Purandara Dasa Aradhana

Purandara Dasa composed over 4,75,000 compositions according to tradition, of which some 1,200 survive in active performance. He systematised the pedagogy of Carnatic music, creating the exercises and scales that students still learn today: the sara sarige exercises and the graded varna-s. His work at Vijayanagara during the height of its cultural flowering shaped the grammar of Carnatic music so profoundly that later composers including the Carnatic Trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, and Syama Sastri all built on the foundations he laid. He is called Pitamaha because he is, in this sense, the grandfather of the tradition.

Hampi was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire and the city where Purandara Dasa spent much of his creative life. He is believed to have composed sitting in the sandstone pavilion that now bears his name, the Purandara Mantapa, near the Vittala Temple complex. The Tungabhadra River runs directly beside it, and the entire landscape of boulders, ruins, and ancient temple architecture surrounds the performance space in a way that few classical music venues in the world can match.

The annual Aradhana was initiated at Hampi in 1974 by N.A. Murthy, a Kannada journalist moved by then-Maharaja of Mysore Jayachamaraja Wadiyar's expressed regret that Purandara Dasa had not received in Karnataka the recognition that Tyagaraja received in Tamil Nadu through his Aradhana at Tirupati. After Murthy's death, his son Raja Rao continued the festival at Purandara Vittala Devalaya in Mulbagal, and the Samithi Trust has maintained the Hampi festival independently.