Song in praise of St. Joseph
Set to the tune of Thokayara

The anonymous author of the song presents the text in the form of a prayer addressed to St. Joseph. The forty verses in twenty couplets cover selected events from the infancy narratives in the Gospels according to St. Mathew (Mt 1:18-25) and St. Luke (1:26-38, 2:22-52). When the Bible was not yet available in the Malayalam language, the song served as a means of catechesis.
From a literary point of view, the text may be placed in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The Italian missionaries promoted the devotion to St. Joseph in South India in the eighteenth century. Constanzo Joseph Beschi (Viramamunivar, 1680-1747), an Italian Jesuit who worked in the Tamil speaking area, wrote an epic poem, Tempavani (“Honey-sweet Verses”), 3615 verses in honor of St. Joseph.
Varghese put the word "thokayara in parenthesis. The word may be of Tamil origin and is not in current use in Malayalam. The word may mean either the poetic meter or a melody that used to be popular in the previous century. We do not know if the author of the Malayalam text used Tempavani as a source.

( Handout for music practice)