New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism 9781138503182, 9781315145280

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New Mansions for Music

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New Mansions for Music Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism

by

Lakshmi Subramanian

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Lakshmi Subramanian and Social Science Press The right of Lakshmi Subramanian to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bhutan). British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-50318-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14528-0 (ebk) Typeset in Plantin 10/12 by Eleven Arts, Delhi 110 035

For Mushir, In appreciation

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. The Katcheri: A Living Laboratory or Enchanted Space?

32

2. Articulating an Aesthetic: The Emergence of the Music Critic in Modern South India

62

3. From the Gurukula to the University: Initiatives in Music Education

106

4. The Lighter Side of Entertainment

139

5. On the History of Music: A Bibliographical Essay

157

Glossary

164

Index

168

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Preface and Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF THREE SEMINAR PAPERS THAT I WROTE BETWEEN

2006–07. The idea of knitting them together as a single narrative was very largely my editor’s who convinced me that there was a book waiting to be written. I was initially hesitant having finished a book on music in south India just then, and apprehended the possibility of sounding repetitive. However, the hesitancy vanished when I actually set out to examine the subject of music and its troubled engagement with modernity, this time not as the biography of an institution but as snapshots of the principal actors who constituted the changing world of performance. Going back to my material I realized that the story had immense potential and that our entrapment in the world of textual representation meant that the focus was never on the practitioner but on the critic and the selfappointed connoisseur who chose to represent the artist not from the point of view of his dilemma but that of his own anxiety and self-reflexivity. To this day I regret that I failed to engage with my own music teacher who was, in so many ways, a remarkable individual and a realized musician. Growing up in modern India as a middle class girl, wrapped up in the excitement of youth and self-absorption, and only partially, even absentmindedly, interested in the music lessons, I learnt to love the form but failed to give it and its practitioner the attention they deserved. I do not claim that I have the means to recuperate the musician in history nor that I have done so in these pages. All that I have tried to do is to see how the emerging functions of criticism, pedagogy and performance positioned the musician in a changing public space and how the exercise in most

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Preface and Acknowledgements

cases was an extension of the connoisseur’s prerogatives. This is not to deny that biographies have been written of musicians, but barring a few like Namita Devidayal’s lyrical novel, The Music Room, or the writings of Indira Menon on the Madras Quartet, these have tended to be small directories of well-known and endlessly churned out facts. I have, in developing my ideas, immensely benefited from a long and deep association with Jon Barlow whose interventions have always tended to be quirky, thereby forcing me to think out of the box. My parents have been immensely supportive emotionally and intellectually, sharing their time and assistance in many ways — going through my translations with a fine toothcomb and even venturing to do some freehand translations. I have also greatly benefited from talking to my younger brother whose passion for music and for Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer gave me access to that magical world of affect that I talk about. My students in Jamia and J.N.U. have provided me with what only they can do best— a sounding board to bounce off ideas that helped me in various stages of writing. My growing association with Aditi Deo a doctoral student has been immensely engaging, both at a personal level as well as at an academic one. Aditi spent a week with me in Delhi where we listened to music together, discussed our interests and research problems late into the night. The sessions were stimulating and helped me considerably in formulating my arguments. The seminars that I attended in Kolkata (2005) Mumbai (2007) and Boston (2007) brought me in close association with academics whose work I have long admired and drawn from. The material that I have consulted has been drawn principally from the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Madras, the Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi in Delhi, the NCPA library in Bombay and the National Library in Calcutta. The staff in all these institutions has been extraordinarily generous in supporting my unreasonable demands— I would be remiss if I were not to single out my aunt Vijayalakshmi, librarian in the Sahitya Akademi and her colleague Padmanabhan, who gave me all the assistance that I could ask for. Likewise Sundar and Muthumalati of the Roja Muthiah Research Library went out of their way to scan material and speed post them to Delhi making my research that much easier. And finally a very big thank you to Professor Mushirul Hasan who gave me a

Preface and Acknowledgements

xi

wonderful space in Jamia to work, teach and research. It is to him that I dedicate this work. Readers who are unfamiliar with the world of Karnatik music may be baffled by the list of proper names and of musical concepts and forms that pepper this narrative. I hope the glossary provides some relief. New Delhi, February 2008

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Introduction

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1

Introduction

It is obvious on the very face of it that it is this Academy of Karnatik music and these Sangeetha Sabhas that ought to give the lead to the whole of Southern India in the matter of our musical development and especially in arriving at and fixing that common standard. What Madras does today, the rest of the presidency will come to do in course of time. It is from here that all movements political, social or musical spread through out the province. Besides as far as I know there are no Sabhas or Academies of the kind that we have here in the mofussil; therefore, it is not too much to hope that our Academy and our Sangeetha sabhas will take the initiative in this matter. They ought to do it for this, if for no other reason, that no other organization can do it. If they too fail to do it, will not the public lay at their doors the charge that they are guilty of a gross dereliction of duty?

P.S. Iyer, 1921

A DEVOTED AMATEUR AND CONNOISSEUR, WHO SPENT HIS LIFE LISTENING TO

music and promoting the cause of a modern institutional approach to music education in Madras, P.S. Iyer, was referring to the newly established Academy of Karnatik Music in which he was personally involved.1 Like so many of his contemporaries, he embodied all the expectations and anxieties of the middle-class Brahmin elite of south India, who by the 1920s, were ready to assume the responsibility of directing and safeguarding the region’s musical tradition by incorporating it and its practitioners within a modern organizational structure. Convinced that professional musicians and traditional practitioners were incapable of training students or of assuming the custodianship of the authentic art, Iyer spoke in favour of a radical reconstitution of the art form, to be achieved through professional bodies (sabhas and samajams) that would produce a blue print for a 1P. S. Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music, Kamala Press, Tirupapuliyar, Madras, 1937, pp. 8–9.

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standard classical version of music for the region. The lead had to come from the city and its professional elite—a decision that was fraught with significant implications presaging a fundamental transformation of the musical landscape of southern India (Tamilnadu in particular) making it almost entirely urban-centric. Moving away from the larger constituency of temple ritual and consumption in the hinterland, the urban elite strove to establish a new aesthetic conception of music performance and appreciation in the secular arena. This found practical expression in the formation and activities of music associations or sabhas that within a short time became critical sites of a new disciplinary formation. As a key element in the construction of new publics, they played a major role in positioning classical music and dramatic entertainment in the cultural life of Madras city. Radically distinct from older and earlier performative spaces and associations, the sabhas emerged as critical agents in the configuring of musical aesthetics and standards articulated through the refined katcheri or concert, which, in many ways in the twentieth century context, was comparable to a descriptive catalogue accompanying art collections and exhibitions. Just as a catalogue accompanying a curated show in a museum gallery highlights selectively those items that are seen to embody a particular style or genre or even period, the concert was restructured in a manner to represent what the new custodians saw as the classical style. Consequently, the katcheri became more than just a performative space where the performer enjoyed the freedom to capture the attention of his audience—rather it became a tightly organized space where the performer was expected to abide by conventions and by a fairly fixed repertoire that carried with it, the carefully assembled markers of classicism. The newly refined modern concert format facilitated the display of music as an object with textual explication, sharply different from the emotive and non-verbal forms of experiencing music in the context of ritual and religious practice. Additionally, the katcheri played a critical role in the consolidation of a new audience and its regime of expectancies and tastes by emerging as that site where the audience could be fore-grounded as privatized owners of interiority that was emotional and spiritual. Safeguarding this domain of experience and expertise was the modern critic who emerged in the same period, in the context of an expanding literary and journalistic culture. While initially, music criticism was part of a more generalized discourse of musicology and

Introduction

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music appreciation, it subsequently entered the more public domain of vernacular weeklies, as part of entertaining social columns covering aspects of Madras’s cultural life and milieu before emerging as an explicit disciplining tool to streamline music performance that could not be completely ignored by the performer or by his corporate sponsors. The critic was, at the same time, in a unique position of mediating the space between the performer and his/her audience and of recording the dominant trends of the times in a way that was fundamentally different from earlier appraisals of performance and the art form. The validation of aesthetic standards was expressed through regular reporting and criticism, which had the power to make or break reputations, and to demand standards of performance from musicians and artistes. The emergence of the modern music critic embodied even more clearly, shifts in the changing world of performance which was being reconstituted by new agents, who from their location in the new mansions of music brought, as Amanda Weidman has recently argued,2 their modern subjectivity into play in their engagement with music, producing in the process, a new politics of voice and vocalization. A third constituent in the changing world of music was the modern music school or college that was also seen as a vital catalyst and an indispensable tool in accelerating music’s engagement with modernity. Most of the sabha leaders were explicitly in favour of modern music education, which they argued, had to be integrated into the school and university system with a definite curriculum, thereby ensuring a scientific and systematic mode of transmission besides creating an informed audience that could respond more presciently to classical music and safeguard its standards from dilution. The incorporation of music into the system of modern education became, for a brief while, a pet obsession with the Madras elites for whom scientific instruction held out immense prospects of defending the authentic version of the classical music tradition as it had historically evolved in Tamilnadu, especially since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What many of them did not factor in was the difficulties in locating the traditional guru and his methods within the new pedagogy, and the irreconcilability of the gurushishya parampara with the modern classroom system that brooked no hierarchy in principle and was 2Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Post Colonial Politics of Music in South India, Duke University Press, 2006 (hereafter Weidman, Voicing the Modern).

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ordered around very different principles of instruction, evaluation and intention. The difficulties became apparent within a few years of experimentation, when the issue of modern scientific instruction came under more serious scrutiny and exposed the contradictions that were built into the modern project of recasting music, a consequence of what Weidman calls, the conditions inherent in the curiously double life that music lived in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The simultaneous association of music in south India with technical and mathematical attributes (in full display, in certain departments) along with the emotional and melodic dimensions of aesthetic experience produced predictably divergent discourses about the most effective modes of transmitting music, and these were periodically punctuated with murmurs of nostalgia about the traditional guru and of regret over the new breed of cunning music teachers who had to deal not only with middle-class girls of mediocre talent but also with their ambitious and over-caring parents.3 The interplay of new aesthetic formulations with the ethical and artistic aspirations of the middle-class surfaced with the emergence of the modern music commentator and critic whose interventions, in fact, set the tone for the ongoing public debate about standards, classicism and the classical-popular divide in the domain of music. The debate was central to the articulation of a new and transformed public cultural sphere that played a major role in audience formation and constituting its expectations, and consequently, in shaping the normative model for performance and its appraisal that modern institutions like the universities had to take responsibility for. On the other hand, the didactic scope of performance was stressed time and again, not only as an integral element in educating the audience, but in enabling it to participate more fully and directly in identifying with the music and its performer, and thereby, become part of the enchanted magic space within a non-ritual domain. Why there was a need for such a space, how it was assembled and how it fitted into the modern project of establishing a secular space for classical entertainment, how it maintained its linkages with the new and modern institutions 3In 1945, a journal edited by S. R. Kuppuswamy was issued from Coimbatore to deal with matters of music reform. This was titled Karnata Sangeetam and carried essays and discussions and also a series of amusing anecdotes about middle-class parents and music teachers. Copies of this journal are available at the Sangeet Natak Akademy, Delhi. See the concluding chapter for a sample of the jokes that circulated around this time. The journal, in all probability, was started in 1945. The 1946 issue has clear dates but the same cannot be said for the previous year. For information on the aims of the journal, see Karnata Sangeetam, 1946, pp. i-v.

Introduction

5

of education and entertainment, what its implications were in forging and fracturing cultural practices, are some of the questions that this collection will address. Some of these issues find reflection in Amanda Weidman’s study of the violin and the politics of voice in south India, where she argues, the colonial encounter produced a particular engagement with the notion of the ideal and modern singing voice, and with the violin as the most appropriate vehicle for negotiating what was Indian and what was not. This collection, while acknowledging the importance of Weidman’s formulations, will interrogate the idea of the modern being entirely produced in and being constitutive of the colonial encounter. Even if we assume that the engagement and improvisation with the violin ‘the colonial instrument that went native’ embodied the movement towards the Indian modern through a colonial instrument, how true could this be of vocal music and vocal practices? Furthermore, how self-consciously was the modern produced? How did musicians negotiate the modernist agenda of their immediate patrons and audience? What were their specific inputs into the agenda? Was it merely a case of playing out the rhetoric in performance or was there a degree of self-awareness when they factored in technological changes that the art form had to accommodate in the context of recording and amplification? Did they completely jettison old ways of learning and old musical values that they had imbibed in their own youth and which they adapted to a new context? Was not adaptation always a recurrent pattern of Indian music and musical thought, as Lewis Rowell4 argued, for an earlier period? These questions are of some relevance, for unlike north Indian music, where only a few practitioners were directly brought in as collaborators of the project, a greater number of musicians in southern India played a key role in articulating conventions about vocal practices and sound production, occasionally invoking traditional practices of breath control and sadhakam, while at other times, segmenting and reinventing their practice for the modern concert attending audience.

Sabhas and the Middle-Class in Madras The formation of sabhas as a social formation in twentieth-century Madras forms the starting point of our study. These associations were multi-faceted; functioning simultaneously as a new socializing space 4Lewis Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology), University of Chicago Press, 1998 (hereafter, Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India).

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in the city, as a major patron of the arts, an arbiter of cultural taste and standards and a provider of a very distinct and different performative space. The new city sabhas, emerging in the latter decades of the nineteenth century were, in terms of their functions and membership, markedly different from the older performance venues located in temples and mathas of Tanjore and Tirunelveli or even in courts and individual salons. The contrast will stay with us right through the study especially as it is useful in emphasizing the special and specific profile of the sabhas as sites of modern disciplinary formations relating to the practice of non-ritual music. This, as mentioned before, was achieved through a new aesthetic conception of performance reverberating through the redesigned and redefined concert format or katcheri paddhati that became, even for schools and teaching institutions, the main blue print to follow. In other words, the collection maps the changing musical landscape in modern south India from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when a complex convergence of social changes and cultural practices associated with the formation of a new urban elite generated competing discourses of aesthetics, authenticity and meaning, and split the performing tradition into high art secular music and popular ritual music. Sabhas, however, were not static bodies impervious to change and challenge. Not all of them adhered to a similar agenda—nor were all of them interested in issues of cultural debate and custodianship. However, many of them emerged in the early-twentieth century as concerned organizations capable of providing classical music entertainment to its members, and thereafter, of redefining and setting the tenets of classicism in music. Such a situation wherein some sabhas became major and responsible speaking bodies assuming the onus of safeguarding standards, tradition and authenticity (the sampradayam) emerged largely in the context of a major transformation of the public sphere in early-twentieth century Madras and, more specifically, in response to the auditory changes within the listening public in the wake of the unprecedented popularity and spread of musical entertainment in Madras city from the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The growing appeal and availability of musical and music related entertainment generated serious questions among the middleclass about what classical music ought to be, and how it was to be presented and preserved, and made distinct from a range of other styles and forms.

Introduction

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The anxiety of the new patrons derived from a renewed and inflected appreciation of integrating those elements of cultural practice, which had artistic appeal and also carried vestigial elements of memory and inheritance and a field of association, into a modern set up. Here, sabhas had a big role to play as providers of musical entertainment in a transformed public space. What did this mean for members and those who constituted a ticket buying audience? For the former, sabhas were seen to represent a modern organizational form that gave the members the right to raise issues of organization and styles of functioning. In 1901, a letter to the editor of the newspaper, Madras Mail pointed out how poorly some sabhas in Madras were organizing cultural events like the kalakshepams (religious-musical discourse that were a form of extremely popular entertainment) and how they incurred ‘the displeasure of the citizens in the way they manage other functions’. Citing the instance of the Bagawatha Katha Prasanga Sabha, it pointed out that while the sabha was ... progressing on the patronage of the public day by day, but the Directors of the Managing Committee do not look to the comfort and of the members of the public who attend.They have on the rolls six hundred [or] seven hundred members if I am right but instead of being satisfied with the collections from the members they sell tickets at an enhanced rate to the public who are non-members ... making the hall overcrowded. I would also state that the hall will not hold more than 700 to 800 people and I have seen instances where more than 1500 should have been admitted to the meetings. On the other hand, they do not consider the inconveniences the public are put to and the sickness ... thanks to the impure air formed on account of such overcrowded meetings. The same sabha neither distributes copies of their annual reports or balance sheets to their members and do not even convene general body meetings at least once a year although the sabha is purely a public one. Under these circumstances, I would urge upon the authorities of the Sabha to look into these grievances ad do the needful in future.

The letter ended with the note that other subscribers would appreciate the writer’s sentiments.5 What the letter does suggest is how members and subscribers envisaged the sabha as an adjudicating body organized on democratic lines, and how they expected a certain measure of participatory 5 Madras

No R6383).

Mail, 25 February 1901 (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Reel

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control over its proceedings.This translated over time into a collective concern over cultural issues and the question of standards with the result that sabhas became speaking bodies which took the initiative to set conventions of performance and become sites of legitimation for classical music. From the very beginning, in fact, sabhas invented themselves as arbitrating bodies that would take the responsibility for raising general awareness of music; by inviting and sponsoring accomplished musicians, they hoped to educate their audiences and thereby, create a genuinely growing space for classical music. By the 1930s when sabhas had proliferated all over the country, this idea was firmly entrenched and expressed regularly and consistently. For example, speaking on the occasion of the Kanpur Sangeet Samaj in 1933, S. N. Ratanjhankar, a pioneer in modern music education and an accomplished singer, remarked that musicians had to do all in their power ‘to educate their audience, create a taste in them for the right type of music by a proper exposition of it and fit them out to meet it, instead of flattering them by easy tickling commonplaces. This is only possible when the audience consists of cultured people and music is the main function and not where music forms a minor item in a ceremony just to keep the guests engaged for a while and make them forget their appetites till the table is laid. Music on such occasions is like a girl in rags soliciting every indifferent passerby and addressing them Sir, may I have a morsel? Classical music especially has no reason to present itself at such places unless it is demanded for its own sake and the people are in readiness to receive it.’6 Contemporary publicists discriminated between responsible sabhas whose function was to provide and regulate music of good quality and which subsequently became important associations to seek membership in, and those that did not follow these tenets. In Madras, the profile of the sabhas as reforming and socializing spaces was even more tightly integrated into the elite’s self-description as cultural custodians and participants of a shared set of practices that had to be scrupulously protected, especially in the context of their relocation from an older ritual space to a modern secular one. The context for the emergence of the sabhas is, therefore, important and a critical starting point to begin our study. 6‘Indian

Music’, The Indian Review, Vol. 34, No. 5, May 1933, Madras, p. 364.

Introduction

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Politics of Associations: Articulating Sabha Culture The articulation of a full-fledged sabha culture was part of the larger social transformation that Madras underwent from about the latter decades of the nineteenth century.The formation of western educated professional elite groups was accompanied by a concerted effort to build associations that would represent the larger interests of the group beyond the local level and to project a clearly articulated identity that was grounded in an understanding of shared cultural and political values.7 This involved, generally speaking, a commitment to modern ideas of self-government, representative politics and social reform, while at the cultural level, it encompassed the possibility of retrieving traditional arts and practices, investing them with new significance and aligning them thereafter, to a national ideal of cultural regeneration. It was in this context of what Pamela Price has referred to as the formation of the new publics that sabhas or cultural associations for music related performance began to emerge and proliferate.8 For Price, these new associations constituted a new formation in that it represented the mobilization of a self-identifying group engaged in activities intended to build opinion or influence government policy beyond the local level. The formation of sangeetha sabhas9 was part of the same ‘public’ formation, in the consolidation of a collective cultural habit. There were commercial considerations as well; the growing popularity of musical theatre and religious discourses in Madras from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when musicians from Tanjore, (the principal centre of music until the midnineteenth century) came and performed in the city created a market 7R.Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India1852–1891, Tucson, 1974. 8Pamela Price, ‘Acting in Public versus Forming a Public: Conflict Processing and Political Mobilisation in Nineteenth Century South India’, in Keith E.Yandell and John J. Paul (eds.), Religion and Public Culture Encounters and Identities in Modern South India, Curzon Press, Surrey, 2000, pp. 27–56. 9Even a cursory reading of some of the writings of leading publicists and critics is enough to indicate the importance of attending sabha sponsored music concerts. Lada Gurden Singh mentions in the biography of Subbudu, a leading music critic, that ‘the need for sabhas was felt because they led to greater social interaction among small groups and helped sustain and develop the interest for music within the family and neighborhood’. Lada Guruden Singh, The Life and Times of Subbudu, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 2005, p. 34.

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demand for entertainment leading to the establishment of associations. Consequently from the very beginning, sabhas performed a dual function; to make arrangements for performance with an eye on the ‘box office’ as well as to invent themselves as arbiters of good taste and sponsors of classical music. As elite institutions in terms of their social composition, sabhas were especially mindful of their role as custodians of classical culture, a preoccupation that became marked from the 1920s. Sabhas in due course became an extension of the elite’s social life and expectations with the result that a distinct sabha culture emerged in the city and which became coeval with notions of status, respectability and taste. From the 1930s, sabha culture became an object of reflection in literature and popular writings as well, where it was occasionally lampooned and caricatured as a manifestation of misguided elite snobbery, and at other times, reinforced as a significant marker of good taste and sensibility. The noted litterateur and critic Kalki Krishnamoorthi (1899–1954) was especially ironical in his weekly pieces, ‘Aadal Paadal’, where he made fun of sabha secretaries running after subscriptions and seeking the patronage of city luminaries and only marginally interested in the art form and its practice. This was not so when the first associations of sabhas came into being. As organizations representing the urban elite, sabhas tended to define themselves as modern bodies, constituted to address issues of entertainment and musical taste at a time when the project of retrieving their cultural inheritance assumed importance and urgency. While most of the premier sabhas were based in cities, there were occasional instances of provincial associations and music related initiatives, cases in point being the Tanjore Sangeeta Vidya Mahajana Sangam organized by the connoisseur, Abraham Pandithar10 in 1912, and the publication of the music journal Karnata Sangeetam (in Tamil) 10Rao Sahib M. Abraham Pandithar (born 2 August 1859) learnt music under Dindigul Sadayandi Patthar and a nadaswaram artist in Tanjore, and emerged as a knowledgeable musicologist and patron. A doctor by profession, music was his passion. He knew several contemporary musicians in Tanjore, where he practiced indigenous medicine and carried out important horticultural projects. His links with local colonial officials, his educational background and service as a senior schoolteacher combined with his passion for music and traditional medicine makes Pandithar an archetypal colonial modern subject. He convened the Tanjore Sangeeta Vidya Mahajana Sangam on 14 December 1912 with stalwarts like Muthiah Bhagavatar and Konneirajapuram Viswanatha Iyer. See Karunamirtha Sagaram: A Treatise on Music or Isai Tamil which is one of the main divisions of Muttamil or Language, Music and Drama Rao Sahib M.Abraham Pandithar (first published in 1917), reprint Asian Educational Services, Delhi 1984 (hereafter referred to as Karunamirtha Sagaram).

Introduction

11

in Coimbatore. This music journal was launched after the Second World War in Coimbatore, the purpose being to ensure a standard in performance, standardize melodic conventions and compositions.11 What tied the sabhas, and even the more informal associations, together and gave them a degree of unity was their leadership which was assumed by a largely, if not predominantly, western educated elite that assumed the double responsibility of proving musical entertainment and regulating its standards. The first formal music association we come across in south India, for instance, was the Madras branch of the Gayan Samaj (1883), that represented a concrete attempt on the part of the city’s music connoisseurs to disseminate music among the middle-class, ‘to promote the cultivation of music as a domestic amusement among the Hindus who were now passing their B.A’s in the educational movement of the nineteenth century’.12 This involved a series of arrangements that included the organizing of concerts on a regular basis, establishing guidelines of music instruction and sponsoring a publication programme of music related texts and treatises. More sabhas followed largely in response to the popularity of musical entertainment in the city, so clearly revealed in the statistics of L’Armand and L’Armand:13 in 1895 the Krishna Gana Sabha was started in Georgetown followed by that of the Jagannatha Bhakta Sabha,Triplicane Sangeetha Sabha, Mylapore Sangeetha Sabha, memberships in which were thrown open to the public on payment of monthly subscription.14 By the 1920s there was a plethora of sangeeta sabhas, partly a 11Karnata Sangeetam, Coimbatore 1945. See author’s note. Copies of this issue are available in the Sangeet Natak Akademi Library in New Delhi. 12Hindu Music and the Gayan Samaj, Published in Aid of the Funds of the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj, Bombay, 1887, p. 33. 13Kathleen L’Armand and Adrian L’Armand, ‘One Hundred Years of Music in Madras: A Case Study in Secondary Urbanization’ in Ethnomusicology, 1983, pp. 411– 38 (hereafter, L’Armand and L’Armand, ‘One Hundred Years of Music in Madras’). 14P. Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, Madras, 1966, Chapter XIII. Sambamoorthy mentions that it was in 1895 that that the first music sabha, the Krishna Gana Sabha was started in George Town, Madras and that membership was thrown open to the public on payment of a monthly subscription. Also see The Kasi Diaries Excerpts from the Diaries of N.D.Varadachariar (1903–1945), edited by N.V.Sampath, Malathi Rangaswami and N.V. Kasturi, East West Books Private Limited, Madras, 2004, pp. 21, 23, 29, 33, 46, 55 (hereafter The Kasi Diaries). The diaries are replete with references to city sabhas and their concerts. Kasi Varadachariar was an important Congressman in Madras and came from an illustrious family of scholars and lawyers. Kasi was a regular sabha hopper like so many of his friends for whom attending music concerts was a customary mode of socialization.

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New Mansions for Music

consequence of individual initiative and partly because of a steady democratization of music’s audience. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar mentions in his reminiscences how he with a few friends was in charge of a sabha and managed to organize annual conferences on special occasions; how, for instance, he along with Srinivasa Iyengar and E. Krishnier was able to organize the Tyagaraja Aradhana celebrations in 1920.15 The nature of the participation and patronage, especially of the new elite, came into full display when Pandithar convened the Tanjore SangeetaVidya Sangam in 1912 and testified to both the interest of the new professional classes as well as to the importance they accorded to music as a valuable cultural resource and marker of taste.16 The activities of the sabhas went through distinct phases. Initially they responded to the growing demand for musical entertainment coming in the wake of musical discourse or harikatha performances and of the influx of traditional performers from Tanjore into Madras. The decline of Tanjore from the second quarter of the eighteenth century, partly as a consequence of languishing Maratha power that lost its vitality in the wake of British incursions into the region, had its repercussions on the arts scene.With the decline in court patronage, Tanjore ceased to be the principal cultural centre by the first half of the nineteenth century and was superseded by the rise of Madras as the city of opportunities, generated by the interest of its local notables, whose initial investment was informed by notions of ritual display and status but which eventually became an informed concern with issues of aesthetics and trusteeship of culture.The influx of performers— musicians and dancers, and harikatha exponents into the city had the important effect of maintaining an artistic and cultural continuity with Tanjore, besides constituting and consolidating an audience for music. The popularity of music and music related entertainment also had the additional effect of enhancing its commercial value, which posed the inevitable conundrum of defining the performance— whether it was popular or whether it carried other artistic possibilities and manifestations that could not be categorized as popular. The question of classicism in itself became pressing even as sabhas proliferated, and was a direct consequence of a new and collective concern among the middle-classes about their artistic inheritance 15Musings of a Musician (Recent Trends in Carnatic Music) by R.Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, Wilco Publishing House, Bombay 1977, pp. 18–19, 28 (hereafter Musings of a Musician). 16Karunamirtha Sagaram, pp. 219–21.

Introduction

13

and the need to validate it for themselves as much as for their colonial superiors. Consequently, the unprecedented popularity of musical entertainment produced an inevitable angst about standards, so much so that by the 1920s, the commercial aspect was seen by aficionados of the city to be diluting the quality of musical performance. As P. S. Iyer observed in his contributions to the Madras dailies, sabhas had become suppliers of music to the public at low prices. The initial enthusiasm for supporting music related research and establishing guidelines for performance had given way, with the result that they had become ‘cheap imitations of western societies’ and hastily organized concert suppliers.17 By this time, the importance of raising the bar for classical music had become a key preoccupation with the new patrons of the city. This assumed the form of creating a new body that could undertake studies of Karnatik music, run a publications programme and set standards for classical music performances. As mentioned earlier, for Iyer, the lead had to be given by Madras.18 Iyer’s observations clearly overlooked the network of temples and mathas in south India that remained important as patrons of music in the second half of the nineteenth century especially the Tiruvavuduthurai matham or indeed, the more modern initiative of Abraham Pandithar who organized the Tanjore Sangeeta Vidya Sangam in 1912. The latter initiative had been especially important for several reasons; it reflected the increasing interest evinced in cultural issues by networks of the literate gentry connected with colonial administration at the district level, the currency of ideas of standardization and authenticity, and new modes of pedagogy and preservation. At the same time, the initiative directly addressed the issue of local musical culture and traditions of Tamil compositions patronized by religious organizations and mathas in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As Abraham Pandithar remarked on the occasion of convening the conference, ‘as we are making researches into srutis and ragas, we found it expedient to organize a sabha of vidwans so that they may be systematized. But it is a matter of regret that many other keertanams are in use at the present time the ideas of which are not clear even now.We desire very much that the Tamilians of south India should hear more than they do now the singing of Tamil keertanams and devotional compositions like Tevarams, 17P. 18P.

S. Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music p. 9. S. Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music, pp. 9–10.

14

New Mansions for Music

Tiruvachakam. All keertanams in alien languages should first be interpreted before they are sung.’19 What he was effectively stating was the need to foreground local musical practices and compositions that did not enjoy the same circulation in the concert circuits of Madras. The statement also anticipated an important controversy regarding the issues of music and language. Pandithar’s initiatives did not, however, reflect the general orientation of the city’s sabhas whose chief agenda at this time, was to provide diverse kinds of entertainment and present an inclusive repertoire accommodating as many kinds of compositions and styles as possible, but without necessarily taking on board the issue of maintaining standards. Iyer’s critique in the 1920s, therefore, was directed at the crass commercial preoccupations of the sabhas and raised the issue of declining standards forcefully. His articles emphasized the urgency of establishing common standards that would distinguish classical music from non-classical music, and which would be safeguarded by sangeeta sabhas providing classical music entertainment of high standard, thereby validating it. On his own initiative, he founded the Academy of Karnatik Music, which he hoped, would (along with other sabhas in the city) ‘give lead to the whole of southern India in arriving and fixing a common standard. There are a few men in these sabhas who are justly regarded as musical experts. These men should hold a preliminary meeting for the purpose of setting certain details as to the way musical reform should be carried out as to evolve a common standard out of the welter of popular tastes that prevails at the present day’.20 Implicit in this suggestion was the way in which sabhas were required to reinvent themselves as arbiters of standards, thereby initiating a new kind of relationship between individual subjects (listeners) and the object (music), and isolating in the process, a body of knowledge that was defined as classical and authentic, and producing a new disciplinary formation to fit in with both performance as well as with institutional needs of modern education.The manner in which the new societies and associations embarked upon a taxonomy of compositions, styles, melodic arrangements gestured towards the sensibilities and orientation of the new class of listeners and patrons who created and simultaneously participated in what came to be known as ‘sabha culture’ that was identifiably different from an earlier listening culture associated with sadas organized in temples and mathas. 19Karunamirtha 20P.

Sagaram, p. 207. S. Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music, pp. 9–10.

Introduction

15

Sabhas became critical instruments in the larger process of secularizing music in modern India but with an important difference that distinguished it from the European experience as postulated by Kant, who had argued for a realm of aesthetics separate from religious experience in the late eighteenth century, a distinction that endured into the early twentieth century. According to his reasoning, as Beck has pointed out, religion and music had to be viewed as separate aspects of the human enterprise that were each associated, in the fashion of German theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl, with a single psychic function. In practical terms, this meant that the temple and concert stage were considered venues for separate genres of musical performance: one for religious experience and the other for secular amusement.21 This dichotomy, which was rejected in Europe subsequently, assumed quite a different shape in the Indian context where the secular staging of performance brought with it considerations of classicism associated with elite entertainment replete with new notions of ethico-aesthetics and spiritual ideals of music.The redefined concert became an important site for not merely validating classical music, but for educating the newly constituted audience and for facilitating an ambient milieu in which the performer and audience could collectively identify with the transcendental and spiritual dimensions of music. It was this overriding concern of maintaining standards and spirituality that produced a series of ambivalent responses very regularly from the sabha sponsors; while on the one hand, they definitively rejected the older modes of patronage and participated fully in the modern experience of a transformed public space, they were uneasy about over-democratization that threatened to undermine the very basis of classical music which was seen as an elite preserve and as a valuable and precious resource that could not be corrupted by crass commercialism. The situation was summed up succinctly in 1945 when, in an address to the Madras Music Academy, the premier sabha of the city, the chief guest, the Raja of Ramnad observed: The advantage in this [i.e. the sabha] is not at all disputed, since it gives chance for more number of people to hear and appreciate the art several times over. But then let us compare both [i.e. royal patronage and the sabhas]. While the former institutions enriched the artistes and perfected the art, the latter only enriches the audience, and the consequent degeneracy in art is slowly creeping in by the backdoor, due to the hurried visits of these bhagavatars 21This point is explained in Guy Beck, (ed.) Sacred Sound: Experiencing Music in World Religions, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006; see Introduction.

16

New Mansions for Music

from sabha to sabha which do not give them the leisure necessary for sadakam or practice which is the only way to attain the perfection or the height which they are capable of. By their having too many performances their health which is an essential factor to have sweetness or jeevan in their voice or sariram which gets impaired. Take the present case in our music world—why can we not look back beyond four or five musicians at the most as the outstanding artistes? I am certain it is due to the malady I have mentioned above.22

He suggested that sabhas had to be more self-regulating, and that a combination of older forms of support and the new sabhas would be more conducive to artistic development. The Madras Music Academy prided itself on being different and taking a more committed approach to the preservation of classical standards in performance—a claim that was in fact almost universally recognized by contemporaries— musicians and artistes like. This is not to suggest that the Madras Music Academy did not have its share of detractors or that it was outside of the emerging sabha culture in Madras city. What set it apart was only its remarkable success in emerging as the premier body to arbitrate on matters of convention and effectively implement a format for performance and involve musicians and musicologists to decide on both theoretical aspects and practical usage in music. Sabha culture, however, would appear to have struck firm roots in Madras even before the Madras Academy was formalized in 1929 although it became even more visible thereafter. Essentially sabha culture appears to have stood for a certain socializing habit around the listening of music and which had the effect of consolidating a sense of collective cultural identity grounded very strongly in both music appreciation and in the implicit association of classical music (Karnataka Sangeetam) with refined taste and sensibility. To this was added the more social and urbane dimensions of elite consumption; wherein the very fact of being present in a major sabha katcheri was linked with notions of self-esteem and status. Contemporary writings in Tamil and English like the ‘Karnatakam’ section carried by Kalki Krishnamoorthi in the weekly Ananda Vikatan or The Kasi Diaries (by N. D. Varadachariar) give us interesting vignettes of the workings of sabha culture, how sabhas provided the burgeoning middle-class of Madras a new space for socialization and a forum for musical entertainment. Not only did these provide musicians and performers an important performance space in Madras by the 1920s, but also 22Journal

of the Music Academy, Vol. XVII, Parts 1–4, 1946, Madras, pp. 3–5.

Introduction

17

enabled organizers and patrons to forge ties of solidarity and cultural affinity based on a collective listening habit. Within the sabhas, hierarchical distinctions occasionally came into display inviting the sarcasm of writers like Kalki and a series of popular witticisms that journals carried regularly from the 1940s. Kalki’s caricature of sabha activities was especially entertaining, when he lampooned the sycophancy of the sabha secretary concerned more with seating arrangements for the learned judge and the formalities for honouring him, and remained entirely absent-minded about the concert or its standards.23 The Kasi Diaries, on the other hand, invoke images of a more integrated and dynamic cultural scene in the city where the middle-class visited the sabhas regularly in search of theatre and musical entertainment, discussed these avidly and in the process, experienced companionship based on aesthetic appreciation.The close friendship that Kasi24 had, for instance, with T. T. Krishnamachari, was reinforced by their mutual appreciation of music and the arts and their interest in its systematic patronage and review. It was in this context that music criticism too emerged as an activity and determined the way in which performances had to conform to certain standards of classicism. Music criticism, subsequently, worked in tandem with journalism and literary activity, where the elite were equally prominent, with the result that sabhas began to reinvent themselves as arbiters of standards and aesthetics.25 The most concrete and significant illustration of this was, as mentioned earlier, the formation of the Music Academy in Madras in 1929. The emergence of the sabhas as the new patrons of music and the arbiters of its standards was linked closely to the changing sociology of performance in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when music not only moved into a new physical space, namely the city, but also occupied a different kind of secular space. Admittedly, the latter threw up its own imperatives and trappings of performance ritual and audience etiquette, but it was removed from the earlier contest 23See Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India, O.U.P. Delhi, 2006, pp. 174–5 (hereafter Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court). 24The Kasi Diaries reflect, very subtly, the nature of his friendships and personal associations. 25The Kasi Diaries, see p. 88, entry dated 28 December 1933. Here Kasi talks of the Music Conference Vidwat Committee, where the vidwans decided on the lakshanas of Karnatik-Kafi and Behag. ‘Perfect anarchy prevailed,’ he writes, ‘but the vidwans were thoroughly interesting and knew what they were talking about.’

