Trust to rerecord Harivarasanam

Harivarasanam Trust, not TDB, involved in the process: Padmakumar

The sacred lullaby Harivarasanam Viswamohanam… , rendered at the Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala while closing the sanctum sanctorum after the rituals every day, has created a flutter in the social media with a audio track doing the rounds that singer Yesudas has rendered its revised version.

The Harivarasanam uploaded on the social media now is believed to be the one sung by Yesudas at a classical music concert in Chennai.

Earlier, there were reports that the Travancore Devaswom Board had decided to rerecord the song with certain corrections in the existing version sung by Yesudas, once it received the singer’s date.

No TDB decision

However, TDB president A.Padmakumar told

The Hindu that the board had not decided to rerecord the song. Instead, the Thiruvananthapuram-based Harivarasanam Trust, of which Mr. Padmakumar is the secretary, had decided to rerecord the song with certain corrections.

Mr. Padmakumar said Yesudas had informed the Harivarasanam Trust that he would be able to give a date for rerecording the song in February or March.

There are many versions of the song by many music directors and many singers. But the song played at Sabarimala is the one sung by Yesudas, tuned by G.Devarajan.

Yesudas had sung the song for the movie Swamy Ayyappan in 1975 and since then its recorded version had been played during the closing of the sanctum after the day’s rituals.

During his pilgrimage to Sabarimala in 2017, Yesudas admitted that the words ‘ari’ (enemy) and ‘vimardhanam’ (annihilation) in the lyrics should have been spelt separately and he would be happy to rerecord it with due corrections.

Mr. Padmakumar had claimed that Harivarasanam was written by Konnakathu Janaki Amma, his grandfather’s sister, whose father, Ananthakrishna Iyer, was the head priest at Sabarimala from 1907 to 1920.

The TDB president said he had enough evidence, including the author’s manuscript, to prove that Janaki Amma had written Harivarasanam.

Mr. Padmakumar said the honorific term ‘Swami’ was there in each line of the original verses, which was absent in the recorded version.

However, he says the sacred lullaby sung by the Melsanthi is the original version and the recorded version, simultaneously played outside, is meant for the devotees outside the temple.