Moral Rights Before Moral Rights: The Carnatic Trinity and Modern Copyright

[L-R Sadguru Sri Tyāgarāja Swāmi; Śyāma Śāstri; Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar]: Illustration of the Trinity of Carnatic Music via Artium Academy

There is a conventional assumption, not entirely without merit, that intellectual property law is a creature of modernity. That the sophisticated apparatus of authorship, attribution, integrity, and access control is the product of Enlightenment-era statute and the subsequent centuries of legislative refinement that followed. The Statute of Anne 1710, the Berne Convention 1886, the Rome Convention 1961, these are the instruments through which we typically narrate the evolution of authors’ rights.

That narrative, however, becomes considerably more complicated when one examines the compositional practices of the Carnatic Trinity: Tyāgarāja (1767–1847), Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar (1775–1835), and Śyāma Śāstri (1762–1827). These three composers, working contemporaneously in the Kaveri delta of South India, entirely without recourse to statute, court, or counsel, obviously, deployed a suite of devices that map, with striking precision, onto the doctrinal architecture of modern copyright law. They were, in the fullest sense, authors who understood what authorship meant. They simply expressed that understanding in Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil rather than in legal prose.

This piece of mine examines such devices, namely, the nāma mudra, the rāga mudra, and guru mudra, compositional seriality, and the treatment of the public domain and considers what their existence tells us about the relationship between creative identity and legal protection.

A. The Mudra: A Signature as Assertion of Moral Rights

The concept closest to the mudra in modern intellectual property law is not copyright in the economic sense, but rather the moral right of attribution, the droit moral, as it is known in the civil law tradition, and as it is now recognised under Article 6bis of the Berne Convention.[1]

The moral right of attribution is, in essence, the author’s right to be identified as the author of a work: to have their name attached to it, to prevent its circulation under another’s name, and to claim it as theirs in perpetuity, independent of any assignment of economic rights.

Each composer of the Trinity embedded their name, or a chosen alias into every composition they produced. This embedded signature is called the mudra, from the Sanskrit for seal or mark. Tyāgarāja signed himself as ‘Tyāgarāja.’ Śyāma Śāstri as ‘Śyāma Krṣihna.’ Dīkṣitar, famously, adopted the name ‘Guruguha’ one of the names of Muruga,following his visionary experience at the Tiruttani temple, and embedded it in every krithi he composed thereafter.[2]

‘Srī Nāthadi Guruguhо jayati jayati’ is the very first line of Dīkṣitar’s very first composition. His mudra appears not in the body of the work, not in the conclusion, but in the opening phrase. The seal was placed at the gate.

The mudra was not merely decorative. It served a clear and deliberate authenticating function. In a tradition transmitted almost entirely through oral instruction and performance, where a composition might travel hundreds of miles from its source through a chain of disciples, the embedded name was the only reliable mechanism for attribution. Remove the mudra, as some performers have attempted, and you remove the author’s name from their work. Alter it, and you commit what modern law would characterise as a false attribution. The composers understood this. The mudra was not a stylistic flourish; it was a mark that is inseparable of its authorial identity.

Dīkṣitar’s mudra is particularly instructive because he did not sign with his birth name but with various other devotional aliases acquired at initiation into the Sri Vidya tradition, and other mudras too.[3] In the pallavi of Sri Nathadi Guruguhо, he goes further still, embedding not merely his mudra but his secret initiation name: ‘Shri Chidananda Nathoham iti’. Meaning, ‘I am Sri Chidananda Natha.’ This is attribution functioning at two registers simultaneously. The public name and the private identity, both woven into the text, both irremovable without destroying the integrity of the composition.[4]

But the Carnatic mudra goes considerably further than a name appended to a title page, and this is where its legal sophistication becomes remarkable. In the majority of Dīkṣitar’s compositions, the mudra is not separable from the meaning of the text. Remove it, and the lyric does not merely lose its attribution — it loses its sense entirely.

Consider Sri Nathadi Guruguhо Jayati. The very first line — Sri nathadi guruguhо jayati jayati. This line, in its essence, is a declaration of victory for Guruguha, that is Muruga. ‘Guruguha’ is simultaneously the name of the deity being praised, the philosophical concept being articulated, and Dīkṣitar’s own signature. Excise it, and you have not merely removed the composer’s name: you have removed the subject of the sentence. The composition becomes grammatically and semantically incoherent. The mudra is the pallavi. You cannot subtract one without destroying the other.

The raga mudra in the charanam/ chorus of the same composition illustrates the identical principle. The line māyāmāLāvagauLādi dēsha mahīpati pūjita pada pradēsha names the raga — Māyāmālavagaulā — as the defining musical identity of the land whose kings bow at the deity’s feet. Alter or remove māyāmāLāvagauLādi, and the geographical and devotional sense of the line collapses entirely. The attribution is not ornamental to the meaning; it is the meaning.