18

New Mansions for Music

of court or temple-based ritual and more directly aligned with the world of market/commercial entertainment and bourgeois sensibilities. It was this shift that made sabhas different from earlier sadas and produced a new approach to the appreciation of music and its artistic values. To draw a distinction between sabhas and sadas will be to emphasize the contrast in terms of the constituency of listeners the two drew on, and how this, in turn, affected the semiotic dimensions of music. A brief overview of the changing musical landscape of southern India from 1880–1930 will be sufficient to track the changes that occurred in the social context of music, in terms of audience formation and audience expectation that was directly linked to new modes of listening and affect and that altered existing aesthetic parameters. The pre-modern world of patronage saw affluent men, merchants and rulers, organizing music performances or sadas where the artist was honoured and wherein the act of extending this honour was part of the patron’s dignity and status. Under the circumstances, the musician’s loyalty was closely tied up with the patron, and the rest of the audience while being appreciative and even knowledgeable, maintained a very different, even passive relationship with the art form and its practitioner. This ceased when music spilled into the public domain and sabhas emerged as providers of public entertainment. Members and organizers of sabhas could not be, and were not passive listeners; they used the occasion to evaluate the music of the artistes whom they invited, and this fed into the emerging music criticism that Tamil dailies and weeklies began to accommodate. It was from this circuit of circulation provided by sabhas, concerts and journalism that a consensus about classicism and standards came to be constructed and which was distinct from the earlier culture of musical practice and performance.

Mapping South India’s Landscape: The Changing Sociology of Performance Court sponsored music, ritual singing and individual practitioners belonging to musical families came together to constitute the complex world of music and performance in south India. South Indian musical culture operated at several levels and along discrete poles of ritual, court entertainment and higher learning. There were overlaps and

Introduction

19

exchanges between the poles even while the functions and features of performance in each of these spaces differed considerably. However, until the late nineteenth century, it would appear that the respective domains were able to accommodate a miscellany of caste groups and that the distinctions of caste and ritual status were not very rigidly drawn.26 A major patron and site of music—albeit ritual and sacral—was the temple and the adjacent religious/monastic institution or matha, especially prominent in the district of Tanjore. Both temples and mathas employed music as part of ritual worship—they supported, for instance, an elaborate orchestra designated as the peria-melam, dominated by the shawm or nadaswaram. This orchestra, along with the chinna-melam, accompanied ritual worship and drew on a specific repertoire that shared some features in common with the art music developed in courts and other spaces of secular entertainment. The dispersion of art music from the Tanjore court to the city of Madras in the nineteenth century was an important development that transformed the configurations of the music profession in southern India. In the first place, it allowed musicians concentrated in the Tanjore kingdom to explore new opportunities in the city, especially in the aftermath of Tanjore’s cultural decline. Here, especially from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, musicians began to encounter a new constituency of listeners and patrons for whom music carried affective powers of transformation and became a field of deeper personal identification and self-fashioning. It was in this context, as mentioned before, that sabhas emerged to provide entertainment, and thereafter, to deliberate on an appropriate version of classical music and a concert repertoire. The lead given by Madras city was later taken up by other centres of music patronage, courts and mathas of which mention may be made of the Mysore court under the Wodeyars and the matha of Thiruvavuduthurai (in Tanjore) especially under the leadership of Subramania Desikar from the middle of the nineteenth century. A rare connoisseur of Tamil literature and music, Desikar encouraged music-related reform and training, and supported performances that encompassed all sorts of genres and styles that included, in a big 26This was certainly true of teaching and transmission; we have clear instances of nadaswaram musicians like Rajaratnam Pillai learning from senior Brahmin vocalists. See Yoshikata Terada, ‘T.N.Rajarattinam Pillai and Caste Rivalry in South Indian Classical Music’, Ethnomusicology, 44, 3, 2000, pp. 460–90.

20

New Mansions for Music

way, the singing of Tamil devotional songs like the tevaram.27 We get an excellent account of the matha’s activities in U.V. Swaminatha Iyer’s (1855–1942) autobiography28 where he describes the annual celebrations of the matha on specific festive occasions. He speaks of celebrated musicians taking part in these celebrations that offered space for both ritual music (nadaswaram and tevaram) along with that of art music practiced by bhagavatars. In fact, under the leadership of Subramania Desikar, it would appear that the matham took on a proactive role in determining standards for music. For instance, we have stories that suggest the personal initiative of Subramania Desikar in making available the best teachers for some of his protégés like Rajaratnam Pillai, of attracting well-known practitioners to attend the celebrations sponsored by the matham. The advances in instrumental music—especially of the nadaswaram, some of whose exponents enjoyed an iconic status, would suggest that musical culture, as a whole, was beginning to respond to the changes that were ushered in the wake of new class formations, changing modes of patronage, which were becoming increasingly urban. However, the experience of playing or performing in matham sponsored sadas remained distinct from that of the urban sabha and stood for an older and pre-modern context of performance. As far as musical assemblies convened during special festive occasions were concerned, the religious and even ritual aspects of the events were unmistakable. The descriptions that we have in U.V. Swaminatha Iyer’s autobiography, of the Tiruvavuduthurai matham’s sponsored celebrations bear this stamp. Describing a festival sponsored by the matha in the 1870s, Swaminatha Iyer remarked on the wonderful variety of participating scholars, musicians and artistes. There were 27Tevarams are Saivite temple hymns set to music mainly ascribed to three ninth century poets and mystics, namely Appar, Sambandar and Sundaramurti.Their hymns were based on existing melodic traditions referred to as panns. See Ludwig Pesch, The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music, O.U.P., New Delhi, 1999, p. 186 (hereafter Pesch, The Illustrated Companion). Also see Indira Peterson, Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989. 28U.V. Swaminatha Iyer (1855–1942) was a Tamil scholar and researcher and was instrumental in bringing out many of the classics of Tamil literature. He collected and studied manuscripts and published several works on the classics with annotations and explanations. Affectionately called Tamil tatta (grandfather), his autobiography offers a fascinating reflection on the transition of a segment of Indian society under colonial rule. From studying with a traditional guru, Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Swaminatha Iyer joined the modern educational service as a teacher and his life experiences reflect the complexities of the transition.

Introduction

21

literally thousands of musicians including singers who gave musical discourses, besides those who played different instruments. Groups of Sanskrit scholars reciting the Vedas accompanied tevaram musicians who sang ‘traditional panns (melodies) in sweet voices captivating the minds of the listeners’.29 These occasions also saw musicians engaged in competitive displays—the pride of the patron being an important consideration. Loyalty to the patron was an important and sometimes over-riding determinant in the selection of compositions as well as of residence. We have the case of Ghanam Krishna Iyer resisting invitations from the Tanjore court; he was reported to have said that a thousand sovereigns would not equal the nod of appreciation that he received from his patron, Kachiragendran.30 The competitive aspect of performance with musicians engaged in vocal duels was evidently a common feature that surfaced again and again in anecdotal retelling of great musicians and the validation of their styles. They also sang with different accompanists at different times—a feature that invited subsequent criticism and was eliminated in later revisions of the concert format. Finally, the boundaries between a music performance and a public devotional display using popular religious compositions were not self-consciously drawn in the events organized by mathas. We are, in fact, told that Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer organized his concerts in such a way, that on the first day, he would adhere to a standardized concert format with a clear repertoire, while on the second day, he would sing Tamil songs almost exclusively,31 as part of a more popular devotional performance. His association with the Thiruvavuduthurai matha and its patrons like the Setupati of Ramnad32 brought him closer to the early politics of Tamil devotion; Muthuramalinga Setupati (1841–73), in fact, urged him to become more proficient in 29The

Story of My Life: An Autobiography of Dr.U.V. Swaminatha Iyer (translated by K.Zvelebil), Institute of Asian Studies, Madras, 1994, pp. 14–15, 185–200, 180ff, Chapter 44. 30U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, Ghanam Krishna Iyer in Tamil, Kesari Press, Madras, 1936, p. 41. 31P. Sambamoorthy, Great Musicians: Giving Biographical Sketches and Critical Estimates of Fifteen of the Musical Luminaries of the Post Tyagaraja Period, Indian Music Publishing House, Madras, 1959, pp. 4–5. 32The Setupati kingdom of Ramnad came into prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when British power intervened to circumscribe its power. The rulers remained important patrons of ritual and performance not to speak of Tamil scholarship, especially Saivite classical texts.

22

New Mansions for Music

Tamil and gave him a copy of a condensed version of Skandapuranam33 to be read daily and regularly. Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer took this advice seriously and over time, set several Tamil compositions to tune.34 Temples arranged for congregational singing—Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer’s father Doraiswami Iyer was a member of such a bhajana mandali and sang before the temple at Thiruvayur and which was even attended by royalty. We have an interesting description of the sadas organized by the Thiruvavuduthurai matham by U.V. Swaminatha Iyer in his biography on the celebrated musician, Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer. The sada, was on this occasion, a site for a major vocal duel between Vaidyanatha Iyer and his contemporary, Periya Vaidyanatha Iyer. The responsibility of conducting the sada was entrusted to Thandevaraya Thampiran while Venna Chinayya was appointed as mediator. The competition began in right earnest with one musician after another demonstrating his prowess.The raga chosen was Nattai, which Vaidyanatha Iyer elaborated in a variety of ways. In Swaminatha Iyer’s words, ‘he developed the raga from the lowest octave and sealed to the third and his voice was as sweet as if the dancing of the fingers on the veena produced the melody. The rasikas stood still as statues. Then only did Periya Vaidyanatha Iyer realize how wrong he had been to underestimate his opponent. He was so captivated by the music that words of appreciation poured out almost involuntarily.’35 On the same occasion, the young protégé demonstrated his understanding of theory and explained the grammar and character of the raga Chakravakam in perfect consistency with the textual version; or this was the way Swaminatha Iyer preferred to describe it. These details may baffle the modern reader. What is immediately evident is, of course, the extraordinary stature of the musician whose performance had the potential to break out of normative standards. At the same time, the description that Swaminatha Iyer came up 33The Skandapuranam is a collection of stories relating to Murugan or Skandan, represented as the archetypal Tamil warrior god. This work was retold and composed in Tamil notably by Kacciappa Sivachariyar a great Saiva Siddhanta poet and mystic and whose work Kandapuranam became an important classic for the Siddha tradition in Tamilnadu. It had important advocates from the mid Nineteenth century especially among regional kingdoms like Ramnad. 34U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer (in Tamil), Madras, 1945, pp. 6–9, 11–14. 35U.V. Swaminatha Iyer concluded his description by commenting that ‘the greatness of an individual is greatest when appreciated by the opponent’.

Introduction

23

with demonstrated not only his complete admiration for the musician who also happened to be a close relative, but also reflected the growing concern among commentators and, even perhaps performers, to validate practice by textual reference and knowledge. In any case, the comment is telling in that it underlies how important theoretical validation was for twentieth century connoisseurs and even perhaps, for their nineteenth century counterparts and practitioners. To draw a distinction between traditional sadas organized by mathas and individual patrons and modern sabhas will be to emphasize the changing context of performance and the new marks of signification that music began to bear for its patrons.This is not to deny the elements of commonality that distinguished the two formations; in both cases, there was the foregrounding of performance before a large audience as well as the honouring of the artiste. But here the parallel ended, for unlike individual patronage of the musicians, sabhas drew on market mechanisms in the form of tickets and donations and in the process, embodied a collective investment in art and its consumption.36 Again given the commercial orientation of the structure, there were constraints in terms of time, repertoire and presentation, each of which had to secure a commercial validation. But this was not the only determinant or even mark of difference. The real shift lay in the nature of performance that sabhas promoted and this had to do with the relocation of music in a non-ritual domain, which in turn, threw up a new set of aesthetic imperatives tied up with the selfimage of the consuming middle-class.

Sabhas: In Search of a New Aesthetic As mentioned before, the emergence of the sabhas testified to two critical changes that transformed the social and musical landscape of southern India, namely the emergence of a professional elite in 36 There is an interesting anecdote about Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer’s total incomprehension of the commercial aspect of performance.When he arrived in Madras on the day of the performance and saw wall posters announcing his performance, while giving details of admission rates he was shocked and scandalized. He called sabha organizers and asked them, ‘What is this? Is my music for sale? Please throw it open to all lovers of music’; Quoted in Professor V.V. Sadagopan, ‘Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar’, in Sangeet Natak, No. 3–4, 1966–7, p. 64. The story could be entirely apocryphal—what is interesting to note is the value attached to music not as a commercial resource but as a deeply felt cultural one.

24

New Mansions for Music

Madras city around colonial education and employment coinciding with the influx of musicians and traditional practitioners from Tanjore into the city.The latter carried with them an important and invaluable inheritance in the form of compositions, of the celebrated trinity of Tanjore—namely Tyagaraja (1767–1847), Muthuswami Diksitar (1775–1835) and Syama Sastri, (1763–1827)—all of whom were contemporaries and who had, in their distinct ways, enriched the musical culture of the temple city, by and large independent of official court patronage.37 Especially important was the effort made by Tyagaraja in developing a line of discipleship that not merely ensured the articulation of a distinctly authored style, but also ensured its dissemination after the death of the saint composer. Consequently, his disciples even as they left Tanjore in search of new opportunities carried with them a solid repertoire of song texts that they circulated in the new centres, notably Madras city. Responding to the demands of the city for musical entertainment, the latter turned initially to performing a musical discourse called the harikathas. This form of entertainment involved the use of a great deal of music and extempore recitation in several languages, and was especially instrumental in creating a listening habit among the high-caste elite in Madras city and in exposing them to a wider circulation of songs including the songs of the trinity, especially of its leading figure, Tyagaraja.38 The popularity of the harikathas waned in the first quarter of the twentieth century but not before it had facilitated the creation of an auditory habit among the city’s consuming elite and an interest in the compositions of the Tanjore trinity, especially Tyagaraja whose compositions enjoyed the benefits of systematic dissemination, thanks to his disciples. The latter were also responsible for initiating a new trend in the secularization of performance wherein music for the new urban audience detached itself from ritual, and personal patronage had to be reinvested with the new aura of a reinvented classicism. 37Subramanian,

From the Tanjore Court.

38Thiagarajah (A Great Musician Saint) by M.S.Ramaswami Aiyar, first published

1927, reprint Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, 2003, p. 5. The author writes that the chief aim of his work was to show how the composer consolidated the whole of Madras.

Introduction

Muthuswami Diksitar

25

Syama Sastri

Tyagaraja Courtesy: Ludwig Pesch, The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music, O.U.P., New Delhi, 1999 and Sangeeta Vidvan, Sri S. Rajam

26

New Mansions for Music

Armand and Armand were among the first scholars to comment on the secularization of performance as a consequence of nineteenth century secondary urbanization in Madras, a process characterized by two major breaks: the separation of temple dance and dance music from their functional basis of the temple and the virtual disappearance of the musical opera or harikatha which, until the 1900s, was the most popular form of urban entertainment.39 Even as the urban public consumed the music of the religious discourses and thereby, retained their older connections with the moral economy that they had left behind, they brought to the act of listening, a new mode of reflexivity that constituted the backdrop to a process of redefining the classical music tradition or the Karnataka sampradayam.40 The preoccupations of the Madras elite in clearly demarcating a distinct classical tradition derived largely from their responses to colonial discourse41 on Indian music and culture and from their psychological compulsions to reclaim an artistic tradition that remained in their perception, un-colonized and uncontaminated. For this, it became vital to redefine the tradition supported by notions of authenticity, purity and rigour. Translated in real terms, this meant several things; namely authoring an ancient history for Indian music, assembling a repertoire that emphasized spontaneity of personal devotion with high musical values and a performance style that reflected adherence to an established teaching lineage and discipline. More immediately, what was required was to detach the musical tradition from the larger tradition of musical opera and theatre where music was but an auxiliary adjunct to dramatization and narration.42 Equally, it was necessary to assemble an expanded and representative concert repertoire that would demonstrate the skill, training and imagination of the performer. The emphasis was not so much on the performer’s ability to compose originally, but his capability in reproducing the correct tradition, by bringing his talent, voice and training together to produce the desired effect. From this developed 39 L’Armand and L’Armand, ‘One Hundred Years of Music in Madras’, pp. 411–38. 40Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court. 41Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court. 42‘Harikatha Kalakshepam’, in Alamelu Govindarajan, A Miscellany in Indian Music, Kalakshetra Publications, Madras. Here she makes the important point that a kalakshepa performer was always viewed differently from a regular musician. He was associated with the role of a preacher, and furthermore, music never monopolized his performance.

Introduction

27

further notions of voice production, of the foregrounding of the vocalist and the soloist in relation to the accompaniment, and ultimately, the intentionality of the concert itself. The complex interplay of these factors eventually produced a fairly cohesive aesthetic that became the hallmark of classical music. Sabhas stood at the forefront of this project especially from the 1920s when there was a definite consensus about the need to regulate performance and establish a common and universal standard that would conform to the newly emerging notions of classicism that appealed the self-definition of the middle-class consumers who were equally anxious to make music a part of study in the modern educational system. Thus as mentioned before, even in Tanjore, by 1912, local notables like Pandithar was busy assembling the Tanjore Sangeeta Vidya Sangam to put forward a comprehensive programme of studying music as an academic discipline, to establish an academy for the systematic teaching of Indian music, to clarify issues regarding musical issues, to standardize melodies or ragas and to honour eminent musicians.43 Leaders of mathas were also known to consider institutional improvements for training artistes on the nadaswaram and for encouraging Tamil compositions. Whether the Tanjore Sangeeta Vidya Sangam became the model for later sabhas and even the Madras Music Academy is not known, although it is likely that such collective initiatives became a regular feature of the city’s cultural practices. Kasi Varadachariar, an important member of Madras city’s professional elite, spoke of the meeting undertaken by several city sabhas in the 1930s to form a federation which he thought would be a good idea,44 enabling successful arrangement of concerts on a commercial basis and of endorsing a set of standards to develop, refine and expand a classical style. The federation was not thought of as a grand cartel; just a loose but effective coming together of the various city sabhas working towards a common artistic and social programme that had commercial implications as well.This form and style had to be necessarily expressed through the typical concert or katcheri, which would encapsulate a repertoire that reflected the richness, complexity and diversity of 43‘India needs accomplished musicians endowed with a sense of responsibility and competent students who could learn the science and carry their knowledge with dignity.’ See Karunamirtha Sagaram, p. 236, for the opinions of T. S. Balasubramania Iyer, SubJudge of Kumbakonam on the Sangam. 44The Kasi Diaries, see entry dated 1 December 1935.

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New Mansions for Music

the tradition. The sabha managers and patrons had, at their disposal, a rich inheritance that just half a century before, had been energized by extremely accomplished composers in Tanjore and by sustained courtly patronage. The Tanjore court had set in place, new guidelines for pedagogy and performance, choosing those constituent elements in the tradition that coincided with the preoccupations of the urban elite. These related to a performance repertoire that drew on several genres but notably on the newly refined song text, the kriti,45 whose altered structure made it the most effective vehicle for expressing musical values. It was different from congregational singing and recitative music which did not demand the same training in the subtle aspects of vocal practice, and from the repertoire of the chinnamelam, notably the padam whose ritual context, erotic content and association with dance, imposed certain limitations in terms of melodic execution and imagination. In the changing space of urban entertainment, the compositions of the trinity became central and were quickly identified as emblems of a higher music that could not be imbibed without training.46 The first step in reconstituting public musical performance was to distance it as far as possible from the harikatha performances that dominated the entertainment scene in Madras. In 1899, for instance, these outnumbered all other kinds of performances but diminished very substantially by the 1930s.47 Musical standards in harikatha performances were a major topic of discussion. R. Srinivasan, an accomplished katha performer, mentions in his reminiscences, how the katha repertoire was very different from that of the vocal concert, and how the percussion ensemble was deployed to produce a particular ambience.48 This was not in conformity with the idealized performance environment the middle-class elites wanted to construct 45Kriti is the most widely used form in Karnatik music. It has typically three parts, the opening pallavi theme in the middle range (madhyama Sthayi), the pallavi theme serves as a refrain at a later stage; a second theme the anupallavi which mostly reaches the upper octave and a concluding section or the charanam. See, for more details, Ludwig Pesch, The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music, O.U.P., New Delhi, 1999, p. 178. 46Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, pp. 22–82. 47L’Armand and L’Armand, ‘One Hundred years of Music in Madras’, pp. 416–17. 48Professor R. Srinivasan, Kathakalakshepam, published by the Institute of Traditional Cultures Madras, 1964, pp. 12–13. Srinivasan confessed how as a child he had been fascinated by the harikatha and how his taste for classical music developed out of this fascination and listening habit.

Introduction

29

for the stand-alone music recital. Thus from rearranging the accompanying ensemble supporting the vocalist and scaling down its volume in relation to the solo performer, the sabhas began to develop a new aesthetic that was finally perfected and refined under the aegis of the Madras Music Academy.The new and clearly modern notion of musical aesthetics and appreciations engaged principally with the ideas of authenticity and integrity that could be expressed, first, through proper teaching and training, and second, through a well-modulated singing voice that could convey a new conception of sound with the full accoutrements of personal absorption and identification with the transcendental dimension of music. From the more generalized register that congregational singing produced, there was an audible shift to a more individual and interiorized musical expression, that in its intention, resonated perfectly with the audience. The notion of nada and Nadabrahman was put forward as the ultimate ideal. The idea was of an originatory deep mind that produced the experiential world through vibration and touched human consciousness as audible sounds; an ocean that included every sound but especially the domain of intelligible sound in which music was the purest expression of idea prior to, though including language.49 It was not a case of singing in a particular language, but of becoming immersed in a melodic field that transported the singer and his listener to a new dimension. In the Indian lexicon on sound, the term ‘nada’ occupied a central place with distinct connotations. In the ninth century musical text, the Brahaddesi of Matanga, it is used in the sense of a primordial sound, the pervading causal sound that animates the universe, also as a general word for musical sound, as a technical term for the process of emerging vocal sound as it wells up from the inner source and moves along bodily channels, and most specific of all, a term signifying the improvised exposition of a raga. The idea of sound being a central conduit in the experience of realization of pure consciousness—the Nadabrahman— which could be attained by music practised as a form of yoga carried important semantic density for the new custodians of music who were looking for new meanings in their experience of listening to music.50 It was in this pursuit of pure sound that the aesthetics for 49Kumara Guru C. Subrahmanya Ayyar, An Artistes Miscellany on Society, Religion and Music, R. Venkateshwar & Co., 1946, pp. 99ff. Musical enjoyment, according to Ayyar, lay in the realm of pure sound beyond the effect of spoken words. 50Rowell, Music and Musical Thought in Early India, pp. 40–7.

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New Mansions for Music

performance and guidelines for the katcheri or performance format were articulated. The focus, as far as the former was concerned, was very much on producing an integrated and coherent musical sound; hence the perennial lament about excessive accompaniment or ‘pukkavadyam’ and the need to mark out a greater space for the soloist whose music was to be supported by the accompaniment in order to produce a coherent and integrated musical experience. Another added imperative was to mark out a clear and identifiable regional tradition, or what came to be defined as the Karnatik sampradayam. The rationale for this was evident in the way regional musical traditions had evolved after the thirteenth century and how these encompassed a repertoire of genres and song texts in regional languages, but what set the nineteenth century project apart was to present the tradition as more authentic than north Indian music, in terms of its relative distance from Persian and Central Asian musical influences. This representation was derived directly from Orientalist scholarship on Indian music, and led to a more rigid and rigorous standardization of melodies, with debates raging over the permissibility of particular combinations and the need to avoid others.51 In part this was a reaction to the popularity of drama music that drew from popular Hindustani melodies that were used by poets and composers like Gopalakrishna Bharati in his Tamil plays. There was a general consensus that very little needed to be known in order to be a successful drama performer, in sharp contrast to the demands on a classical performer. A grasp of the various genres that demonstrated the skill of the singer and his appreciation of the melodic dimensions of music was required. This could be achieved only through a reformatted concert, conforming in its acoustic layout, to the new conception of sound that was being deliberated, and accommodating compositions and performative practices that demonstrated training and virtuosity as well as purity of emotion.52 In other words the katcheri had to be constructed for the performer and for his audience as an enchanted space, vibrant with meaning and teaming with cultural signification. 51Subramanian,

From the Tanjore Court.

52P.S.Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music. ‘Very little,’ he wrote, ‘needs to be known to

be a successful Harikatha performer. Indeed it is surprising that any audience of Tamilians who boast of having produced the most ethical and spiritual literature in the world can put up patiently with the grimaces and vulgar anecdotes passing for hasya or humour which forms the stock in trade of the vast majority of these brahmans or bhagavatars.’

Introduction

31

Critic, student and listener thus came together in the katcheri to find both a shared space for socialization as well as for establishing a definite mode of performing and listening. It was here that the intent of music as much as its execution was reflected upon, often unconsciously, and thereafter, translated into a normative ideal of performance. This was critical not only as an invaluable tool of selfdefinition and social identity, but also as an enabling device in disciplining classical music as it took shape in a new ambience of university departments, training colleges and of middle-class homes. It was here that the imagination of the new audience found relief and fulfilment. It was here again that the university student found an actual performance model to work towards and it was here again that the modern critic sharpened his quill to contribute to a particular kind of discourse on music appreciation and classicism.

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1

The Katcheri A Living Laboratory or Enchanted Space?

Madras

Tanjore

Map not to scale

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, K.S.MAHADEVAN1 A NOTED MUSIC CRITIC GAVE

a detailed account of a typical music concert in Chennai in the late 1920s when music concerts or katcheris were becoming an integral part of the entertainment scene. By this time, the city boasted of a number of sabhas that undertook the arrangement of music concerts and music related shows, including kathakalakshepam or musical discourses that combined song, scriptures and dramatized storytelling. With the steady flow of musicians and performers from 1‘Down Memory Lane’, an interview with the critic, K.S. Mahadevan, http:// www.carnatica.net/special/ksm1.html as on 7 February 2008 (hereafter Interview with K.S.Mahadevan).

The Katcheri

33

the districts of Tanjore and Tirunelveli to Madras, the city elite had access to a reasonable pool of musical talent they could invite to perform. The performers, on their part, drew their inspiration and sustenance from a pre-existing performance tradition and repertoire that had been configured within the precincts of temple and court and subsequently expanded in the wake of an emerging modern theatre tradition. This valued, in a major way, an emphasis on rhythm, on the performer’s ability to display his virtuosity in complex rhythmic exercises in a time cycle through the vehicle of what is described as swara singing, along with a detailed and elaborate exposition of melody or raga through the Ragam Tanam Pallavi, which seems to have been the central and most prized section of a concert. The display element was emphasized further by a complete accompaniment ensemble— the full bench, as it was known, and it required a performer of rare merit to hold his own before such an assembly. Describing the performance of Naina Pillai, a formidable musician, organized by the Mylapore Sangeeta Sabha in 1926, Mahadevan reminisced on the formidable artistes list thus: ‘Naina Pillai (Vocal), Malaikottai Govindaswami Pillai (Violin), Dakshinamurti Pillai (Khanjira), Alaganambi Pillai (Mridangam), Sitaramiah (Morsing), Sundaram Iyer (Ghatam) and the inimitable Kanpur Pakkiri (Konnakkol).’What struck him, as he observed, was ‘the priority in the seating arrangement— how well I visualize the scene! Naina Pillai in the centre, Govindaswami Pillai on the left, and on the right, Pakkiriappa Pillai in front facing

The Pleasure of Performing, a Concert in Progress. Drawing by Mali Courtesy: Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras

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New Mansions for Music

the violinist. Just behind him, Dakshinamurti Pillai, behind whom sat Alaganambi Pillai with the Ghatam, and the Morsing further back. The experience was similar to facing a thunderclap with lightning thrown in everywhere. There was no mike (microphones had still not made their entry). The concert, which started at 4.20 pm on a terribly hot Sunday, went on till 10 pm. It had to be so, because just after an hour, there was a full laya session of singing kalpanaswaras, starting from the Mridangam, till it went on to Pakkiri. Giving at least 5 minutes per round, you will surely understand the long duration of this concert. One could surely call it a ‘Laya concert’ with giants of their fields all playing.’2

Rhythm, Ritual and Performance The privileging of rhythm and the celebration of the tala katcheri, it may be surmised, was part of an older logic of performance that accompanied temple worship and court ceremonial. In a situation where melam music, (the orchestra accompanying the ritual worship of a deity in a temple) was an important part of both ritual and acoustic expectations, where performance encompassed a large range of percussion instruments and organized around the idea of a competitive display, the expectations of the audience were informed by notions of religious fervour and identification as well as by the affective potential of rhythm that was stimulating and carried the potential of awe akin to that of modern sport challenging the limits of human endeavour. Contemporary accounts describing the musical entertainment organized by temples reveal these tendencies at work. Here we are fortunate in having the personal memoirs of an expressive writer who by birth, location and sensibility enjoyed very close access to the traditional world of Tamil scholarship and music, and recorded his awe and appreciation of contemporary musical assemblies and well-known artistes, some of whom were family members. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, for instance, who as mentioned earlier was singularly responsible for collecting and bringing to light several, Tamil classics, belonged to a family of eminent musicians and was closely associated with important temple endowments that organized musical assemblies. Many of these events find reflection 2Interview

with K.S. Mahadevan.

The Katcheri

35

in his writings that bring out both musical features as well as the social context of performance. The concerts organized by temples and their endowments tended to be around festive occasions that brought musicians, scholars and artistes together in a common space of shared religious experience. Evidently in this domain of performance organized around specific festive dates in a calendar, the emphasis was on sacred songs and ritual chants that captivated the minds of listeners who responded to the ritual ambience of the setting. There was, however, an additional performance space that was more in the nature of a musical display that was organized by a specific individual patron. This was the traditional sadas or musical gathering organized by important members of society, who were also acknowledged connoisseurs.These events, by and large, tended to assume the form of a contest between musicians; with an adjudicator who would give the final verdict for the performer with greater virtuosity, knowledge and technical perfection. In these gatherings, there was scope for a different kind of display and for a different set of intentions; besides the obvious benefits of patronage, there was the element of one-upmanship, which brought to the fore ideas of skill, refinement and other categories of musical standards. This element is brought out in U.V. Swaminatha Iyer’s biographies of senior musicians also—Ghanam Krishna Iyer (1790–1854) and Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer (1844–93) both of whom were exemplary performers and enjoyed immense influence in their days among patrons and contemporary musicians. Given the context of ritual and display, it was not surprising that performances, for the most part, tended to be in the nature of a spectacle appealing to a larger collective and structured around conceptions of sound and musicality that valorised competence in rhythm control on the one hand and elaborate delineation of raga or melody on the other, through what we have described as pallavi singing. The anecdotes that we have in circulation about the incredible speed of Shatkala Govinda Marar or the proficiency of pallavi artistes would suggest that these were considerably valued elements in performance and continued in some form even after the social context for performance changed after its relocation to Madras. In fact the obsession with rhythm became an important and recurrent critique of the new reform discourse on music in the first half of the twentieth century.

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New Mansions for Music

The growth of public performances on a commercial basis became pervasive in Madras by the end of the nineteenth century and was ordered around a different kind of ritual, namely that of a musicalcum-narration art form that took on religious themes but performed in a secular setting. This was the Kathakalakshepam3 developed by musicians from Tanjore, who drew on their musical training and knowledge of the epics to develop a form that amalgamated storytelling with music and dramatic interpretation and who brought it to the city of Madras, where it gained immense popularity in a very short period of time. Credit for this went to a number of remarkable and talented artistes whose acting skills as well as musical training made a profound impression on listeners and helped disseminate a broader musical taste among the urban audience. The form became a conduit for transmitting music to a wider audience who were treated to familiar stories drawn from epics and scriptures, and to songs and tunes that created a growing taste for music. The music in the harikathas did not have to conform to the specifications that court music demanded and it may be surmised that this drew from more familiar congregational music practice and from shorter and simpler melodic lines easier to follow and equally easy to recall and sing. The form also made use of several accompanying instruments, which enabled to enhance the ambient sound and thereby, to create the right atmosphere for a dramatic narration. The popularity of harikathas was unprecedented in Madras, where the idea of public musical entertainment began to strike deep roots from the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and music sabhas or associations proliferated primarily with the intention to provide musical entertainment on a commercial basis. Within a matter of a few decades, the city witnessed a proliferation of sabhas and a huge expansion of music related entertainment riding the wave of popular appreciation of what was a novel medium of consumption. The enjoyment of listening to music in a public space that was not within the precincts of a temple or within an intimate private circle, became a major factor in the rapid popularity of sabhas and the music 3Harikatha Kalakshepam is a composite art form that involves the telling of stories interlaced with songs and recitation and mime and dance. Most of the stories were drawn from epics and devotional literature although we have instances of secular themes being presented as well. The rendition is theatrical and the performer is expected to be master of scripture and song. See Pesch, The Illustrated Companion.

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concerts they sponsored. The life experiences of E. Krishna Iyer, a senior Congress leader and an important reformer who was largely instrumental in reviving classical dance, bear this out clearly. As a student of Madras Christian College, he was a regular theatre-goer developing an enormous interest in music and dance. Trained on the violin, he attended all music concerts of note to absorb the finer points.4 C.S. Iyer’s experiences were similar as he combined his initial training with long periods of listening to established artistes.5 There was however a flip side to this development—especially as the self-appointed custodians of culture among the elite began to feel the need to mark off a distinct set of musical practices and repertoire as classical, and to distance it from musical theatre that was deemed popular and light, and the kathakalakshepam, which as an art form was only marginally musical. It was in this context that a discourse of criticism emerged and the idea of a perfect concert format was considered as a means of defining and validating the classical style as well as a space where the audience and the performer could come and identify with the larger psychological experience of emotional identification with the music. At the same time, the reformers had to consider the challenges of public demand and to cater to a growing audience which had to be educated in the niceties of classical music so that they could distinguish it from popular fare, which however attractive, could not be treated at par with the former. So the order of the day was to design and structure a music concert that would satisfy the growing audience without compromising any of the features of classicism that the reforming elite wished to uphold. It was this double movement, the constant attempt to balance a complex and rigorous version of musical practice with a lighter and entertaining musical mode that made the project appear inconsistent and ambivalent. The initial experiments were not immediately successful. A careful reading of the available material would suggest that individual vocalists had to compete with a strong and aggressive accompanying ensemble with the result that there was a tendency either to indulge 4E.

Krishna Iyer (1897–1968), ‘Saviour of a Dance in Distress’, Sruti No. 27, December 1986/87, pp. 32–3. 5Kumara Guru C. Subrahmanya Ayyar, An Artist’s Miscellany on Society, Religion and Music, R.Venkateshwar & Co., Madras, 1946.

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in acrobatics expressed in the form of very rapid swara singing6 or concede more time to the accompanists.The proliferation of the sabhas did not help—in fact the overtly commercial profile of the sabhas meant that audiences had to be kept satisfied even if it meant compromising the art form. The performer had to concede to the demands of his audience—a development that was viewed extremely unfavourably by senior musicians as well as publicists. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, probably the most eloquent in his times was especially critical; as he wrote later about his experiences in the 1920s in his memoirs, My association with the Egmore Sabha brought me face to face with a new generation of musicians quite different from those I had known. They had no idealism or dedication. They lacked a zest for study, research and growth. They had a poor understanding of them dimensions of Carnatic music. Closed minds, arrested growth, sophistication, showmanship and an avid desire to get on in life stamped every one of them with a cramped vision, craze for boost and publicity and a sense of insecurity due to growing numbers and competition. To add to this, entrepreneurs, innocent of music, stepped into the arena. With their eye on the box office, they patronized musicians who were idols of the masses. Surging crowds and thundering applause determined a musician’s status and career.7

Ayyangar was not the only voice of dissent. Contemporary observations of the music scene in Madras give us a reasonable idea of the early sabha concerts, which by and large reflected the prevailing taste. A fascination for technical virtuosity, which in practical terms, came to mean the performer’s ability to execute complex swara singing and to engage in competitive bouts with the accompanying percussion ensemble seems to have captivated public imagination. Alongside there was a growing interest in Tamil songs and padams that had been popularized by harikatha performers and padam singers, mostly devadasi women. The Ragam Tanam Pallavi,8 which had been the core item 6Swara singing is improvised singing or playing of individual notes always leading back to the theme from which it was taken up (pallavi) mostly performed alternatingly with an accompanist whereby its length increases with each turn, sometimes culminating with a shortening pattern (kuraippu) and concluded with a complex pattern or korvai. See Pesch, The Illustrated Companion, chapter 17, p. 183. 7R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, Musings of a Musician, p. 18. 8A ragam tanam pallavi is considered the most elaborate form of creative music in south India and may be said to resemble a khyal in north Indian classical music. It begins with a detailed exposition of the chosen melody or raga followed by the pallavi that is a line of lyrics divided into two parts—the arudi being the point of division.

