- Lived:
- birth year contested — the Tirupati temple authorities hold to c. 1470, modern scholars have argued for 1480–1494; died at Hampi on 2 January 1564, one year before the empire around him fell. Birthplace also contested: Purandaragad near Pune by long tradition, Kshemapura/Araga in Karnataka's Malnad hills by recent scholarship. The life itself happened across the Vijayanagara empire — Pandharpur, Tirupati, Udupi, and above all Hampi.
- Field:
- Carnatic music and Kannada devotional poetry — the Haridāsa ("servants of Hari") singing movement of the Dvaita tradition; honoured as Saṅgīta Pitāmaha, the grandfather of Carnatic music.
- The Big Idea:
- A rich gem-and-pawn merchant gave away everything at thirty, took up a tambūra — and then designed the graded ladder of scale, exercises and first songs by which Carnatic music has been taught to every beginner, everywhere, for five hundred years.
- In their words:
- "Make me your servant, my Lord — let me carry the canopy, the sandals, the water-pot of your true devotees." (from the devaranāma "Dāsana māḍiko enna"; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- Somewhere near you, this week, a child sat down for a first Carnatic music lesson and sang the very scale and the very exercises set down in this man's name half a millennium ago. The empire he sang in was burned within a year of his death; the syllabus walked out of the fire in children's throats.