Tyagaraja: Lyric to Liberation is first and foremost a reverential narrative of the life of an unusual person in whom the triple streams of bhakti, music, and saintliness coalesced. In Tyagaraja, the streams were fed by his remarkable ability to zero in on the single aim of liberation through a skilled deployment of language. No other composer before or since exhibited the range of emotions, sensibilities, or attitudes toward the Godhead symbolized, in his case, as Rama. Every human endeavor, short of the goal of self-realization, was a wasted effort. Rama was as real to him as any other human being with whom he interacted. The devotee and the Lord were not separate. It was this unshakeable conviction that informed the entire output of the poetry that was the collection of his songs, whether we place their number at 700 or 24,000. His lyrics were not mere exercises in musical composition or saintly spirituality: they were the man himself.

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