The Katcheri

39

in the older repertoire, lost its primacy partly because concert time did not permit the same expansive space for the performer. In 1929, in fact, a battle raged in the Madras newspapers over reclaiming a place for the pallavi. Senior musicologists, connoisseurs and critics wrote scathingly about the absurdity of providing the man on the street with an average concert with no scholarly merit. As one of them wrote, it was absurd to characterize the pallavi as a ‘monstrosity’, simply because some musicians had been unable to execute it with finesse and because the audience had not had the good fortune of listening to superior pallavi singing. Under such a circumstance, were the critics of the pallavi right in condemning it in entirety and setting a time limit to it? P. Sambamoorthy, an emerging musicologist of note and with an astute musical sense, reiterated this position and wrote, ‘of late it has become the fashion for some people to argue that the pallavi has no place in a modern musical performance’ and that while ‘the principal cause for all the crusade against the pallavi is to be attributed to utter ignorance of the great beauties underlying this branch of musical art, to condemn the pallavi as a whole was the height of musical unwisdom’.9 On the other hand E. Krishna Iyer, a major figure in the city’s musical circles, argued forcefully against the inclusion of the pallavi in the concert format, pointing out that few people had the expertise to execute it and that most often the form was mechanically produced. It is in this context of debate and deliberation over what should constitute the concert repertoire that Naina Pillai’s interventions have to be understood as articulating a definite aesthetic position. Pillai consciously set out to make a mark as a solo vocalist who could hold his own on the concert stage and establish the idea of the soloist’s primacy. His forte was mastery over rhythm and his experiments in this department were important for they would seem to have represented that moment when the vocalist was, in fact, responding to the challenge that the accompanying ensemble offered. While the The lines are developed slowly bringing out the full potential of both raga and lyrics, after which a series of swara patterns is performed. A process of permutations of rhythmic patterns and melodic patterns culminates in a conclusion where intricate strings of long and short notes are calculated and combined in such a manner that that they lead back to the beginning of the original theme. The pallavi theme is then resumed and leads to an elaborate percussion solo. See Pesch, The Illustrated Companion, p. 181. 9Sruti, April 1984.

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New Mansions for Music

element of competitive display was built into the structure of performance, it had lost a measure of proportion that is in fact evident in contemporary descriptions. The Tamil daily Swadesamitran in its 1921 issue10 carried a short piece titled ‘Sharir Bhedam’ where the author moaned the fact that musicians in concerts tended to give too much time to their percussion, a concession that only reflected their own incompetence and lack of training. P. S. Iyer was even more scathing in his critique and insisted that accompaniments had to be subservient to the main performance. How often he asked ‘have we seen a really good musical performance incessantly interrupted by the noisiest drummer who believes in the strength of his brawny arm and goes away pounding with his might and main?’ Iyer was also extremely critical of the speed in which swaras were sung, a practice that completely undermined the melodic quality and simply made use of excessive rhythmic display.11 Under the circumstances, Naina Pillai’s personal style was not necessarily seen as the answer for articulating a new aesthetic. By the 1930s, it was clear that, for an important section of the audience, the thrill of the full bench and the rhythm-dominated concert were no longer as compelling. However, this is not to detract or discount the performer’s importance or to conclude that his style did not captivate the imagination of many in the audience whose appetite for musical bouts remained large and served as a consideration for performers. Further it is not difficult to understand why swara singing held such an extraordinary appeal for the audience. The faster and more complicated the note patterns, the greater the levels of excitement, and with it an assumption that it required enormous talent and mathematical intelligence to calculate and arrive at the starting point within a cycle. Where the point of difference and interrogation arose was the time that could be assigned to such renditions in a public performance, and whether these ought to embody and represent the classical style in a public space. As far as the reforming elite was concerned, the desirable parameters for a classical style had to do with a balance between melody and rhythm, emotion and intellect, and it was only through a proper amalgam 10Swadesamitran, (Tamil daily printed from Madras provided by C. Subramania Iyer) Nehru Memorial Museum and Library R4259 (1 January–3 March 1921); see p. 7 for article (1 January 1921 issue) entitled ‘Sharir Bhedam’. 11P.S. Iyer, Articles on Carnatic Music, pp. 49–50.

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that the style could be perfected. And it was precisely here that the whole debate on classicism turned—namely, what the classical as an idea meant to convey, how it related to the intention of musical performance, and how it was to be rendered in order to satisfy the original spirit of the compositions. Was the concert meant to merely demonstrate the prowess of the performer in exploring the full facet of melodic interpretation and rhythmic structures in an abstract fashion which is what raga alapana and swara singing signified or was it to be conveyed through compositions that were central to music both in terms of providing a clear template for melodic interpretation as well as for pedagogic authentication?

The Concert Repertoire: A Case for the Trinity As early as the late 1920s, the idea of a model performance to showcase and demonstrate the classical style found recurrent expression. This was linked generally to the need for establishing common standards for a classical music concert, which had to be marked off as a distinct entity and practice from other forms of entertainment. Newspaper articles and tracts emphasized the overriding need to build a solid public opinion about the idea of musical reform and to consider and deliberate on an appropriate format for public performance of Karnatik music. The format was intended to both showcase the principle features of the music tradition as well as the performer’s capability of rendering it and thereby, demonstrating his talent and training. The selection of these features was not entirely arbitrary; even earlier, we have instances of the Tanjore court trying to establish a pedagogy for performance that was informed by notions of excellence and standards. Similarly, the emphasis on the compositions of the trinity, especially Tyagaraja was to do with recognition of their artistic merit and the fact that they had assumed a foundational status in the hierarchy of compositions.12 This had largely to do with the way the compositions had circulated through teaching lineages that had settled down in Madras and due to their innate emotionalism that captured the imagination of the cogniscenti, who saw these as the fountainhead of pure classicism. What was now necessary was to make them the cornerstone of a classical music performance, which 12Subramanian,

From the Tanjore Court, pp. 84–110.

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had to be designed and restructured in such a way that the performer could retain his popularity among the growing audience and, at the same time, preserve the salient elements that had come to embody the classical style. Reformists recognized the difficulties of maintaining the precarious balance between a diluted popular style and a staid boring classical one; as Krishna Iyer observed in the battle for pallavi, ‘What do the protagonists of the pallavi want? Would they stop merely with singing the praise of the creative genius in it or make it the be all and end all of a music performance? Do they intend helping in the improvement of public taste or confuse the public by false and exciting cries of danger where it least exists? Do they face real problems in the improvement of our music or fight imaginary dragons? Do they mind the essentials of good art or glorify cobwebs and side-growths that stifle our good music?’13 For Iyer, the best means of preserving the standards and taste for classical music was to disseminate the compositions of the trinity, which was a great artistic treasure of eternal beauty. Writing around the same time, P.S. Iyer suggested the organizing of lecture demonstrations and model concerts that could resolve vexing questions and confusion over theory and present to listeners, the best fare possible. Additionally, Iyer spoke of the need to tone down percussion and engage in serious voice culture, which reflected a new conception of the voice and the kind of unified sound that the listener could identify with in a concert. Most of Iyer’s suggestions were exceedingly detailed and prescriptive and some of which we will note in another context dealing with music criticism as a genre. The public concert or katcheri was increasingly seen as the most effective and appropriate vehicle for establishing the performative norm for Karnatik music so that it retained its distinct identity and was not diluted by what the elite saw as lighter musical pieces. Once the idea of a solo musical conference gained ground in Chennai and displaced the harikatha as the most popular medium of urban musical entertainment, it became pressing to streamline a concert format that conveyed the new concerns and aesthetic parameters articulated by the reforming elite. Central to the latter’s project of defining a clear performance tradition for classical music, was designing the katcheri that could enable the performer to demonstrate his training as well as his command over theory by rendering the trinity’s compositions 13Sruti,

1984.

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that were recognized as the practical and living embodiments of musical scholarship. At the same time, it was vital to include within the repertoire those pieces that held easy and quick appeal for the growing community of listeners, who would, by and by, mature into an audience capable of appreciating the more complex aspects of the tradition and apportion a slot for swara singing and pallavi that would display the performer’s control over these vital aspects. What was important was to balance all these elements in such a manner that all the essential components could be suitably presented and reproduced within a shortened time span. Consequently from the very beginning, the model katcheri began to feature as a major concern in the reform project of the Madras elite. From the 1920s when the concert repertoire and classicism became central issues in the reformist discourse, there was a strong reaction to the rhythm or laya-dominated concerts that had become common in Madras. This was articulated especially by the Madras Music Academy that emerged in the late 1920s as a premier adjudicating body that carried with it the consensus of publicists and senior performers. Emerging in the wake of the Indian national Congress sessions in the city, the Academy very quickly consolidated its status as the premier sabha, interested in consolidating the classical style.14 It was largely through the Academy’s December concerts15 that the idea of a proper katcheri and repertoire was discussed. In fact, experts and presiding officials of the Academy repeated time and again that musicians had to take note of the discussions and decisions of the Academy while singing in their performances. The emphasis on the trinity’s compositions16 especially those of Tyagaraja and on the importance of singing them accurately including the sangatis (an innovative feature that Tyagaraja introduced in his composition 14Subramanian,

From the Tanjore Court, pp. 79, 84–110. music season of the Madras Music Academy was started in 1926. The winter season seemed the most appropriate time for organizing a week long festival. The idea has persisted and has continued although the number of concerts and sabha katcheris has increased exponentially. The idea of organizing concerts between mid-December and mid-January (corresponding to the Tamil month of Margazi) is also informed by the auspiciousness attached to it. 16Trinity indicate the three major composers of Karnatik music, Tyagaraja (1767– 1847), Muthuswami Diksitar (1775–1835) and Syama Sastri (1763–1827).Tyagaraja’s kritis were especially marked by sangatis or embellishment devices that enhanced the melodic, rhythmic and textual dimensions of the song. 15The

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in order to bring out the fullest potential of melody and poetry by a mode of creative repetition of a line) was a persistent feature of the Academy’s meetings where experts met and agreed, that they constituted in a real and practical sense, the theoretical essentials of the music tradition. It is easy to see why there was such a self-conscious commitment to the trinity’s repertoire. This was partly to do with the way the compositions had circulated and come to enjoy artistic status with several practising musicians who had moved into Madras city in the mid- and late-nineteenth century and most of whom laid claims to the lineage of the trinity. Whether these claims were valid or merely invoked to validate their own training and credentials, is not important.What is significant is the recognition that the repertoire had a definite basis, and that it had been accurately reproduced and transmitted through a clear line established by the composers themselves in their lifetime. The oeuvre was not a fragmented and incomplete assemblage of hearsay and reconstructed melodies and composition, but one that had a clear and assigned authorship—a perception that carried enormous weight with a middle-class that was attempting to modernize a tradition within a framework of textual conventions. Right from the late nineteenth century, when the trinity’s compositions began to enjoy an extended circulation and an artistic value among the community of singers and students and their audience, the importance of learning and correctly rendering these songs became a marker of musical integrity and value. At the same time, there was the social consideration behind devising a repertoire that assigned a central space to compositions such as the kriti in contrast to the more erotic padams and javalis that had been the domain of the devadasis and the more popular devotional and nationalist songs that were the mainstay of religious and secular theatre. To maintain the classical style in performance it became necessary to set a hierarchy of genres in place that maintained a balance between the kritis of the trinity and the padams and love songs as well as simpler devotional pieces celebrating either God or the nation, that were melodically pleasing and capable of generating more immediate appreciation. It was recognized that appreciation at a simple level was connected with the accessibility of a song text and of simple melodic tunes that circulated in the circuits of popular dramatic entertainment and folk traditions. Consequently the classical had to be defined in terms of a musical ideal that was not simply meant

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to entertain, but to engage with a complex system of acoustics and aesthetics that grappled with philosophical notions of self-realization and of immersion, and to abide by ideas of a substantial theoretical density that was located in the trinity’s compositions. Teaching and performing the accurate version of these compositions became critical strategies in consolidating the classical; one ensured the reproduction of a lineage while the other educated the audience to discriminate the subtleties of the classical tradition. The rationale was simple enough and easy to understand. But this was not all for both sabha owners as well as elite publicists were aware of the importance of retaining and even expanding the audience for classical music—a consideration that had to take into account the diversity of audience taste. As early as 1934, important members of the Academy presiding over its annual conferences maintained that one of the primary functions of music was to entertain and that this was possible only when it made an emotional appeal to the audience. They also agreed that this element was common to both music of the highest variety as well as the more common and simple one. This feature could not be forgotten, and performers and connoisseurs reiterated the importance of pleasing the audience. Excessive intellectualization of performance and music practice by the performer could become a deterrent to the average listener whose attention would then veer away from classical music. To ensure that classical music had a growing but informed audience, it was necessary to perfect a style and repertoire. What this meant in concrete terms was the presentation of songs without too many embellishments and exaggerations only meant to show the gymnastics of the performer’s voice, and of adhering to a repertoire that was accessible. The emphasis on the ‘emotional’ was an important and pressing consideration and, in fact, constituted the single most important determinant in the making of a modern classical style that could not however, compromise on the solidity of the existing repertoire of valued compositions. Striking the balance between the emotional (bhava) and the technical (shastra) aspects of practice was the critical issue, one which encapsulated the major changes in the context of performance and the expectations of a modern community of listeners. The popularity and currency of modern devotional songs employed in musical theatre meant that the performer could not be oblivious to this aspect of entertainment; neither could he eschew

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those elements of the performing tradition, namely the songs of the trinity and the performative conventions that had been transmitted through established teaching lineages. These were seen as critical tools in the consolidation of the style and the taste, which had to discriminate between different types of music and genres in a concert. It was here that the pedagogic potential of the concert became so important and was in fact acknowledged by musicians and musicologists in the country. As Pandit Ratanjhankar stated in his address to the sixth annual ceremony of the Kanpur Sangeet Sammelan, classical music had always been a bugbear and that its inaccessibility was a major problem for it turned listeners away. Musicians therefore had to do all in their power to educate their audience, create a taste in them for the right type of music by a proper exposition of it, and fit them out to meet it instead of flattering them by easy tickling compositions.17 The creation of a proper classical style that encompassed acknowledged compositions of value and deployed a new conception of sound and emotionalism was implicit in the discussions on accompaniments in a concert. Implicit in the production of a new kind of voice and the scaling down of percussion to produce a more interiorized experience was the pursuit of the emotional dimension of music that could resonate sympathetically with the yearnings of the modern listening subject. No more for him/her the bouts of competitive display or even the spectacle of a vigorous percussion ensemble—what was more important was to identify with the music and musical sound as an extension of a personalized emotional experience but within a disciplined framework through the medium of the modern katcheri. The experience was described in terms of bhakti that did not necessarily correspond to a specific religious experience but one that encompassed a deep sense of identification and interiority transcending sectarian belief and ritual. There was an aura about the experience that made it religious in a distinct nonreligious space of public entertainment. As a senior practitioner pointed out in his presidential address to the Madras Academy in 1942, theory and practice was best learnt by the study of the compositions of the well-known composers and exponents of Karnatik music such as the trinity who were true bhaktas and whose complete absorption in 17S.M. Ratanjhankar,

The Indian Review, Vol. 34, 1933, p. 364.

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music as the chosen vehicle of personal meditation was the principal ingredient in bringing out the essence of the raga.18

The Katcheri and its Architect The artist credited with the designing of the modern katcheri, which, in its broad essentials remains in place even today was Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (1890–1967). An astute performer, Ariyakudi from the very beginning, seemed to have his finger on the pulse of the audience. He realized the necessity of streamlining a format that would assimilate the essential features of the tradition as he had received it with the requirements of a changing audience, which neither had the time to listen to a long and leisurely concert nor the sensibility to appreciate the purely spectacular. Additionally, there was the overriding consideration of fixing a representative and wideranging repertoire that fulfilled the diverse nature of the audience and acknowledged the emerging popularity of Tamil compositions sung in drama and musical theatre. Furthermore, Ariyakudi was interested in developing all the prerequisites for an effective performance and the production of a pliant voice that would not

Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar Courtesy: Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras 18Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, Vol.XIV, 1943, see pp. 7–8 for the presidential address by Vidvan Subbarama Bhagavatar in the XVIth annual conference of the Academy, 1942 (hereafter JMAM).

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betray the performer during his concert. The search for a repertoire was matched by his search for a proper voice and its adaptation to the intervention of the microphone. The foundations of his style, according to later admirers went back to his student days and apprenticeship with Namakkal Narasimha Iyengar, where he collaborated with his friend and lifelong associate Sesha Iyengar to develop ideas about pallavi singing and voice production.19 His remarkable success as a performer encouraged him to experiment and it was not entirely coincidental that his understanding found such an easy and quick acceptance among the new patrons and connoisseurs. His association with the Madras Music Academy from its very inception and his complete endorsement of its agenda meant that his suggestions and blue print became formalized as the model for later performers. Ariyakudi’s experiments were, at one level, a creative response to the growing need for a compact concert repertoire that suited the logistic requirements of commercial entertainment as well as the aesthetic parameters being put forward by self-appointed custodians and connoisseurs of music. For Iyengar, the pace set by the performer was important in fixing the attention of the audience while the selection of the repertoire was indispensable in endorsing the classical potential of the music being performed. Additionally, the repertoire in terms of the songs, and the melodic treatment and display of rhythmic virtuosity were expected to unite the listeners in a shared experience of pleasure and identification. In achieving this, Iyengar was able to draw on his own training and inheritance and thereby, showcase a performance repertoire that popularized classical music as well as set a standard. His own vocal facility enabled him to appreciate the growing interest in articulating an ideal singing voice that became a desired medium for expression and something that Weidman argues, was to do with a new politics of vocalization. As indicated earlier, the Madras Academy had by the early 1930s begun to deliberate on reforms that would improve performance. One of these suggestions pertained to the size of a concert. It was decided by a resolution20 in 1933 that no concert would exceed three hours. It was generally felt this was an adequate time for a performer 19V.V. Sadagopan, ‘Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar’, Sangeet Natak, No. 3, 1966, pp. 63–79. 20Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, p. 105.

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to demonstrate a full repertoire that would give the audience access to the range and creativity of the tradition and its praxis.The Academy, like its predecessors, the late-nineteenth century sabhas, reiterated the idea of popularizing as many compositions of the trinity and accommodate other pieces thereafter. It was, however, left to Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar to formalize these suggestions and come up with a format that satisfied both the pedagogic and performative aspects of the project. While the former emphasized the idea of a properly framed repertoire as part of an emerging discipline of classical music in a modern context, the latter saw the concert as a space of mutually shared emotional affect connecting the performer and the listener in an imaginative and aesthetic experience where music became a deep mode and medium of personal identification. Above all, there was the question of the performer’s readiness— here, too, the refined katcheri was seen as an enabling device to get the musician’s voice in correct pitch and tone, and at the same time, to get the audience in readiness for the performance to follow. Ariyakudi paid special attention to this detail and was well aware that the performer had to be in a position to capture the attention of his audience with the very first note, by no means an easy task given the shift in aural expectations. No longer was the audience mere spectators in a ritual setting nor were they easily taken in by gymnastics—this was now a self-conscious and self-regulating body of listeners, whose consumption practices had changed and whose expectations were mediated by a strong emotional need to discover the ineffable and intangible sense of personal and romantic identification. It was only through a deft performance that played with the elements of melody, rhythm and feeling, all held in balance, that the performing musician could invite his audience to identify with the music as an individual listener as well as part of a community of like-minded connoisseurs. Ariyakudi was well aware of all these elements as he listed concrete suggestions for a model concert in his presidential address to the Madras Music Academy in 1938, and subsequently in another address on the katcheri paddhati.21 Ariyakudi’s address began with an etymological definition of the word katcheri, which he said, was an Urdu word that referred to a court of law, but it had acquired a very special connotation in 21JMAM, Vol. X, 1939; see pp. 9–11 for the presidential address of Sangita Ratnakara Ariyakkudi Ramanuja Aiyangar.

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southern India, where it had come to mean a much-valued recital of a refined art form and activity. These events had to be carefully structured in order to sustain the attention of the listener as well as the energy and staying power of the performer. Explaining why he began his concerts always with a varnam, he pointed out how musicians had earlier perfected this form and how it had the potential to relax the performer’s voice and enable it to cover a wider musical range. In his words, ‘It imparts mellowness to the voice and a flavour to the subsequent rendering of kritis or ragas.’ This was essential, especially since the performance was intended to ‘keep the listeners spell-bound, making them stay on to the very end, thirsting for still more’. Once the performer had succeeded in setting the mood and had the attention of the audience, he went through the concert with consummate ease. It was in order to facilitate this process that Ariyakudi suggested a viable repertoire, wherein the performer could make provision for the singing of what he called classical pieces (by which he meant the trinity’s compositions) prefaced by crisp alap or melody delineation and a balanced treatment of rhythm, melody and emotion. This, he suggested, could be executed almost formula-like in the arrangement of a specified number of compositions, of a pallavi and thereafter, followed by a number of miscellaneous items in the second half of the concert. These could include padams, javalis and nationalist songs, which would ensure that many members of the audience could identify with what was being sung in a concert. As he pointed out, the singing of miscellaneous pieces was a modern innovation but one which was in his estimation entirely consistent with the ‘spirit of tradition’. He cited the instance of older musicians who had rendered some of these pieces and the fact that none of them were guilty of deviating from tradition.The rhetoric of maintaining tradition became central to his modernization project that saw a compact repertoire conveyed through a sweet singing style as a precondition to the efficacy of the concert.22 22JMAM, Vol. X, 1939; see Ariyakudi’s address where he said that the late Veena Dhanammal was one of those musicians who consistently adhered to the practice of rendering miscellaneous pieces in her concert. Dhanammal’s classical credentials were in little doubt and if she could do this and retain her popularity and spontaneity till the very end, what prevented others from following suit. What is interesting is the way Dhanammal and her style were often appropriated by spokesmen of the classical and yet she was never asked to participate in these expert meetings where important ideas were being debated.

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So much for the repertoire; Ariyakudi also laid down a list of prescriptions for an effective performance. These expressed the collective wisdom of a generation of musicians who had come forward with their cooperation in assisting the Music Academy in Madras to assemble and consolidate the classical style. Most of these prescriptions were configured around a distinct conception of a modern sound and style that eschewed loud ambient noise and sought emotionalism in musical expression.Year after year, the journal of the Madras Academy carried articles on how important it was to reclaim the rightful place for melody and play down the excessive craze for rhythm and thrills, how emotional music and aesthetic music had to remain in a sensible balance during concerts, which after all, represented diverse listeners. In order to hold a diverse audience together, therefore, Ariyakudi opted for a medium tempo for singing and rendering the compositions and deployed gamakas23 and favoured what is known as the sarva laghu24 style of rendering swaras. This was a departure from the more complex and convoluted rhythmic patterns in swara singing and yet managed to retain an appeal by riding on a natural flow of rhythm that fascinated the cerebral listener. In fact, by appealing to the twin facets of technical skill and emotionalism, Ariyakudi managed to moderate a style that sloughed off the excesses of the earlier layadominated approach on the one hand, and a laborious and overindulgent treatment of melody on the other. The formula worked perfectly and as his admirers later pointed out, even laymen hastened to listen to his concerts, waiting patiently for the delectable miscellaneous pieces that came in the end, patiently and respectfully sitting through his classical renderings in the first part of a concert and going into ecstasy when the miscellaneous pieces came. By the promise of romantic music at the end, audiences were trained to enjoy sophisticated classical music. Ariyakudi’s ideas and interventions were not entirely new or unprecedented—from their very inception, city sabhas and their sponsors, as well as individual publicists and performers professed their utter fidelity to the compositions of Tyagaraja. From Chinnaswami Mudaliar, among the early pioneers of Indian musicology to the noted critic P.S. Iyer, to performers like Naina 23Pesch defines gamakas as embellishments based on individual notes or groups of them. See Pesch, The Illustrated Companion. 24Sarvalaghu is free flow of musical notes in an improvisation mode without prearranged patterns. See Pesch, The Illustrated Companion.

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Pillai and Veena Dhanammal, the compositions of Tyagaraja were continually showcased as the most important treasures of Karnatik music, which every performer was obliged to sing. Naina Pillai, for instance, is said to have made it a point to sing as many compositions of the saint composer as possible. The currency these enjoyed as the ultimate embodiments of the tradition was not entirely a conspiracy by the music sabhas or the Brahmin musicians who collaborated with them, but derived from an older context of continuity and memory of transmission. What made Ariyakudi so remarkable was his success as a performer and the efficiency of his format that was adopted by others whose creative inputs only served to enhance the practice. All the leading musicians were convinced of the need to familiarize their audience, and at the same time, to create and rely upon a special and specialized audience for their distinct performance style. The refining of the concert format, as a conscious exercise, undertaken by the sabha managers and associations such as the Madras Music Academy, was informed by deep and abiding faith in the style, ideals and teaching lineage of the trinity, especially Tyagaraja, and therein, of an endorsement of the incremental body of knowledge that it stood for. It was the idea of an uncompromising integrity to the guru as the purveyor of the true tradition, of authenticity, moral and artistic, that appealed to the new consumers as they overhauled the katcheri and saw it as a medium of familiarizing a large audience with authentic music. The urban audience was a testimony to the democratization of music but this was still not to be confused with the popular; classical music was meant for a select few even if that circle expanded to include greater numbers participating as modern subjects. As Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar observed in his address to the Swati Tirunal Music Festival at Trivandrum in 1944, ‘Now the question for us all to consider is whether classical music is worth reserving. I say “yes” a thousand times. It is subtle; it is not easy to follow; it requires a trained ear, a special musical memory; it is essentially—and I repeat it at the risk of giving offence to some persons—chamber music; it is not intended to make a mass appeal. The ideal assemblage or audience for Carnatic music of the classical style would be about a hundred or two hundred at the most.’ He continued in this vein and mentioned that the success of Karnatik music depended, ‘for its success and fruition, upon fellow feeling, a bond of sympathy between the man who produces the strain and the

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man who listens to the strain. We may blame the art, if we like as being aristocratic; we may call it highbrow if we please; we may term it overcomplicated and subtle, but we must take it or leave it; taking it at its best and leaving at its worst. It is because some of us believe that at its best, it represents one of the peaks and climaxes of the musical art that we are determined that it should live. But if it should live, there should be a careful definition of its boundaries, its limitations, and possibilities.’25 Seen from this vantage point, the concert space became a shared domain of affect besides functioning as a site of aural display. If the performers were more than ready to respond to these compulsions, the audience was equally appreciative of the concert space where they heard and experienced the single-minded commitment to the teacher and the tradition. As Varadaraja Iyengar, a disciple of Tiger Varadachariar wrote, ‘hence right from the varnam till the end, the concert became an edifice in which each stone was a jewel. How the yester-year greats could maintain the super level throughout, with each piece thoroughly polished, beats me.’26 In his opinion, it could only be ascribed to their utter sincerity, to a commitment to execute the job in hand, to the art and complete fidelity to the gurus.Therefore the formula lay in serving the parampara embodied in the lineage of the individual guru. It was only through a complete and selfless absorption in the style of the guru that a performer could be enabled to reproduce accurately, the repertoire of classical compositions and to maintain his voice in as good a condition as possible. This was seen as essential in order to convey the fullest range of emotions that became increasingly associated with the modern classical style. The adoption of this format by performers became important not only in setting standards of classicism but also in conveying the sense of a shared spiritual experience among a community of listeners. Submitting to a tradition created by a remarkable line of composers, who were seen as ideal individuals pursuing not lucre but pure devotion through music, which was more than just sensory pleasure, meant that the modern katcheri in its urban setting, became an enchanted 25Selections from the writings and speeches of Sachivottama Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Dewan of Travancore, Volumes 1 & 2 edited by P.G. Sahasranama Iyer, Trivandrum, 1945, pp. 103–4. 26Vinjamuri Varadaraja Iyengar, Tiger among Musicians; see http://www.geocities.com/ vinjamuri_s1951/Tiger_among_Musicians.htm as on 17 February 2008.

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space redolent with meaning and replete with spiritual significance. As modern subjects, the new connoisseurs worked towards a crafted and self-reflexive culture that eschewed crass commercialism and immoral materialism, and held the only prospects of liberation from the excesses of rampant modernity that had already threatened an idealized way of life. Consequently, critics, who resented the rapid popularization and commercialization of musical culture, repeatedly invoked this ideal from time to time. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, for example, was the most vocal of these critics. In his memoirs, he came out categorically against the musician who was more interested in entertaining his audience, even at the expense of the values that underlay his art form; in his view, if music had to be developed in conformity with the ideals of nadopasana, ‘inner illumination and spiritual beautitude’, it could be and had to be fostered only through the patronage of intelligent sections of society.27 Ayyangar was not being especially original in his description of musical values, for decades earlier, the same normative model was invoked by the sponsors and patrons of the Tanjore Sangam; the opening address mentioned how ‘the effect of music is to stimulate the divine in us; the end of music is the attainment of spiritual bliss and I have nothing but pity for those who sing for money’.28 However, what was new was the enthusiasm and commitment with which the new elite reworked older musical conceptions at a time when music practice had shifted to the public domain. Early Indian musical thought had always privileged the subtle and inward processes of sound movement and encapsulated musical practice within a larger cultural system of meditative awareness and it is not difficult to understand why Indian elites focused on these values to give their project a distinct aura. The challenge lay in balancing the higher objectives and orientation of music with the reality of commercialization of musical entertainment within a new public space. Under the circumstances, the pursuit of spiritual bliss through music could not be an entirely unmediated process. The audience had to be carefully trained to listen by being provided with the right staple, which is what the reformed katcheri was meant to achieve among other things.Tied to the restructuring of the concert therefore, 27R.

Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, Musings of a Musician, p. 53. Sagaram, p. 236 for the opinions of T. S. Balasubramania Iyer, Sub-Judge of Kumbakonam on the Sangam. 28Karunamirtha

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was the idea of educating a larger community of listeners, albeit elite, and improving their taste. Ariyakudi, as its architect, it has been suggested by his later admirers, consciously appealed to all sections of the listening public—the learned and the lay. By the promise of lighter and more romantic and lyrical compositions at the end of the concert, audiences were trained to enjoy sophisticated classical music. The enormous popularity of music concerts in Madras from the late 1930s when it effectively displaced the harikathas as the dominant form of musical entertainment, rested on an informed audience whose presence and participation had served to create and mark off a distinct branch of music that was designated as the mainstream classical. Notwithstanding critics who deplored the standardization perpetuated by concert repertoires, a distinct and identifiable model for performance had been set out, within which individual musicians were free to improvise. Ariyakudi had an enormous following, and notwithstanding some detractors, was enormously successful in consolidating the katcheri padhati or concert style during his lifetime.Working with close friends and musical associates he was able to perfect the repertoire and make available to the audience, a wide variety of compositions in several languages besides familiarizing them with the essentials of the Karnatik style. Within the repertoire, there was ample scope for creative improvisation and variety; in fact, several contemporary listeners claimed that the 1950s saw ‘the best and purest of the art’s phases’ with enormous diversity in approach embodied in the music of artistes like G.N. Balasubramanian, who evolved his own techniques that employed phrases in quick tempo (known and described as brigas); in the simplicity of Madurai Mani Iyer and his penchant for swara singing; in the harmonic, passionately bhava-laden music of Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, among several others, not to speak of women artistes and instrumentalists who emerged as great performers. The concert habit became so deeply embedded that even those who were not especially trained to appreciate the subtleties of rhythm, or who scoffed at the more complex exhibitions of laya, stayed back and appreciated when maestro Palani Subramania Pillai played to the kanjira with Palghat Mani Iyer on the mridangam.29 More recently it has been suggested that the difference between styles was not 29Kalki, in his ‘Aadal-Paadal’ writings often referred to the virtuosity of these artistes and the rapport they enjoyed with their audience.

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as exaggerated as assumed and that the notion that G.N. Balasubramanian did not use gamakas is erroneous and that within the generally accepted format, individual artistes deepened the repertoire by their improvisation. In fact, the solidity of the repertoire and the delineation of a clear and unambiguous style by Ariyakudi, in terms of content and execution, gave both performers and training institutions a model to work on. Performers were required to know a certain number of compositions and to render them consistently and in accordance with ‘tradition’ which involved adherence to an accepted teaching lineage, the ability to reproduce the authentic tradition and a period of apprenticeship. At the same time, the clarity of the katcheri model facilitated its incorporation into the modern institutions of music education, where not only were students expected to perform as part of their training but were provided with a curriculum that went through the basic repertoire of songs and melodic understanding.

Revisiting Questions of Aura and Authenticity The construction of a classical style, predicated upon its empathetic reception by a knowledgeable audience of connoisseurs, was part of a larger process of middle-class fashioning of the self and an aesthetics that emphasized notions of authenticity, propriety and artistic excellence. As the new leaders of society and self-appointed custodians of high culture, the middle-class agonized over issues of authenticity and commitment to higher ethical and artistic standards in classical music, which was valued as a priceless resource that also bore the marks of the emerging nation’s spiritual identity. The act of staging a classical music concert as a public event made it doubly important to showcase its higher values, and this necessarily involved looking at the concert space as a very special magic space that permitted the special and specialist community of listeners to recall and invoke the aura of art. The circumstances in which some musical compositions, notably of the Tanjore trinity, had come to be acquired and inherited produced an insistence on accurate reproduction; this did not necessarily mean a formulaic and mimetic recall of the compositions and their embedded style, but rather an ability to evoke the intuited emotional content of those compositions. It was this ability that constituted the quality of improvisation, and it required both skill

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and empathy on the part of the performer and understanding and receptivity of the listener. Reinvoking that intuitive emotional quality meant that the very act of listening to music in a secular public space became an act of collective spiritual experience. Around the 1920s, Margaret Cousins, the celebrated Theosophist and spokesperson for Indian musical education, expressed her unequivocal admiration for audiences in Madras. Recalling a visit to an eminent lawyer’s house where a musical soiree had been organized, she wrote, ‘I remember my entire surprise the first time I was asked to attend an evening party at the home of a famous Madras barrister. I expected jollity and chatting and perhaps a little music; instead the entertainment had begun before I arrived and consisted of a singer giving a rendering in music of some religious story, and all the legal luminaries kept silent all the evening, profoundly engrossed in a religious theme. I could not fancy a duplicate experience amongst a group of similar people in Dublin, from which I had only recently come.’30 A similar identification with the performance was replicated in sabha concerts and Cousins was entirely appreciative of the audience-performer connection in making the musical experience an enchanted space. As she observed, ‘a musician’s highest powers are drawn forth by a large audience more than by the limited circle of a drawing room. He needs either the solitude of a salon if he be a musician of spiritual devotion with not more than three or four unobtrusive pupils to absorb the teaching he gives unconsciously by this subjective method—or he needs the magnetic action and reaction of a large number of people filling a hall proportionate to his power of sound.’31 Later observers did not endorse Cousins’ enthusiasm for the educated audience—we have copious references to the disengaged and indifferent audience, which showed scant respect to the percussionist and often left for a break when the percussion solo began. Kalki Krishnamoorthi writing in the 1930s for the popular Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan often commented on the mixed audience that frequented the city’s concerts that drew a variety of listeners, not all of whose expectations converged. He identified four categories of listeners. There was, first of all, the serious and pedantic music critics (he did not count himself in this category) and musicologists who 30Margaret Cousins, Music of Orient and Occident: Essays towards Mutual Understanding, B. G. Paul & Co., Madras, 1935, p. 131. 31Cousins, Music of Orient and Occident.

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worried about conventions, were quick to detect the slightest deviations and monitored the performance scrupulously without caring for the prescience of melodic enjoyment or of a sweet singing voice. The second category consisted of the well-to-do and affluent people who were not interested in any kind of technicality but were drawn to anything that sounded immediately pleasing to their ears. They had no understanding of the intricacies of rhythm and were put off by percussion displays. The third category, arguably the most numerous, was whom Kalki called the real rasikas or connoisseurs. Unlike the first category, they were not interested in spotting the mistakes of the performer but merely responded to a sweet singing voice that was capable of rendering complex and deep musical thought. Finally, there was the fourth category, which was principally interested in competitive displays between the singer and the percussionist, in demonstrations of swara singing.32 The entry of the last two categories, according to Kalki, was what constituted the new audience, which testified to the popularity of classical music and the importance it had assumed. He ascribed this development to the endeavours of the Madras Academy that never lost sight of the importance of maintaining the status of classical music as a resource to be practiced and enjoyed. What is telling about the project, especially in its initial stages, was the seriousness of the reformers in creating this space of signification and musical magic. Even as sabha katcheris became social events in the sense of who occupied the first rows, or who functioned as secretary, the katcheris also became shared spaces of an intimate emotional experience. That, in itself, became a central value and an organizing principle. Musicologists and musicians were aware of what the concert was intended to achieve and responded by expanding and experimenting with the model and also came up with actual normative prescriptions. The writings of this period speak of a modern taxonomy of performers and listeners and also frame rules for audience behaviour. Professor P. Sambamoorthy in his dictionary of south Indian music had a detailed section on katcheri dharma where he developed on the lines of the Natya Sastra, the obligations and rights of the audience. For instance, he insisted that members of the audience maintain a proper silence when an 32Kalki (under the pseudonymn Karnatakam) ‘Sarvam sangeeta mayam’, Ananda Vikatan, 5 January 1936, pp. 19–21.

