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Purandara Dasa

Type Figure Region Vijayanagara Time c. 1484–1564 Also known as Purandara Dasa

Purandara Dasa was the foremost 16th-century Kannada Vaishnava saint and composer of the Karnataka region, active in the late Vijayanagara Empire and…

Timeline

  1. c. 1484–1530Purandar · KarnatakaTradition holds that he was originally the wealthy merchant Srinivasa Nayaka, who abandoned trade for devotion after a spiritual awakening, taking Vyasaraya of the Madhva tradition as his teacher and turning to a Vaishnava devotional life, laying the groundwork for his later large-scale composition and preaching.
  2. 1530–1564Vijayanagara cultural sphere · VijayanagaraFrom the 1530s to the 1560s he composed numerous kīrtana in Kannada within the Vijayanagara Empire's cultural sphere, expounding Krishna bhakti doctrine and systematizing swara and alankara exercises. The 1540s–1550s were his most productive period, and his works spread widely in the south through oral transmission and manuscripts.

Sources