gurucharan performing

On day three, a morning walk on West Main Street in Thanjavur led us past the Bangaru Kamakshi temple, to whose goddess Shyama Shastri devoted many of his musical compositions. That same evening in Thiruvaiyaru, Sikkil Gurucharan sang for Bangaru Kamakshi. I was moved beyond words.

For a moment, I thought I saw both poet Muttusvami Dikshitar and Shastri walking together, singing, just ahead of us on the street where they once lived at the same time. Imagine the creative effervescence of those days in Thanjavur at the royal court, the temples, and in the musical salons. Clearly, these astonishing geniuses are still very much alive.

Intimate settings

On the first night of the performances, Shruthi Veena Vishwanath, whose work celebrates the intersection of classical and folk forms, sang a medley of intoxicating abhangs (devotional poems), accompanied by Shruteendra Katagade on tabla and Babui on dotara. Marathi abhangs — dramatic, highly personal, emotional, and sometimes antinomian — are by now intrinsic parts of the Carnatic concert canon, as is only right.

Shruthi Veena Vishwanath at the Festival of Sacred Music

Vishwanath performed them, and also described them in words as fiery texts of resistance to oppression, prejudice, and self-righteous arrogance, thus in line with our current movements of feminism, post-colonialism, and the search for authentic subaltern voices. I could see her point, but soon I was simply carried away by the music with its bold, recurrent moments of delightful dissonance and unforeseen endings. Her English translations from the Marathi texts were a gift: Like a puppet on a string/ You make me swing/ Tinted by your sense and form/ My senses come alive, says Tuka, the 17th-century Marathi saint and poet.

On the second night, in Thiruppugalur, the versatile master of many instruments and musical forms, Thiruvetakkudy C. Saravanan, led his veena ensemble of nine in padams and other genres by various composers, including Purandara Dasa, Oothukkadu Venkata Subbaiyer, and my favourite, Muthu Thandavar. He is one of the most creative, and now largely forgotten, of the early 16th century composers of Tamil padams and kirttanais. I assume that Lord Agnisvara-Siva was listening in from across the great three-sided temple tank. Carnatic music was meant for that kind of intimate performance for a receptive, attuned audience, in just such a setting.

Experimenting with forms

The Diwanwada ruins of the Maratha palace at Thiruvaiyaru were illumined by oil lamps on every level of the still standing 18th-century dovecot when Gurucharan began his katcheri on night three. He wisely sang Tyagaraja’s Evar Unnaru, in Malavashri, on Lord Pancanadeesa, the Lord of Five Rivers. The composer’s samadhi was just a stone’s throw away on the bank of the Cauvery. Before the performance began, we had the privilege of darshan at the Thiruvaiyaru temple in that early evening hour when pilgrims linger, singing Tevaram verses, the moon is still nearly full, and the drummers are playing. That haunting moment fit the “sacred”. So did Gurucharan’s thrilling rendition of the core composition that night, Shyama Shastri’s Talli ninnu namminanu, in Kalyani raga.

We live in divisive times. Music at the highest level may offer hope and some sort of solace. People may complain about an alleged erosion of taste and the lost art of listening to classical music, but in my view Carnatic music is flourishing as never before. A new cohort of young, profoundly gifted musicians are already present in the sabha katcheris. Some are experimenting with forms and visions that deepen our awareness and enrich our experience. The sacred music festivals, such as the annual one by Prakriti, have a crucial role to play in this vibrant scene.

The writer is an Indologist and poet.