Friday, August 27, 2010

Champions of Carnatic music

First published in The Bengal Post

“There are good listeners,” the late Gangubai Hangal said to Shrinkhla Sahai, a young journalist, during the course of one of her last interviews, “but where are the performers?” She was speaking of the dearth of young musicians she believed existed in present day Hindustani music. In Carnatic music of the South, quite the reverse scenario exists. Plenty of young talent is visible on stages big and small, in cities and small towns, in India and abroad, but drawing young audiences is increasingly challenging, with the plethora of choices before a tech-savvy younger generation.

Happily for Carnatic music, its young practitioners have been proactive about sustaining their listener-base and building a future constituency of followers. True, without the tremendous support they have been enjoying for nearly two decades now from the subcontinental diaspora—and that includes a prominent proportion of Sri Lankan Tamils—the purveyors of south Indian classical music and dance would have been reduced to relatively small numbers, but their own efforts to take their art far and wide have been commendable.

Some of the leading musicians of today—a revealingly youthful brigade of under fifties—came together 25 years ago in a brilliant instance of intuition and foresight to form the Youth Association for Classical Music, “for the purpose of promoting Carnatic music amongst the youth, and providing a platform for talented youngsters.“ Over the years, YACM has conducted a successful slew of activities towards ensuring the continuance of the tradition and practice of Carnatic music. Its silver jubilee celebrations this month have been an unqualified success.
Other initiatives include Svanubhava—a big annual draw with young music students at the school and college levels involving concerts, lec-dems, quizzes and discourses by senior as well as current artists—and Sampradaya, an archival institution that has been organising monthly public interactions—which it calls Samvada—between old masters and young musicians, at once keeping the oral tradition alive and documenting these valuable exchanges for researchers and the general public.

One of the architects of such efforts has been the articulate and urbane vocalist TM Krishna, whose interests are wide and varied (he recently wrote a provocative article on the death penalty and did a spot of bungee jumping in New Zealand). The charismatic Bombay Jayashri Ramnath has been another. With her appeal to young listeners enhanced by a superb voice, complete absorption in her music and occasional forays into genres other than the purely classical as in film songs, jugalbandi and musicals, she has been a successful champion of Carnatic music among both the public and corporate audiences.

Chitravina Ravikiran has been a veritable global ambassador of Carnatic music and his fretless veena, creating a cerebral following not only among NRIs but also discerning westerners in the US, Europe and Australia. Festivals to commemorate the famed Trinity of Carnatic music, Tyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri are now celebrated in all the continents.

Naturally, such widespread interest has created lucrative career paths in south Indian music and dance, but an even more exciting development has been the growing number of artists born and brought up outside India. It is not uncommon for youngsters who speak English with genuine American or Australian accents and very little Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, or indeed any Indian language, to master the enunciation of lyrics steeped in bhakti and complex metaphysics, in all these languages—and Sanskrit to boot. The total dedication of these youngsters and their parents may be a measure of their western upbringing but their reverence for the old masters and their guru bhakti can put the most devout traditionalist to shame.

Perhaps Gangubai Hangal’s lament over the current state of Hinustani music was overly pessimistic, but at its best, Hindustani music may struggle to match its southern counterpart in continuing to attract young professionals into its fold. The continuous fertilisation of the mainstream by a healthy inter-migration of people and ideas across continents has been responsible for this happy state of affairs.

The one downside of such churning has been the inevitable burgeoning of a variety of half-baked efforts at fusion. Here too, some of the leading musicians of today play a vital role in maintaining aesthetic values—by insisting on constantly offering the most authentic fare in their concerts and weaning young audiences away from cheap substitutes. The future of south Indian classical arts seems to be secure.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Vyjayantimala

“I really hope you don’t enter the concert arena. We singers will have to look for a new profession if you do,” said senior Carnatic vocalist Neyveli Santhanagopalan to the veteran dancer. He was among a handful of music and dance practitioners, rasikas, and critics assembled at an after-dinner ‘thinnai’ session—the rough southern equivalent of an adda—at the sleepy temple town of Tennangur in Tamil Nadu.

