Carnatic vocalist Ajith Namboothiri’s tryst with Swathi Thirunal, a king among musicians and a musician among the kings, began during his student days at the Sri Swathi Thirunal College of Music. Recently, he released Swathi Mudra , a book on the composer-musician’s body of work. Besides exploring Swathi’s musical legacy, the book, which runs into 1,232 pages, has notations of original compositions of the king-composer.
Besides notations in Malayalam and English, it has a section with lyrics in Sanskrit (Devanagiri script). Speaking about it, Ajith says: “The seed was planted in 1991 when I met Semmangudi Swamy (maestro Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer) to prepare an article on Swathi. My query was about the general perception that Swathi’s original compositions are lost and what we hear now are tunes set by musicians that came after Swathi.
He told me that the tunes were already there in the book Balamritham and he had polished it,” says Ajith. Ajith Namboothiri| Photo Credit:SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT Balamritham was written by S Renganatha Iyer, son of Sankara Bhatt Sasthrikal, court musician during Swathi’s reign. It is believed to have original notations of the tunes composed by the king.
“There started my search to find the book that was published in 1917. First I met RP Raja who had written New Light on Swathi Thirunal , considered one of the most authentic works on the ruler. A scanned page from Balamritham was in that book,” Ajith says.
Although Raja directed him.