His two important works, both of which are extant, are Karnātaka Kādambari, a champu (mixed prose-verse metre) based romance novel and an adaptation of Bana's Sanskrit Kādambari, and Chandōmbudhi (also spelt Chhandombudhi, lit, "Ocean of prosody" or "Ocean of metres"), the earliest available work on Kannada prosody which Nāgavarma I claims would command the respect even of poet Kalidasa.
Nilakanta Shastri and R. Narasimhacharya, Nāgavarma I belonged to a migrant Brahmin family originally from Vengi (in modern Andhra Pradesh).
[9] Chandombudhi, the earliest work on the science of prosody (Chandonusasana) is important from the point of establishing a relationship between native (desi) folk metrical forms of Kannada and the dominant Sanskritic literary culture that had descended on medieval Karnataka.
It was written at a time when the Sanskrit textual production had won mainstream (margam) appeal and its scholars were held in high esteem.
[10] He mentions the native shatpadi (six-line verse) metre, more than two centuries before it was hugely popularised by the Hoysala poet Raghavanka in the 1225 CE.