Songs of Three Great South Indian Saints

Book excerpt: This anthology provides a representative selection from the songs of three great singer-saints of sixteenth century southern India. William Jackson translates the songs of Annamacharya, Purandaradasa, and Kanakadasa in an English that is sometimes startlingly contemporary and colloquial, capturing the essence of bhakti as a movement that belonged to the people, and spoke the language of the streets. All three singer-saints lived during the peak of the Vijayanagara empire, around 1500 AD, when southern India a renaissance of Hindu culture and the north experienced a wave of bhakti enthusiasm. Thay shared an intense, transformative devotion to Vishnu in various forms; in experiences imbued with drama, each of them found their calling, gave up their humdrum lives for an ascetic one. Between them they were the acknowledged masters, even progenitors, of the love lyric, and Karnatic music. Jackson's illuminating essays on each of the singer-saints tells the story of their lives and the literature they originated. A general introduction and an essay on Bhakti literature put the songs into their historical and literary context.