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instrument was being tuned and that they remained seated when a piece was being performed. An audience in his words, ‘was like a catalytic agent and draws the best from out of the performer. Audiences should remember that an encouraging applause from them produces very good results. Apathetic and indifferent audiences are a problem for the performer or the giver of a lecture-recital. A cold reception to some of the rare fights in the sphere of creative music or to a polished rendering of a difficult sangati, or to the production of a phrase from a higher position in the case of a violinist, damps the enthusiasm of the performer. Even silence on the part of an audience, when the performer expected an applause from them has the same negative effect upon him.’33 To applaud or not to applaud became the subject matter of several reviews, whether or not the katcheri dharma as an obligatory exercise could remain consistent with the idea of a commercial space of entertainment, were contentious issues to be sure, but these reflected, at the same time, the nature and intensity of public engagement with the idea of the katcheri. What is important about these suggestions was the collective interest that surfaced around making the concert a hallowed and special space for a unique transaction between performer and listener. This is not to say that these suggestions did not carry an element of absurdity or that they reeked of extreme formality and tokenism, but merely to underscore the investment in classical music performance, which within its new context became a major and new ritual process. It is here that Cousins’ observations were significant for these publicized an important strand of public opinion about the katcheri as a multi-faceted site of demarcating classicism, as a space of shared affect and emotion. The larger question of authenticity associated with affect also raises the more contentious questions of aura and originality that Walter Benjamin addressed in his writings on art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin, it may be recalled, had suggested that the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art had its basis in ritual and that prior to reproduction, it was an unique object or performance that could not be experienced except by the audience willing to make a pilgrimage to the art work’s location. The art work had an aura, which precluded its being understood except by its creator. 33P. Sambamoorthy, Dictionary of South Indian Music and Musicians,Vol. 2, Indian Music Publishing House, Madras, 1959, pp. 265–71. For quote see p. 271.

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The audience could contemplate it and in the very ritual and process of contemplation, there was the implicit acknowledgement of the art-work’s cultural value and of the elevation of the artist to the status of genius. Due to its cultural value, the art object had a value in itself and of itself and was moderately inaccessible. When and if reproduced, these images were robbed of their value.34 Applying these assumptions to a musical work, like a performance that had to conform to the authentic and yet remain original and ever prescient, how do we reconcile the idea of the authentic with that of reproduction of the correct tradition? Here it is important to keep in mind that what the sabha organizers were attempting to do was to retrieve repeatedly the aura of the musical experience by framing a normative model of performance that enabled a community of listeners to participate in a collective ritual of worship and contemplation. They did not suffer from any anxieties about losing the original or undermining the essence of the musical art so long as it could be safeguarded within the parameters of a legitimate lineage of transmission. There was never any question of detracting from the originality of the composition if it was accurately rendered for the precondition to maintaining the aura was fidelity to an accepted version of the song text with its embellishments, which in itself gave the performer adequate scope for individual improvisation and creativity. It was this balance that was seen as the ultimate ideal. Nor was it new or unprecedented; from early Indian musical thought that oscillated between the poles of composed music and improvised music to later developments that saw compositions emerge as the practical embodiment of shastra or theory, the performer was always expected to articulate his creativity and spontaneity and bring forth the emotional content of the piece as the original composer had intended. The changing context of performance did not displace this idea—on the contrary, there was an edge to the emerging concern for empathy and emotional identification with the tradition and practice of music embodied in the celebrated compositions of respected musicians. The identification was part of an older tradition of piety and devotion, and of the more contemporary fascination for feeling and emotionalism, which assumed a different set of signification for the modern listening subject. As C.S. Iyer noted in 1946, ‘our melodic 34Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in H. Zohn (trans.) Illuminations, Essays and Reflections (Schoken), New York, 1968, pp. 217–52.

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music, especially of the musical trinity of south India is intended to raise the singer as well as the listener to a spiritual beatitude and the rapt attention necessary thereof, should not be disturbed.The aesthetic beauty of the face, possessing calmness in combination with a voice of resonant sweetness and effortlessness is thus insisted on, to irradiate a joy and happiness to the listener.’35 The katcheri has since then undergone several changes.The pursuit of enchantment, however, remains integral to the listening experience just as the concert remains the litmus test for an aspiring musician. Yet the katcheri is no longer the same either in terms of the excitement that it carried for the first generations of public listeners or in the kind of commitment a generation of musicians had brought with them to the stage. This is not to subscribe to the overwhelming tendencies in existing and emerging discourse36 that either lament the state of decay or hold the promise of a brave new future, but merely to anticipate how reflections on music practice and performance have followed a particular trajectory and have failed by and large, to initiate a creative conversation between the critic and the singer.

35Kumara Guru C. Subrahmanya Ayyar, An Artistes Miscellany on Society, Religion and Music, R.Venkateshwar & Co., Madras, 1946, p. 95. 36See ‘Features of the Kutcheri Today’ in Sruti, March 1985, pp. 5–7.

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Articulating an Aesthetic

2

The Emergence of the Music Critic in Modern South India

IN 1938, MARGARET COUSINS, IN ONE OF HER MINI COMMENTARIES ON INDIAN

music wrote thus: A Hindu music party is no programme of fragmentary songs; it is a mental and moral discipline necessitating powers of patience and concentration. A really fine musician will almost hypnotize his hearers as he works up to his climacteric points. Their hands and feet will join in keeping time; facial expressions change, heads move to appreciate the minute changes which gradually pile up, the ascension from the abysses of silence towards sounds which are continually becoming more intensive, acute and etherealized to rise into that higher ‘silence’ implying sound which comes at the moment of ecstasy. This music is not music for its own sake. It is not abstract music, nor didactic, neither vague nor impressionist, but one pointed in devotion to something afar from the sphere of ‘our sorrow’. Such music is veritably an instrument of yoga.1

In this elaborate and somewhat convoluted encomium to Indian music, Cousins indicated, quite forcefully, two salient features which by her time, had become the basis of a new aesthetic paradigm for Indian music. Emphasizing the spiritual or mystical overtones of the art form in the experiential domain was one, while the other consisted of training, discipline and rigour that permitted the performer to hypnotize his audience so that they were in complete identification with the artist. For Cousins, this was an inevitable sequel to the very nature of Indian music, which she suggested, was not for concert rooms. It was either ‘for the shrine or the sunrise or the social religious 1Margaret Cousins, ‘The Science of Indian Music’, The Indian Review, February 1938, Madras pp. 39–40 (hereafter Cousins, ‘The Science of Indian Music’).

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ceremony. Being based on the self-sufficiency of the human voice, it is vocal; being individualistic it is necessarily melodic. One may generalize that our music is monistic, in turned, while western music is dualistic and out turned’.2 The articulation of this aesthetic paradigm, to which Cousins gave such eloquent expression, was tied up very intimately with the emerging sensibilities of the new consumers and patrons of music in modern south India. The latter had reworked some of the ideas that had been represented as central musical values in India. The emergence of a modern middle-class reengaging with tradition, as we noted in our previous chapter, was accompanied by a range of new experiences and discursive production associated with the conception and consumption of performance. The need to theorize about the intention and orientation of music, from the presentation of the performer in the concert stage to the dynamics of audience behaviour and appreciation found expression in a series of efforts, some random, others coherent. This chapter will examine how in the course of articulating a distinct classical style and refining the space of performance, a body of writing developed as a genre of music criticism, why it adopted a particular language which at a conceptual level was not especially effective or adequate, and why despite this limitation, the figure of the modern music critic assumed a special position in the popularization of musical taste. It will also, in passing, look at some individual figures who made their mark as premier music commentators and critics and who intervened at decisive moments to popularize and consolidate the new aesthetics of classicism.

Wanted: A Common Standard Music criticism, as a specific genre, emerged initially in response to a growing consensus among the new middle-class patrons of music to establish common standards of performance and pedagogy. These were expressed largely in the form of newspaper articles, where the decline of musical standards and their dilution was commented upon extensively. In the process, a very tentative and repetitive set of prescriptions was assembled to constitute a genre of music criticism that was thereafter, developed more self-consciously, but not 2Cousins, ‘The

Science of Indian Music’, pp. 39–40.

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necessarily more effectively. The prescriptions had largely to do with the appropriateness of the concert repertoire and accuracy of reproduction and occasionally with the issue of voice training. Amanda Weidman’s work on the politics of voice in southern India demonstrated how a specific notion of the modern singing voice was constructed as the locus of authenticity. Early efforts at music criticism did engage with the issues of voice and the interpretation of musical intelligence but failed to come up with an evolved vocabulary that addressed the subtleties of the practice or the art form.The early language of criticism and appreciation was predictably hybrid—the recourse to traditional theories of rasa or emotion, expression and the taxonomy of performers and voices, balanced with terms derived from western models of description produced a mélange of terms and categories that did not cohesively spell out the tenets of criticism. This was evident as early as the 1930s when a discourse developed around the voice and its centrality in musical communication. The importance of a good singing voice that was natural and pleasing was stressed time and again, but without entering into the technicalities of actual vocal culture. The ‘natural voice’ was the one sought after, and here, the balance tilted in favour of women’s voices that seemed to satisfy the aural expectations of the modern consumers; women’s voices were found to be closer to the universal language of art and functioned as an appropriate medium that could be worked to correspond to emerging notions of ideal womanhood. E. Krishna Iyer, a key figure in the dance reform project in south India, was among the first to comment on this, but was also alert to the importance of training. It is but natural that in the general dearth of good and well trained voices among the platform musicians and scared away by the excesses of dry acrobatics of the technical experts, the clamour of the music loving public the real paying patrons of art should run mad after sweet sounds as such wherever they are found irrespective of the quality of human art. It may not be easy to convince the democracy that sweetness of natural music as found in the voices of young women, young boys and singing birds, very necessary and desirable as it is, cannot by itself and without the human art of developed techniques and practice make a whole and true picture of a highly refined and cultivated system of art as South Indian music.3 3E. Krishna Iyer, Personalities in Present day Music, Madras Rochehouse & sons, 1933, p. xvi (hereafter E. Krishna Iyer, Personalities).

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It was obvious that good music, as Krishna Iyer wrote, was a happy combination of natural music of sweet sounds and the human art of refined technique, practice and presentation. What it was that produced the ideal voice was not something that was clearly articulated. The preferred female voice, which was to do with alterations of pitch and which was able to blend clear articulation of the song with melodic fineness was talked about but not by addressing or attempting a new vocabulary. Instead, the emphasis was squarely on continuing and fragmentary conventions of description that fitted the newly found zeal for defining a clear set of practices as classical, but without fleshing out the practical elements involved in expanding and developing techniques. Music criticism was confined to the reiteration of a classical performance repertory, of voice types, of performance gimmicks and the need for their abolition, as well as of audience etiquette. Early musical reportage was, therefore, directed as much at the performer of the art form as its listener who had to be initiated into the technique and conventions of theory and practice; a compulsion that may explain why music criticism developed more as a popular and journalistic activity rather than an academic discipline or why it did not really interact with the discipline of musicology seriously and systematically. Early music criticism responded initially to the growing need for an acceptable conception of musical sound in performance. How was sound to be arranged that was socially acceptable especially among the new middle-class consumers? The constraints imposed upon the art form, in terms of limited time and a closed space in the urban public arena, combined with the introduction of recording and amplifying technology meant that musical sound had to be differently arranged, and indeed, conceptualized. It was first of all, essential to tone down volume considering that the performance was not an openair one, and also to integrate the accompanying ensemble to refine vocal articulation. The idea was for the accompanying instrument to act as the ventrioloquist4 to give more clarity to the soloist’s vocalization and thereby, produce a composite aural experience. Responding to this idea, early music appreciation focused on three concrete issues that were seen as critical in perfecting a performance technique and in adhering to the essentials of the tradition.These were: 4Weidman, Voicing the Modern.

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one, the scaling down of excessive ambient noise and the intrusions or excesses of the percussion; two, the measured execution of melody and rhythmic virtuosity; and three, display of emotionalism through a finely modulated voice that could register the finer shrutis as well as that of technical skill that only a close understanding of the trinity’s compositions could ensure. These were, in fact, the recurrent motifs of music criticism and appreciation expressed either through serious essays and pieces or through amusing snippets and satirical sketches, some of which we shall have occasion to explore elsewhere. Debates over the contentious issue of percussion and accompaniment reflected a shift in emphasis from rhythm to melody, from technical display to melodic analysis. Debates on what constituted the ideal accompaniment, characterized virtually all major writings related to music. Right from the comments of P. S. Iyer in the 1920s to the official discourse of the Madras Music Academy, there was a serious attempt at evaluating how the appropriate ensemble of accompaniment should be arranged and assembled, and how this was to be articulated to produce a unified conception of sound. It was not as though the new connoisseurs were not aware or appreciative of the element of display and competitiveness in a concert, but what was important was a shift in emphasis. Articles in English dailies as well as in Tamil, the Swadesamitran and Ananda Vikatan being cases in point, criticized the tendency among contemporary artistes to give their percussion more time than necessary. In the January issue of 1921 of Swadesamitran, it was pointed out, that the time given to the accompanying ensemble was actually a cheap ruse adopted by musicians to cover up their lack of talent and confidence. ‘Do not people know’ the writer asked, ‘that it is conventional to allow the fiddle a little time for raga elaboration and a similar slot for the percussion?’5 In 1933, the editorial of the Madras Academy’s journal carried a piece on ‘The decline of taste’ where it said: The history of south Indian music during the last quarter of a century is the lamentable change over from the reign of soulful melody to the tyranny of the mechanical drum. Raga has been dethroned and Tala has usurped the supremacy. The practice of mathematical swara permutations has frozen up the fountains of creative joy of the emotional spirit. Today, it is the scale that is attacked, the raga is seldom rendered. This mechanical 5Swadesamitran,

1 January 1921, (see NMML R4259) ‘Sharir Bhedam’.

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attitude of the musician has had its reaction upon public taste. A singer has come to be esteemed less for those exquisite touches of melody that move even non sentient beings than for the number of swara avruttas with which he can overwhelm the drummer. Equally reprehensible the tyranny of sangatis that overburdens the graceful and delicate forms of the master composer. Another weakness, which is characteristic of the age we live in, is the craze for speed thrills. No more is heard of the soft and restful rendering of the great passion modes with graceful glides and long drawn notes, the favoured haunts where the spirit of the raga forever dwells. The age of melody is gone that of the drum Morsing and Kanjeera have succeeded.6

This was an intolerable situation as far as the new consumers and patrons were concerned and there was consequently, a sustained pressure to transform the acoustic space of performance. By the late 1930s and 1940s, sabhas and journals relentlessly kept up the pressure to refine the percussion accompanying the solo performer and also to persuade the latter to opt for a medium tempo style of singing, to avoid excessive displays of speed and to achieve a balance between technical expertise and melodic sensitivity to make the performance an expression of superior entertainment with none of the derogatory connotations associated with mere entertainment. Swara singing was one area of intervention; here the musician was expected to reel off swaras (musical syllables) at great speed thereby demonstrating his command over the rhythmic cycle and keeping the audience entertained by these acts of technical skill. By the late 1930s and 1940s, this practice came in for severe criticism, and connoisseurs argued that these detracted from the aesthetic experience of melodic music. Contemporary journals were unanimous in condemning the practice as a gimmick; the Karnata Sangeetam, the Coimbatore based Tamil journal, carried an item that made fun of the combative element in swara singing and how it resulted in a shower of sputum on the mike!7 Observers insisted that the practice had to be done aesthetically and in moderation.The new mantra was veering towards emotionalism or bhava, which was seen as the magic substance capable of elevating the standard of a music concert. These directives on swara singing and percussion became standardized in the following decades when music histories and 6JMAM, Vol. 7Karnata

IV, Nos.1–4, 1933, see editorial ‘The Decline of Taste’. Sangeetam, 1946.

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textbooks carried elaborate prescriptions for what was permissible and how the idea of percussion was to augment the musicality of the performance. Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the attack on extreme rhythmic display and technical virtuosity, which had its fair share of takers, came at a time when the music scene was dominated by absolute masters of percussion and who, very often, refused to play for artistes they did not consider their equals. These tensions did not translate into a clear and cogently argued debate about contending aesthetic conceptions. On the whole, however, percussionists like Mani Iyer collaborated with the Academy, wrote important pieces for its journal on the techniques of percussion and performed with leading artistes to produce an impressive corpus of recitals that consolidated the classical style. By the 1940s, it would appear that the new aesthetics or conventions regarding accompaniment and the scaling down of percussion had come to be more or less endorsed, and within that, a refinement of registers was set in motion. Percussionists of great reputation were able to hold their own but it would not be far-fetched to suggest that their conceptions negotiated effectively and sensitively to the emerging ideas of sound and aural refinement, and that they endorsed the larger idea of pursuing the voice within the instrument, the drum, which they beat. In fact, even when the 1950s and 1960s saw impressive percussionists and violinists who dominated the concert stage and held their own before the solo vocalist, there was the constant refrain of the voice and the vocal dimensions of music. This valorisation of the voice was the most significant feature to emerge in music appreciation. It was the pursuit of the inner voice of the instrument that was marked off as a sign of great music although the historical antecedents of this value were not always fully explored. Scholars working on the changing sociology of music in modern India have been struck by the emphasis on the voice and the voicing of musical instruments, but have been unable to explain why the idea gained such a powerful appeal and articulation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weidman makes the case for the modern voice; Janaki Bakhle speaks of the ideal female voice that captivated the new constituency of listeners, but we are not entirely sure what it was about searching for the authentic voice in music that was part of the modernist project. Evidently, vocal music in India had always been valued—from normative descriptions of good voices to

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conventions of vocal practice, from anecdotes of musicians whose voices were so powerful as to combat the elements to esoteric descriptions of breath control and stillness that blurred music practice with meditation, we have sufficient basis to make a case for vocalization. So what was it about the new criticism that referenced the voice differently? It is a question that is difficult to answer especially as the language of the emerging criticism remained vague and general, or else, invoked older categories and theories but without locating them or applying them in a specific context. Much of the writing that may be subsumed under the category of music criticism invariably addressed issues of classicism and of the elements constitutive of tradition without articulating a specific language of musical preconditions of arrangements. Even the preoccupation with the ideal voice did not yield an imaginative or sensitive understanding of the medium of expression, or of what it was that could facilitate the communication of an exquisite experience through a delicate combination of feeling, technical expertise and vocal quality and that could unite the singer and listener in a shared space of pleasure and absorption. Pitch or shruti suddham was an oft-quoted requirement— but nothing more was developed in terms of clearly articulated strategies for vocal training or culture. The silence is perplexing for musicians and their admirers were familiar with a number of anecdotes and family histories in circulation. Many of these descriptions especially in relation to the life sketches of musicians adhering to what was called the ‘ghanam’ style of singing emphasized not only the quality of great voices but related this to a form of yoga and meditative practice that was seen as integral to music. These descriptions were however lost in translation as modern reformist connoisseurs and self-styled musicologists were unable to develop these ideas within a modern conceptual framework, and instead, took recourse to a vacuous vocabulary of appreciation and criticism. Further, there was a greater stress on assembling a discourse that saw the ideal voice as the vehicle of authenticity, referred to important conventions and practices that facilitated musical expression and cultivated the voice.

The Voice and the Music Critic The discussion on voice and vocal culture, therefore, assumed a very specific set of inflections in the emerging musical discourse. Three

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general features may be noted. In the first place, there was a growing recognition that the move away from spectacular technical display to a more melodious approach to music required sweet voices that would hold the attention of the audience; a point that E. Krishna Iyer stressed in his writings. Second, there was an increasing emphasis on voice culture that was seen to remain conspicuously absent in southern India especially in contrast to its northern Hindustani musical counterpart. Third, there was also an esoteric approach to the idea of the voice especially put forward by the Theosophists who saw music as a form of yoga and referred to older existing vocabulary that spoke of breath control and breath-related practices as the most important precondition to vocal musical articulation. P.S. Iyer’s articles in the 1920s pointed to a crisis among performing musicians most of whom, he wrote, had impaired voices due to faulty training and to the excessive stress on technical display. Iyer was not terribly impressed with the female voices he heard; he dismissed them as being nasal and contrived, and it is likely that he was giving expression to a preference that would, in a matter of decades, assume more general currency. Iyer argued that male singers would have to concentrate on a ‘closer scrutiny of regular sounds of varying intensity and their correct production’ and would have to eschew swara singing in fast tempo that had destroyed south Indian music. In the following years, in fact very rapidly, these ideas became generally current and by the time that E. Krishna Iyer wrote his sketches of eminent personalities in Madras city, the preference for sweet natural singing voices had been established beyond dispute. Writing in the 1930s when the talented Saraswati Bai had already made a mark on the musical scene in the city, he admitted that it was but natural to seek out sweet natural voices that were neither shrill and high-pitched not bass and ‘mannish’, and which were found in women, young men and birds. He admired Saraswati Bai’s voice as a divine gift, which she had trained effectively to display it in the exposition of high music. It had, in his words, ‘neither the shrillness of a very high pitched voice nor the bass quality of a mannish one’.8 It had just the desirable middle volume, resonance and audibility with mellifluous effect, flawless tone, texture and wide range that captivated listeners who were tired of listening to rough gruff voices that had further been impaired by wrong techniques of 8E.

Krishna Iyer, Personalities, p. 46.

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practice. In fact, several writers before and after Iyer, spoke of the need to reconsider techniques of practice that were harmful in their consequences but did not recall the techniques that practitioners actually must have used in their lifetime. As a result, we are left with a number of very generalized descriptions and terms emptied of their meaning, like for instance, sadhakam,9 but without any access to the actual technicalities involved or its psychological and physiological dimensions. This was, in part, to do with the pursuit and celebration of the sweet and ideal voice, especially of women singers, who assumed a central significance in the reform project, which aimed, among other things, at creating a central performing space and category for an idealized middle-class singing woman. Her primary responsibility was to her class and impeccable collective culture and her music had to reflect this. The very nature of such an intention raised difficulties in squaring this order of modern priorities with traditional terminology. Additionally, there was the problem arising from the fact that many of the reformers and connoisseurs had only a superficial understanding of traditional voice culture even if they had an encyclopaedic knowledge of melodies, compositions and technical details. It is also likely that the shift in emphasis on the romantic or emotional aspects of music, which underpinned the reformist project conceived of a very different notion of the voice that had to contain acoustic finesse. Contrasting earlier descriptions of voice culture and musical practice suggest that the point of articulation involving a complex play of energy and listening within, with a steady flow of rhythm was all-important, and reflected in descriptions of stillness of breath, and of the breath moving through the psycho-physiological circles along the spine. It was the articulation through a perfect balance of breath and effortless rhythm that enabled the production of the most difficult and dynamic of gamakas without distorting the voice or shifting it from its centre. Though this did not obviously preclude an interest in acoustic finesse, it did shift it to the margins and the preoccupation was, first and foremost, with location and resonance. The Theosophists, or at least some of them, wrote about the voice 9Sadhakam or vocal practice is a recurrent topic for discussion in the Karnata Sangeetam. Virtually every single issue in 1946 carried a piece on this.

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and music in terms of breath control and yoga but these do not appear to have got integrated with the music criticism that emerged, more as a literary genre. Margaret Cousins was an important correspondent for Indian music, who put forward strongly the idea of the voice as the determining feature of Indian music. Drawing the oft-quoted difference between Indian and western music, she wrote, ‘the human voice is its measuring rod, its center and circumference; not even Italy has paid attention to the control of the voice and the breath than has India. Can east and west ever meet in musical appreciation? Yes answers the writer. By intellectual study, by external aids and by a yoga (spiritual discipline) which will draw its music from the inner source from which all music has welled forth.’ The description was repeated by others without any real exegesis and taken only to emphasize the spiritual orientation of Indian music.10 Rukmini Arundale (1904–86), for instance, also with strong Theosophist leanings, spoke of emotion and melody as the hallmarks of Indian music whose spiritual overtones made it especially valuable.V. Raghavan, an eminent Sanskrit scholar and Theosophist, did not elaborate on voice culture or its traditional techniques with the result that the emerging genre of music criticism did not have at its disposal a vocabulary of technical terms, or indeed, of practical conventions. Musicians, on the other hand, did indicate the importance of breath and singing from the mooladhara or navel—a practice that composers like Tyagaraja also mentioned in their compositions—but these pronouncements hardly had any impact on the emerging preferences for the sweet voice, melodious music and the modern concert format. The celebration of sweetness and of the natural voice that conveyed a certain evanescent quality was balanced in the emerging discourses, by the stress of training and tradition, which in turn, meant a deep engagement with the existing repertoire of kritis, especially of the trinity, and with the prevailing conceptions of raga singing, and of maintaining the sruti and purity of notes (swara suddham). In fact these were emphasized time and again—and it was only within this framework that the singing voice, male and female, could be properly evaluated. Kalki never tired of reminding his readers how certain concerts stood out because the performers in question were able to blend their voices with the sruti effortlessly. It was only when the voice, sweet or deep, was able to align with the sruti and interpret the 10Cousins, ‘The

Science of Indian Music’.

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knowledge of melody and rhythm with ease that it could command the status of a true singing voice, capable of conveying good music. In his words, good music had to ‘please your ears, tickle your brain and touch your heart’.11 What was so modern about this pronouncement is a question that one may legitimately ask. Long before the establishment of institutions like the Madras Music Academy, critics and commentators had written about the treatment of melodies and the desirable vocal qualities of singers. Classical texts were elaborate in their prescriptions about sruti, uccharippu (enunciation), talam (rhythm), and sangatis (embellishments) and even about the gimmicks that performers indulged in and which had to be eschewed. Where, then, did the difference lie? The difference, one may suggest, lay in the emphasis on self-reflexivity and on the alignment of the art form and the auditory experience of performance with the self-definition of the consuming elite. For the Brahmin practitioners and consumers of music, the cerebral aspect of the exercise (translated into the precision of the Karnatik idiom, the intricacy of cross rhythm and swara exercises— kanaka vazakku) was as important as the sweetness of voice that conveyed to them the sublime aspects of devotion which was, in fact, the proper and ultimate intention of classical music. The cosmetic engineering that was put in place to mark out an aesthetic space and then project it repeatedly as an experiential space was a rupture with the pre-modern sensibility. For Tyagaraja and his disciples, the very practice of music was a sadhana, and while they were involved in the making of a creative idiom and a new aesthetic, their music was not separate from their new social role, even if it was not entirely congregational in character. In the case of the modern-day audience, the consumption and representation of music was part of a new socializing process that had to bridge the world they had left behind with the world they were putting together in the aftermath of colonial modernity and its accompanying appendages of market, a transformed public space and new conceptions of individual and collective responsibility. Cousins observed this in 1935, ‘I remember to my entire surprise the first time I was asked to attend an evening party at the home of a famous Madras barrister I expected jollity and chatting 11Ananda Vikatan.

‘Aadal Paadal’, 4 October 1936. See also 2 June 1935 issue. Virtually on every occasion that moved Kalki, he wrote about the emotional dimensions of performance that also happened to frequently involve the rendering of songs in Tamil, which he could identify with, immediately.

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and perhaps a little music, instead the entertainment had begun before I arrived and consisted of one singer giving a rendering in music of some religious story and all the legal luminaries kept silent all the evening profoundly engrossed in a religious theme’.12 In voicing the preference for the ideal singing voice, musicians and connoisseurs referred to the superior voice culture that underpinned Hindustani classical music. Here, it is important to recognize that the circulation of Hindustani music and musicians in late-nineteenth century India was important in shaping the development of musical drama as well as popular taste for Indian music. We are told how the Hindustani musician Ramdas was an important teacher who taught Gopalakrishna Bharati and interacted with musicians like Ghanam Krishna Iyer, how mystics and yogis acted as an important catalyst for musicians and taught them principles of pranayama. These anecdotes, admittedly with recurrent motifs, make it difficult for modern historians to see them as verifiable facts but there seems little doubt that they reflected, in a general way, the abiding faith that musicians reposed in some of the larger principles that informed Indian musical practices These ranged from all sorts of modes, from mechanical exercises connected to a repertoire, to subtle graded paths of interrelated meditative practices that focused on vocal awareness.13 Here, the north Indian musician with his orientation towards a more leisured style of vilambit was presumably seen to command a greater sense of voice culture. Experts at the Music Academy in Madras agreed that Hindustani music gave the artist more freedom to improvise and that musicians in south India had a lot to gain by adopting methods of intensive voice culture and alapana in vilambit. In 1947, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, a respected musician even in his time and who suffered from voice troubles, in an address to the same academy, commended the example of north Indian musicians, who regularly performed riyaaz with the purpose of voice control. Several others endorsed this position but these assertions do not seem to have translated either into a systematic pedagogy for voice culture or into music criticism. Interestingly, even ironically, self-appointed connoisseurs resented the charges levelled against them about the inadequacy of music criticism as a genre but the response continued to be framed within a formulaic production 12Cousins,

Music of Orient and Occident, Madras, 1935, p. 180. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, Ghanam Krishna Iyer, Madras, 1936. Also see Mahavaidyantha Iyer, Madras, 1945. Also see Vidvan Veenai Varadayya, ‘Bobbili Kesaviah’, JMAM, Vol. 22, 1951. 13See

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of concert-related etiquette. Music criticism remained, for the most part, a literary and journalistic function that fed into the established social circuits of consumption and reflexive contemplation. Kalki Krishnamoorthi best exemplified this tendency. One of the most popular critics, his weekly section on music and dance in the popular Tamil weekly, AnandaVikatan, were directed more against the nature of the middle-class project and sabha organizers, and subsequently in defence of the Tamil music movement that championed the cause of Tamil compositions. Not that Kalki did not take himself seriously— he came up with severe ripostes against self-appointed music experts and defended his style of criticism and parodied the habit of writing reviews that asserted how wonderful recitals were just so as to neutralize the critical elements. He made no bones about the fact that he was not a theoretician whose function was to confuse his readers with technical details, but that he had sufficient understanding to appreciate the art form and evaluate the performer and his performance.14 What did this imply for the development of music criticism as a field of critical analysis? As far as Kalki was concerned, his prose was the reflection of an informed layperson, who by his style, was able to connect with the general tastes and sensibilities of the audience and at the same time, played a key role in popularizing the practice of listening to classical music. Featuring as a miscellaneous piece in weeklies where the idea was to expand the readership, the music review could hardly be expected to develop into a serious genre of critical writing. What was important about Kalki’s writings was the way they functioned as a lighter representation of the official version of classical music that patrons and performers were seeking to consolidate. Endorsing fully the importance of maintaining a balance between technical excellence and emotionalism through form and melody, Kalki came up with amusing and even perceptive descriptions of concerts in Madras; these were significant because they reflected the taste of the day and reinforced the standard being put forward and consolidated by organizations like the Madras Academy.

Kalki’s Music and Dance: ‘Aadal Paadal’ Kalki wrote regularly on issues related to music—its patronage and consumption—and intervened quite decisively in his instinctual 14AnandaVikatan, ‘Aadal Paadal’, 10 June 1934, ‘Ido sangeeta panditar’ (‘Here’s the music expert’), pp. 24–32.

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appreciation of both the technical aspects of the art form as well as the social dimensions of the altered context of its patronage.15 The importance of technique was not discounted even if the expressive dimensions of the performance enjoyed greater currency with modern connoisseurs like Kalki. Implicitly endorsing the necessity for a balance between sweet singing and technical virtuosity, Kalki, nonetheless, had little time or patience with the intellectual critic whose theorizations seemed to miss the point of practical demonstrations.What is curious about his writings as well as other contemporary notices is the adoption of a popular, even commonsensical, style of music appreciation that neither studied theory seriously nor documented older memories of vocal practice. Kalki was no exception—indeed his mild amusement at the pretensions of the music pandits was a recurrent feature of the ‘Aadal Paadal’ section. He described the vidwat sabhas as wrestling arenas, where expressions such as ‘kick the Rishabha a little higher’, ‘better take care of the Gandhara’, with a menacing stick to add emphasis, ‘beat on the head of the Suddha Dhaivata’ were too frequent for comfort. In his opinion, the debates were a waste of time and it was only the presence of Muthiah Bhagavatar (the leading light of the Music Academy of Madras) that made them tolerable. Kalki suggested that committees had to be reconstituted and experts were to be given the power and responsibility of deciding the various issues regarding raga lakshanam, by which he meant the basic features and properties of a melody, or the properties of a raga. This could have been an allusion to the Madras Academy’s experts committee where musicians met every year to determine raga lakshanams. In fact, Kalki was especially lavish in his praise of Sabesa Iyer, another key figure in the Madras Academy debates—and here he drew attention to Sabesa Iyer’s knowledge that enabled a profound and expanded interpretation of a composition in spite of his gruff voice. The patrons of debates and concerts also came in for a fair measure of lampooning. The childish and naïve pleasure of being the key organizer so outweighed the aesthetic appreciation of music that an organizer when asked about the quality of a particular concert, almost compulsively spoke of the seats that he had arranged for a high court judge, the rose garland that he had ordered for the chief guest, the minor wrangle about who would garland the chief guest, and the 15This section is based on the Ananda Vikatan, a Tamil weekly, wherein Kalki wrote regularly on the music performances of the day. The material used is based on the years 1935–7.

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A Discriminating Audience Courtesy: Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras

stress of the entire business of organizing a first rate concert.16 Some extracts of this dialogue have been quoted in the concluding chapter as they offer us the best insight into the social world of modern music as it was reconstituted around social celebrities, eager association members and enthusiastic volunteers, for all of whom the experience was an extension of their self-definition and identity. While Kalki was making a significant point about the social dynamics that underpinned the reception and consumption of music, his writings did not help in setting a new basis for music criticism to develop as an identifiable genre. His comments on individual singers, notwithstanding his humorous and laconic style, did not grapple seriously with the issue of musical values. Rather, they were written to entertain a readership whose investment in music appreciation and tastes were reinforced by the writer. Kalki was really a social commentator whose vignettes were little more than ironic reflections on the middle-class project of which he was an integral part. When he did choose to comment on musical values that he preferred, he endorsed, as indicated before, the emerging aesthetics unequivocally, and picked on the performative aspects like the artiste’s mannerisms, 16Ananda Vikatan, ‘Aadal

Paadal’, 18 October 1936.

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ability to maintain pitch and whether he was able to correctly convey the song texts. We have an interesting illustration in the piece that he wrote on 10 June 1934, where he came up with a sharp critique of a performer and also of a music expert who had expressed his distaste for Kalki’s tongue in tongue-in-cheek comments. In the process, he made a strong statement in favour of bhava in singing and in maintaining the right balance between improvisation and technical solidity. He drew an analogy with the paintings of Ravi Varma that he contrasted with a traditional kolam (geometric drawing), which despite its elegant lines and precision lacked the life force of a painting.17 Even in his important collection of essays titled Taram Kuraiyuma18 (‘Will Standards Fall’) dealing with the Tamil music movement and the alternative ideas of classicism it attempted to pose, Kalki was unable to develop a separate or even sharp language of music appreciation and criticism, to interrogate the classical version that had been put together and consider the possibility of investigating the history of musical practice from an altogether different vantage point. Responding to the call for Tamil music, whose protagonists demanded the singing of Tamil songs and spoke of old Tamil musical traditions, Kalki wrote in defence of the movement but without engaging with the more complex issues of vocalization, musicality and language in the modern context. What he did emphasize was the impossibility of conveying real musical emotion through songs that were not rendered in the mother tongue. While these writings did engage in a limited manner with the larger issue of music and language, of musical language that transcended the specific language of composition, they did not rise above the obvious logic derived from the development of a modern Tamil subjectivity. In his essay, ‘Bayappada vendam’ (‘Fear not!’), he argued that words were central to music and that it was only in very superior transcendental music, like that of the singing of birds, that lyrics were not necessary. He also accused those who argued to the contrary, of inconsistency; ‘what does it matter to them in which language the songs are in?’19 For him, like many other protagonists of the Tamil music movement, the important point was to use the concert space to propagate Tamil songs; he did not believe that this would necessarily displace the importance of classical compositions. 17Ananda Vikatan, ‘Aadal

Paadal’, 10 June 1934, pp. 30–2. Taram Kuraiyuma (‘Will Standards Fall?’), Bharati Press, T Nagaram, Chennai, 1957 (hereafter Taram Kuraiyuma). 19Taram Kuraiyuma, pp. 38–42. 18Kalki,

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Even a cursory reading of his weekly reviews is enough to indicate how Kalki valued the classical style and its clearly identified markers of improvisation, familiarity with compositions and vocalization.20 His comments were always laced with mild irony that appealed to his readers and enabled them to identify more closely with the author and with the practice of listening to music. He admired stalwarts like Musiri Subramania Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer and Muthiah Bhagavatar all of whom he described as pillars of the contemporary music scene. In most cases, the assessment of artistes was organized around conventional registers, notwithstanding differences of individual styles. In his weekly round up, he referred to the different abilities of singers and showered praise on those whose ability to improvise set them apart. His appreciation of voices was as diverse as those of the stage artiste K.B. Sundarambal, of D.K. Pattamal and her contemporaries, but this was, by and large, expressed in very generalized terms. If there was a clear set of musical values that Kalki endorsed, it was the notion of bhava or emotion-laden music. It was this quality that enabled a performer to connect with his audience, it was this quality again that enabled the audience to realize the deeper connotations of music as a vehicle of affect. Realizing the fullest potential of melody (raga bhava) and that of the composition were preconditions for an effective performance—and only when these were blended well, could music said to be complete. As he put it, in the mansion of music, raga is the foundation, tala the roof and bhava the space between.21 These observations reflected the premium put on emotional and melodious singing in the twentieth century—what gave Kalki’s writings a special edge was the way in which he set these arguments to make a case for Tamil songs and music (Tamil Isai). The cause for Tamil Isai was elaborated in his Taram Kuraiyuma. Here he set out to make three kinds of arguments: one had to do with the larger question of music and language, the second dealt with the responsibility of musicians to popularize Tamil songs and finally to mark out a clear space for emotional music and music understanding that had to be detached from the complexities of theory that had no connection with the experiential wisdom of the connoisseur. For Kalki, it was the connoisseur who held the key to genuine music enjoyment while the critic was caught up in needless theoretical knots 20Ananda Vikatan, ‘Aadal 21Ananda Vikatan, ‘Aadal

Paadal’, 17 June 1934, pp. 26–32. Paadal’, 17 June 1934, pp. 26–32.