This is a distinction that modern copyright doctrine has only partially caught up with. The right of integrity under Article 6bis of Berne, and under Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957, protects against distortion or mutilation of a work. But the conventional assumption underlying that protection is that author and work are separable, that one can, in principle, strip the name from the text and leave the text intact, even if doing so is legally impermissible. Dīkṣitar made that assumption false as a matter of composition. In his hands, authorship was not a label applied to the work from outside; it was woven into the semantic and grammatical structure of the work from within. To remove the mudra is not to commit a legal wrong against an otherwise intact composition, it is to commit an act of destruction against the composition itself.

Under Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957, the Indian legislature recognises the author’s special right to claim authorship of a work and to object to any distortion or mutilation likely to be prejudicial to their honour or reputation.[5] The mudra system anticipated precisely this right. The composers could not enforce it in court. But they built the notice into the work itself.

B. Compositional Series: The Logic of Collective Works

The Trinity did not compose in isolation. Each developed the practice of creating compositions in series. Groups of works linked by a unifying theme, deity, or structural principle, and intended to be understood and performed together. Tyāgarāja composed the Pancharatna Krithis. The five compositions in five ragas, each a jewel, collectively a crown. Dīkṣitar composed the Navagraha Krithis, the Kamalamba Navavarana Krithis, and the Guruguha Vibhakti Krithis. Eight compositions, each employing a different grammatical declension of Sanskrit, on his presiding deity.[6]

The Guruguha Vibhakti Krithis are particularly remarkable from a jurisprudential standpoint. Dīkṣitar composed the first, Sri Nathadi Guruguhо, in the nominative case, and then proceeded through all eight Sanskrit declensions. Eight compositions. One system. The series is only complete when all eight declensions have been traversed.

This is the logic of a collective work, a work whose individual components derive their fullest meaning from the integrity of the whole. Modern copyright law recognises the concept of a collective work under Section 2(y) of the Copyright Act, 1957.[7] Dīkṣitar’s seriality anticipates this doctrine: each composition is independently protected as a musical work, but the series as a whole has an integrity of its own. An integrity that is violated when compositions from it are performed without acknowledgement of their place within the sequence.

Tyāgarāja’s Prahlada Bhakti Vijayamu, a full five-act opera, takes the principle further still. The opera opens with Sri Ganapathini Sevimpa Raare in the raga Saurashtra and closes with a *Mangalam in the same raga: what musicologists describe as upakrama upasamhara nyaya, the principle of tying beginning and ending together.[8] The structural closure is not merely aesthetic; it is a statement of wholeness. Any performance that disrupts this frame, extracting the opening without the closing, or performing the Mangalam* without the opera, fragments what was designed as an integral whole.

This is precisely the concern that modern moral rights doctrine addresses through the concept of right of integrity, the author’s right to object to derogatory treatment of their work, to prevent the work being subjected to addition, deletion, alteration, or adaptation that amounts to a distortion or mutilation. Tyāgarāja built the integrity notice into the architecture of the work itself. The raga told you where you were. The structure told you what belonged together.

C. The Public Domain and the Grammar of Attribution

The Trinity did not compose ex nihilo. They drew extensively upon a common heritage. They used the rāgas and tālas of the Carnatic system, the Sanskrit and Telugu poetic traditions, the iconographic language of Hindu theology, the compositional forms inherited from their predecessors. In doing so, they practised, with considerable sophistication, what we would now call the distinction between the idea and the expression: the rāga belongs to no one; what belongs to the composer is the unique expression of that raga in a specific compositional form.

Dīkṣitar’s compositional engagement with this boundary is documented with particular clarity. He undertook the systematic project of composing in all 72 melakarta ragas, or the complete grammar of the Carnatic tonal system.[9] In doing so, he produced musical examples for many rare and lost ragas, effectively rescuing them from the public domain by creating new, attributed works that demonstrated their structure. He was not merely using the tradition; he was augmenting it, and in augmenting it, he was staking an authorial claim to the augmentation whilst leaving the underlying grammar free for all.

This is the idea-expression dichotomy in operation — the foundational principle of copyright law that ideas, facts, styles, and techniques are not protectable, but the specific expression of those ideas in a particular work is.[10] A raga is an idea: a tonal framework, a collection of permitted phrases, a mood. Dīkṣitar’s composition in that raga is an expression: specific, attributed, and his.

Tyāgarāja’s treatment of the same distinction is equally instructive. He composed over six hundred works, though scholars dispute the precise number. The corpus itself raises fascinating questions about authenticity, attribution, and oral transmission that are, frankly, the intellectual property law problems of the eighteenth century rendered in musical terms. How does one authenticate a composition where the only record is a student’s memory of their guru’s performance? How does one establish originality when the tradition operates through elaboration and recombination?

The answer tradition developed was the mudra: if the composition contains the composer’s signature, it is his. If it does not, or if the signature is inconsistent with his known usage, it is suspect. The mudra functions, in this context, exactly as an authorship presumption operates in modern copyright law: the presence of the author’s name on a work creates a rebuttable presumption of authorship. The burden shifts to the party asserting otherwise.

