Eminent Telugu litterateur, Music Composer, Instrumentalist and Sanskrit Scholar
Rallapalli Ananta Krishna Sharma was a Telugu lecturer at Maharaja’s College, Mysore, for nearly three decades. He was single-handedly responsible for discovering and putting to music many popular compositions by Annamacharya, Vemana and Kshetrayya, which had till then been all but forgotten. Many of these compositions were so popular that musicians like M.S. Subbalakshmi and Balamurali Krishna sang them and made them household hits. Sharma was furthermore responsible for cataloguing scores of copper plate inscriptions and musical compositions which were in the Tirupati Temple lockers for centuries. He was a student of Bidaram Krishnappa and was trained in Mysore for nearly a decade in the early years of the last century. This is a small tribute to Karnatak Music’s much venerated treasure. —Ed