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that left little space for emotional identification. In fact, he continually reinforced the distinction between the pedant or the music pandit or critic and the informed rasika or connoisseur with whom he identified, and whose appreciation was more intelligible to the larger audience of readers and listeners. Let us consider some of his writings in this connection especially to make the larger point about emotionalism in music, which for Kalki had absolute centrality. This meant that any preoccupation with theory and its display in writing about music appreciation was taboo for it was seen to obfuscate the real issue, which was one of emotionalism and lyrics. Kalki was suspicious of those critics who seemed to over-value and intellectualize music appreciation. Describing the antics of the ‘Pseudo-Knowledgables’ in the field of music as both ‘hilarious and thought-provoking’, he wrote of a concert in progress where there was … this Nambudiri in the audience keen to show off his knowledge of music. [Nambudiris are the traditional butt of jokes in Kerala]. This guy just knew the names of a few ragas, but couldn’t connect them with the singing. So, he stood up and requested the musician to sing the Yadukula-Kamboji raga. The musician was delighted to oblige, and agreed. However, the Nambudiri could not identify the raga even as it was being rendered and in all innocence told the musician to make sure that he sang the Yadukula-Kamboji raga and warned him of dire consequences if he tried to fob him off with some other raga like Bhairavi or Ananda-Bhairavi. He said that even if he could not identify the raga, the Lord (Padmanabhaswami in the shrine in which the concert was taking place) would detect the discrepancy and mete out justice!

In reconstructing this imaginary anecdote, the point Kalki was trying to bring home was the futility of officious and intellectual appraisal of music. He created a whipping boy in the figure of the Mukhya Sthanam who embodied the pedantic critic tending to theorize and intellectualize musical performance. He elaborated on this forcefully as the following extract demonstrates. Recently a newspaper carried a tribute to a renowned musician who had passed away. The reviewer had, amongst other things, said that the late musician’s forte was his cadence in his singing (‘gamakam’), whereas lack of cadence was indeed this musician’s major failing. A common friend asked us as to how the reviewer could praise the departed soul for the one attribute which he sadly lacked in his singing career. My musician-friend had a ready riposte: ‘Don’t be harsh on the reviewer; poor feller, the only word he knew was “cadence” (gamakam) and he had to use it, in context or out of context.

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He played safe by saying that the late musician had cadence (gamakam) in his singing!’ Our common friend’s summing up was that the reviewer had outdone the Nambudiri-friend for shallowness of musical knowledge. All the above exchanges left me in a confused state of wonder: ‘Can it get any worse?’ But after having read the piece by our ‘Music’s Epicenter’ (‘Mukhya-Sthaanam’), I realized there was more of such inanity ahead. This eminence argues that an understanding of the meaning of the lyric (‘saahithyam’) is not necessary for enjoyment of the music; by the same logic, how relevant is an understanding of the musical terminology and the appropriate use of such terminology in musical reviews? Let us spend a few moments on the raga and lyric aspects of music (‘ragabhaavam’ and ‘artha-bhaavam’). I have argued, in an earlier article, about the error in making a distinction between these two aspects; that is because, in my view, there is no such thing as a ‘lyric content’ (‘artha-bhaavam’) standing alone in music. The two aspects together make enjoyable music. If we are interested in the ‘lyric content’ only, there is no need to go to a concert; we can buy a book of songs and read it in comfort in the garden. Music becomes enjoyable when the ‘lyric content’ in a song is delivered with a ‘raga content’ appropriate to it. The two contents blended together in this fashion and delivered with passion, is the life-force of music; this is what I refer to as ‘bhaavam’ in music. It is such music that can claim ‘completeness’ in its style and substance—‘poornam’ in music. This indeed is the view expressed by the master-reviewers of the past. Our forefathers described music as a structure built of ‘raagam’, ‘bhaavam’ and ‘taalam’. In this visualization, ‘raagam’ was seen as the foundation, ‘taalam’ as the roof and ‘bhaavam’ as the living space between the two. Note that, without ‘bhaavam’, neither ‘raagam’ nor ‘taalam’ has any relevance.The music form adopted for ‘Bharata-naatyam’ dance recitals, especially in the ‘abhinaya’ mode, illustrates this aspect in a striking manner. That is why master-musicians of earlier generations have held that music reaches its ‘completeness’ (‘poornathvam’) in its presentation in ‘Bharatanaatyam’ recitals. Having argued that ‘raga content’ and ‘lyric content’ are inseparably entwined in good music, I need to address the query: ‘Can there be no music without lyric content? Can music based exclusively on raga content not be enjoyed?’ The short answer is: ‘Of course, yes; such music can also be enjoyed.’ After all, when we hear an ‘aalaap’ (detailed expounding of a raga), or listen to instrumental music or, for that matter, hear songs in unfamiliar languages, what we receive is the raga content only; and do we not enjoy them? Of course, we do! At the risk of offending some music lovers, I have to say that such music, however, lacks completeness and has to take second place to music, which

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harmoniously combines the raga and lyric contents. An analogy will be that, while a ‘rangoli’ is also an art form, we cannot decorate the walls exclusively with ‘rangolis’ to the exclusion of portraits and paintings. We recognize the need for both for aesthetic appreciation; the limited form of art contained in a ‘rangoli’ cannot replace the splendour and satisfaction provided by a proper painting. I rest my case here.22

Kalki was clearly setting forth his views on emotionalism in music and the most appropriate medium for its expression, namely, the deployment of lyrics in one’s mother tongue. He rejected any criticism that was levelled against Tamil compositions, on the grounds of classicism. Setting up an imaginary duel with votaries of classicism for whom the compositions of the trinity constituted the most important element of the classical style, he challenged the views of a reviewer who was alleged to have said that the patriotic song composed by the famous poet Subramania Bharathi sung anywhere, would stir our emotions, because it fulfilled the desideratum for ‘bhaavam’ in music. Kalki had no quarrels with that. But when it came to the assertion that a Hindustani number, either sung or played on instruments like veena, violin etc., if rendered properly, would stir our emotions in the same manner, then there was something suspicious. As he put it, if in his perception, this music also had ‘bhaavam’, then he had no option but to respectfully disagree, and the only charitable comment he could offer under the circumstances was that he was surely God’s unique creation, for which a second could not be found! Kalki slyly suggested that such a critic had to be endowed with the supreme wisdom that enabled him to see a water buffalo and an Arabian steed as the same; even while he was incapable of comprehending the substance of Bharathi’s brilliant composition. The following comments illustrated his impatience even more clearly. Leaving aside Nature’s freaks like the above-mentioned reviewer, for the common man like you and me, there does exist a difference in the impact of songs sung in familiar (to us) and unfamiliar languages—there is no getting away from it. Just as an example, when Musiri (Subramania Iyer) sings ‘Nagumo’ ( a composition in Telugu) and later comes up with ‘Thiruvadi Saranam’ (a number in Tamil)—both of which he renders with the same felicity so characteristic of this maestro—there is a difference in how they impact (the Tamil-speaking) us. ‘Nagumo’ provides aural delight and touches the heart; ‘Thiruvadi Saranam’ not merely does these but also uplifts the Soul in us! This happens because we are able to understand the lyric content 22Ananda Vikatan,

‘Aadal Paadal’, 17 June 1934, pp. 26–32.

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in the music better when sung in a language familiar to us. The difference is palpable and cannot be wished away!

What Kalki was, in fact, doing was to reiterate the centrality of emotionalism in raga music. For him it was essential to arrive at a proper understanding of the role of raga content and lyric content in creating wholesome music. As he pointed out, if it was accepted that raga content alone was enough to ensure enjoyable music, then instrumental music would automatically outshine vocal music, for instruments were more consistent and predictable and could be set for pitches much higher than the human voice and could cover many more octaves as well. Instruments were not governed by the limitations that the human voice had to endure with regard to timbre and pitch. And yet, the fact remained that even a second string vocal musical concert was more satisfying to a music lover than a top-ofthe-line instrumental rendering. Even leading instrumentalists acknowledged this fact. Why was this so? Here it is evident that like so many of his contemporaries Kalki was giving expression to the values of vocalization in Indian music and to the idea that music to be effective had to convey a deep emotionalism that required both voice and content. He cited the example of the contemporary veena artiste,Veena Dhanam, to substantiate his assertions, writing that even the veena which was the most preferred instrument could not substitute for the human voice, for the greatest of performing artistes felt the need to sing with it. As a living proof of his assertions, he exhorted his readers to attend a veena concert by the maestro, Veena Dhanammal, at the first available opportunity. Despite her advancing years and her failing voice, she always made it a practice to first sing the lyrics of each number, clear and crisp, before she started strumming the veena strings. When she chose to play a number featuring Sakunthala, she chose, as Kalki pointed out, to first paint a mental portrait of Sakunthala’s divine beauty, sung in her non-cooperative voice; she then—and only then— embellished this portrait by playing on the veena to describe the setting consisting of the lake, the garden, the flowers, the birds, the deer, and the ashram where Sakunthala was seated.Why did she do this? Because she recognized that the instrument in itself could not convey what the human voice could and this from a lady who was known to make the veena speak at will. Kalki added a post script to this by pointing out how the so-called pedants had tended to take potshots at women artistes reminding

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his readers that Veena Dhanammal stood as a Colossus in the Karnatik music arena, with eminent artistes awaiting her patronage. Not only were the critics insensitive to the powers of expression they were also completely out of touch with the contemporary scene. Raga elaboration featured prominently in Kalki’s criticism. However, here too moderation was of the essence. Raga elaboration (alap), he argued, was undoubtedly an important component in concert renderings. But such elaboration extended beyond a point, paled even in the hands of an accomplished exponent. He maintained that there was no completeness in music that was limited to raga elaboration only. Admittedly, there was plenty of scope for the musician to reach into his imagination and to display attractive delivery styles, when he elaborated a raga. The same comments applied to singing of the pallavi (first antara) also. But, viewed dispassionately, they were akin to the performances of a circus artiste. They thrilled while in progress but seldom left a lasting impression. Introducing the circus analogy, he spoke of how the initial excitement of viewing a trapeze artiste wore off. The artiste climbs a tall pole and comes diving down with summersaults en route. First time around he does two summersaults on the way down, next time he increases it to four and then may be to six on the next dive. And (hopefully) finishes the display unhurt. All very thrilling and hair-raising to watch! Suppose then, you were to witness the next day a dance recital by the great Uday Sankar. How differently would you feel? That is the chasm of difference that separates plain Raga/Pallavi singing from rendering a full ‘Kirtana’ with ‘bhaavam’ (that inevitably includes raga, pallavi and yet more to give music the completeness it deserves.

The precondition to a successful performance was ‘bhaavam’ that lay at the core of the life-force of music. And this ‘bhaavam’ stemmed from a harmonious blend of the raga and lyric contents, rendered with due deference to talam and abundantly laced with passion. It was also his firm conviction that, barring a few eminences like the pedantic critic who he christened as ‘Mukhya Sthanam’, who were beyond redemption, all music lovers would endorse his views on the subject. Kalki’s reference to Mukhya Sthanam was a jibe at those critics who in their defence of traditional compositions actually argued that music did not require lyrics and had dragged the great

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Tyagabrahmam himself into the debate, by claiming that the great saint had ‘liberated Music from the slavish yoke of words!’ This, to Kalki, was ridiculous. For him it was evident that the throbbing life in Tyagabrahmam’s compositions arose precisely from the kirtanas which were garlands made up of some most exquisite words redolent with meaning. Kalki reminded his readers that they had all been taught that Tyagabrahmam’s compositions were the spontaneous outpourings of his anguished soul at the feet of his Lord Rama, necessitated by various real life vicissitudes he had to encounter in his life, that his unflinching devotion to the Lord made him compose these entreaties in some of the most apt and enchanting collage of words, that divine grace enabled him to express communicate these words to the Lord in a wide array of ragas, set in the completeness of musical ‘bhaavam’. And yet these were being overlooked by Mukhya Sthanam; ‘Know ye all men! All this is false; so says our “Music’s Epicenter”!’ Was this because, as Kalki suggested slyly, the great composer had while living his entire life in Tamil Nadu, composed almost entirely in Telugu? For Kalki, the issue ultimately boiled down to the advocacy of Tamil songs. He rejected what he considered an inane argument about music needing no language. It was especially unfortunate that such an argument came only from the musical fraternity in Tamilnadu. Taking the imaginary haughty critic to task, for having roped the celebrated poet Dr Rabindranath Tagore into the fray, he informed his readers that it was fortunate that the noble poet had not reacted. It was just as well for had Dr Tagore reacted it would have been only ‘to ask that “Music’s Epicenter” be entered into a lunatic asylum for treatment’! In Bengali music, compositions sans lyrics (‘saahithyam’) were, as Kalki pointed out, very rare. The Bengali music school recognized that lyrics were the bedrock of that style of music; it was this recognition that provided the richness of content to Bengali music. Indeed, all of the great poet’s poetry was eminently suitable for being set to music. Why had Mukhya Sthanam then brought Dr Rabindranath Tagore into the debate? Kalki could only hazard a guess; he suggested that people generally cited eminent personalities to buttress an inconsequential argument, but then, in such cases, it was proper

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and normal to quote exactly what they had said on the subject. But Mukhya Sthanam had refused to conform to such etiquette and had simply said that, ‘Dr Tagore had spoken on the subject’ without indicating what this was. Kalki concluded his indictment by stating that taking someone’s name, without facts, was incorrect and dangerous. Such out-ofcontext quotes could also be misleading. He signed off his piece with a typical line: ‘Mahatma Gandhi said that Charka spinning is a Yagna.We cannot take this out of context, argue that Gandhiji himself has asked us to do Yagna and use that pretext to resort to doing “Vajpeya Yagna”—a Yagna that entails slaughter of goats!’23

Kalki’s advocacy of Tamil Isai addressed the larger question of music and language but only implicitly. The writings did not, in any way, approach the issue from the perspective of musicality and or musicology; but instead grappled with the anxiety to restore to Tamil music, a long, celebrated and impressive genealogy that had been obscured due to historical processes. This resulted predictably, in celebrating the lives and labours of celebrated Tamil saints and singers, of the huge corpus of Tamil songs that was available, and in putting forth a case for their excavation. The arguments used did not address the larger question of the importance of form and composition for Indian music, of the tension or complementarity between composed and improvised music and the shifts that the compositional form registered in the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Tyagaraja’s compositions or keertanam became a blue print of sorts for other composers to emulate. Musicians, on their part, had been receptive to these shifts in compositions, styles and values and had always continued to integrate available song texts to expand their performing repertory but their engagement did not form the subject of Kalki’s enquiry. It was the rasika’s prerogative that Kalki represented and the immediacy of enjoyment formed the subject matter of his writings. However, there is not much doubt that Kalki preferred the emotional version of classical music and like many of his contemporaries, appreciated the uncompromising commitment 23Ananda Vikatan, ‘Aadal

Paadal’, 17 June 1934.

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to a classical style that refused to bow down to popular taste, that a few artistes like Veena Dhanammal embodied.

The Limits of Criticism Kalki’s style was adopted by music journals that emerged spasmodically in the 1940s and raised similar issues of standards, concert etiquette and performance techniques, including voice culture. We have, as mentioned before, the Karnata Sangeetam that reproduced the discourse of the Madras Music Academy about tenets of classicism as well as parroted the sentiments of Tamil Isai. But more significantly, it echoed the abiding influence the idea of emotional music exerted on the new audience. As the editor indicated in his introduction, music was generally expected to be sweet, enslaving the gods and stimulating the emotions. Classical music had to be emotionally appealing and it was imperative that steps be taken to safeguard this aspect. On the issue of voice culture, the periodical carried essays on sadhakam or practice—these emphasized certain prescriptive techniques—and endorsed the generally held view that musicians in southern India had to learn and imbibe the techniques of Hindustani musicians. The journal came out strongly in favour of the traditional musician who was seen as eminently appropriate to judge the qualities of aspirant performers, and who had to be looked after by society and government.24 Popular music-related writing continued in tandem with oldfashioned textual conventions for music appreciation.Taking recourse to older prescriptions and descriptions regarding voice and style, manner and motives remained an important strategy in writing and its defence appears to have been especially prominent for a short while in the pre-independence decade. Critics and connoisseurs like C.S. Ayyar resented the allegations about the inadequacy of music criticism and even about the occasionally unfavourable comparisons drawn between Hindustani and Karnatik music. In his address to the radio in the 1940s, he maintained that music was not like the written verses of poetry to be read, nor like the finished statue in marble to be gazed upon, and enjoyed by anyone at any time. One had to first of all, listen to music, that is to say, listen to the interpretation 24Karnata

Sangeetam, 1946, see editor’s note.

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by the violinist, vocalist or veena player of the composed music. In this situation, the interpreter’s abilities and musical qualities should be the first aim of criticism depending upon his musical voice and knowledge of techniques. This had been guaranteed by the oral tradition and the standards had been maintained. Iyer also drew attention to the fact that music criticism had an old genealogy in India and several texts enumerated the desirable qualities of a vocalist and all that he/she had to avoid. Most of these had to do with mannerisms and gimmicks, all of which Iyer repeated as important prescriptions for a successful performer. The issue of voice culture did not figure in his discourse; the tenor of his intervention had to do with the defence of the newly constituted classical repertoire that invested Karnatik music with a distinct aura of spirituality, and of its technical dimensions that made the music cerebral and intellectual. He emphasized that he did not find these qualities undesirable or in any way detracting from the greatness of the tradition; as he put it, ‘being highly intellectual to me is no discredit. It is quite justifiable that aesthetic beauty can be understood by means of the intellect and not alone through emotion, just as virtue itself has been taught as an intellectual concept by Socrates, though felt as a fine emotion by Jesus.’25 It was around two distinct styles of music-related writing, one social and the other pedantic, that a rudimentary and even limited language of music criticism cohered. The popularity of Kalki’s writings had ensured a significant space for such expression and a growing readership while the efforts of music connoisseurs, some very knowledgeable, put in place a theoretical vocabulary that was not especially useful but gave the listener a handle to describe Karnatik music and performance in accordance with the conventions that had come to be associated with it. The decades following independence saw only a marginal shift in the terms of music appreciation, even under the celebrated critic Subbudu, (1917–2006) who was able to carve for the critic, a certain space in the public domain. Emerging as a volatile and articulate critic, adequately familiar with the intricacies of music’s technical aspects and who did not shy from sarcasm and acerbic criticism, he was seen mostly by his admirers to have opened up a new relationship between performers and their 25C.S. Ayyar, The Grammar of South Indian (Karnatik) Music, published by the author and printed by R.Narayanaswami Iyer at the Madras Law Journal Press, Madras, 1939, pp. 116–17.

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art form and audience. However, in terms of his style and description, he followed Kalki, his acknowledged mentor26 and produced what was essentially a social commentary on musical performance combined with very harsh comments on the performer’s voice and talent. It was this quality of brutal appraisal of the performer that made Subbudu a very controversial figure in his lifetime and opened up a new and interesting relationship between performer and critic, and critic and the audience.27 His writings, however, did not yield especially striking insight into performance and music appreciation; in terms of content and analysis, Subbudu’s writings only reinforced the existing vocabulary with one difference, namely a more clearly articulated emphasis on the performer’s voice and virtuosity. As a public figure, the performer was obliged, in Subbudu’s estimation, to perform efficiently and unless that essential condition was fulfilled, he had failed in his chosen field. He firmly believed that an artiste, however proficient he might be, required a special talent for public performance as it had come to be structured. For Subbudu, some deviations from structure in terms of tempo, for instance, were clearly intolerable—we have a review of M.D. Ramanathan, which is full of ironic comments about his slow tempo, low pitch and an interpretation that did not fit in with the formula. Instead of tackling these questions musically, we have Subbudu writing, albeit with great style, on how the concert was a big drag, whether one should be singing a varnam for half an hour and how in his rendering of a song that spoke of Nataraja’s cosmic dance, the tempo was so slow that it could have been executed only by an aged Balasaraswati! This kind of cheeky reportage may have elicited a few laughs but, in fact, it was detrimental to a serious engagement with the art form and its praxis.28 Admittedly, Subbudu was a knowledgeable critic and able to spot the slightest deviation in rhythmic patterns and melodic expositions, and this made musicians take him seriously. As part of a changing world of performance, the critic was clearly an important agent along with the new audience, but what dented this relationship was the sheer vacuity of critical appreciation and the extraordinary self-indulgence that the critic assumed in representing the rights of 26Subbudu, Isai Nattiya Vimarsanam, Kanmani Creative Waves, Chennai, 1997, 1999, pp. 148–9 (hereafter Subbudu, Isai Nattiya Vimarsanam). 27Lada Gurden Singh, Beyond Destiny: The Life and Times of Subbudu, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 2005. 28Subbudu, Isai Nattiya Vimarsanam, pp. 53–4.

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the audience. This was especially evident in Subbudu’s writings, where virtually every artiste barring his favourites, came in for assault. Readers loved his wit and sarcasm, and it was not surprising that the circulation figures of the weekly, Ananda Vikatan that he wrote in, registered a monumental increase. Musicians, on the other hand, expressed their irritation, even anger, and it was unfortunate that a creative dialogue between the practitioner and the interlocutor never happened.We will have occasion to reproduce a dialogue that Subbudu had with Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar and that demonstrated all too clearly the limits that the critic imposed on his interaction with the musician. It was in the sixties that Subbudu emerged as an important critic and commentator and filled the vacuum caused by the unexpected demise of Kalki. An enthusiast and keen amateur since his childhood, Subbudu was an obsessive listener with a flair for expression in both English and Tamil. This he put to good use by writing regularly in a number of weeklies and newspapers and making his mark as a fearless critic who, in the words of his recent biographer Lada Gurden Singh, was always seeking to invade boundaries that an artiste created for himself. He believed that the artiste was always accountable to his audience and that he could have no excuses for a mediocre performance. A review, he said, could not be written on grounds of compassion. On the other hand, he did not stop shy of commenting on features that had nothing to do with musical qualities or performance—there were, for instance, references to personal mannerisms, eccentricities and even sartorial preferences that had nothing to do with the music. Subbudu insisted that a performer had to abide by some conventions that included his stage presence—but in so insisting, he was merely reinforcing what had become the function of criticism in modern south India, namely to refine the social dimensions of an aesthetic practice contained within a very rigidly defined space. This is not to detract Subbudu’s understanding of the form, and its technical aspects but merely to demonstrate the nature of music criticism as a genre, and its limited utility in developing a modern vocabulary of appreciation or pedagogic access. It may be argued that his writings facilitated the popularization of Karnatik music, reaching it to a growing audience, still very elite and high-caste, that his style responded to the needs of his readership that was able to appreciate the keenness of his understanding, that

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his candour and his refusal to jettison his position on what he thought was an appropriate format, enjoyed the consensus of a large community of listeners. Conversely, however, it could well be argued that for all its sarcasm and biting wit, such a corpus of orthodox writing, which reinforced all the stereotypes that had been set in place, did not grapple seriously with complex issues like training, voice culture and ideas of musicality and classicism. His rejection of the gurukula tradition of transmission was not backed by serious argumentation; his allegations that great masters had not produced good students (and he mentioned Ariyakudi in this list!) seemed almost flippant and one can only suggest that his presence in the contemporary music world was contingent upon a certain moment when readership, consumption of music and certain practices of reflection converged to give him the space that he consolidated. Let us pause here to consider the ways in which he positioned himself as the rasika in relation to the musician, how he insisted upon assuming the role of a headmaster assigning grades to the performing musicians and how he assumed that the latter were incapable of addressing issues, and took cover under the admiration of their sidekicks. Such a description precluded all possibilities of an intelligent documentation of music history and of a meaningful understanding of traditions, styles and practice. Let us look at the conversation that he had with Ariyakudi in Delhi and attempt to read it, not the way Subbudu presented it to his admiring readers, but to tease out the underlying assumptions that permeate the conversation.29 The conversation was prefaced by Subbudu’s disavowal of the gurukula system, which he said, had failed to produce any great students of merit.The teachers were guilty of exploiting those students who had good voices by making them support singers. Students were never encouraged to think independently and were obsequious in their demeanour. Flatterers and admiring students who prevented any serious and objective discussion from happening always surrounded the musician. It was under such circumstances that Subbudu met Ariyakudi and asked him a couple of questions about Karnatik music of yesteryears and now. 29Subbudu, Isai Tukkuda (‘Musical Tidbits’), Kanmani Creative Waves, Chennai,

1997, 1999, pp. 35–6 (hereafter Subbudu, Isai Tukkuda). The conversation was reported in the Dinamani Kadir, date not given but probably in 1971 as suggested in the preface.

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What do you think of standards now? I asked. Well a lot more people listen to Music, he replied. What about then, in olden days? A few listened to music those days. In that case, can we say that music has developed considerably in our times. Can we come to such a clear conclusion? He replied. Standards have deteriorated. One may say that music those days had depth, now it has more spread. (At this his sidekicks laughed uncontrollably and one of them said you can’t win against Iyengar’s riposte!) I did not give up. Okay, I accept that. But have you compromised your own muisc in response to the lowering of taste? How can that be? I cannot lower my standards—after all it is what I have learnt from an old tradition; indeed my music is alms from my elders. But I don’t see how I can square up all that you say. You say on the one hand that the number of connoisseurs has increased, that you have stuck to your standards and yet tastes have gone down. How can we reconcile these? At this point his sycophants intervened. No.1: Is this a ballot box? Nos. 2, 3, 4 (laughing) I let the matter rest there. The fact was that music appreciation had grown immensely and there were many more people in the audience who could spot and identify ragas, and who flocked to concerts in large numbers. Who is there anymore to carry the mantle of Ariyakudi’s lineage? It is a great loss.30

What this extract does or purports to do is interesting. Evidently, Subbudu ranked Iyengar as a great musician but did not, for some reason, acknowledge his services as a teacher notwithstanding the enormous success. This is especially surprising given the enormous popularity and renown that Ariyakudi’s senior disciple, K.V. Narayanaswami attained in his lifetime. But that was not what Subbudu set out to express—instead, he was keen on conveying his general dissatisfaction at the practices that continued to be associated with musicianship. He was mildly derisive not just of the company of sycophants that musicians kept, but also of the nature of implicit devotion that gurus demanded from their pupils and, at the same time, was completely convinced about the level of musical understanding of the modern audience, which he embodied.There was, consequently, no real investment in understanding the world of musical practice as experienced by musicians, and the focus was squarely on the 30Subbudu,

Isai Tukkuda, pp. 35–6.

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audience whose investment in musical performance was seen as the crucial determinant and whose expectations had to be fulfilled by the artistes. It was not as though musicians were unmindful of the importance of the audience—yet there was a different edge to the expectations of the new constituency of listeners, mediated by critics like Subbudu which rankled. We have another instance featuring Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer whose vocal problems were frequently criticized by Subbudu. The two were involved in a heated exchange, which reveals how polarized the positions of artiste and critic were and also how ordinary music appreciation tended to sound. On one such occasion, Subbudu happened to mention a speech that Semmangudi had delivered on the occasion of Ariyakudi’s birthday celebrations, where he pointed out how intimate the relations between the listener and the singer had been in the past, and how in the present context, the musician was intimidated by the sight of the critic armed with pen and paper. This was, in all probability, an allusion to critics, the likes of Subbudu. The latter immediately took up the baton, and argued that it seemed as though Semmangudi was a frequent visitor to the races given the way he wanted people to spur him to perform better but that he had overlooked the all-important question of whether the horse running the race was a genuine thoroughbred and also how its failure affected those who had placed a wager on its performance. Not only was this joke not especially funny, it also betrayed Subbudu’s complete absorption with what sounded smart and snappy.31 In fact, what strikes most of these so-called critical writings is the complete lack of interest in what constituted pedagogy within the gurukula system and how musicians, in their own personal and professional choices, dealt with the transition. It is only very recently that we have some autobiographical snatches in the interviews that music magazines like Sruti organized with professional performers or in the compilations that scholars like C.S. Lakshmi have come up with. In fact, reading the interview that Sruti had with K.V. Narayanaswamy, one is struck by the kind of relationship that he enjoyed with his anna (elder brother, a term that he used for his guru, Ariyakudi) and also by the pedagogic method employed.32 One could legitimately argue that this tendency of inconsequential reporting continues to bedevil Karnatik music appreciation even today. Reviews of the music season in major newspapers, notably, 31Subbudu, 32Sruti,

Isai Nattiya Vimarsanam, p. 122. Issue 27–28, 1986. Interview with K.V. Narayanaswami.

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The Hindu, tend to suffer from the same vacuous tone and empty phrases. A recent entry in a blog, (ennisophiliablogspot.com) has drawn attention to this where it is categorically stated that reviews are most often vapid and achieve no purpose with their lame subheadings and descriptions such as the overall effect of a particular performance was delectable, that a combination of impeccable articulation, the blend of karvai and brigas was apt and brought out the potential of the raga, and that the accompanying percussion was supportive. None of these assertions had any depth of theoretical engagement nor practical understanding and all that was apparent to even a lay person was that these generalizations left very little scope for a deeper investigation into issues of musicality and voice culture, and understanding of musical practice. The level of familiarity many critics had with music in terms of what constituted a well-tuned instrument, or singing in perfect pitch and adhering to the rhythmic cycle was enough to be able to identify gaps and aberrations of a standard kind. But what they failed to pick up was the subtleties of the musical performance and style, and even more seriously, to articulate their understanding and experience in an appropriate language of communication. Consequently, unless the musician sang completely out of tune and pitch, skipped the beats at regular intervals and mispronounced the lyrics of a well-known composition, what was there left to critique barring snipes at his/her choice of dress or his mannerisms? There was never any serious contemplation about the changes in pitch or phrase lengths and rhythmic density that were being used or not used to produce the affect that underlay performance. Why has such a situation come to persist is an issue that we need to grapple with? Is this because the processes involved in the relocation of music from an earlier setting to an urban secular space did not give adequate space for musicians to develop their own vocabulary of teaching, transmission and practice? Did music-related writing only reflect the growing appeal of music for the middle-class? Did the renewed emphasis on musicality by the middle-class patrons and the conventions on classicism put forward by them in a foreign language preclude the possibility of a modern language of music teaching and criticism? Or was the very ideal of musicality a red herring and not really considered essential for performance or on par with classicism? We shall attempt to speculate on some of these issues. In an important essay written in the early 1970s, Harold Powers talked of the features and limitations of writings on Indian music in

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the English language,33 a corpus which was produced by members of two vastly different musical cultures who shared an intimate knowledge of the English language, whose history was quite independent of the art to which it referred. Working under the assumption that music is a universal language, there were free verbal exchanges between Indian and western audiences, thanks to the common language, which in a strange way masked the lack of real familiarity with the respective art forms. Writers used one of the three principal strands in their own work, namely, that the practice of music was in the hands of primarily professional musicians for whom neither knowledge of old texts in Sanskrit nor new reflections in English was relevant, the surviving Sanskrit literature was produced by men who knew Sanskrit, and perhaps even music with a more or less continuous and purely verbal tradition of its own and the historical and empirical approaches of the west in English. Occasionally there was also an intertwining of these strands producing an uncritical and confused scholarship. To quote Powers: There have been, right from the beginning, serious and careful studies on the textual sources of Indian musical history, which have never attempted to stir in a seasoning of present practice. And by the same token, there are teaching texts and ‘music appreciation’ books, which are extremely useful to those who already are familiar with the practice of Indian music. For the western reader, however, these types often present the same difficulties as most of the theoretical studies. With the exception of a few studies of treatises primarily by Sanskritists, these writings involve much untranslated and usually untranslatable, technical terminology, ancient and modern. The excellent working definitions often give of technical terms still presuppose some musical experience on the part of the reader, usually an Indian and a natural musical experience which even Europeans resident in India rarely have.When Indian writers do attempt to provide western equivalents for Indian terminology, their equivalents are rarely helpful and often misleading; for not only do such writers know European music but they also get their equivalents (directly or indirectly) from European writers who did not know Indian music.

Citing a specific work by the well-known connoisseur and sponsor, Subba Rao, Powers referred to the oblique allusions that he used when writing about musical compositions that not merely addressed a limited and self-selecting audience but betrayed an indirect influence of foreign approaches, and of that almost aggressive 33Harold Powers, Ethnomusicology Vol.9, ‘Indian Music and the English Language: A Review Essay’, 1965, pp. 1–12 (hereafter Powers, ‘Indian Music’).

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defensiveness about Indian music which mars so many writings on Indian music.34 Powers’ analysis would appear to have persisted in the succeeding decades when scholarly works continued to reproduce in a circular fashion, a stock set of phrases and idioms in explaining music. On the other side of the divide were popular journalistic pieces written by critics who more often than not displayed wit rather than understanding, and wrote tongue-in-cheek snappy reviews that made their writings much in demand with an audience whose engagement outside the concert hall was more with the persona of the artist, rather than the style he embodied or the performance that he executed. Else how can one explain why readers should have found some of Subbudu’s reviews where he poked fun at a performer’s sartorial style, especially funny or relevant.35 Once a space was created for this kind of writing which was more in the nature of an ironic reportage, music criticism became even more restrictive, failing to fulfill its potential of educating the audience with the dynamics of the performance or performing style of the artiste. Consequently, the more inaccessible and subtle aspects of the art form and its practice remained unstated and very generally articulated—a gap only widened by the fact that very few actual musicians wrote anything about music or performance. Compared to the early twentieth century, when musicians made major interventions in the actual business sessions of the Madras Academy and when writers like U. V. Swaminatha Iyer attempted to write about the actual nature of music practice and transmission, albeit in a hagiographic vein, we have very little representations by the actual musicians. Would it be legitimate to argue that the actual performance and access to a perfect and ideal voice was not an ideal with older musicians or indeed, a precondition to music as it had evolved before the articulation of the modern classical project? This line of interrogation was pursued in the pages of the contemporary music journal Sruti (December 2005) and it may be useful to follow this briefly. A paper titled ‘Classicality and Musicality Do the Twain always meet?’, written in the form of a dialogue between two connoisseurs began with two interesting epigrams, one that referred to a musician who refused to follow the lead given by youngsters in singing melodiously and who was more interested in adhering to his 34Powers, ‘Indian 35Lada

Music’, p. 11. Gurden Singh, Beyond Destiny, pp. 158, 168.

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guru’s style, and the other, related by Subbudu, who poked fun at an ageing musician who reportedly said, ‘You should judge my music by my abhiprayam (intention) and not how I actually sing.’ To this Subbudu replied, ‘Oh fine provided you accept my abhiprayam to pay you and do not insist on actual payment.’36 Whether this was apocryphal or not, the dialogue in both cases is revealing. There would appear to be a gap between musicians’ perception of what was authentic and traditional and what was being projected as musical, and that there was a failure to communicate this element of musical thought in criticism. On the other side, Subbudu’s acerbic comments would certainly suggest that he expected certain performance conventions to be followed and that a performer who was being paid was obligated to perform up to standard. Do we detect in this, a shift in attitude towards the professional musician who, even four decades before, was patronized and taken on as a collaborator in what was partially a collective project of reform? Was this the moment when there was a reworking of the figure of the professional musician not so much as a figure of derision or questionable morals as that of a dependent, on the favours of the sabha audience and more significantly, on the critic? We do have a number of instances where the musician locked horns with the critic—there were conspicuous instances of a major stand-off like the much publicized confrontation37 of Veena Balachanadar and Subbudu or that of the latter and Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer. But what is interesting to note here is that these controversies were not so much on the constitutive elements of musical thought as they were on presentation or the even more problematic subject of authenticity, which in turn, revolved around the exact reproduction of the trinity’s compositions. However, this imaginary dialogue enables us to access the question of classicism and musicality, which happened to emerge as the most central concerns of music appreciation, that failed to speak of the more interesting and inaccessible issues of traditional voice culture and indeed, of musical intention especially from the perspective of the performer. What it set out was how the new melodic turn transformed the approach to music and persuaded most musicians to adopt new modulations, and how even those who suffered from vocal problems embraced the new aesthetic. This, it would appear, was generally true, but at the same time, there was an implicit assumption 36Sruti, 37Lada

December 2005, pp. 53–60. Gurden Singh, Beyond Destiny, pp. 158, 232.

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that this new style could not be at the expense of Karnatakam, whatever that was emblematic of. It was this quality of tradition, classicism that was somehow never spelt out within a modern critical discourse. So while admitting the point about the new aesthetic that emphasized the sweet voice and the melodic approach, the implications of this in terms of older practices remained obscure. It is here that performers could, in fact, have intervened to give music criticism a new edge at least in the field of music writing. One could, of course, argue that within the newly emerged taste, musicians were all the time seeking to validate their styles and their lineage distinctiveness and this concern was, in effect, a reflection of their conversation with emerging tastes and opinions.

