The 15th Century Telugu poet Annamayya or Annamacatya, left a corpus of some 14,000 padaris addressed to the god Verikatesvara at Tiruppati. These poems mark a revolutionary shift in sensibility in South Indian Bhakti poetry, a shift linked to the world of "mood" - the irrecudible moment of nuanced feeling and perception in the experience of an irreducible individual. I distinguish, here, between "mood" and "emotion", the latter exemlified by the earlier, Tamil poetry of viraha, where the love devotee longs for the usually absent deity. "Emotion" in these Tamil poems reflects a state of melting down, loss of self, and the frustation of a goal never fully acheived. By way of contrast, "mood" in the Annamayya corpus is discursive and present-oriented in the context of a deepening subjectivity - both of the poet and of the god he worships.

The historical shift in tone is probably related to a restructiring of the social and political domains in 15th century Andhra, and to a parallel reconstruction of the Tirupati ritual and puranic worlds. Indeed, Annamayya's voice - that of a new elite active both in state-building and in the temple economy - may be said to articulate, for the first time, the ethos of a newly integrated individualism at a moment of cultural and institutional expansion. "Mood" is the defining feature of this voice, which also impinges upon the Verikatesvara mythology in its late-medieval form, and which assumes ritual roles in relation to the god's subjective pressence in the temple. A new perspective on this divine presence, accessible through a kind of yoga and the exploration of meditative moods, is implied.