The Kalahastisvara Satakamu is a collection of poems composed in Telugu by Dhurjati, who has been described as an ashtadiggaja in the Vijayanagara court of Krishnadevaraya. [1] The poems are dedicated to the form of Shiva venerated at the Kalahasti temple. [2] They are well-known by Telugu-speaking audiences. [3] [4]
A Satakamu text generally comprises a collection of one hundred poems [3] in praise of a deity. [5] The manuscripts of this text contain somewhere between 21 and 129 poems. [2] Each poem ends with an invocation of Shiva, the god of Kalahasti. [2] The poems primarily concern devotion [2] to Shiva as a means to liberation from karma. [5]
After the introduction of the printing press in the nineteenth century, print copies of the already popular Kalahastisvara Satakamu circulated among Telugu audiences. [4] A selection of these poems has been translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao and Hank Heifetz. [2] [5] The collection was published by the University of California Press. [6]