Hamsanadam – Raga Ruminations

In the song Bantureethi Kolu Viya Vayya Rama, Tyagaraja says that worshipping Rama liberates one from the six vices of lust, anger, delusion, envy, greed and arrogance. This song in the raga Hamsanadam remains one of the most popular Carnatic compositions till today.

Hamsanadam means the “call of the swan” and is a joyous melody to hear. Besides Bantureethi, some popular songs in this raga are Kalyanarama (Oothakadu Venkatasubba Iyer) and Kripanidhe Kripajaladhe (Harikesanallur Muthiah Bhagavathar). The song Kalyanarama describes the swayamvara of Sita – from the prelude to the actual event.

Vocalist Vijay Siva gives a stellar presentation of the song Kalyanarama following raga Hamsanadam.

http://karnatic-mp3.blogspot.in/2012/01/kalyana-rama-vijay-siva.html?utm_source=RelatedPosts

There is no Hindustani equivalent to this raga.

In movies, this raga has been used by several music producers.  Illayaraja has composed this unusual song Isayil Thodanguthamma for the Tamil movie Hey Raam.

For those who want details, raga Hamsanadam is a derivative of raga Neetimati (Mela 60) and the scale is as follows. SR2M2PN2 SN2PM2R2S

Note – Sometimes, the Shatrusthi Dhaivatham (D3) is heard in this melody – this was the traditional way of singing the raga.

1 thought on “Hamsanadam – Raga Ruminations

  1. you didnt say Poovasam purappadum penne and iravum nilavum from karnan.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this:
search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close