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For more than three decades, the song ‘Harivarasanam’ has resonated at the famed Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district.
Known as the ‘Urakka Pattu’ (lullaby) that puts the presiding deity Lord Ayyappa to sleep, the devotional song is rendered at around 11 pm, before the temple is shut for the day.
For years, the version of the song sung by KJ Yesudas for the 1975 film Swami Ayyappan has been played at the temple. Now, this particular version could undergo a change and a re-recorded version could take its place.
The newly appointed president of the Travancore Devaswom Board (TBD) that governs the temple said that the song will be re-recorded to eliminate two mistakes in the earlier version.
Confirming this to The News Minute, president A Padmakumar said:
According to him, at the sanctum sanctorum, the temple priests orally sing the song (the original version with the word ‘swami’ in every line). However, the movie version of the song is played through the temple stereo for the devotees to hear.
Padmakumar said that they have reached out to Yesudas already and that the singer has expressed willingness to re-record the song.
The decision to re-record the song, however, was not taken by TDB, but by the Harivarasanam Trust. It was a dispute in the authorship of the song that led to the formation of this trust a few years ago.
For the longest time, it was believed that the song was penned by Kumbakudi Kulathur Iyer in 1950. However, in 2014, the family of Konakathu Janaki Amma, who was the daughter of the head priest Ananthakrishna Iyer in the 1900s, claimed that it was not Kulathur Iyer, but Janaki Amma who penned the lyrics.
Padmakumar is a descendant of Konakathu Janaki Amma and was instrumental in forming the Harivarasanam Trust.
Asked whether the Devaswom’s consent was required to play a re-recorded version of the song at the shrine, Padmakumar answered in the negative.
However, Prayar Gopalakrishnan, the former president of TBD – who had an uneventful exit recently, after his tenure was cut short by the state government – saw Padmakumar’s move as being in line with the “newfound habit” of trying to change things at the temple.
Although Padmakumar felt that the Devaswom’s consent was not required to play the re-recorded version, Prayar has a different viewpoint.
When TNM reached out to Devaswom Minister Kadakampally Surendran, he said that he was not aware of the matter at all.
“I am not aware of such a move to re-record the song,” he said.
Prayar, however, chose not to comment on the dispute regarding authorship of the song, saying: “That Janaki Amma wrote the song is a claim by certain people. There are documents available in the temple records that should be studied and a conclusion must be drawn.”
(This article was originally published on The News Minute)
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