(b Tiruvarur, Tamil Nadu, 26 April 1792; d Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, 6 Feb 1827). South Indian composer and musician. He was the oldest member of the Karnatak trimūrti (‘trinity’) of singer-saints (see also Tyāgarāja and Muttusvāmi Dīksitar). His family was not musical but he was taught Telugu and Sanskrit by his father, who was the pūjāri at the Kāmāksi temple in Thanjavur. Śyāma Śāstri received his musical training initially from a wandering sannyāsin, Sangīta Svāmī, and later from Paccimiriyam Ādiyappayya. Although, like the other two members of the ‘trinity’, Śyāma Śāstri eschewed royal patronage in favour of a life of devotion, his financial position was secure due to his inheritance of land, originally granted to his father by the ruler of Thanjavur in 1783. One request he did accede to, however, was to sing against the Andhran musician Bobbili Keśaviaya, who had issued a musical challenge to the court musicians at Thanjavur.
Devotion was the primary aim of his music-making, inspired by the Hindu bhakti revivalism of the 18th century. He worshipped the goddesses Kāmāksi, to whom many of his compositions were addressed, and it is possible that he initiated Muttusvāmi Dīksitar into Devi bhakti. His output is smaller than Tyāgarāja's (traditionally said to be around 300 pieces, many of which are now lost), but it is generally considered to be extremely fine and rhythmically intricate; his use of tāla is widely admired. Śyāma Śāstri's texts were largely composed in Telugu, widening their popular appeal. Some of his most famous compositions include the nine kriti, Navaratnamālikā, in praise of the goddess Mīnāksī at Madurai, and his eighteen kriti in praise of Kāmāksi. As well as composing kriti, he is credited with turning the svarajati, originally used for dance, into a purely musical form (his three svarajati in rāga Tōdi, Bhairavī and Edukulakāmbhōji are all devotional songs to Kāmāksi).
P. Sambamurthy: Great Composers, i (Madras, 1962)
T.S. Ramakrishnan: ‘Śyāma Śāstri and his Compositions’, The Music Academy Madras: Forty Seventh Conference 1973 [no page numbers].
V. Raghavan: ‘Sri Syama Sastri’, The Music Academy, Madras: Fifty First Conference 1977 [no page numbers]
MARIA LORD