Music for a goddess in Savadatti

The sounds and rhythms of the Jogtis and Jogappas of Savadatti Yellamma came alive at the Bangalore International Centre, recently.

Ethnomusicologist and professor Amy Catlin Jairazbhoy held a screening of her seminal work on this genre of music, titled ‘Music for a Goddess’.

Born in Maryland in the US, Amy grew up appreciating Indian music and started learning it at a young age from the teachers at Wesleyan University in 1970. She then travelled to India and had her systematic training in Indian classical music at Madras University and then completed her PhD in 1980 on the same subject from Brown University. Amy has also sung at concerts in India, notably ‘Kinguri Vali’, Vanraj Bhatia’s composition in a European classical style, celebrating the charm and style of a Rajasthani woman.

However, her work that is best known in this part of the country is that of the songs by the Jogtis and Jogappas of Savadatti Yellamma. She was exposed to these songs of the goddess when she watched ‘A life before death’ by Beheroz Shroff from the University of California, Irvine. She travelled extensively across south Maharashtra and north Karnataka during her research.

She reminisces about her first visit to Savadatti, a day after the full moon, when she could experience the environment first hand. The use of the ‘chaudke’, a single-string instrument which is used to sing these songs, fascinated her. She says that the simple chordophone or string instrument represents a rare form of musical art. The songs that she documented for her film are mostly Bhakti songs, in praise of Goddess Yellamma and Parashuram. 

Previous research

Amy is carrying forward the work of several others who worked on research in the field. In particular, she is working to study the recordings of Arnold Bake, a Dutch scholar and singer. The Jogtis that Amy and her husband met at Savadatti in 1999 recognised the Yellamma song in one of Bake’s recordings, and sang it for them the following day at Karnatak University Dharwad. 

That song became the seed for Amy’s most recent film. “Bake recorded many Kannada songs in 1938 along with Shivaram Karanth, as well as Marathi songs in Belgaum (now Belagavi),” says Amy.

Bake’s extensive Mappila recordings are also being studied by historians in Kerala. These are the only known recordings of Mappila music from the 1930s, and are especially valuable because of their forgotten lyrics and historical significance. 

Bake taught Sanskrit with special emphasis on Indian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Apparently, it was Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to the Netherlands in 1920 that motivated him to study Indian music. 

While studying, Bake began traveling and recording music throughout Bengal and Nepal, then throughout India and Sri Lanka in 1936, often following in Tagore’s footsteps.

Amy’s husband, the late Nazir Jairazbhoy, was Bake’s student. Now, Amy is working on the subject: “I have been working on Shivaram Karanth’s materials at UCLA. He was Arnold Bake’s research collaborator, including on the Yellamma song recorded on the road to Bijapur. He had a notebook for that research, which I am trying to access through his children,” she says.

Amy has visited India nearly every winter since 1976. She has worked on Bake’s recordings and films since 1982, but says most of the rest of Bake’s materials remain to be studied.

A ‘jaatre’ dedicated to Savadatti Yellamma.

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