The year was 2008 and the lady, already in her seventies, was a key resource person in an annual dance workshop convened by Chennai-based Natyarangam. After wowing her audiences during the day with her unflagging energy and exquisite aesthetics, she was now entertaining us to the unexpected delights of her deep-felt and nuanced singing of rare gems from the oeuvre of the Tanjore Quartet of 19th century fame. She rendered for us her first public song, one that she recorded for All India Radio when barely six, film songs she had enacted, a song she had learnt from the late Carnatic music doyenne DK Pattammal, and best of all, some brilliant samples of the Dhanammal school of music to which learning dance from Kittappa Pillai had exposed her. By the time she finished, it was past midnight, and Santhanagopalan revised his original request. “You must perform as a vocalist soon,” he said. The delighted star of the evening almost blushed. “What happens to my dance, then?” she asked, with the innocence of a schoolgirl.

Vyjayantimala Bali turned 76 yesterday, Friday, 13 August, but her passion for her art is undimmed. Just the other day, she firmly declined a request to sing or dance at the function to be held later this month to award her the prestigious E Krishna Iyer medal, “because I am already practising for two performances and I cannot do justice to one more.” This uncompromising attitude marked her distinguished career in films as well as bharata natyam. Even as a young actress still finding her way around the industry, she demonstrated the courage of her conviction by turning down a Filmfare award for best supporting actress in the Bimal Roy version of Devdas, in which she co-starred with Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen. “My part as Chandramukhi was a joint lead role along with that of Paro in the movie. It was no supporting role,” she recalls, bristling with principled outrage decades later.
One of the two men she recalls with great affection and respect is still with us—Dilip Kumar who not only inspired her with his perfect, almost effortless acting, but also put her completely at ease on the sets in the numerous films they did together. Of her other favourite film person, she says, “Bimal Da had total confidence in me and encouraged me to give of my best as Chandramukhi, a role that demanded great histrionic skills, when all around us doubted my acting ability. After all, I was known only for my dancing talent and light-hearted roles in films. The results were there for all to see when the film was released.”

It has always been fashionable for film stars with classical dance training to refer to that art as their first love, as though acting in cinema were somehow an inferior calling. In Vyjayantimala’s case, not only was she a top dancer before she entered films, she refused to dilute her art in the classical dance sequences in films, though she was not averse to performing folk or exotic numbers—as in “Dhayyare dhayyare” in Madhumati, or “Kya karun Ram mujhe budhdha mil gaya” in Sangam. Never could anyone expect her to inject anything light or film-based into her classical dance performances either.

Vyjayantimala’s life can be divided into three phases. In the first, she was a child prodigy—shaped into a fine dancing talent by her beloved grandmother Yadugiri and mother Vasundhara—and an all round athlete in the making. The second phase was her sensational film career during which she was paired with some of the biggest heroes of Tamil and Hindi cinema. Marriage to Dr. Chaman Lal Bali brought her true happiness and a fulfilling second innings as a bharata natyam artist away from the world of celluloid. This was also the period when she took to golf and won amateur titles at the national level, and took up causes she believed in as a parliamentarian.

Today, she is the perfect picture of a consummate artist who has aged gracefully, one who has so much to pass on from her rich artistic past, a role model for young aspirants in every aspect of her art. She is an outspoken champion of tradition at a time when it is under siege from several powerful forces. Her attitude to new-fangled ideas can be summed up by her comment on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas: “It is a distortion of Sarat Chandra’s classic.”