Performers and the New Aesthetic How did performers deal with the reconstituted world of performance, with critics and scribes who commented on their mannerism, dissected their style, the audience with its changing preferences and with academies which deliberated on aesthetics and conventions? There is no doubt that the project of streamlining and expanding a classical tradition, as I have argued in my earlier work, was collaborative and put together by performers and patrons. The former came together with sponsors and connoisseurs in developing and expanding the new aesthetics in the Madras Academy during its annual celebrations.The deliberations that took place in the annual meetings of the Academy demonstrated the linkages and the creative energy that marked the meetings. Besides honouring the established musicians, their cooperation was enlisted to resolve issues of standardization and reproduction. The musicians, therefore, were part of the aesthetic building but this did not mean that they were incapable of devising new artistic approaches. This was especially so in the first half of the twentieth century, best illustrated in the case of the Madras cultural project, where there was no disjunction between the performer and the patron; they belonged to a common fraternity and the representation of musicians in institutions such as the Madras Academy was substantial, even decisive in redefining the configurations of Karnatik music. Sabha patronage and audience appreciation were important determinants but these did not divest the performers of agency in

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improvising on and developing the aesthetic paradigm they had access to. Individual conceptions and interpretations did have free rein— in fact, if one looks at the musical milieu of the period between the 1950s–70s, one is struck by the diverse voices and styles within the Karnatik tradition, not to speak of the enormous strides that instrumental music made during the same period. The contributions of artistes like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Musiri Subramania Iyer followed by musicians like G.N. Balasubramanian, Madurai Mani Iyer, Madurai Somu among numerous others, not to mention women vocalists like M.S. Subbulakshmi, M.L. Vasantakumari and Brinda-Mukta to name a few, were significantly instrumental in expanding the parameters of musical conception and classicism in the art form and its execution. All of them inherited the grand conceptions of the trinity and the sampradayam music they embodied, and had, at the same time, as their immediate inheritance, the music of contemporary artistes and teachers like Naina Pillai of Kanchipuram (1889–1934) who attached extensive improvisation, especially swara kalpana, to his performance of kritis, and was renowned for his mastery of the rhythmic aspects of the music. Equally impressive were artistes like Pushpavanam, Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer and Dhanammal, the most outstanding woman musician of the early twentieth century and a specialist in singing the padam. Musicians like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar learnt these compositions (traditionally associated with the devadasi repertoire) from Veena Dhanammal and Mylapore Gauri Ammal. Such networks of interaction and musical exchange not only helped, in the case of Ariyakudi, to devise an efficient concert format with a comprehensive repertoire of songs and compositions but also to expand the styles and approaches to performance and musical interpretation. Dhanammal herself was averse to deviating from her traditional style and was critical of her daughter’s decision to send her own daughters Brinda and Mukta to the legendary Naina Pillai to learn swara singing and ragam tanam pallavi. As it happened, the training stood them in good stead, and enabled them to successfully carve a feminine space in what was, until then, exclusively a male domain. The two sisters Brinda and Mukta eventually became synonymous with the solemn vilambit style of interpretation—where the musical imagination was tied up with the slow and detailed and unhurried delineation of melodies (using gamakas) and a mature

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rendering of elaborate padams distinguished by a swaying rhythm and a full enunciation.38 In marked contrast to this was Ariyakudi’s style associated with a brisk tempo and an attractive format which accommodated a number of compositions, short and brisk alapana and limited swara singing. He hardly left any open spaces during a concert—when he finished one, he started another almost immediately, and his focus was on keeping the concert going. He found that a combination of medium and fast tempo (madhyakala) pieces elicited the best responses from his listeners, a technique that has survived and been refined by his successors like K. V. Narayanaswami, who are able to hypnotize the audience by the sheer content of the concert along with an exquisite appreciation of shruti. The ability to accommodate a variety of song types and to come up with an efficient melodic treatment became the hallmarks of the Ariyakudi vazhi—and which has continued to enjoy immense popularity even to date.39 At the same time, Ariyakudi popularized Tamil compositions, set them to tune, made them part of the classical repertoire and thereby, ensured the fuller participation of the audience. In all this, he was giving full expression to the prevailing idea that the performance had to keep the audience spellbound. There were admittedly other ways of ensuring this; Maharaja Viswanatha Iyer, for instance, was eclectic in his habits, open to natya sangeet and Hindustani traditions, and adopted the raga delineation methods of Hindustani music. There were other major shifts—most notable is the case of G.N. Balasubramanian, who started a new style with briga singing. This involved the rendering of rapid passages of notes, mostly in the form of vowels (akara) often rendered during the concluding stages of an alap. A self-taught artist, G.N. Balasubramanian’s racy style sparkling with brigas, revealed a new range of colours and redefined the very idea of the sampradayam. As he saw it, ‘sampradaya is conditioned by factors like time, region, standards of appreciation among rasikas and the capacity of the vidwans. For instance, I have heard veterans in the field frowning upon a very popular musician years ago for rendering the gandhara 38Indira Menon, The Madras Quartet: Women in Karnatak Music, Roli Books, New Delhi, 1999 (hereafter Indira Menon, The Madras Quartet). Also see T. Viswanathan and Mathew Allen, Music in South India, O.U.P., New York, 2004. 39V. Sriram, Carnatic Summers: Lives of Twenty Great Exponents, Skanda Publication, Chennai, 2004.

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in the Kalyani raga without gamaka in violation of sampradaya’.40 It is now common knowledge that the same swaram is being rendered both ways nowadays. G.N. Balasubramanian’s style did not have too many takers, M.L. Vasantakumari being a notable and gifted exception. The style itself was not endearing to the majority of musicians; Brinda, of the Dhanammal school, abhorred the emphasis on speed which was in integral element in briga singing involving rapid passages of notes, in the form of vowels rendered during the concluding part of an alap. On the other hand, artistes like Semmangudi preferred to work within the tradition. Semmangudi’s forte lay in melodic improvisation and maintaining a free flow of musical notes in a rhythmic fashion that was regular and improvised, referred to generally, as the sarvalaghu that lent an easy swing and lilt to the execution. At the same time, the solidity of the approach gave a certain fixity and clarity to the music they sought to preserve. The point being made here is how the balance between improvised music and composed music was something that individual musicians worked out in their own ways, and how in each of these efforts, the audience was a factor that could not be overlooked. In fact, musicians were deeply sensitive to the needs of their audience and it was this empathy that constituted the precondition for a successful performance. K.V. Narayanaswamy in his interview to Sruti mentioned this categorically: ... timing, a sense of propriety is very very crucial to the success of a musician, his performance. My master had an unbelievable acumen for this, a marvellous feel for what would get across to the audience. He would size up the audience in the first few minutes of a recital and decide with uncanny precision, the ragas, kritis and the general approach of that day’s kutcheri. The listeners would obviously go back delighted. Some would boast Iyengar sang such and such song as we wanted him to sing today, you know. A musician must develop a very close empathy with the listeners and should understand the rasikas’ psychology perfectly.41

It is unlikely that performers did not take the audience seriously— and, at any rate, the question of music appreciation could not remain confined to whether or not the musician was being entirely oblivious of the audience. On the other hand, there was the larger issue of the artist’s autonomy—to what extent could the musician compromise 40Quoted 41Sruti

in Indira Menon, The Madras Quartet, p. 109. interview, issue 27/28 December 1986.

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his standards to please a growing audience. Here, I think a reference to the uncompromising Veena Dhanammal would help contextualize the issue. In any case, no discussion on aesthetics can be complete without reference to the musical lineage of Veena Dhanammal and the approach that she and her successors represented. An extremely individuated performer, Dhanammal drew on her artistic inheritance while enhancing it with her own conception and musical imagination that emphasized a scrupulous adherence to sruti, to deep and spontaneous emotion conveyed through a masterful, slow-speed style of rendering ragas. She was renowned for her repertoire of Diksitar’s compositions and most major male musicians made it a point to visit her house in Georgetown on Friday evenings, where ‘pin-drop’ silence would rule as she played for her friends and acquaintances. In one of the many tributes that were written on the occasion of her death in 1938, the unhurried aspect of her music was commented upon—a melodic reminder of an age when art had a different tempo and was not packed within a stringent time limit. Music for the audience as well as the artist was characterized by an unhurried and cultured leisure. Dhanam’s music reflected and even exaggerated the roseate aspects of such an age. She recaptured it for all her admirers. For us who are young and know her only in her later days, she offered glimpses into the art and through art into the life of the period, often creating vain yearnings to have lived then rather now.42

Dhanammal’s music, the reviewer noted, was a perpetual source for the physical perfection of sound and when she reached a particularly pleasing point of melody, often as it happened on or near the upper shadja note while playing on the veena, she would stop for a split second before passing on. Dhanam was confident about her interpretations, especially her understanding of padams, to which she brought her unique imagination and family inheritance. Story has it that she rebuked her nephew for trying to sing a padam, with the remark that how can a moustache-bearing thadiyan (macho) ever comprehend the inner essence of the love song or the sentiments of the nayika (lady protagonist). On the other hand, her daughter Kamakshi Ammal had no doubts that her own daughters, Brinda and Mukta, had to be sent to Naina Pillai for learning, what was at that time, quintessentially 42The Indian Review, ‘Veena Dhanammal: A Tribute by S.Y. Krishnasamy’, Madras, November 1938, p. 735.

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a male conception of music, almost totally different from their family style. The result was, what Indira Menon calls, an androgynous conception of music that kept within the gamaka-laden style. Recognized as the most authentic, Brinda also worked on padam singing, bringing to public attention the rich artistic heirloom of her family. In her presidential address to the Madras Academy in 1977, Brinda said, ‘Padams are replete with the bhava of rakti ragas ... They are to be sung in the Vilambit kala and the gaps provided in the sahitya should be filled up by the singer with long karvais and beautiful gamakas.’43 Here was an instance of a distinct and articulate aesthetic conception of what pure music was meant to be. The common point, however, was in the acknowledgement of the trinity’s repertoire as fundamental to any improvisation and what Brinda called ragajnanam. The Dhanam style was recognized as the best embodiment of the unity between various elements that made up the repertoire: text and musical expression, melody and rhythm, basic note and interval, scale and raga, and pitch and embellishments. Tributes came freely after her demise and her music was held as the embodiment of the very essence of the art form in all its dimensions.

Towards a Resolution The contributions of individual performers produced, over time, a comprehensive conception of performance, enabling different styles to articulate the received tradition. The aesthetic paradigm that the middle-class elite had tentatively articulated from the latter decades of the nineteenth century was consolidated and transmitted through established teaching lineages that were partly accommodated in modern institutions. The central organizing principles continued to emphasize a scrupulous advocacy of the received tradition in terms of the compositions of the trinity and whose music represented a language that was self-authenticating and removed from the crass contingencies of everyday usage. Musical language was mysteriously autonomous—in fact, this idea surfaced strongly and ironically in the context of the Tamil Isai controversy, when a section of the Tamil intelligentsia demanded the singing of Tamil songs in concerts to the exclusion of everything else. Historically, the classical music repertoire 43Quoted

in Indira Menon, The Madras Quartet, p. 150.

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had evolved in such a way that compositions in Telugu and Sanskrit predominated.The great majority of performers refused to be coerced into singing Tamil songs exclusively while the patrons deployed the rhetoric of pure music that did not need the framework of verbal language. Pure music transcended lyrics and was superior to what critics called ‘applied music’. And yet, it was within the same discursive field that the sacro-sanctity of Tyagaraja’s compositions was stressed for these song texts represented a musical language and not that of poetry—the kind of language without positive signs, or at any rate, with enigmatic signs which turned the listener’s attention to his own inventive subjectivity. There was, of course, nothing uniquely Indian about this conception; we have nineteenth-century European ideas about music that challenged older epistemologies and theories of its aesthetic representation. In the case of south India, the articulation of such a conception of musical aesthetics was tied up very intimately with the self-definition of both the performer and his consumer, who responded to the inner needs of replicating the shrine in the stage. It was within this legitimizing space that classical music could be appropriately nourished and celebrated as secular entertainment, and function as an experiential mechanism to forge a sense of continuity and commonality. It was this space that Cousins commented upon when she remarked how struck she had been when she visited a music party in Mylapore and found it to resemble a prayer rather than a concert. It was also a matter of pride for the elite that this was so, and that the sampradyam resonated with religious overtones that lent additional weight and authenticity to the southern version. Even critics shared this space and while occasionally, figures like Kalki took a firm stand on behalf of Tamil Isai, there was never any question of revising the larger aesthetic parameters of the tradition. These parameters would appear to have been in place in the decades after independence when critics like Subbudu were able to play a role in commenting on musical performance within the articulated conventions of classicism and musicality and enjoy thereby, a special status as critic and spokesperson of the mainstream standard. There was a pride in being able to carve a reputation as being the fearless and uncompromising critic whose knowledge of music’s technical aspects was balanced by a set of social expectations invested in the art form. Musicians were not impervious to these opinions and on their own admission, took these seriously and in the process became more accessible to the listening public but without

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necessarily losing their individual styles or conceptions. For the musicians, the invoking of tradition was not emptied of meaning nor was it entirely constructed.There were memories of practice, of a shared vocabulary of experience and absorption, and of a deep understanding of the form, which continually adapted in response to their personal preference as well as to the tastes of a changing audience. The situation showed signs of a transformation especially after the 1970s, when the investment of the state in showcasing its cultural heritage overseas and of the Indian diaspora in reclaiming music as the most important cultural resource, produced new circuits of patronage. On the one hand, there was the rise of new and young musicians— from middle-class and traditional backgrounds ready to expand the repertoire and improvise with even the concert format (in the form of duets with north Indian musicians or in presenting a concert, where the compositions of one individual composer were presented) who found a cordial reception among the diaspora as well as cultural agencies of the state that was prepared to invest in certain aspects of the regional musical form. On the other hand, there was a growing circuit of patronage that emerged outside the nation that gave more opportunities to the musician to perform and even to consider alternative ways of presentation and pedagogy. This found reflection in a new shift of values as far as concert performances and pedagogy were concerned. More recently, opinions have come to be voiced about the suitability of the Ariyakudi repertoire, whether this has not outlived its utility and whether Karnatik music could consider new modes of conception, presentation and pedagogy. Whether or not this will find reflection in a new language of music appreciation and communication is something that we cannot anticipate but it seems legitimate to infer that changing conditions of consumption and circulation will have important repercussion on the art form, its reproduction and representation. Given the importance of cyberspace and the cohering of a virtual community of rasikas coming together to share material, engage in a discussion forum and analyse available material, music criticism appears to stand at the cusp of a major transformation. Equally significant is the investment in music pedagogy in universities overseas where the terms of the older gurushishya parampara are being overturned. Just how important this would be in reconceptualizing musical thought and in reworking categories of musicality and classicism, tradition and modernity are important issues that await further research and investigation.

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3

From the Gurukula to the University Initiatives in Music Education

SPEAKING ON THE OCCASION OF MRS KALYANI SUNDARAM’S GRADUATION IN

music from Madras University in 1935, Margaret Cousins, the prominent Theosophist leader and the founder member of the All India Woman’s Conference observed, ‘when one remembers that all music was taught orally and individually about ten years ago, it will be seen that the change to class teaching and the placing of Indian music within the purview of standardized examination is in the value of a revolution.’1 Cousins was not entirely wrong or unjustified in her enthusiastic assertions. Her words captured the contemporary belief in the validity of formal music education located within the modern university system, which was seen as an eminently, if not exclusively, the appropriate site for disseminating instruction in Indian classical music. She wrote at a time when educated middle-class public opinion in India had warmly endorsed the idea of formal musical education for the middle-classes and of locating the practice of music within the spaces of middle-class dominance. However, Cousins missed the point of the irreconcilability of the assumptions underlying the modern nationalist pedagogic project for classical music with that of older modes of musical instruction that had evolved around an earlier moral economy of culture. Part of the incompatibility derived from the nature of and contradictions within the Theosophist agenda of national reconstruction. Predictably, Cousins’ engagement with music and musical education, part of a larger Theosophist programme,2 1Margaret

Cousins, Music of Orient and Occident, Madras, 1935, p. 180.

2Catherine Candy, ‘The Inscrutable Irish-Indian Feminist Management of Anglo-

American Hegemony’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2:1, 2001. Also see ‘Joanne Stafford Mortimer, Annie Besant and India 1913–1917’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.18, 1983, pp. 61–78.

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generated serious questions about the relevance of music in national life, but stopped short of resolving some of the more pressing and uncomfortable questions of accommodating traditional practitioners and conceptions within the new system of pedagogy and music instruction. The reception of the Theosophist agenda, especially as it related to music and musical instruction among the educated elite of south India has to be understood in the context of the transformed public sphere in the twentieth century. This involved, among other things, an intimate negotiation with the processes of modernity as a subjective experience and as an objective ideal to be pursued, and with the reclamation of tradition, of an older cultural inheritance that had somehow to be squared with the experience of being modern subjects. From the vantage point of view of the Madras elite, the intervention of the Theosophists was timely—the invocation of a hallowed Brahmanical past by a variety of Theosophist leaders along with their strident demand for Home rule and emancipation fitted almost perfectly the self-description of the Brahmin elite.They saw themselves as the custodians of tradition, spokesmen of modernity and the bestequipped leaders for reform that had to be undertaken in new spaces of sociability and interaction. Education figured prominently as an issue and the university as the most critical site for experimentation.3 Applied to music, this move involved the relocation of music from the traditional gurukula to the modern university. Adopting classical music as the uncontaminated emblem of nationalist culture, Indian publicists from the latter decades of the nineteenth century found it imperative to integrate it within a modern space of institutional education, thereby securing for the art form and its new consumers and custodians, an acceptable and respectable space for its promotion,4 The process of relocation was not easy and the ambiguities of the project surfaced repeatedly, to demonstrate the schizoid agenda of the Madras nationalists. This chapter hopes to look at some of the constraints and contradictions that emerged in the nationalist initiative on music education, and thereafter, in the context of post-independence efforts, its reception among the educated elite and its intersection with the ongoing debate on cultural reform and regeneration. 3R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India 1852–1891, Indian edition, Delhi, 1980. Also see Pamela Price, ‘Acting in Public versus Forming a Public: Conflict Processing and Political Mobilisation in Nineteenth Century South India’, in Keith E.Yandell and John J. Paul (eds.), Religion and Public Culture Encounters and Identities in Modern South India, Curzon Press, Surrey, 2000, pp. 27–56. 4Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court.

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Music and Musical Education in the Nineteenth Century: Courts and Colonial Modernity In nineteenth-century British India, music was performed mainly in courts of princely states and in individual salons while its transmission followed family lines of inheritance—gharanas5 in the north, and panis in the south. Notwithstanding regional variations in the organization of music, pedagogical habits of teachers and performing families tended to be closed, erratic and self-protective. From the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the princely courts, or at least some of them, began to assume a more interventionist role in sponsoring and disseminating music partly on account of the value they assigned to the art form as a vital cultural resource and partly because of the larger modernizing and bureaucratic initiative they embarked upon. Tanjore was the best example where a succession of eclectic Maratha rulers, many of whom were accomplished musicians and poets and undisputed connoisseurs, devoted considerable energy in introducing guidelines for the preservation, standardization and promotion of music. This found expression in a variety of ways that included rudimentary experiments with notation, seen as the vehicle of a more systematized instruction methodology and imbibed largely from the early encounters with European ideas. These ideas were more fully fledged in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century with Baroda6 under the rule of the Gaekwads taking an important lead, followed subsequently by Mysore and Vijaynagaram in the south in the first quarter of the twentieth century. By this time nationalist ideas on music reform and education had begun to enjoy substantial currency. The Gaekwad state of Baroda was among the first to emerge in the nineteenth century as the model princely state, modernized along colonial lines. This meant, especially in the context of being a hollow crown, an excessive preoccupation with ritual and ceremony integrated into a tightly organized and standardized bureaucratic apparatus. One of the consequences of the court’s modernizing initiative within the framework of what Janaki Bakhle has characterized as ‘feudal modern’,7 5Vaman

Rao H. Deshpande, Indian Musical Tradition: An Aesthetic Study of the Gharanas in Hindustani Music, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1973. 6Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition, O.U.P., New York, 2005, pp. 21–5 (hereafter Bakhle, Two Men and Music). 7Bakhle, Two Men and Music.

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was a reconstitution of the system of music education, not so much for its practitioners who continued to learn along traditional familial lines of transmission, as for a new constituency of learners who could be from a non-hereditary background. For the latter, music had to be written, notated, systematized, institutionalized, codified and encapsulated in textbooks, all of which bore the undisputed signs of modernity and were meant for modern spaces of education and learning. The court musician, Maula Baksh, assisted his sovereign in the enforcement of the project and brought to it, his energy and inputs. Maula’s inclinations and experiences, according to Bakhle, made him uniquely qualified for this project as he adopted a curiously modern hybrid approach to the complex subject of music reform and reorganization The collaboration produced interesting results. A school of Indian music was established on 1 February 1886, as an experimental measure designed to supplement general education, with a view to ‘teaching the science and art of music as an accomplishment to students of the 5th and higher vernacular standards’.8 What was interesting about the school and the curriculum it followed was its close replication of teaching methods in southern India, (Mysore and Tanjore) where Maula Baksh had spent considerable time in meeting musicians and musicologists. The favour that Tanjore found with Maula Baksh and his master derived partly from the older Maratha axis that had connected Baroda and Tanjore in the eighteenth century and partly from the perception that the southern tradition was somehow more systematic and backed up by more regular and standardized pedagogic methods.This, as mentioned before, was a consequence of the musical revolution that had happened in eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Tanjore when the court along with a series of brilliant composers had raised the level of musical knowledge and practice and expanded the existing system of teaching lineages. 9 The dispersion of the students, their relocation in Madras from the latter half of the nineteenth century and their subsequent negotiation with ideas of preservation and transmission within a modern framework enabled musical culture and practice to stabilize even after Tanjore declined and Madras became a centre of musical culture.10 The Baroda model was replicated by the first generation of Maula 8Bakhle,

Two Men and Music, p. 139. Seetha, Tanjore as a Seat of Music, Madras, 1981. 10Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court.

9S.

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Baksh’s students who established schools in Bombay and sponsored textbooks and graded primers. The importance of the project was almost immediately appropriated by the emergent nationalist consciousness in western India while in the south, the lead for music reform and education was taken up largely by the Mysore court and by the elites of Madras city. Mysore, like Baroda was a prominent case of a modernizing princely state, which responded to the modernizing potential of music education and endorsed the emerging opinion about systematizing the theoretical basis of classical music. The court took an interest in developing a palace school for teaching music and setting it to notation. In such a scheme, teachers willing to develop a theoretical base were welcomed. This was expressed in various ways—from honouring those singers and musicians who were identified as adept in theory, to facilitating the publication of scientific treatises on music within an institutional rubric. The operative features of the project were scientific theory and systematization— values that derived largely from colonial modernity, and seen as critical adjuncts to any modern system of pedagogy. The palace records yield interesting details and information on individual musicians who came forward to collaborate in the emerging project of musical reform and education and to combine their functions in the durbar with research and compilation. Illustrating this, for instance, is the case of the Mysore durbar endorsing the virtues of the singer Karagiri Rao, ‘an excellent professor in music and thoroughly well versed in the art of its manipulations. The professor is also adept in its complicated theory’.11 Karagiri Rao was deputed to examine the merits of persons visiting the state professing knowledge of the lakshya and lakshana branches of music. It was, however, Madras that emerged as the premier musical centre to direct the course of musical activity and reform in southern India. Here, the initiative was taken by the city’s Brahmin elites who emerged as the major beneficiaries of western education and as agents of the newly transformed public culture in the city. It was in Madras that colonial education struck deep roots with a new constituency of publicists, listeners and patrons of the arts, especially music, which became simultaneously an object of affective pleasure and of intellectual contemplation. The new colonial city attracted musicians 11Government

of Karnataka, Selections from the Records of the Mysore Palace, Divisional Records Office, Vol. I, Mysore, 1993, pp. 88–90 (hereafter Selections from Records of the Mysore Palace).

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from older centres, especially Tanjore. A variety of new forms of music related entertainment, the harikatha or kathakalakshepa, for example, emerged in which musicians featured prominently and which produced a significant listening habit among the city’s elites who found in music, a source of deep identification and pleasure.12 At the same time, the impact of western education, and more specifically, the colonial ethnography on Indian music was instrumental in transforming the elite’s attitude to music and culture and the issue of its preservation. European representation of Indian music as an adjunct of Indian spiritual and religious tradition persuaded the Indian elites to emphasize the spiritual aspect of Indian music even as it underwent a major spatial relocation from the temple and court (ritual and sacral) to the public non-ritual arena. Herein lay the catch and it was this aspect of the transformation that made music’s tryst with modernity so troubled. For music to sit easy with the new patrons, courts and modernizing elites alike, it became important to address the deficiencies that colonial Orientalist representations identified so persistently. From William Jones to Charles Day, European scholarship stressed the following features: the primacy of melody, the absence of an adequate theoretical base expressed often in the so-called gap between theory and practice, the existence of a very rudimentary system of notation that precluded effective reproduction and preservation of the musical form and the stratification of the musical profession among communities who performed at least in southern India different functions and commanded different status.13 The cumulative effect of such pronouncements was a growing concern among Indian publicists to consider a reconstitution of the system of musical patronage and education which would facilitate the relocation of the practice among the middle-class in a non-ritual space and yet retain certain features that would elevate it to a classical form as the middle-class understood it in their new context of colonial modernity. The latter decades of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of music societies that not only sponsored musical performances but also attempted to raise awareness about music and music appreciation among the middle-class. The Gayan Samaj was the first of such societies to emerge in Poona with a branch in Madras. Its 12R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, History of South Indian (Carnatic) Music from Vedic Times to the Present, published by the author, Bombay, 1972. 13Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, pp. 54–69.

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avowed objective was ‘to revive a taste for our musical science amongst the brethrens of the upper class and to raise it up in their estimation’.14 The Samaj was meant to arrange for public music concerts, assisting those who were in need of pecuniary assistance and to set up schools for instruction. Some of these aims were already in effect in Poona and replicated in Madras where educationists like T.M. Venkatesa Sastri and Umayalpuram Natesa Iyer set up the Zenana Music institution and the Mylapore Music School respectively. In order to ensure effective instruction these institutions sponsored the publication of primers and graded textbooks with notation, the circulation of which spelt the growing concern with a scientific model for musical instruction that was also seen as an expression of modernization. Pioneers in this field were the Singacharulu brothers, Chinnaswami Mudaliar and Maduranayakam Pillai who made important contributions in anthologizing the compositions of Tanjore’s celebrated trinity, collecting a representative repertoire of songs and exercises for instruction and in the process, streamlining a clear sense of what constituted classical music.15 The emphasis on notation and a scientific model suggested the importance of endorsing a western rational scientific epistemology in re-organizing cultural life and practices exemplified best by the collaboration of European officials and Indians. The Deval-Clements project, Reverend Popley’s attempts and the efforts of Abraham Pandithar and Chinnaswami Mudaliar in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century bear testimony to the changing musical landscape of India. They also heralded the emergence of new structures of public, institutional, professional and cultural activities of the middle-class who organized themselves in voluntary associations, wrote novels and contemplated culture from a new vantage point of interiorized reflection and built up through these activities, a new web of social solidarities and redefined cultural values in the context of colonialism and its impact. A major initiative in this direction, as stated earlier, was the Tanjore Sangeet Vidya Mahajana Sangam in 1912 organized by Abraham Pandithar whose objectives were to establish an academy for the study of Indian music, 14Hindu Music and the Gayan Samaj, published in aid of the funds of the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj, Bombay, 1887, p. 3. 15P. Sambamoorthy, A Dictionary of South Indian Music and its Musicians, Vol. I, The Indian Music Publishing House, Madras, 1971.

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to standardize music and to arrange for a modern system of accreditation and evaluation, and to work these out in consultation with professional and practising musicians.16 An important area of musical collaboration was associated with Christian leaders many of whom demonstrated a rare depth and interest in developing their awareness of indigenous music traditions and yoking them to the service of the Church. Zoe C. Sherinian’s important work on the indigenization of the kirtanai to local styles argues that this process of indigenization was a ‘manifestation of the need to create indigenous Christian musical and theological expressions relevant to changing socio religious identities among Tamil Christians’.17 Particularly significant for our discussion is the nature of collaboration between local and European missionaries and Indian musicians and musicologists, and which stimulated a number of possibilities for music appreciation and instruction. We have noted how Madras, by the first quarter of the twentieth century, had a robust group of gifted amateurs who were single-minded in their resolve to modernize and standardize music teaching and locate it within a modern context. Individuals like P.S. Iyer, the founder of the Academy of Karnatik Music, C.S. Ayyar, who wrote extensively on music and published the compositions of Tyagaraja, formed part of a circle that debated on issues of musical reform and engaged with the subject from a sense of deep appreciation for the art form. Visiting Europeans with an interest in India’s musical culture took their advice and sought their counsel; Emmons White being a good case in point. Like Reverend Popley, he learnt music from a local expert, Jalatarangam D. Srinivasa Iyer of Madurai, and wrote passionately about the beauty and depth of Indian music and insisted that to learn it required the services of a teacher. His own work was the result of a close acquaintance with local experts like Popley, C.S. Ayyar and P.Sambamoorthy whose initial teaching experience was also in a summer school set up by Reverend Popley.18 C.S. Ayyar’s work on the grammar of music and the teaching of the violin 16Karunamirtha

Sagaram, pp. 218–19.

17Zoe C.Sherinian, ‘One Kirttanai, Three Songs’, in Indira Viswanathan Peterson

and Davesh Soneji (eds.), Performing Pasts Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, O.U.P., Delhi, 2008, pp. 313–48 (hereafter Peterson and Soneji, Performing Pasts). 18Emmons White, Appreciating India’s Music, Serampore Christian Literature Society, Madras, 1957 (hereafter Emmons White, Appreciating India’s Music).

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reflected a similar concern to present the richness of Indian music to a larger audience, and at the same time, express clear preferences for teaching methods. Ayyar, for instance, was severely against notation which was just the skeletal framework and not capable of expressing the natural intonation that would fill the framework. As he wrote, ... it may take some years of musical study to understand the raga bhava, but that is no reason why we should go in for a staff notation, which does not carry an auditory impression, also at the same time. As I have said, the swaras Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Da Ni, with flats and sharps, when sung and understood, convey both a visual and an auditory impression with a texture of spoken words, and it is an evil day when we shall choose to reject this method, which has led to the development of melodic music and stood the test for two thousand years.19

Admittedly Ayyar was writing at a time when the initial enthusiasm for a major transformation of music teaching had waned.

Music and the Nationalist Imagination In any case, the newly emerging sensibilities and solidarities associated with music listening and related activity, fed directly into an emerging nationalist consciousness wherein music figured prominently. The importance of a national music was emphasized time and again, and by the time the first All India Music Conference took place in 1916, it was evident that music, as an emblem of nationalist imagination and aspiration, had a special place in the agenda. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande speaking at this conference expressed this sentiment forcefully and poignantly when he remarked, I cannot but hope that in a few years more there will be an easy system for the instruction of our music, which will lend itself to mass education. Then will the ambition of India be fulfilled for then the Indians will have music in the curricula of their universities and music instruction will be common and universal. And so if it please Providence to so dispense that there is a fusion between the two systems of North and the South, then there will be a national Music for the whole country and the last of our ambitions will be 19C.S. Ayyar, The Grammar of South Indian Music 1939–57, published by the author, printed by R. Narayanaswamy Iyer, Madras, pp. 112–13.

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reached, for then the great nation will sing one song. Once there is a system for music the gates of instruction will be thrown open and compulsory music education will immediately follow almost as a natural consequence. Writing easy text books and gradual manuals will be accomplished in a trice.20

Bhatkhande’s address struck a chord among nationalists and educationists, who were quick to seize the idea of a nationalist education where music would enjoy an exalted status and would contribute to the holistic education of the individual and the cultural regeneration of the nation. Music education was widely seen as an essential precondition for all-round development of the individual, as a panacea for communal discord and as a necessary corrective to the extreme instrumentalism of modern material life. Successive music conferences reiterated Bhatkhande’s views; it was strongly felt that as India entered upon the day of regeneration under the auspices of the British regime and was stirring in the various departments of her national life and endeavouring to revive and improve her educational, political and industrial functions, the cause of music would have to be seriously pursued. The Conference authorities were keen on the preservation of existing material and inclusion of musical training in the general educational system. Beyond that they did not have a clear idea how reform would actually impact upon the art form and whether the modern system of instruction could actually be a viable substitute for an older system of more personalized exchange. Two elements cropped up recurrently in nationalist discourse and gave a distinct inflection to the agenda for music reform; one was the centrality music enjoyed in the inner imagination of publicists and the affective potential that it commanded, and the other was an engagement with notions of an educational system that would be holistic, including music in a central and scientific way that would make music instruction effective for the new constituency of listeners and learners. From the very beginning, there was an anxiety about compromising certain values and features in a programme that catered to mass education even when it was conceded that the musician was a marginalized entity bearing ‘the odium of society’, going ‘perilously near vice’ and often plunging into, but nursing the art form in a pure 20V.N. Bhatkhande, A Short Historical Survey of the Music of Upper India: A Reproduction of a Speech Addressed by PanditV. N. Bhatkhande at the first All India Music Conference, Baroda, 1916, Bombay, 1934.

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and unadulterated fashion. Evidently there was something about this music that demanded preservation and more so, because it was also seen as solvent of communalism. AsVaikuntaram Pandit of Bombay observed, ‘it is the one art on which the Hindu and Mahomedan have worked with supreme devotion. To me there is nothing more glorious in the unity of Indian culture than for instance, a typical Mahomedan singing melodies composed by Hindu saints or recording the doings of Hindu prophets and gods. Likewise I have heard orthodox Brahmmin ustads singing melodies popularized by Mahomedan families of musical repute. It is a standing emblem of the future of Indian culture that, in the practice of divine art, the Hindu and Mahomedan cease to exist as such.’21 The value of such a resource in the cause of nationalism could hardly be in doubt. To these were added the actual logistics of organizing nationalist activity wherein sessions of the Indian National Congress were followed by music recitals that produced and perpetuated an explicit connection between performance and political activity. Regional centres vied with each other in presenting the best concerts. For instance, during the Congress session in Belgaon in 1924, the representative of the Mysore palace observed in a letter to the leader C.V. Rajagopalachari that the occasion would give them an opportunity to ‘show to the outer world how the music department in our state has progressed under the benevolent rule of our His Highness. Our young vidwans know how to play Karnatik, Hindustani and English music.The concert that is so well fostered by His Highness will certainly appeal to the people of all nationalities’. The concert as it turned out was a huge draw and as Malviya a prominent leader remarked: I am sure I express the sentiment of all present, when I say we are under deep obligation to the concert party and the members of the committee. We also express our gratitude to H.H. the Maharaja for sending the party of musicians. Music is the richest of all pleasures. It is a means by which our unity is cemented. If there is a wrong or discordant note struck, we all reject it. We make no difference in so doing. Happy is the place where we meet. Just as this wooden instrument contains wires etc., our bodies contain corresponding wires; our tissues are a number of wires as every wire is tuned our tissues will have to be trained to enjoy the delicate and exquisite note inside the body i.e. our hearts of our sisters and brothers.22 21A. Vaikuntaram 22Selections

Pandit, ‘Indian Music’, JMAM, Vol. III, 1932, Bombay, pp. 92–3. from the Records of the Mysore Palace, Vol. I, p. 136.

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The projection of music as a national treasure and a source for national regeneration was echoed persistently in nationalist discourse that balanced the imperatives of modernization through education and of preservation of tradition through an emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of Indian music.This was especially evident in south India where the intervention of the Theosophists and their participation in nationalist consciousness and activity.The Theosophist agenda and their appropriation and presentation of Hindu culture augmented the curious tradition-modernity mix of the project as it foregrounded nationalist education and the reclamation of Hindu culture and practice as the twin pillars of Home rule.

The Theosophists, Margaret Cousins and Music Education in Madras Nationalist activity in south India assumed a distinct character with the advent of the Theosophists whose orientation and agenda was especially well-received by high caste local publicists who found themselves equipped with a new language of pride and self-definition to counter the colonial critique of indigenous society and religion. Originating in the United States, Theosophy was a mix of magic, science and philosophy and insisted that all knowledge was part of one ancient wisdom even if it tended to privilege Buddhist and Hindu philosophies. In India, it enjoyed special favour in the south, where it was heartily accepted by the Brahmin elites eager to maintain their cultural capital and caste order through reinventing traditions of an original golden age of Sanskrit Indian culture. The Theosophical movement, like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj, was part of a neo-Hindu movement that preceded the articulation of political nationalism in India. Although inspired by western understanding of eastern civilizations and culture, and pioneered by a number of influential Europeans like Colonel Olcott, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, the movement appealed to certain segments of the Indian middle-class and enabled them to legitimize their political aspirations. Western-educated Indians were not slow to appreciate Theosophist representations of classical Hinduism and traditional Indian society as rational, scientific and moral, even as having a desirable spiritual dimension the west lacked and something which Theosophy aspired to bring back. Madame

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Blavatsky, for instance, stressed the importance of mystical experience and the occult arguing that spirits linked all the objects of the physical world in a single set of mutual sympathies that could be acted on by magicians or higher beings—the Masters—under whose commands she had organized the Theosophist Society. These Masters lived in the Himalayas, and from the very beginning, the Theosophists emphasized the importance of ancient cultures like those of ancient Egypt and India. This emphasis generated a great deal of support and appreciation for the movement in India when the Theosophists landed in Bombay and Madras. In view of the sense of shame and inferiority educated middle-class Indians experienced in relation to their encounter with western rationality, they eagerly responded to the influence of Theosophist ideas, which extolled pure Vedic faith, and identified Brahmanism as the ideal source of all religions. These ideas appealed to sections of the middle-class especially high-caste and Brahmin publicists in south India, and even fed into the nationalist movement. The interest and respect the Theosophists accorded to Indian culture provided the western educated Indian elite with resources to forge an identity while at the same time, the incendiary agitation techniques developed by leaders like Annie Besant had a major impact on the development of Indian nationalist consciousness. Annie Besant more than anyone else, enjoyed a special status in southern India especially among high-caste elite groups, as she was explicitly partial to the Brahmanical tradition and publicly stated that Hindu practices and India’s Aryan heritage had to be celebrated. ‘Those who like myself,’ she wrote, ‘desire the maintenance of the caste system should reform the system of the subdivision of the same caste and thereby strengthen the caste system against its assailants.’23 Clearly such pronouncement struck a chord with Brahmin publicists in Madras who were simultaneously engaged in a modernizing project as much as they were involved with a redefinition of their tradition. As major beneficiaries of the colonial dispensation, a consequence of their western education and professional success in the colonial services, they were torn between the poles of modernity and tradition and it was precisely to this sense of crisis that Theosophist ideas had a particular resonance. The invocation of India’s antiquity and spiritual traditions and the attack on western materialism by the Theosophists appealed to 23Kumari Jayavardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule, Routledge, 1995, p. 132.

