Ramanujan A.K. (ed.). When God Is a Customer

California: The University of California Press, 1994. — 73 p. — ISBN: 9780585102979.The poems translated here belong to the category of padams short musical compositions of a light classical nature, intended to be sung and, often, danced. Originally, they belonged to the professional caste of dancers and singers, devadasis or vesyas (and their male counterparts, the nattuvanar musicians), who were associated with both temples and royal courts in late medieval South India. Padams were composed throughout India, early examples in Sanskrit occurring in Jayadeva's famous devotional poem, the Gitagovinda (twelfth century). In South India the genre assumed a
standardized form in the second half of the fifteenth century with the Telugu padams composed by the great temple-poet Tallapaka Annamacarya, also known by the popular name Annamayya, at Tirupati. This form includes an opening line called pallavi that functions as a refrain, often in conjunction with the second line, anupallavi. This refrain is repeated after each of the (usually three) caranam verses. Padams have been and are still being composed in the major languages of South India: Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada. However, the padam tradition reached its expressive peak in Telugu, the primary language for South Indian classical music, during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in southern Andhra and the
Tamil region.