[5][8] Abandoned by Subba Rao, she found refuge under Shastri, a Sanskrit scholar in the court of the Mysore Maharaja.

[7] However, Shastri also abandoned Nagarathnamma who soon left Mysore and found protection under her uncle, Venkitaswamy Appa, a violinist by profession.

Narahari Rao, a judge in the High Court of Mysore, was one of Nagarathnamma's patrons and he suggested to her to move to Madras (now Chennai) to further her career as a musician and dancer.

[9] According to Nagarathnamma, she was directed in a dream to build a memorial in honour of Thyagaraja and create a platform for perpetuating Carnatic music.

[10] While in Madras, Nagarathnamma was informed by her guru, Bidaram Krishnappa, of the dilapidated status of the samadhi or tomb of saint Thyagaraja.

She acquired the land where Thyagaraja's samadhi was located and built a larger edifice embodying a temple in his honour with her own financial resources.

She arranged for an idol of sri Thyagaraja to be installed and consecrated by Brahmin priests and for prayers to be offered daily.

The idea of one or more female artist singing and participating in the annual functions of the shrine was anathema to society, and the rival performing groups therefore prevented Nagarathnamma from participating in the festival, even though she had paid for the renovation and she said that she would not sing or dance like a courtesan, but would only recite Harikatha in front of the deity.

She was a linguist who held religious discourses not only in Kannada, her mother tongue, but also in other languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu.

This was a book which Paidipati Venkatanarasu had edited based on the ready to print version, which Charles Phillip Brown, an eminent scholar in Telugu, had prepared and deposited in the Oriental Manuscripts Library in 1855.

She protested against this double standard and wondered "Does the question of propriety and embarrassment apply only in the case of women and not men".

However, after India attained independence the ban on the book was lifted by Tanguturi Prakasam, the then Chief Minister of Madras, with a comment that "he was restoring a few pearls to the necklace of Telugu literature".