Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just as classical arts move with time without losing their classicism, MS’s music stays relevant with the universalism of the virtues it symbolizes.
A thousand years before Madras became a glint in British eyes, Madhurapuri, literally the ‘city of sweet nectar’, was the reigning capital of a kingdom, a metropolis, where art and literature flourished, and the nucleus of a temple civilization that held the south of India in thrall.
But it was neither the awesomeness of the towers nor the gorgeous complexity of the carvings that accorded the Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswara Temple its uniqueness. It was the idea. Among the multitude of Hindu shrines, it was the only one dedicated to Shiva and Parvati, not in their familiar forms as the destroyer-restorer and his ever-present consort, but as the romantic god Sundareswara and the fish-eyed beauty Meenakshi.
the modern phase of Carnatic music began with Purandara Dasa (1484-1564).