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the old and young men of Madras to restore India’s religious and cultural glory. As the Madras Mail observed in 1883, ‘The old apologetic tone, which characterized the utterances of natives regarding everything Indian a short time ago has given place to a tone of selfassertion not quite so pleasant to the ruling class perhaps, but certainly much more natural and healthy.’24 Colonel Olcott, one of the principal founder members, enthused Madras elites in the cause of an Aryan revival and called all Hindus to return to the ways of the sages, the warriors, the great intellects of yore. He imagined a future when disunity amongst men would disappear, when Brahmins would no more wallow in menial professions as clerks and merchants, and when all Hindus would feel fit to rule the world, nay, meet the gods on equal terms. Annie Besant who succeeded Olcott held out even greater ambitions for the Brahmins; she said: I have a vision which I hope is not only a dream of this mighty Brahmana caste which in the past has given to India all that was greatest in her literature and the arts and of you the natural leaders of the people by your high education, by your brilliant intelligence, by your powers of speech—I have had a mighty vision of your mighty caste going forward to the feet of India ... the mother taking off the coronet of privilege and laying it down in sacrifice at her feet. I have dreamt that the great act of national sacrifice once accomplished, splendidly performed, India the mother would stretch out her hands in blessing and say to her children who made the sacrifice. Go back to your people and take your rightful place again as leaders still in India. Give to them your splendid intellect, give to them your wonderful eloquence, give to them the power of your past and the influence of your names crowned no longer with the crown of privilege but with the deathless crown of self-sacrifice.25

It is easy to see how such ideas struck a sympathetic chord with the emerging Brahmin elites of Madras who around this time were beginning to engage with their cultural inheritance in an altogether new spirit of reflexivity and attempting, thereby, to integrate existing cultural practices into their new location and lifestyles produced by modern western education and professional employment. Music was especially central in the case of the south Indian Brahmin elites whose ideas of assimilating the performing tradition within the modern institutional and public space of pedagogy and performance faced 24R.

Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India.

25Quoted in S.Geetha and S.V. Rajadorai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From

Iyothee Thass to Periyar, Samya, Calcutta 1998, pp. 6–7 (hereafter Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium).

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the inevitable problems of balancing ideas of tradition with modernity, and in the process, constructed the modalities of a secular ritual form and practice. Here the impact of the Theosophist discourse, as articulated especially by the Cousins (James and Margaret Cousins who were invited by Annie Besant to work in India and who made India their home) was especially evident. While James Cousins was initially involved with the publication of New India, Margaret Cousins was closely involved with the founding of women’s’ organizations and with syllabus reform relating to the adoption of a curriculum in music. Her own training in music in Dublin was an added qualification and she tried to work out a comprehensive scheme of musical education in the context of a larger agenda of reinstating indigenous musical forms.26 Their views stressed the importance of the arts in nation building and in introducing it within the system of national education. As James Cousins wrote: Yet the India of the Indians is no more the real India than a house is its occupants and the Indians of India are not to but wholly in a census return. When you have put the Indian nation into a string of figures, you are eternities away from the real nation unless you have reckoned up the contents of the counted heads. The real India hovers over India’s heads—it is the totality of all that lives in the region of the imagination. It lives through Indian minds and bodies on Indian soil but it is greater far than they; it includes them as the soul includes the senses, but it is not included in or all of them. The true habit of a nation is in the national imagination, and its own expression must be found in the national arts. It is in the artistic records of a nation, much more than in the records of wars and dynastic changes that the nation’s true history is to be found. ‘History’ as it is at present conceived, is the account of a nation’s diseases and much thought on disease is not the way to health, the story of India’s real life is the story of the making of the Ramayana, the decorating of Ajanta, the sculpturing of Konarak, the revival of Indian painting in Bengal, the revival of the drama in the Telugu country, the All India Music Conference, the poetry and prose of Tagore, and these are the more truly vocal of the inner soul of the country because they spring directly from the great affirmation of its spiritual consciousness, they are suffused as naturally with religion as they are with the food, drink and air that are wrought through the instrument of the artist with language and sound and colour.27 26Catherine Candy, ‘The Inscrutable Irish-Indian Feminist Management of AngloAmerican Hegemony’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2:1, 2001. Also see Joanne Stafford Mortimer, ‘Annie Besant and India 1913–1917’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.18, 1983, pp. 61–78. 27James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India, Madras, 1918, pp. 26–8.

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Margaret Cousins made an even more direct case for music as a vehicle for enhancing the emotional health of young people and of national regeneration and from the 1930s worked single-mindedly in tying it up with national education and reconstruction.28 By the 1920s, a number of early and tentative efforts towards musical education were noticeable. Some of these, as suggested earlier, were inspired by missionary initiative; successive Reverends thought of using familiar musical idioms and styles to popularize Christian congregational singing. We have, for instance, Emmons White considering the use of indigenous musical forms to reach out to a larger population just as his predecessors, Richard Hickling (1866– 1934) and T. Ayyadurai Bhagavatar (1884–1948), had done.29 Reverend H. A. Popley started a summer school for teaching music to Christian men and women; from 1921 this school functioned regularly every year for a six-week term and incidentally, he was the one who gave P. Sambamoorthy his first major break. Invited to deliver a series of ten lectures on ‘Musical Forms in South Indian Music’, Sambamoorthy went on to become the principal of the school, and thereby, gained invaluable experience in the process of developing a serious pedagogy for music instruction. A number of music schools emerged in Madras city indicating the growing interest in integrating it within the modern educational system. Here, the initiative assumed by some traditional practitioners like Muthiah Bhagavatar was especially remarkable and it may be surmised that his experiences as a palace musician reforming courts like Travancore and Mysore enabled him to intuitively understand the changing equations in the world of music and music reform. In 1924, a meeting of musicians presided over by Muthiah Bhagavatar passed a resolution, urging Madras University to include music among optional subjects for the Intermediate examination. The resolution was endorsed at a subsequent meeting. The University authorities responded by setting up a committee to draft a syllabus and on 7 January 1926, at a meeting a resolution was adopted that ‘this meeting considers that a Musical Academy be started to develop and encourage indigenous music and the same shall be known as the South Indian Academy of Music.’ However, this move was dropped when, in 1926, the Queen Mary’s College became the first institution to offer an intermediate course 28Margaret

Cousins, Music of Orient and Occident, pp. 39–44. Appreciating India’s Music, see chapter on Kalakshepam.

29Emmons White,

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in music with P. Sambamoorthy as the teacher.The course was adopted in 1930 as part of a two-year B. A. degree course. With this, Madras University became the first centre in India to include music in its curriculum of studies and to have a research department in music. Margaret Cousins devoted a great deal of her energies towards this effort and took the important decision of involving musicians from the very start in drafting the syllabus from primary grades` in schools right up to the degree level in universities.30 From this emerged the Tanjore conference of senior musicians whose views were solicited to give reform a substantive and practical dimension. The Madras initiative came in the context of a widespread agitation for national educational reform, one of the major concerns of the Indian National Congress that pushed the cause with greater energy in the 1930s.The value of music education was stressed time and again; public opinion in the wake of the All India Music Conference was convinced of the issue and as the popular daily, The Hindustan Times put it: India simply cannot afford to despise or neglect her music. With education, now a transferred subject in the hands of Indian ministers, the national music of the country must be honoured, must be taught, must be financially upheld, and the first and easiest means of doing this is to make an elementary course of class singing, with proper training in notation, talim and intonation compulsory right up to the college.31

While in the case of north Indian publicists, the issue of relocation was inextricably tied up with the prejudices against Muslim practitioners, in southern India, owing to the social and structural organization of the musical profession, the project was, from the very beginning, based upon the support and collaboration of practicing musicians, or at least an influential segment among them. The Tanjore Conference yielded important results, and according to Cousins, enabled the drafting of an appropriate syllabus and graded primers, which were enthusiastically received by the Mysore Palace and the newly established Annamalai University (1929). The results of all these efforts meant that music came to be seriously pursued as an object of study, and training centres for music teachers came to be systematically planned. It was in this context that women students like Kalyani Sundaram took their university degrees in 30P. Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, Madras, 1966, see chapter XIII. Also see Margaret Cousins, The Music of Orient and Occident, p. 178. 31The Hindustan Times, 1 July 1938.

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music. Cousins was unequivocal in her advocacy of modern musical education; she wrote that the result of the increased interest in music was to improve the status of professional musicians and that they could now be confident of being paid according to rates set by government standards. Cousin’s efforts were endorsed and supported by the city’s leading sabhas, notably the Madras Music Academy that spared no efforts in setting up teachers’ training colleges and conferring with the university authorities over issues of curriculum and teaching methods. The Academy, from the very beginning, expressed its concern over the possibility of sub-standard schools and colleges, while simultaneously supporting the general drive for employment. In the 1932 session of the Music Conference, they clearly announced that they had decided to entertain in their model schools, ‘only those that have passed out of our Teacher’s College. This will go to solve their employment, to some extent and will be a source of encouragement for others to get themselves strained in our College. Perhaps stimulated by our activities and the growing enthusiasm for scientific music, a few schools have been opened in various parts of the city by private individuals and institutions for imparting instruction in music. The idea is indeed laudable but the one thing I must take exception to is the granting of Teachers’ certificates to students who attend these courses, which do not extend beyond five or six weeks.’32

Changing Imperatives: The New System of Transmission The misgivings were not without basis. The relocation of music from the gurukulavasam to the university generated new imperatives of teaching and reproduction that invariably, and continually, raised issues of standards and authenticity in classical music. The very idea of authenticity had been closely linked with the notion of a specific teaching lineage that had passed on the compositions orally through a system of discipleship that ensured a fidelity to the line and the compositions it carried. The lines on which the gurukulavasam was organized facilitated a particular mode of pedagogic transaction that was complete and stressed an experiential approach. Gurukulavasam 32JMAM, 1933, p. 67, for Dr. U. Rama Rao’s welcome address to the Madras Music Conference of 1932.

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referred to a method of teaching and learning in which the shishya or disciple lives with the guru, learning music by a process of slow absorption and serving the guru as a member of his household. The practice was an old and revered one but seemed to accommodate and incorporate a new and heightened semantic density—not only did it refer to a specific personal loyalty between teacher and student but also involved a fidelity to a specific lineage and style.33 By the twentieth century it also encompassed the idea of a larger commitment to tradition, an adherence to the element that made the music truly Indian and classical. It also represented the pre-modern, a mode that existed before the differentiation of time into concerts and music lessons, before the differentiation of music teaching into beginners and advanced lessons, before the abstraction of music from its organic context. In its essentials, therefore, the idea of the gurukulavasam was incompatible with modernity, with the new modalities of technological reproduction and transmission. How, then, was this idea accommodated within the new agenda of modernizing music, which as a classical art form had been consciously recast in course of the latter decades of the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth century? Just as modernity generated the desire for reinventing and reclaiming tradition, the new system of music education reopened the issue of the gurukulavasam that acquired distinctly multiple meanings. Consequently even as the new system of musical instruction was being assembled and professional teachers like P. Sambamoorthy were attempting to devise a teaching methodology that went beyond rudimentary notation, the validity of the gurukula system was emphasized time and again The Madras Music Academy, which was at the forefront of music reform and education, kept the debate alive extolling the virtues of the gurukulavasam while the established artistes who became principals and directors of music instruction in the University and the Teachers Training Academy, endorsed the importance of the gurukulavasam as far as their own experiences were concerned. Even a senior artist like K.V. Narayanaswami who headed the music department in the University maintained that there was no real alternative to the gurukulavasam for imbibing the canon and performing it. These ideas circulated largely through contemporary publications and journals, like that of the Madras Music Academy which remained 33Amanda Weidman, Voicing

the Modern.

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committed to the idea of modern musical reform. It played a direct role in setting up a training college for teachers, which would facilitate the process of music instruction in colleges where the subject had been recently introduced. The senior musician, Tiger Varadachariar, was assigned the responsibility of functioning as its principal—a decision that was in keeping with the general idea that a traditional musician could act as the bridge between an earlier system and the modern institution.34 Several members in the Academy were of the opinion that with the introduction of music as a formal course in the University, systematic research into the theoretical aspects of music could be conducted. C.S. Ayyar in particular was emphatic when he said that practitioners or vidwans had to be involved with the University in the teaching of music. As he put it during his vote of thanks address in 1931, ‘The University of Madras will shortly appoint a professor of vocal music on about Rs 300 per mensem and I sincerely hope that it will not, in its wisdom, choose a graduate of Physics or one in Law and not even a working knowledge of the art, but will choose a savant who has laboured a whole life time under the Gurukulaparampara system for the sake of music.’35 Ayyar, as mentioned before, was a severe critic of mechanical and formulaic understanding of music. For him, the potential of music lay in its ability to affect human beings and thereby lead them to the infinite. ‘The highest melodic music of India has always been what we call sacred, tending us to spirituality, when no more of our earthly burdens and trammels are felt, and we are lifted to a higher sphere of consciousness and the feeling of the Divinity within us: I make bold to say that when priests have failed in their mission, musician artistes like Thiagaraja and Dikshatar have taken their place.’36 Pursuing degrees was bound to compromise such ideals. These sentiments were periodically repeated and reaffirmed by other members; in 1945, Dr Savoor in his address to the Academy mentioned that to learn real music under the gurushishya parampara was excellent, that ‘music education had lost sight of it owing to the large scale production of degree holders. Whatever be the value of that system to the present education, for learning fine arts, especially good music, such a system was really useful. Proficiency in the fine art of music could only be passed from a real guru to a real shishya.’37 34JMAM, Madras, Vol.

II, No. 4, 1931, see editorial. Madras, 1932, p. 222. 36C.S. Ayyar, The Grammar of South Indian Music, p. 120. 37JMAM, Vol. XVII, Madras, 1945, p. 39. 35JMAM,

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The Madras University is a modern university but it always nurtured and deployed the services of traditional musicians

On the other hand there was a strong lobby within the Academy and in the larger public domain that attacked the gurukula system, which was seen as arbitrary and laborious, and one that bred extreme sycophancy on the part of the disciple. Dr B.V. Keskar represented this extreme position, as a minister in charge of information and broadcasting (1953–61), he denounced the gharana and gurukula system in no uncertain terms, and insisted that schools and colleges would go a long way in building an informed and intelligent audience. He argued against the gurukula system, which he feared would eventually destroy Indian music. He saw no virtue in the system, which had outlived its utility in modern India and said that it was inequitable and unfair, wherein the student was put under a regimen that was personally humiliating. Keskar insisted that the popular notion that modern schools and colleges would not be able to develop good singers was baseless; just as the majority of students in any school were not likely to become prominent in any profession, so also in music, because music required not merely good learning, but some intrinsic gift in the student himself.38 P. Sambamoorthy was an important advocate of modern music teaching methods and laboured through his life to systematize music teaching and bring it in line with the requirements of modern instruction. He did not denounce the traditional system as Keskar did and neither did he entertain such extreme views but merely drew a useful distinction between the two modes of transmission. 38B.V. Keskar, Indian Music Problems and Prospects, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1967, p. 27.

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A few biographical details of P. Sambamoorthy will be useful here.39 Trained as a lawyer, Sambamoorthy’s passion was music that he sought to study and teach systematically. His early experiences in the music institutions run by Popley in Madras, and subsequently in Queen Mary’s College, were honed further by a stint in Germany thanks to a scholarship. In Munich, he took practical courses in the violin and the flute besides absorbing theory and history of European music. The European orchestra seemed to have left a profound imprint on him for he endeavoured to devise one for India as well on his return, an experiment that was not especially popular.40 The criticism levelled against the experiment inevitably alluded to the ideals and intentions of Karnatik music, and which were equally relevant in relation to the modernizing of its instruction. Let me quote some extracts of this review, which did convey some of the elements of popularly held public opinion: The multifaceted beauty of Carnatic music blossoms only in solo singing. This is not to say that there is no joy in group singing or in listening to such group singing. It is in recognition of this fact that our forefathers set up the concept and practice of ‘bhajan’ music. Songs for this mode of singing were chosen with emphasis on being pleasing to the ears and not demanding any excessive modulations in delivery (light on, or devoid of, ‘sangatis’). And the lyric was almost exclusively stringing together of the multitude of names of Gods that exist in the Hindu pantheon. The focus was on mass proletarian appeal. Sir, I hope you now appreciate my citing my proficiency in bhajan songs as a qualification to join your orchestra! Continuing on this theme, if group singing is visualized under the Carnatic style of music, it would be best to choose ‘light’ numbers, easy to sing and not requiring nay major modulations in delivery (‘sangatis’). But, you have chosen songs that are heavy in content and involving major modulations (‘sangatis’). As an example, there was this recent concert by your Orchestra at the Mylapore Rasika Ranjani Sabha, in which six of your lady artistes did a group rendering of ‘Ninnu Joochchi Na Udaythi’, a composition by Pattnam Subramania Iyer. This Telugu composition is a monster in terms of the complexity involved in rendering, heavy in ‘sangatis’ at every stage; even a seasoned artist would have a trying time to render this song without offending 39‘Professor P. Sambamoorthy, Musicologist of the Century 1901–1973’ in Sruti, issue 251, August 2005, pp. 15–27. 40Ananda Vikatan, 13 May 1934 for Kalki’s scathing comments on the Brinda Gaana orchestra.

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the sensibility of the listener. How such a number can be handled by six artistes singing in chorus with any degree of audience acceptance begs the question. This experience took me to my childhood days in our village where the bullock-driven oil crushing mills used to make a sound equally grating! Almost makes one wish he was deaf!

By 1937, P. Sambamoorthy had secured appointment as Professor of Music in the Madras University, a position that he maintained till his retirement in 1961. A prolific writer and compiler, he left behind for his students, a huge corpus of writings that were rich in detail but syllabus-oriented and not always imaginative. However, these are extremely useful in tracking the preoccupations of the reforming elite as far as music teaching was concerned. His most significant writings addressed the teaching of music that gives us the most systematic account of his priorities and the way he saw music education as a critical resource to train an audience and a constituency of professional teachers. Sambamoorthy made a clear distinction between the performer and the teacher. For the aspiring performer, the gurukula seemed to be the answer, but for a teacher and interested amateur, the modern system of instruction seemed, to him, to be more appropriate. Implicit in this admission was a clear distinction between the teacher and the performer, and the logical assumption that music education in the universities was not only about performance, and as a result, the teacher had a different mandate than a guru. He made this very clear when he suggested that a teacher did not have to be a gifted performer; the teacher, did however, have to be good at explaining the elements of music to the student, highlight the latter’s mistakes and be prepared to repeat himself as many times as was necessary. Teachers, thus, could not be mercurial like the gurus—they had to be even-tempered and less exacting.This was in complete contrast to the gurukula system, where a separation did not exist between a teacher and a curriculum to be taught; the guru embodied his or her musical knowledge and one learned music by emulating one’s guru, by becoming absorbed in him/her. By contrast, the teacher’s authority was simply that of someone authorized to teach a predetermined curriculum.41 For Sambamoorthy, this authority was to be valued and rewarded by the state—for there was no doubt in his mind that between ‘the 41P.

Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, Madras, 1966, p. 9.

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teacher of music and the performer in concerts’, the ‘former renders a greater service to society than the latter’.42 It was the value ascribed to modern music teaching that informed P. Sambamoorthy’s extensive publications on the teaching of music. These captured quite unselfconsciously, the growing perception of the utility of music teaching as a middle-class profession and, only incidentally, of the need to educate an audience for the reception of art music. From the initial euphoria of introducing music education as a desirable vehicle for regenerating the nation and enabling it to connect with the deeper aspects of its heritage, the emphasis shifted to the nitty-gritty of teaching techniques in the classroom, of properly designed curricula and evaluation methods in order to develop a profession with a standardized system of grading. It was important for the new music teacher to dispel the older stereotypes of the indulgent and indigent bhagavatar—who was, in most cases, a failed performer—and cultivate a persona that would inspire the class. As a result, Sambamoorthy wrote in meticulous detail about the duties and responsibilities of the new music teacher who had to possess a robust body and fine mind, clean habits and a sweet temperament, and was willing to teach students patiently. Detailed sections of the rights and duties of a music teacher were listed—the qualifications covered a wide range of skills and knowledge from the technical aspects of music to actual practical demonstration, linguistic adeptness and an ability to spot talent. For the rest, his instructions bore a predictable similarity with those attending any high schoolteacher given a subject for instruction.43 It was here that the ambiguities of the project surfaced—at the rhetorical level, there was emphasis on the utility of adapting the gurukula system into modern education, but at the level of implementation, the syllabus and course of study showed a remarkable lack of imagination. Apologists could, of course, argue that the purpose of the reforms was not to produce a brilliant performer but a qualified teacher who could train students to appreciate music and learn its fundamentals before taking up apprenticeship as a guru. Here, Sambamoorthy echoed the sentiments of the early reformers who saw the katcheri as a site of instruction—as he wrote, the formation of a good taste was an important consideration and this could be ensured only by the teaching of good songs, which had to be properly 42P. 43P.

Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, p. 8. Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, pp. 9–12.

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graded in accordance with the standards and requirements of the students. He also suggested the organization of a model concert by the teacher so that he could explain the underlying principles behind the arrangement of songs, which would make the programme representative of the classical tradition. The challenges before the teacher were different from those faced by the performer. The real testing time was the examination, and Sambamoorthy spoke at length about the problems a teacher setting exams would face, beginning with the tendency to correct mistakes and yet not discourage the students.The examination itself was about the ability of a student to produce music on the spot and in a limited amount of time, and not about the student’s ability to reproduce his guru’s style or imbibe his knowledge and express it through performance. The examination also imposed different kinds of pressure on the students and the teachers; as P. Sambamoorthy wrote: ... the mere thought of an examination is sufficient to make the voices of even steady singers shaky ... the music teacher comes across voices of varying types and grades of excellence, from the unpliable stony voice to the ringing silvery voice. The singing of some creates the impression that they are vomiting something. Things are no better in instrumental examinations. The bowing of some (on the violin) is so repulsive and harsh that at the end of the performance one can find heaps of hair that have come off the bow, stealthily removed and strewn behind the performer. Some go on aimlessly and artificially moving their fingers up and down the neighbourhood. Their play impresses one as the mewing of a cat and one need not be surprised if a cat in the neighbourhood begins to blink and search in vain for the new formless member of her kind.44

Unlike a guru or a performer, the teacher was expected to remain unfazed at all this and move on while correcting the student gently and persuasively. What did these pronouncements amount to? It was evident that the agendas before the music teacher and the traditional guru were markedly different and that the approaches they brought to their work reflected this dissimilarity. For the guru, the acceptance of a student meant not merely an investment in a practice that knew no artificial segments and gradations but an immersion in a whole way of life and style that carried within it, multiple connotations of music realized through successive generations of practitioners. For the 44P.

Sambamoorthy, The Teaching of Music, pp. 150–3.

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teacher, the job was made clinical—he had a prescribed syllabus to complete, train students who were not always musically inclined, conduct examinations and then certify them as capable of teaching, and even performing music. This was, in view of the pressing need modern publicists felt about introducing music education in schools, to be taught compulsorily in all training schools at least so as to ensure availability of reasonably competent teachers. As Sambamoorthy wrote in one of his early contributions to the Academy’s journal, ‘Since Elementary schools, particularly in the mofussil cannot afford to have separate teachers on their staff, the task of teaching music has to be undertaken by the non-specialist teacher.’45 The case was, however, not always convincing. Almost immediately after independence, the cultural engineers lamented the falling standards of university departments and academies. Most of the criticism was levelled against the standards of textbooks and lack of training among teachers. The journal of the Madras Music Academy once more raised the importance of restoring the gurukula system in its essentials within the modern system. V. Raghavan, the noted Sanskrit scholar and Theosophist, observed how music in schools and colleges had helped in diffusing musical knowledge; it could not be said that modern teaching institutions had been able to produce the degree of excellence which was required to make the student a vidwan.46 For critics like V. Subba Rao, the problem seemed more fundamental. Music as a subject required direct personal method and ‘books, charts, the black-board, printed notation, even recorded music are no substitute for the living presence of the guru’.47 He suggested that even in modern methods the essential element of personal instruction had to be retained: ‘the flexible living voice has to sing and the ear has to take in the music. If the constant personal touch of the gurukula system is not possible in the present set up of society, still the personal element even in college education cannot be avoided. In the case of other humanities and sciences, libraries and laboratories are essential. In practical music, the only library worth mentioning is a collection of good recorded music.’48 45P. Sambamoorthy, ‘Music in Training Schools’, JMAM, Vol. XIII, Madras, 1942, pp. 33–43. 46Music Mirror, Vol. I, No. 3, 1956. 47T.V. Subba Rao, Studies in Indian Music, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1962, pp. 231–6. 48T.V. Subba Rao, Studies in Indian Music, p. 232.

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Was the invocation of the gurukula as an exceptional site of authenticity and appropriate transmission, a reflection of the genuine anxieties of the reforming elite about musical standards, or was it, as Amanda Weidman has argued, a consequence of the new technology of reproduction and pedagogy? Once technology could reproduce music and performance styles, how did the guru see his position immediate relation to his student and in the larger context of transmission? Further, given the underlying principles of modern education and the university system where hiererachy was replaced by collegiality and where the teacher travelled to meet his students, how could traditional gurus make the transition and what did this imply for the art form? Obviously one is not suggesting that for good music, the student had to go through a ritual process of selfdeprecation—as part of the liminal state of transition—but equally this is not to deny that musical exchanges between guru and shishya encompassed subtle elements of absorption and learning that transcended conventional assumptions and expectations. At the same time, it is important to consider the intrinsic contradictions of the new system of music education.The new system of music education was conceived on lines that did not fully comprehend the elements that made up the teacher-pupil experience so central to the learning and practice of music in India. Music in India was a performance-oriented practice, necessarily a one-to-one experience, and hinged upon a conception of artistic fidelity that could not be framed within an impersonal and formalized structure of evaluation and accreditation. The idea was not to go through a standardized regimen that had to be periodically examined—rather the idea was to stay with the guru and absorb his life and musical experience, and through a quotidian discipline of practice and surrender, imbibe all that he had come to embody of the tradition and art form. It was not the anticipation of examination or of marks that determined the practice—it was the desire to perform and identify so completely with a performance style that motivated the student to remain connected to his teacher within an older system of practice, ser vice and apprenticeship. Recalling in an inter view, his gurukulavasam with Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (referred to as anna or elder brother), K.V. Narayanswamy referred to how central kelvigyanam (learning by listening)49 was in understanding music, 49Interview with K.V. Narayanaswamy on the Sixtieth Annual Conference of the Madras Music Academy. This was published in Sruti magazine, Issue 9, January 1987.

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and how gurukulavasam provided the pupil with this kind of continuous access.Without listening to every single facet of the guru’s method and performance it was impossible to absorb the music. It was this element of shared space and commitment that produced a performer. There was no place here for theory—for that matter, the theoretical base for Indian music was not of immediate relevance or prescience even though the nationalist cultural engineers made much of this lack. The reasons for such a preoccupation have already been indicated in the context of the impact colonial sociology of music has on the writing and contemplation of the history of Indian music. K.V. Narayanaswamy’s observations were not fundamentally different from those of Tiger Varadachariar in his presidential address to the Madras Music academy in the 1932 session.While urging higher institutions to take up the cause of music, he reiterated the merits of the gurukula system especially in view of the problems that were connected with the modern system of pedagogy. To the shouts of ‘Hear!’ ‘Hear!’ he urged the audience to consider the value of the ‘Guruparampara system of old with its hard discipline, intensive training and close contact with the personality of the master’, which, to him, was the best organization, suited to the character and music genius of India. He asked the assembly to consider how far this system could be adapted to modern methods of class teaching.50 By 1954, P. Sambamoorthy, Head of the Music Department in Madras University, was remarking on the lack of time university teachers had and that whereas unlimited time was available in the gurukula system, the modern music teacher in schools suffered from several limitations. He had to teach groups of students not always gifted, and this created major problems.51 These frequent refrains did not, however, stand in the way of pressing forward the cause of institutionalization or of music reform. In fact, the alternative deployment of the gurukulavasam as the site of authenticity and tradition and of the modern institutions of higher learning as the desirable space of transmission for the aspiring middle-class students was perfectly consistent with the way the cultural engineers conceived of their project. In making the transition to modernity, the invocation of tradition and authenticity became 50Journal of the Music Academy of Madras, 1933, Presidential address of Tiger Varadachariar in the Annual Conference of the Academy, 1932. 51P. Sambamoorthy, ‘Teaching Methods in Music’, Journal of the Music Academy of Madras, Vol. XXVI, 1955. P. Sambamoorthy spoke on 24 December 1954.

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critical with the result that the idea of gurushisya parampara enjoyed a new potency and validity. This did not, however, detract from the importance they assigned to modern education, which was seen as the only appropriate site of preservation and promotion of classical music. The deployment of the two categories of tradition and modernity, therefore, was built into the very nature of the project while its association with the Theosophists meant that the presentation of music as secular ritual assumed typical Brahmanical overtones. The gurukula versus the modern university debate continued into the eighties. Writing for the Music Academy’s journal in 1980, Sandhyavandanam Sreenivasa Rao expressed his reservations about the system and went to the extent of saying that even the great masters had got very little actual training from their gurus. ‘In gurukula system of teaching, even at best we got a few performing artistes of great draw on the audiences. I have known some Gurus who had not taught anything whatever to the student who was doing all kinds of services over ten to twelve years, not even ten varnams in ten years. I had to bathe the buffalos and cows and wash the clothes. I had to cook. I left him in disgust.’52 The author seemed to reproduce Keskar’s sentiments and reminded readers that no college could produce outstanding performers straightaway. ‘Even a law college cannot produce eminent jurists and judges, nor a medical college eminent surgeons and physicians at the end of the academic course. In music institutions, if the necessary guidance and basic training is given, a student with sraddha and bhakti and assiduous sadhana can shape into a great vidwan after years of performing experience.’53 R.Vedavalli, on the other hand, a product of the gurukula system expressed her dissatisfaction with the university system where the pressures of syllabus and examinations meant that the experience of learning music was reduced to great tedium and hurry.54 The issue defied easy resolution but the fact of the matter was that the university system did not produce great performers; nor did it aspire to do so. The intention behind music reform was to create both an informed audience and a professional course that could provide jobs. One of the most widely advertised instruments of modern musical reform was that of notation. Discussions in the Madras Music 52‘Music

Teaching under Gurukula System and in Recognised Institutions’, JMAM, Vol. LI, 1980, pp. 133–46 (hereafter ‘Music Teaching’, JMAM, 1980). 53‘Music Teaching’, JMAM, 1980. 54‘Carnatic Music Today: Teaching and Learning’, Sruti, No. 9, 1984, pp. 5–7.

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Academy elaborated the vital importance of this device and also reflected on how important early notation efforts had been in disseminating interest and knowledge among the first batch of enthusiastic and talented amateurs. The 1942 session of the Academy’s experts committee saw C. S. Iyer opening the discussion. Reflecting on the endeavours of Subburama Diksitar (late nineteenth century) in popularizing notation and adopting a series of symbols taken from staff notation, he argued that to conserve music as part of national culture it was imperative to adopt notation that would help the student to retain the compositions he had learnt. ‘It has been my sad experience’, he said, ‘of teachers of vocal music of over two and half years who would not allow one to takedown the sahitya (lyrics of the kriti, although one had learnt more than a hundred. One can imagine the time wasted in memorizing the words.’55 This did not, of course, mean that notation could ever take the place of effective musical communication but it was seen as an enabling device to retain accurate versions of lessons and song texts. There were personal experiences of gurus writing down impressive notations and here it may well be argued that they were responding to the growing need for some kind of reproducing device and to that extent exercise their imagination in putting down notation. The Academy passed a resolution adopting a standardized system of notation, and followed this up by sponsoring publications of compositions with notation. These were not always very reliable—in fact, one of the perennial complaints from music institutions was the poor quality of primers as well as textbooks dealing with the theoretical aspect of music. The issue of theory was and remains contentious. It is obvious that music cannot be learnt by rote or by cramming what theorists wrote a couple of centuries ago. The rationale behind reading and appreciating the historical dimensions of Indian musical development can only lie in the appreciation of certain musical values that seem to permeate the system and of the continuity in Indian musical practice. The authorities in their wisdom of framing a syllabus and setting question papers, wherein students had to write short notes on Venkatamakhin or the Sangeet Ratnakara, seemed to have suffered 55Journal of the Music Academy of Madras, Vol. XIV, parts 1–4. The 1942 session of the Academy discussed issues of notation on 30 December 1942 with C.S. Iyer opening the issue. He said that the aesthetics of classical south Indian music depended upon its peculiar gamakas and to conserve our national culture, it was very important to write down music with an adequate notation for gamakas.

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a chronic lack of imagination or understanding despite the vigorous debates that continued to be carried out in journals and public forum. An important contribution to the Academy’s journal by G.N. Ramabhadran in 1971 seemed to sum up the problem succinctly. When we talk of learning, we very often mean learning an ability to perform a stipulated task in a better way. Musical ability can likewise be learned by practice. There is the time, initially, when more and more practice gives increased ability, and later on the improvement slows down and finally settles to a personal style, which no amount of repetitive practice alters. On the other hand knowledge (swara jnana) and appreciation of music is either total or nothing, a fait accompli. It is either instinctive or it has to be told in toto. Theoretical instruction is therefore necessary for the vast majority of musical students. Yes what I want to emphasize is, is not the repetitive nature of Learning—there is no substitute for hard labour therein—but the need to be told what to repeat, i.e. the theoretical aspect of teaching. Repetition is essential to learning; it sharpens understanding, enhances capability and polishes style. But repetition is lethal to teaching the teacher must merely explain the basic features of the system but keep a critical eye on the entire regimen of the pupil.56

The question was whether the university system could provide it?

Some Tentative Conclusions What conclusions may we draw from this preliminary survey of music education that the modern Indian middle-class espoused so ardently? How did the self-appointed custodians of India’s arts and traditions square the contradictions that inevitably surfaced in the course of the new pedagogic project that modern institutions like the University attempted to implement? Seen from the point of view of performance and its history in modern India, there is no doubt that the universities, by and large, have failed to produce eminent performers in the same way as traditional teaching lineages did earlier. Even now, most aspiring performers prefer to learn from an individual teacher recognizing that only modes of individual apprenticeship ensure the subtle exchange of knowledge and sensibilities that cannot be compartmentalized into graded lessons within fixed time slots and examination schedules. It may, of course, be argued that universities were, in fact, not intended 56G.N. Ramabhadran, ‘On Teaching and Learning in Music’, JMAM, Vol. XLII, 1971, pp. 137–8.

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to produce performers but were designed to produce an informed body of students who understood what music was all about at the theoretical level as well as practical aspects that would help in making a modern music teacher. The imperatives of performance could not be addressed by the university system, which even if it assumed residential features of a gurukula, could not endorse the explicitly hierarchical principles embedded within it. On the other hand, the emphasis on theory that universities were meant to address was equally problematic and this derived from the way Indian music was represented in modern European Orientalist discourse that prefaced the nationalist effort. As Harold Powers suggested so persuasively in his writings, western ideas on certain facets of music had a pervasive influence on Indian writing, an influence, which in large part, combined with the Indian scholastic tradition and the natural defensiveness of a former subject population, to produce distortion. The arbitrary distinction made by early cultural nationalists, especially the Theosophists, between theory and practice when practice was, in fact, central to Indian music, created a situation when theory was conflated with notions of spirituality, religion and textuality. An outcome of this was the production not of cogent books, but of mélanges that imposed an evolutionary order on material, which was incompletely known and understood. On the other hand, it was the space of the university that held out the best prospects for accommodating women in the nationalist modern cultural project, and thereby, removing older prejudices attached to public musical performance. It is in this context that we may appreciate Margaret Cousins’ enthusiastic responses to Kalyani Sundaram’s graduation that brought into clear focus the multiple ramifications of the cultural project that simultaneously grappled with problems of standardization, preservation, pedagogy and gender relations. Once universities were cast as modern sites of instruction and had to accommodate subjects such as music that had been recast within a theoretical framework that was tenuous, the system of transmission was bound to suffer from contradictions. The modern teacher could not become the traditional guru even if the latter had lost his earlier status as the only conduit for the realization of the ultimate performance ideal. It may be useful here to suggest as a counterpoint, the opinions of musicians of north Indian classical music, about what they considered as desirable ideals of music and how they envisaged pedagogic strategies. Responding to some of the earlier attempts of Bengali publicists for

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a scientific instruction in classical music, some of the premier musicians subscribed to a petition in the 1870s arguing that they were happy to back new and novel efforts in bringing out theoretical manuals on music but insisting that music could not be learned only by books or by recourse to theory and that it was only practice and practical training within an established line (gharana) that held the key. For the rest they emphasized the vocal aspects of Indian music; ‘All of us who are practitioners of this art form, the best and most expansive form known to the world, demonstrate this either through our voice (gala and gaan) or our command of a musical instrument (baaj). It is the voice, which is the central site and where the raga emerges and it is the vocalist who can really demonstrate the subtle shifts and inflections of shrutis. Vocal music is natural and the original source of musical conception while the instrument is at best imitative.’57 From the 1870s down to the years immediately preceding and following independence, this opinion held true and while, as in the case of south India, practising musicians combined important teaching appointments in universities, their commitment to what could, as a shorthand, be called traditional modes, remained in place. The casualties in the process were the less successful musicians who had to eke out a living as private tutors and who had to pander to the demands of their new middle-class students and their whims. The terms of the gurushishya parampara were completely inverted— instead of seeking the guru and staying with him on a residential basis, the gurus or pattu vadyars as they were known went from home to home seeking employment and fulfilling a role that was for the most part shorn of real status and dignity.