D. What This Tells Us

The practices described above were not developed in response to statute. There was no Copyright Act operative in the Kaveri delta in 1800. The East India Company’s Copyright Act of 1847 was decades away, and in any event applied to books, not musical compositions. The Trinity had no recourse to law. They had recourse only to tradition, and to the norms of the guru-shishya lineage, to the shared understanding among musicians of what authorship meant and what it required.

And yet they developed attribution mechanisms, integrity protections, collective work frameworks, and idea-expression distinctions that map, with remarkable fidelity, onto the doctrinal architecture that Berne and its successors would later codify.

At this point, a second objection must be acknowledged. One more fundamental than the work-for-hire argument addressed above. The Trinity, this objection runs, were not protecting economic rights. They were not guarding royalty streams or licensing revenue. They were composing from bhakti, in a tradition that regarded music not as a commodity but as an offering, a form of worship, an act of surrender to the divine. To read their compositional practices through a copyright lens is, at best, an anachronism. At worst, it is a category error: the imposition of a commercial framework onto a sacred one.

This objection deserves to be taken seriously, because it is partially correct. Tyāgarāja did not compose Nidhi Chāla Sukhamā to protect a revenue stream. The composition comes from his own philosophical musings to his mind. The economic logic of copyright, the incentive theory, the Lockean labour argument, the utilitarian bargain between creator and public maps imperfectly onto a composer who regarded music as inseparable from devotion and the body as a vessel rather than a rights-holder.

But moral rights, and this is the crucial distinction were never primarily about money. The droit moral tradition, which forms the foundation of the Berne framework and of Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957, is not an economic doctrine. It is a dignity doctrine. It holds that a work is an extension of its author’s personality that to distort it, to sever it from its creator’s name, to fragment its integrity, is to do violence not to a commercial asset but to a person. The French courts developed this principle in the nineteenth century. The Carnatic composers enacted it in the eighteenth, not because they had read French jurisprudence, but because the underlying intuition is not legal at all. It is human.

The mudra was not a royalty mechanism. It was a statement of authorial identity. The claim is not diminished by the fact that it arose from devotion rather than commerce. If anything, it is strengthened. A composer protecting a revenue stream has an interest that can be assigned, waived, or bought out. A composer whose name is the meaning of the composition has something that cannot be transferred, because to transfer it would be to destroy what is being transferred.

This, finally, is what the Carnatic tradition offers to the contemporary practice of intellectual property law, not a model to replicate, but a corrective to a distortion. Modern copyright discourse has become so thoroughly dominated by economic analysis, by licensing revenues, by platform negotiations, by the monetisation of catalogues, that the dignity foundation of authorship protection has been progressively obscured. We speak of rights as assets. We speak of creators as stakeholders. We have built a remarkably sophisticated apparatus for protecting the commercial dimension of authorship whilst allowing the personal dimension to erode quietly in the background.

The Trinity remind us that authorship protection was never only, or even primarily, about money. It was about the insistence that a work and its creator are not fully separable. That the name in the text is not a label but a fact, that removing it does not merely breach a rule but undoes a truth. Dīkṣitar did not need a statute to know this. He simply built it into the music, note by note, syllable by syllable, in every composition he ever wrote.

That is not an argument from the past. It is a standard by which the present can be measured — and, increasingly, found wanting.

References:

[1]Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886, as revised), Article 6bis.

[2]T.K. Govinda Rao, Compositions of Muddusvami Dikshitar (Sangeetha Kalanidhi, Chennai, 1997), №43.

[3]Sreenivasarao, ‘Sri Muthuswami Dikshitar and Sri Vidya’ (2012), available at sreenivasaraos.com — a detailed musicological treatment of the Guruguha mudra and its Advaita philosophical context.

[4]KavyaVriksha, ‘Muthuswami Dikshitar’s first kriti — a multimodal masterpiece in raga Malavagaula’ (Medium, December 2025).

[5]Copyright Act, 1957 (India), Section 57 — Special Rights of Authors.

[6]The Guruguha Vibhakti Krithis comprise eight compositions, each in a different Sanskrit grammatical declension (vibhakti): nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, and vocative. Sri Nathadi Guruguhо is the first, in the nominative.

[7]Copyright Act, 1957 (India), Sections 2(y) and 13.

[8]On the upakrama upasamhara nyaya (the principle of structural closure by returning to the point of origin), see Sambamurthy, South Indian Music, Vol. III.

[9]P. Sambamurthy, South Indian Music, Vols. I–VI (Indian Music Publishing House, Madras, 1973).

[10]William Fisher, ‘Theories of Intellectual Property’ in New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

It bears noting that the Carnatic Trinity were by no means unique in employing such techniques. The use of mudras, that are distinctive signature phrases, names, epithets, or identifying markers embedded within compositions — was widespread among Carnatic composers across generations. From earlier composer-saints to later musicians and court composers, the practice of inscribing authorial identity into a work formed a well-established convention within the tradition. A comprehensive account would therefore require examination of a much broader corpus. The present discussion confines itself to Tyāgarāja, Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar, and Syama Sastri not because they alone engaged in such practices, but because their works provide particularly rich and influential examples, and because focusing on the Trinity allows the argument to be developed with greater clarity and economy.