Temple Music Traditions in Hindu South India: Periya Mēḷam and Its Performance Practice

The whole place, too, was filled with the horrid din of tomtoms, and the shrill noise of pipes, reverberating through the weird gloom of the passages, and giving one quite an uncanny feeling.

(Mitchell 1885, 140–1)

The sounds produced by these instruments are far from pleasing, and may even appear hideous to European ears.

(Dubois 1906/1986, 587)

During the festival nights of Ani Tirumanjanam and Arudra Darsanam, I have lingered for hours at a stretch at the corners of the main car streets, in the thrall of Nadasvaram music of Chidambaram Vaidyanathan of revered memory . . . Ever since my boyhood, when I heard it first, nothing has stirred me to the depths of my being as much as Chidambaram Vaidyanathan's mallāri in the raga, Nattai–played traditionally when Nataraja and Sivakama are taken out in procession during the festivals.

(Natarajan 1974, 137)

The unfamiliar music flowing inside and around the Hindu temples has caught the attention of many inquisitive European travelers to South India for centuries. Their reactions to these sounds were mixed with bewilderment and uneasiness at best, and usually characterized by impulsive criticism and naive ethnocentrism. Mrs. Murray Mitchell, the wife of an English missionary, gives a typical example of European reaction when she describes the music she heard in 1882 at the famous Minakshi Temple in Madurai as shown in the first quotation. For Mitchell, the music, sounded as "horrid din" and "shrill noise," was incomprehensive and threatening. The author of the second quotation, Abbe Dubois, is a French Roman Catholic priest and the celebrated author of the Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. Although having lived in South India for more than 3 decades and extremely conversant with the native customs and lore, he was still not free from the European-centered sensibility toward music.¹ The music which Mitchell and Dubois heard was in all probability that of the periya ensemble, featuring the nāgasvaram (or nadasvaram, double-reed aerophone) and tavil (double-headed drum).

The reaction to the same music by a South Indian Hindu, as appeared in the third quotation, presents a sharp contrast to the European characterization of the music as weird and dreadful. For him and millions of other Hindus in South India, the sound of the periya possesses auspiciousness (mangalam) and majesty (gambiram). Periya music is often believed to be the sonic manifestation of the deity, and it makes the deity's presence immediate and real to worshippers. For this reason, periya is considered an essential element of temple rituals and festivals, as indicated in a statement commonly made by periya musicians: "There is no village without a temple, and there is no temple without the nāgasvaram." (cf. Krishna Iyer 1933, 71).

While the significance of periya music in the history of South Indian culture is widely recognized, its history and past performance practices remain to be little known outside South India. In this essay, I will provide a brief account of the history and performance practice of periya music (as part of the temple rituals and festivals) by surveying existing literature and information gathered from my fieldwork.²

Historical Evidence

The origin and development of periya music is traced by musicians and patrons alike to temple rituals and festivals. However, it is difficult either to support their assertion with concrete evidence or to determine the historical depth of this tradition if in fact that was the case, due to the paucity of the historical evidence pointing to the existence of nāgasvaram. Given the current knowledge of this issue, it is important to survey presently available evidence, and to suggest the orientation of future research.

A group of South Indian scholars maintain that it was during the time of the Vijayanagar empire (14th to 17th centuries) when the tradition of periya began, on the grounds that available historical evidence is dated only after the time of Vijayanagar (Raghavan 1949, 1955; Isaac 1964; Sambamurthy 1983). The term nāgasvaram and its cognates began to appear in literary works from the early 15th century. nāgasura or n...