I’ve written about some of his songs in previous posts. Although we no longer know their original melodies, many of Annamayya’s compositions were set to music in the twentieth century, and they’ve become a popular part of the Carnatic repertoire. He is largely responsible for pioneering a new poetic genre, the padam, which rapidly spread throughout south India. Around his lifetime, something like thirteen thousand (!) of his poems were inscribed on copper plates and stored in a vault inside the Tirupati temple, where they remained hidden until the twentieth century. Annamayya lived at the hilltop temple of Tirupati, where he composed thousands of songs to the god Venkateswara. Muddugare Yashoda is a bright, simple song in Telugu, attributed to the fifteenth-century poet-saint Annamacharya (colloquially called Annamayya). I hadn’t heard it before, but after looking it up I thought I had to make a blog post about it! (I also needed some way to procrastinate on packing before I go study abroad in Morocco this upcoming quarter.)

That same evening, her dad told me about this Telugu song, Muddugare Yashoda. My cousin Parnika is three years old, and even at her young age she’s showing signs of being kind of a genius (in my family’s opinion, at least)! In addition to learning English nursery rhymes at her daycare, her dad has been teaching her Hindi children’s songs (like lakdi ki kathi, which I also learned as a kid), Telugu songs, Muthuswami Dikshitar’s Sanskrit nottuswaras, and even some Tamil songs! When they came over to our house the day after Christmas, she insisted that I accompanied her on violin while she sang some nottuswaras and other songs: Tyagaraja’s vara leela gana lola, Dikshitar’s shakti sahita ganapatim, and a few others… stay tuned for when we hit the concert stage together in a couple years.

Lakdi ki kathi song meaning in english