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Come August

(First published in the Bengal Post, 7 August 2010)

The December ‘season’ of Madras has been a unique event in the city’s cultural calendar for decades starting from 1927, when it debuted as an adjunct to the Indian National Congress’s annual meet. Exclusively focused on Carnatic or south Indian classical music, it grew from a festival of sorts into a major annual conference featuring not only concerts but also lecture-demonstrations of great quality and variety. It heralded the birth of the Madras Music Academy, now in existence for over 80 years and considered the Mecca of Carnatic music. Its annual award, the Sangita Kalanidhi, is a coveted honour, something every musician will die for—in fact, some greats have died before the august body could honour them. The magnificent bharatanatyam exponent T Balasaraswati has been the only artist other than a musician or musicologist to receive the award, but after some tentative attempts to feature dance alongside music in its annual conference, the Academy has in recent years added a separate dance festival to its schedule, held in January every year. Dance is celebrated annually by such major institutions as Kalakshetra—founded by Rukmini Devi Arundale—and Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, with the latter’s Nritya Chudamani regarded as probably the highest award in dance.

Neither music nor dance is any more the preserve of any of these institutions. Hundreds of sabhas—institutions supported by membership and sponsorship and headed by their sometimes all-powerful secretaries, the Tamil Nadu version of the impresario of the west—have sprung up everywhere. These conduct music, dance and theatre festivals galore during the annual ‘season’ often described as the Margazhi (the Tamil month from mid-December to mid-January) festival, but now expanded both forward and backward to include November and end-January.

Modern Tamil theatre peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but gradually lost out to cinema and eventually to television, only comedies of the lightest variety that frequently offer no more than strings of jokes surviving the onslaught. Recent efforts to revive serious Tamil theatre seem to be succeeding, though it is still early days. Unfortunately, not many serious plays are being written in Tamil because of lack of performance opportunities and vice versa.

English theatre, in contrast, is alive and kicking. The Madras Players, among India’s oldest amateur English theatre groups, have been in existence for over 50 years, and have constantly reinvented themselves to stay relevant. It is the arrival less than a decade ago of Evam, a young team of theatre professionals, that galvanised the English theatre scenario in Chennai. Though their plays may not always belong to the highest class, the group have marketed themselves expertly and brought young audiences back to the stage. Amateur groups like Masquerade, JustUs Repertory, Theatre Nisha, The Boardwalkers, Perch, Stagefright, and ASAP have managed to transform a hitherto somnolent theatre space into a happening, exciting movement, even if not always producing high quality fare. The more than 100-years-old Museum Theatre, once an acoustic marvel and still a fine theatre despite the depredations of progress is no longer an oasis of excellence, with new facilities in the city like the Sivagami Pethachi auditorium and the Chinmaya Heritage hall offering excellent choices to theatre addicts.

Though there is year-round activity, the serious theatre action in Chennai nowadays starts in August with the Hindu Metroplus Theatre Festival. In its sixth year now, the festival has been a roaring success in the city, drawing sizable audiences who pay very respectable sums of money for their tickets. The festival has in the past two or three years assumed an international complexion, with participation from the US, Europe, Korea and Singapore. This year the festival is being staged at one of the finest theatre spaces anywhere, the Mutha Venkata Subba Rao auditorium inside the Lady Andal School premises. Seating a little over a thousand people, the hall is beautifully appointed and boasts excellent acoustics. It is state-of-the-art in every respect and makes theatregoing an enjoyable experience. It is the place to be seen at for young and old theatre enthusiasts.

The Hindu has also added a new dimension to the music scene of Chennai with its Friday Review November Fest, in which it showcases classical and folk music from all over the subcontinent as well as the west. Drawing an eclectic crowd, the festival carefully avoids treading on the toes of those occupying the traditional space in music and dance, thereby offering entertainment that is very different from ‘season’ fare.

August is also the month when Madras Week—increasingly threatening to turn into Madras Month—is celebrated with several city experts producing interesting programmes on a variety of aspects of the city’s life since its founding more than four hundred years ago. Add the New Festival—earlier the Other Festival—an alternative package of music and dance from all over the whole world, a host of arts and crafts exhibitions, film festivals of a dizzying number of nationalities, and that hardy perennial The Madras Book Fair in January, and the once month-long Madras season has well and truly entrenched itself as a 6-month long celebration of the best Chennai has to offer.