jAvaLi – lyrics and more

Started publishing a collection of a few hundred jAvaLis in different Indian languages – in Telugu script, and transliterated to English, and, some day, Devanagari or Tamil too. Wish we could locate notation or recordings too!

Master list can be viewed here – updated once in a while! All the lyrics can be seen under the jAvaLi Lyrics menu item! We’re adding at least one new jAvaLi each week. My mother’s PhD Thesis on jAvaLis can be seen at PhD Thesis. We’re typing new content EACH day!

We are now on Twitter too – please follow at @JavaliBlog (19 Jan 2024 – Announcing each new jAvaLi post on Twitter hasn’t been working for many months now! ☹️)

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26 Oct 2025

We’ve been posting #javali #lyrics since May 2020. 1251 lyrics so far and still have 100s more on hand! Huge thanks to all the music enthusiasts who have been visiting us EVERY SINGLE DAY! 140+ pages of my mom’s PhD Thesis too!

Lot more work remains – translation, notation, links to dance / music… You could do your bit by spreading the word about this site! This site will remain free.

11 August 2025

Typing my mother’s PhD Thesis is proceeding at a steady pace! You can see the Table of Contents at https://javali.blog/phd-thesis-text/. Today, I added auto-translated titles for each chapter. While the original contents will continue in Telugu, I learnt that a decent translation is possible using AI. Feel free to translate any text on your own, or, if you let me know a certain topic that is of more interest to you, I can do an automatic translation, and also review before publishing the same in this site!

12 July 2025

Will be posting the chapters of the text from the PhD Thesis my mother Mrs Mokkapati Lalitha Devi submitted to Andhra University (Andhra Viswa Kala Parishad), in 2006. First post – Table of Contents – will appear tomorrow – which also reminds us that she left us last year!

Initial content will be in Telugu language only, and in Telugu script. Intent is only to help any other research enthusiasts as a reference material.

When possible, will post the Table of Contents in English script too, and if someone who cannot read Telugu is interested in any part of the Thesis, I could find ways to post a translated version of that part.

05 July 2025

Will soon begin publishing the text of my (late) mother’s thesis for her PhD. (Telugu language, Telugu script to start with. Depending on my bandwidth / collaboration with any enthusiasts, I may attempt a translation too!)
While lyrics in Telugu and English may have helped some, hoping that her thesis may help a few more music lovers / researchers too!

27 July 2024

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that my mother Smt Mokkapati Lalitha Devi – whose research work on jAvaLis is how this blog site started, is no more! She passed away on 13th July 2024 in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, India.

I promise to keep the site alive, and enhance it with more lyrics, and more details in the years to come.

Intend to also publish her M.Phil and PhD thesis on jAvaLis here.

Thanks for all your support over the last few years!

1 May 2024

After posting 200 days non-stop, and completing around 1180, I’m afraid we may slow down a little. Our posts may NOT be daily, but will sure post new ones each week. On one side, we still have a big book of pArsi and tamil jAvaLis, and we also keep discovering new jAvaLis on internet.

Feel very happy to see a good number of visitors each day – it keeps us motivated to add more lyrics, and add more value too – posting notation, audio/video links, or hopefully, even meaning.

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19 Jan 2024 – We crossed the unimaginable 1000 posts number in Dec 2023! Thanks for the daily traffic – we would not have been able to know this if it were a printed book! (Image below shows monthly)

23 April 2022: Tried changing to a different font family so that it is easy to differentiate between letters like lower case L “l” and upper case i (“I”). If it causes a problem to read, please alert us.

27 March 2022: Over 830 jAvaLis, and counting! While the original intent was to publish only what my mother had collected, it extended to discovering many more too. Hope to somehow collect every single jAavaLi ever written/published, and post it here! Proud to say this may well be the single largest collection of jAvaLi lyrics in one place. Thanks to many who helped source the lyrics / help in transliteration! 🙏

Please spread the word so that more people benefit from the collection! 🙏

25 July 2021: As of today, we have run out of lyrics typed in English and Telugu. But, we still have many more to work on – a bunch of lyrics in kannaDa, and also a full book of pArsi jAvaLis, a set of filmi jAvaLis. Plus, we will need to spend some time to mark duplicates, add audio / video links wherever available… The blog posts will NOT stop. But, we may slow down a little for a while! Please continue to visit us, and subscribe if you wish to receive notifications!

9 May 2021: On 5th May, we realized we have been publishing for a year now! We received an occassional visitor, but that was not our objective. Intent was to mainta`in a single repository of all the lyrics we came across so far – even if it meant publishing 2-3 variations in some cases.
With 700+ jAvaLi lyrics in one place, this may be the largest repository of jAvaLi lyrics so far.
We have some more, but, we’ll slow down the publishing rate to one per day from tomorrow.

Once we complete what we have, we’ll begin a second editing round to mark all duplicates better, and also offer any audio / video links we came across!

Thanks for the support so far!