57S.M. Tagore, Hindu Music, 1875, reprint 1994, Appendix (Hindi and Urdu representation by musicians who seem to have endorsed Kshetter Mohan Goswami’s work on Hindustani music. Goswami was attached to the Bengal School of Music set up by Tagore).

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IMAGE, TEXT AND PERFORMANCE INTERSECTED IN A DYNAMIC WAY TO

constitute and characterize the newly emerging public sphere in southern India from the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The act of listening to music was as intimately connected with the self-fashioning of the educated elites of Madras city as the experience of socializing in new institutions of education and work and reading practices. These were instrumental in fostering a sense of a close community, real, imagined and hyper-real. As young men moved through the corridors of Presidency College and Madras Christian College absorbing the pleasures of western literature and philosophy, and travelled far and wide in the course of their professional lives adjusting and extending their world view and responding to new modes of entertainment, they found themselves forming new associations, new tastes and attitudes. These were manifested in a variety of ways, from personal friendships to public interventions, from erudite scholarship to lighter representations and literary expression. A connecting factor in these efforts was the new preoccupation with musical entertainment that found reflection in various forms, from serious public deliberations to private research, from sentimental short stories on the one hand to cartoons and satirical sketches on the other, that were published with great enthusiasm by weekly and monthly periodicals. These satires fed into the larger collective habit of listening to and reflecting upon classical music, which for the Brahmin elite had important social connotations giving them a sense of cohesion, cultural prestige, authority and personal satisfaction. If poetry and Tagore had sung Bengal into a nation, then music and its greatest saint composer Tyagaraja was seen by high-caste

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publicists in southern India to have consolidated the musical cultural scene of Madras in the nineteenth century. Ramaswami Iyer, an important biographer of the composer, had no doubts that the saintsinger had been singularly responsible for creating a universal listening habit. As he wrote in his Preface, to his book, Thiagarajah A Great Musician Saint: Reader I attend a music party in south India and the Sangeeta Vidwans will electrify you with Thiagarajah’s krithis, enter a marriage home and the blooming bride will enchant you with Thiagarajah’s kirtnas, join a bajana goshti and the devoted baktha will treat you with Thiagarajah’s Divyanamavalis; get into a transit carriage and you will hear your fellow passengers hum the same Thiagarajah’s songs on the highway or go even to a bazaar street and you will find the same Thiagarajah’s snatches greeting you again though now from a beggar. Thus from the erudite expert, from the ruling prince to the holiest beggar, Thiagarajah has invariably been an entertaining philosopher, friend and guide.1

Iyer was, of course, speaking for himself and his own community but what is evident in his passionate outburst was the extraordinary attachment a large section of the community felt towards music and its creative composer, whose songs were quickly seen as foundational in the practice of music, and in the shared experience of personal devotion. It was in the domain of music, of listening to it at a quotidian level, of identifying with its social and ritual associations that the community felt a sense of shared values and appreciation2 even as it simultaneously enabled a personal and intimate mode of reflection and pleasure. Friends met and shared the joys of attending a performance that provided an edge to their association, and gave them a space for discussion; we are fortunate in having access to this world of friendship and association thanks to the publication of The Kasi Diaries that record, albeit in a fragmented and telegraphic style, the observations and experiences of the new consumers and sponsors of 1Thiagarajah (A Great Musician Saint) by M.S. Ramaswami Aiyar (AES), first published 1927, reprint AES 1986, 2003. This first appeared in The Hindu between 1921–3, dedicated to the Maharaja of Mysore. 2C.S. Ayyar, whom we have had occasion to refer to several times, had this to say of his listening experience: ‘It (music of the saints) seems to wash away, from our hearts, the dust of every day life. One may contend that in vocal music, the meaning of the words affects man; but why should music through stringed instruments, reproducing the nuances of the human voice, just like primeval speech, akin to that before man ever learned or spoke any language affect us? Can we offer any explanation?’ See C.S. Ayyar, The Grammar of South Indian Music, p. 120.

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music, their socializing experiences and attachment to the art form. Kasi and his band of friends scoured the city looking for the best music the city halls could provide, and thereafter, discussed these performances in threadbare detail.The activity was important in more ways than one—not only did it produce new circuits of interaction among friends and networks of interested listeners but it also generated a keen interest, albeit amateurish, in developing a corpus of scholarship and writing about music. While this was admittedly handicapped by the lack of a thought-out conceptual apparatus of music criticism, the interest was reflected and reproduced in a whole range of literary expression from the sentimental story to the satirical sketch and the clever cartoon, which, in fact, creatively captured the subtleties and nuances of music’s transformation in modern south India, its context, patronage and audiences. We shall have occasion in this essay to reproduce some of these sketches and stories, the jokes that went under the category ‘Wit’ and which were faithfully produced again and again in weekly magazines and periodicals, thereby facilitating a cross-pollination of mediums of entertainment and modes of consumption. In one sense, the literary output on music was selfreflexive and circular, coming from and speaking to the same class of listeners and readers. But this did not detract from its importance or merit—for it was by exploring a new visual and aural vocabulary through different ways of consumption that modern Indian middle class expressed their world-view and forged a sense of community. The growing appeal of public musical culture in Madras, both as a form of entertainment and a medium of socialization that gave a small but growing community of listeners a sense of cohesiveness, cultural pride and identity found reflection in print especially from the 1930s. As suggested earlier, most of the contributors were drawn from the same class of connoisseurs who were able to deploy creative writing to draw attention to the problems of the cultural project effectively and with great sensitivity. Fiction in the form of the story or the satire or even the humble and often banal ‘wit’ provided a space for laughing at the foibles of the community, which as it happened, only augmented the social dimensions of music entertainment. For instance, during the present-day cricket match where the audience follows ball after ball, goes through endless replays on television, and then grabs newspapers to follow the same news, the serialized stories and weekly sketches were avidly absorbed by the reading public, which found this one more way of recalling

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and repeating the experiences of attending the public concert. Here, the celebrated Tamil humour weekly, Ananda Vikatan, and its subeditor Kalki Krishnamoorthy (who joined the weekly in 1932, and whom we have made acquaintance of earlier in the book) had an important role to play. Kalki, whose love for music was matched by his flair for elegant writing, began the series ‘Aadal Paadal’ under the pseudonym Karnatakam, which became immensely popular making the weekly a household name in middle-class circles in Madras.

Kalki and Karnatakam Let us consider in a little detail, some of the writings that we have already have had occasion to mention in a previous chapter. Sabha culture formed a major part of Kalki’s reflections. The vignettes of sabha culture and the idiosyncrasies of the aspiring sabha managers saw him at his wittiest best, as he held a mirror to his community and their cultural project of music reform with all its inconsistencies, pretensions and flaws. This is not to say that Kalki was not himself part of the same project—as an avid listener whose appreciation for music was formed within the same context of his contemporaries, he did endorse his preference for the emerging aesthetics. What set him apart was his laconic and cheeky appraisal of the foibles of his contemporaries who took themselves far too seriously, and especially of the pedantic music pandits whom he made fun of on more than one occasion. It would appear, as I have tried to demonstrate on an earlier occasion, that Kalki took pride in being a connoisseur and not a music pandit, and privileged the experiential approach to a pedantic one. On the other hand, when it came to defending his own preference, especially on the issue of language in musical compositions, Kalki betrayed his anxieties and failed to inject his usual humour into the pieces. Three broad issues emerge from the ‘Aadal Paadal’ writings. The first is related to the social dimensions of public music culture and the importance the elite inscribed on the practice of music consumption and being seen at the music sabhas. Second, there was the tricky issue of debating over the intricacies of musical theory and practice, and the politic of expert committees set up by sabhas whose deliberations often seemed to be an absurd exercise in self-indulgence. Third, there was the thorny and contentious subject of language and music, an issue that became especially pressing in the late 1930s, when there was a demand to sing and encourage compositions in the mother

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tongue, in this case Tamil.3 Each of these issues, as we have seen in our earlier chapters, had been central to the modern project of classical music in south India and it would be instructive to capture the spirit that Kalki as an ironic stylist brought to his writings. The translations admittedly do not mete justice to the original—but nonetheless carry the sense of the conundrum that music’s transformation threw up for the practitioner, patron, listener and student. The caricatures of the sabha secretaries offer the best illustration of Kalki’s humour. Some of these observations deserve to be quoted here as they give us a flavour of the enthusiasm that the middle-class demonstrated in pursuing their project. Sabhas were important spaces for socialization and membership and leadership in these august bodies became badges of honour for the consuming elite. ‘So how was the concert’ I asked. ‘The concert was great. I had reserved a special sofa for a High Court Judge Alamelu Manga Sameda Thiruppathi Venkateswara Chettiar. But some body came and occupied the seat and along with a lady. I was really in a fix. When I requested him to get up, he refused to do so till I provided him with another. I myself dragged a couple of chairs. Yes Sir, if you are a secretary, you should be prepared to do anything and everything. But who realizes it?’ ‘You say the concert was good. What ragas did he sing?’ I asked again. ‘Not a single Raga was left out, heavy ones, light ones—sang everything ... listen to one more gripe of mine! I had bought a rose garland for the judge costing me Rs 1 and a quarter. My god, these flower men fleece you. But after all being a judge, he would be good for a hundred rupees at least. But how could I foresee he would bring his wife along. Kindly tell me what could I do. So I sent another boy to get a garland for a rupee and a quarter.’ ‘What important kritis did he (singer) sing?’ I persisted. ‘He sang everything—Thyaga keertanam, Nataraja keertanam, Diksitar keertanam, Ramayana padam. He made mincemeat of them all. Now the question was who should do the garlanding. You know my partner; he is there in name only but wants all the kudos. Just as we were wondering what to do, the judge showed signs of leaving. We panicked. The judge excused himself, saying that he had work to do but that his wife would stay back. I held my breath, sent a person to stop the second garland from being bought.’ ‘Did the musician’s voice cooperate? You know sometime the voice can be a problem,’ I ventured again in an attempt to know about the concert. ‘Oh yes. The voice was very good. But tell me should not a person have a sense of propriety? My partner is devoid of it. He insisted that since the judge had left, he would like to garland the judge’s wife. I had to convince 3Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘A Language for Music: Revisiting the Tamil Isai Iyakkam’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44, 1, 2007.

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him that it would be very improper and that we would face boos and jeers from the audience.’ ‘You have gone into a lot of trouble. I hope you were pleased with the concert ...’ ‘You say so, Sir. That I have worked hard but who realizes that. You know what one of them at the end of the concert said. Took two rupees and gave a rickety chair to sit on. For those two rupees, I could have bought a brand new chair. How do you like the comment? Who realizes how much I struggle to maintain the sabha without losses. Yesterday I requested the musician to reduce his rate by ten rupees. He refused. But what can I do? If I don’t pay, he would have finished the concert an hour sooner. If this happens a couple of times, that would be the end of the sabha.’4

Performer and Patrons Courtesy: Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras

Kalki was no less severe in his indictment of the pedantic music experts whose theoretical concerns he found unproductive and unimaginative. He also felt that they were obsessively defensive about their superior knowledge, which they treated as ancestral wealth refusing to share it with anybody. Such an attitude produced extreme factionalism—here he referred to the two cliques, constituted by the protagonists of Tyagaraja and Diksitar respectively. Recalling a typical war of words between the two, he wrote: ‘What do you really consider Diksitar’s compositions as Kritis? They sound more like temple chants. Where is the musical value in 4‘Aadal

Paadal’, Ananda Vikatan, 18 October 1936.

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them? They are just elongated passages with words and more words leaving very little scope and space for the singer to improvise with even four sangatis!’ The Diksitar lobby, a bit more reticent and timid took shelter behind a polite acknowledgement of Tyagaraja’s undisputed brilliance and genius but reminding their rivals that on many occasions the use of sharp and flat notes was not strictly conventional [implicitly suggesting that Dikistar had a better command of musical values!]5 (parenthesis mine). This verbal duel was enough to convince Kalki that music experts should jettison the scene forever! For the author, the hallmark of great music lay in its ability to connect with the emotional experiences of the audience and this was very closely connected with language. What is persistently stressed is the impossibility of conveying emotions without the medium of a language that was entirely comprehensible to both performer and listener. This preoccupation runs through the entire corpus of his writings, giving it a distinctly didactic flavour notwithstanding the underlying humour and irony. A typical entry ran: Readers may recognize Dr Srinivasa Raghavier, a regular concert goer who never misses a performance during the season. Sometimes, if you pay attention, you will find him shaking his head from side to side—this is when you know that some phrase of Tyagaraja’s composition is being mutilated by the singer. I noticed this several times before I went up to him. I requested him to make his opinions public and join our crusade for popularizing Tamil songs so that people could derive the pleasure from listening to compositions in the language that they easily understood.6

On another occasion, Kalki warned his readers to avoid music pandits (here he evidently alluded to the critic who had some knowledge of theory) in a concert; ‘they will not allow you,’ he wrote, ‘to listen to anything, they will constantly mutter about the gandhara (the third note) slipping down a little or the nishada (seventh) being out of place. And if the musician actually sings out of tune, they will say look at the way he employs the gamaka.’7 Kalki’s pen did not spare connoisseurs either; commenting on the occasion of an award ceremony in which C.V. Raman was present, 5‘Aadal

Paadal’, Ananda Vikatan, 24 November 1937. Paadal’, Ananda Vikatan, 24 March 1935. 7Taram Kuraiyuma, p. 76. 6‘Aadal

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he mentioned how the celebrated scientist had talked about the differences between Indian and western music and how the audience in a western music concert tended to be more appreciative and how the Indian audience by contrast was not enthusiastic enough. ‘C.V.Raman is a great connoisseur of high music, is well known, and so is his boundless enthusiasm as he claps at the end of each song. On one occasion, when the anupallavi had not been completed, he started clapping.’8 Kalki left an undisputed impression on his readers, and inspired a writing style that influenced most contemporary expression at least in the sphere of music criticism. There was an element of selfindulgence in the way concerts were heard and appraised and as the privileged rasika, the emotional experience of enjoying the concert seemed to outweigh all other considerations. This did not produce, in the long run, an appreciable body of critical discourse but certainly provided hours of entertainment to the reading public. Music journals that debated on pressing issues of education and the penury of the average music master who did not enjoy the status or skill of a talented performer or have sufficient patronage to develop his art form, almost inevitably carried articles written in his satirical style about performance and the patron and jokes and satires that caught the attention of the reader. Music journals such as the Karnata Sangeetam, its first issues (1946–7) that I have had the opportunity to look at, and contemporary ones like Sruti bear this out. It is also important to remember that the anecdotal style was an integral component in the way memoirs and appreciation were recorded, and this, in all probability, augmented the more informal style that Kalki developed and reveled in. A sample representation of the writings that made up the content of the Karnata Sangeetam will suffice to illustrate the ubiquity of the anecdotal style in music-related writing. Virtually every issue had, in addition to the obligatory accounts on historical development of Indian music, biographies of saint composers and of vocal training, short humorous pieces on the state of current performance where good music was ‘rationed’ out, and the plight of the music master in beggared description. Additionally, short stories were written around the theme of music and its emotional power and an assortment of jokes, some funny, others indifferent. 8Taram

Kuraiyuma, pp. 83–4.

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The Music Master If the music pedant and sabha organizer emerged as the new heroes of the social scene in musical entertainment and the ones who had to be taken down a peg or two, the pattu vadyar ( music teacher) was the undoubted casualty in the story of music’s modern transformation. The course of the transformation of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not run smoothly for all concerned, especially for traditional artistes who did not make it to the concert stage and who found themselves looking for employment as teachers in middleclass households. It was one way of keeping afloat in a situation where the coordinates had changed dramatically, and it was not always easy to adapt to the changing requirements of performance, pedagogy and technology. Consequently, there were many musicians on the move looking for opportunities to give private tuition to middleclass enthusiasts among whom the learning of music became an important cultural resource and a marker of taste and status. The choice before the master was not an easy one for the solidarity of caste ties notwithstanding, there was a yawning gap between the traditional music master (complete with his accoutrements of head knot, sarong and snuff) and his student, the pampered daughter of anxious parents keen on giving her the best possible opportunities of cultural accomplishment. This was especially true in the decades immediately following independence when there was an element of derision about the pattu vadyar and residual anxiety about the moral aspect of music entertainment. These writings on the figure of the music teacher as well as a number of jokes about him capturing his dilemma, besides reiterating the proper pedagogic style to be followed, are translations from select issues of the Karnata Sangeetam between 1946–7.9 These writings lack the punch of Kalki’s stye but are nonetheless, illustrative of the challenges of the times. For example, we have a number of snapshots of the music teacher that reveal the pressures faced by the teachers from the aspirations of middle-class parents, whose conceptions about music teaching resemble today’s tutorial schools 9These

issues have been consulted in the library of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Unfortunately the first issues do not have clear dates and it is only through a close reading of the preface or editorial that the years can be identified.

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organized to ensure success in competitive examinations, and how these backfired on more than one occasion. The journal carried short essays on the ‘Music Master’ and his travails in middle-class domestic spaces dominated by uninformed but ambitious parents keen on providing the necessary skills of education and cultural attainments to their daughters. The sketches of the master tend to be repetitive but telling of the changing situation. For instance, in one of them,10 we have the author identifying with the teacher and bitterly lamenting his lot; I had the misfortune of teaching a really dumb student, as slow and slothful as a buffalo. But being the only girl of her parents, anything that emanated from her throat was ambrosia. But for the teacher, it was cacophony. I had no choice but to take up the challenge. I taught her preliminary exercises, (saralivarisai) and urged her to practice these rigorously. But a few days thereafter her mother intervened, fussed over her child, asked her not to strain herself too much and gave her warm milk that would enable her to sleep well. This immediately put paid to the child’s practice sessions. When I asked her to resume her practice, her mother instructed me to discontinue with the exercises and go straight to songs, which she could then demonstrate before an admiring family on the occasion of a cousin’s marriage! Worse still, the mother never stopped interfering with the lessons and kept strict vigil so that she could account for every cent she paid to the teacher! I was forced to write down even those elements that strictly speaking were meant to be spontaneous improvisations by the student. Resistance was not an option for if a teacher refused to oblige, his services would be discontinued. Such a situation was intolerable and explained why so much of the music one heard even at the concert stage was formulaic and repetitive.11

The plight of the music master was clearly a real one even if he was often the butt of jokes. Above all, the articles conveyed the unease of the teacher in having to compromise the principles of traditional teaching. Unrealistic demands were made on him by the students’ parents whose tastes determined the nature of the lesson. It was always to do with learning attractive jingles to make an impact on a prospective bridegroom or to show off to their extended family members, the 10Karnata

Sangeetam, Vol. I, No.10, pp. 374–7. Sangeetam, Vol. I, No.10, p. 377. The author specifically mentioned the impropriety of writing out swara combinations that the pupil would subsequently present as her own. 11Karnata

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accomplishments of their child. One of the pieces narrated the discomfort of the teacher in a household where the daughter was the apple of the father’s eye, how even when she babbled, the parents were in ecstasy. When it came to early morning practice, the father promptly interjected saying that this would damage his delicate daughter’s constitution. More drama followed during the lesson, whenever she had to hit high notes, and her mother ran in with a cup of warm milk. On top of all this, the music master had to run after the student to keep up the schedule—if she was visiting someone, the master was expected to follow suit like the time keeper accompanying the dancer. This was humiliating and amounted to a complete inversion of the older gurukula idea where the student was expected to immerse himself/herself in the guru’s style and become part of the guru’s household.12 The same journal carried a regular column of jokes that touched on virtually all aspects of music’s transformation—on the ambiguity of the secular domain and the non-ritual nature of music, on frailties of the music master, on factionalism among music experts among other things. It is impossible to do justice in translation to the witticisms that circulated, but a small sample, I believe, is an important indicator of contemporary sensibilities and perceptions. In any case, the jokes do underscore the fact that there was, from the very beginning, a lighter side to entertainment, to music reform and appreciation. Seen from such a perspective, it seems perfectly logical to track the story through the device of the joke.

Dhanam: A Sketch by Mali Courtesy Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras 12Karnata

Sangeetam, Vol. I, No.11, pp. 496–8.

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On Music and Musicians Master Ramu

: Tell me Ramu, how would you recognize a vidwan? : Easy Sir! Snuff, tobacco, pleated upper cloth, well shaved face; these are essential.

Grandson

: Grandma, They are broadcasting a music programme on the occasion of Krishna Jayanti (Birthday celebrations of Lord Krishna) in the radio tonight between 8 and 8.15. Hurry up if you want to listen to this. : Just ask them to wait will you? I will have a quick bath and join them.

Grandma

Mother Kamala

: Kamala, Appa has brought the doctor in to check whether you have epilepsy or not! : Nothing of the sort mother! I am only following my master’s instructions and copying his facial distortions!

Father Daughter (learning music)

: How come you are not singing Tyagaraja’s songs? : No father we cannot for we will be fined Rs 5 if we sing his compositions learnt from someone else!

Veena teacher Bhagyam (student)

: I told you to pull the strings to bring out the gamakas, did you practice? : No Sir, I believe someone died pulling electrical wires; so my father has forbidden anyone to touch any wires!

Somu

: Why is Kapadipuram Kameshwar Bhagavatar neighing like a horse? : That is because he thinks he is Thumburu [celestial figure with a horse face who is seen accompanying Shiva in his musical exploits] reincarnated!

Kasi

Kemi Balu

: Why does our Kandaswami Bhagavatar always raise his head so high while singing? : I believe he has had to travel a lot by bus and train and keep his hands and head overstretched!

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: Why are you grunting like a pig? : That is because my master has asked me to sing from the base of my throat to bring feeling to music.

It was in this vein that jokes were put together and repeated. While the underlying humour was not exactly scintillating or even imaginative, they did bring out the popular perceptions of the middle class about music and its practitioners in their immediate context, and reproduced the assumptions of the reform project that the middle class had participated in. The jokes represented the frivolous side of music appreciation, which even otherwise, had remained amateurish, the purpose being solely to familiarize a reasonably informed audience of individual styles and highlights of the season’s concerts and to give expression to a social hierarchy where the middle-class patron and student were positioned above the simpleton music teacher. Even if this attitude did not affect the recognized vidwans and celebrity musicians, the residual anxieties about music and its practitioners and the self-righteousness of the new custodians of arts and culture and the brashness of the new students whose commitment to learning music was quite different from the shishyas of yesteryears, are evident in these witticisms. Creative writing in this period about music tended to be more sensitive and in some cases, as Indira Vishwanathan Peterson has argued, contested notions of classicism and tradition. Examining Kalaimani’s Tillana Mohanambal (1956–7), she suggests, that the author defiantly questioned the notion of the classical, and located the idea of authenticity firmly in the ritual domain and in the art practices of the hereditary dancers and musicians.13 Kalaimani’s novel represented an important point of departure from earlier writings on the subject of music and its meanings and attempted to recuperate the figure of the ritual practitioner who had been marginalized under the nationalist project. Whereas earlier short stories by enthusiasts like Chidambara Subramania Iyer as well as those contributed to journals like Karnata Sangeetam brought out the complexities of 13Indira Viswanathan Peterson, ‘Rewriting Cultural History through the Novel Music and Dance as Tamil Tradition in Kalaimani’s Tillana Mohanambal’ in Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji (eds.) Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, O.U.P., Delhi, 2008, pp. 252–5.

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experiencing modernity, in which music figured as an important metaphor, and endorsed in the process, the middle class project. Kalaimani’s work of fiction chose to interrogate the basis of the new classicism. Here we shall focus on the former, the short stories that expressed the fascination and ambiguity of the middle class in its embrace of music.

Music in Short Stories We have, for instance, a short story in the Karnata Sangeetam entitled ‘Tirpu’14 (‘Judgment’) that tells the story of a severe but morally upright judge Samba Sivachariar and his wife Sugunavati. The story begins with the judge in a discontented mood, upset at having been bypassed for promotion even while others, including his wife’s friend Visalam’s husband, have got a raise. Wary of sharing his worries and disappointments, the judge remains reticent, for his wife is naïve and capable of spilling the beans to her friend Visalam. Sugunavati is a talented musician who can sing and play on the veena. She is well-versed in Sanskrit and is extremely popular in her circle. Her music is much appreciated. Her husband, on his part, is an upright man, forthright, just and unbiased, not given to flattering anyone. This makes him unpopular among a set of people who hatch a conspiracy against him, draw up a petition with several charges of corruption against him, and hand these over to Visalam’s husband to institute an enquiry committee and take appropriate action. Faced with this situation, the Judge resolves to defend himself and prove his innocence. It is around this time that the ladies club to which his wife belongs organizes its first anniversary. Sugunavati quite unaware of her husband’s predicament, throws herself into the preparations. The distraction annoys the Judge but he chooses not to come out into the open and confide in his wife. Meanwhile, it has been decided to open proceedings on the day of the anniversary celebrations, and Judge Samba Sivachariar is not to be seen in the court. Visalam’s husband suspecting that something is truly amiss, begins proceedings against him. The celebrations come to an end and on the concluding day, music and dance recitals are organized. On popular request, Sugunavati is asked to play and the recital turns out to be magical, captivating the 14Karnata

Sangeetam, Vol. I, Nos. 3 & 4, in which the short story was serialized.

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listeners present, especially Visalam’s husband who later drops Sugunavati home in his car and requests her to play on future occasions as well. All this makes matters worse for her husband who silently smouldered in his resentment and frustration. The judgment day dawns the next morning. Agitated, the judge finally decides to tell his wife before leaving for work at 9 a.m. Sugunavati, as always, has risen early, finished her ablutions and prayers, and around half past eight, has taken up the veena and started her practice. The music that emanates from her veena is extraordinary. Around this time, Visalam’s husband sends his servant to find out how things are in the judge’s house. The servant comes and is so captivated by the music that he loses all sense of time and purpose, and stands there, mute. Back in Visalam’s house, her husband is in conversation with a celebrated north Indian musician who expresses his desire to perform in the club. Visalam’s husband thinks of conferring with Sugunavati who knows the affairs of the club being its secretary. He also calculates that the judge would have left for work by now. As he drives to Sugunavati’s house, a number of thoughts pass through his mind: The judge has always struck him as a good man who would never stoop to unfair means. On the other hand there are several accusations that have to be countered. He wonders how this will shake up Sugunavati who is so well-liked and popular, and the prospect of her humiliation saddens him. When he reaches the house and goes in, he finds the household standing still, almost frozen, including his servant, all of them transfixed by her music. Her husband is sitting in his room, looking dejected and still. Embarrassed, Visalam’s husband looks for a way out of what threatens to become a clumsy situation but before he can do that, the power of Sugunavati’s music exercises its hold over him as well. Hours pass by but time stands still in the house. The recital comes to a close as she plays Madhyamavati, an appropriate raga that experts have always celebrated as the melody of auspiciousness. At that very moment, Visalam’s husband decides to free the judge and to save the latter’s household from any shame. He slips out quietly at 3’o clock, leaves for work and summons the judge to his office in the court. Sivachariar, meanwhile, is by now free of all anxiety or fear— all panic has evaporated at the sound of his wife’s music, which has been a like a blessing from heaven. The hearing starts in the court. Witnesses are summoned and on cross-examination, found guilty of misrepresentation. The case is

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thrown out and the judge exonerated with honour. He is even asked to head an enquiry commission that Visalam’s husband institutes. So the story goes. Music had won the day! It is evident that in this short serialized story, the author was giving expression to all the contemporary conventions about music appreciation in addition to the specificities of the middle-class experience in relation to music reform and its addition to their daily life. Especially significant was the focus on the female performer— the middle-class respectable housewife who was also accomplished and whose proficiency was so great in music that it acquired the power to transform human beings. It is this emphasis on the constituency of performers and the normative aspects of musical performance and intention that provide the story with its markers. The emotional dimensions of performance and its orientation to purity that facilitated the realization of justice and well-being is embodied in the figure and accomplishment of Sugunavati, who is held out as the ideal middle-class chaste performer. As music was being domesticated, it was assured of a safe home in the likes of women like her. This did not always mean that the transition was smooth. There were moments of anxiety, which writers like Chidambaram Subramania Iyer captured quite effectively in their short stories. Contemporary reviews of Chidambaram’s work recognized this quality; for instance, The Hindu, in its review pages in 1941, described the book as the work of an artist who was a ‘votary not only at the shrine of literature but also of music, sculpture and kindred arts’ and that his fondness for Karnatik music was apparent not only in the title story but generally in the language, technique and similes used all of which derived from music and the conceptual language that it generated and continually reproduced.15 The review did not, understandably, elaborate the texture of the stories or how closely they represented the rhetorical devices of the middle-class in pushing the project of musical reform, and also of their anxieties, especially in relation to the issue of opening up the performance space for middleclass women. In Chakravakam,16 for instance, where the author was trying to stage all music as the expression of a deeply felt anguish brought about by separation, the play of categories such as lakshya 15The

Hindu, 5 January 1941 (‘Books in Brief’).

16Chidambaram Subramanian, Raghupatiyin Avasthai in Chakravaham and Other

Short Stories, first published 1940, reprinted Alliance Publishers, Madras 1989.

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and lakshana, or the relevance of texts such as the Sangita Ratnakara and Natya Sastra suggests the dominance of music-related discourse in the creative imagination of the new elite. Similarly in a poignant story on the predicament of Raghupati, whose wife Saraswati is presented as a talented veena player, the author’s musical and aesthetic preferences are in full display and which happen to reflect the tastes of the times. Describing Sarswati’s performance, the author refers in loving detail to the repertoire and the treatment, which enthralled the audience as well as the experts.The story also recorded the angst of her insecure husband, Raghupati, his discomfiture at his young and talented wife whose performance on the veena at a public concert elicited snide comments from one callow section of the audience. This had the unfortunate effect of shattering Raghupati’s ego producing a range of confused emotions and causing him to severely rebuke his wife for having agreed to play at the concert forgetting that he had suggested it in the first place entirely in order to show off his good luck at having acquired a talented and beautiful partner! Music became the metaphor of unrequited romantic love in the short story titled ‘The Procession’. What is striking about the story is not just the tenderness of love that suddenly and unexpectedly arose between the protagonist and a young girl, a guest at a family wedding, but the way images of ritual music and the ambient atmosphere it created, intersected with the newly found expectations and emotional sensibilities of the middle-class. If the raga Hindolam suggested the stirrings of love, the plaintive notes of the nadaswaram sounded a requiem even as Pandu Goshhar resumed his song ‘Natakame Ulagam’ (‘The world is but a stage’) and the procession, once more, turned the corner.

A Post Script The lighter side of classical entertainment was essentially a case of popularizing music and a musical style through a variety of discursive writings that the middle-class elite had access to and one they could immediately identify with. Changing patronage brought with it, changing aspirations in understanding and developing the cultural resource that music constituted—and performers in response adapted to these changes. For patrons participating in performances as audience, as sabha members and founders, there had been a strong sense of being part of a larger, supra-regional and national culture,

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what Joan Erdman refers to, as a satisfaction in knowing or hearing what is pleasing and an understanding that the arts provided a complement to personal and social action and emotion.17 The arts enjoyed a special magic, and as Erdman observes, ‘it is in the arts, in cultural performance that a civilization reconsiders its values, teaches them to its young, restores them to immediacy, and accepts changes in their significance and importance.’18 The new patrons took their task seriously—perhaps even too earnestly, to discipline the art form and its practitioners. The latter, however, were not mute spectators to this process, many collaborated and many others blazed their own trails even while conforming to the broad outlines of the classical project. The autonomy of the musician notwithstanding, the pressures of the market and recording industry, the acid pen of critics, was impressive both in terms of the styles they evolved and stuck to and also in terms of the stature they were able to build as gurus outside the formal confines of the university system, which remained largely stagnant. As performers, they were modern and self-conscious in the styles they adopted and endorsed, but did not, barring a few exceptions, see themselves as breaking the moulds of a tradition they admired. The casualties were undoubtedly traditional women practitioners whose voices were no longer heard unless they were able to adopt the new social and aesthetic registers. Ironically, critics failed to emerge as useful interlocutors who could mediate between the performer and the audience—they remained rasikas who came up with tongue-in-cheek ripostes against artistes, and at best, described the concert in terms of the repertoire sung and at worst, displayed common sense appraisals of basic performance conventions, which included mannerisms and eccentricities. Consequently, while it was amusing up to a point to read comments like ‘an offering to Diksitar but a burial for music’; music criticism never developed as an intellectual exercise opening up the dialogue for creativity and improvisation. It was fortunate that successive generations of individuated and exceptionally talented musicians were able to improvise, expand and elaborate an idiom that did not just remain a formula.

17Joan Erdman (ed.) ‘Introduction’, Arts Patronage in India: Methods, Motives and Markets, Manohar, Delhi, 1992. 18Erdman, Introduction, p. 13.

On the History of Music

5

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On the History of Music A Bibliographical Essay

HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP ON INDIAN MUSIC HAS ENJOYED A LONG, EVEN

pedigreed existence. In recent years, it has registered perceptible shifts in emphases, some of which this essay hopes to capture. It is not the intention of the essay to list a complete or extensive set of sources that have been used in writing this book; rather it hopes to raise certain issues of methodology and to understand why a certain kind of scholarship came to dominate the history of Indian music and the understanding of its larger social and intellectual context. It will refer to general histories and historical treatment of Indian music and its development, but with an emphasis on Karnatik music. Most of these works may be dated to after the eighteenth century, when European attention and scholarship on Indian music fostered a particular line of enquiry and historical treatment that became an important template for Indian writing. Classical treatises in Sanskrit, Persian and Tamil on Indian music do not form part of this essay. These are largely musicological and philosophical texts and I have not used them in writing my book, which is largely concerned with the modern context in which Karnatik music was staged, represented and reflected upon. These important works have been examined by scholars like Lewis Rowell in his Music and Musical Thought in Early India (Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1998) or Najma Perveen Ahmed, in Hindustani Music (Manohar, Delhi, 1984) whose critical analysis has been of immense value in recording the historical evolution of Indian music, its aesthetic concerns and features and the philosophical underpinnings of the system.We have also had invaluable translations of contemporary Persian texts on music sponsored by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Performing Arts; these are primarily musicological texts.

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Histories of Indian musical practices acquired a new flavour with the emergence of European interest in Indian culture. The nature of this interest and the methodology they deployed in understanding, discovering and representing Indian music produced a corpus of work that has audible resonances of Orientalism, although a recent work edited by Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, Music and Orientalism in the British Empire Portrayal of the East (Ashgate, 2007) has attempted to argue against a view of Orientalism as nothing more than an act of self-conscious and motivated representation. Among the writings of early British enthusiasts, many of whom were amateurs, the work of William Jones enjoys precedence. His reflections on music, entitled ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos’ (Asiatic Researches, 3, 1792, pp. 55–87) reprinted in Hindu Music fromVarious Authors, ed. Sourindro Mohan Tagore (I. C. Bose & Company, Calcutta, 1882, reprinted by Low Cost Publications, Delhi, 1990) was widely read and used as a model by Indian scholars and amateurs. His work emphasized the importance of recuperating the textual lineage for Indian music and of notation. Jones tended to describe Indian music in comparative terms and understood it in terms of its difference with western music. His views were developed and elaborated by enthusiasts such as William Ousley, Francis Fowke, Francis Gladwin and Colonel P. T. French (also to be found in S.M.Tagore edited Hindu Music). The emergence of important shifts in European musicology pioneered in Germany shaped the history of music in the subsequent century—especially in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. A new engagement with comparative musicology supported by emerging technologies of reproduction through the phonograph fostered an ethnological interest in the music and musical instruments of nonEuropean peoples with the result that scholarship tended to bifurcate into the textual and the anthropological. Indian publicists seem to have responded more readily to the former taking on some of their assumptions implicitly in their own work. An important publication, especially for Karnatik music, was C.R. Day’s The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (1891, reprinted by Low Price Publications, Delhi, 1991) where he emphasized the relative purity of Karnatik music, arguing that the relative isolation of the peninsula from Islamic rule was responsible for the preservation of an autochthonous musical culture and for ensuring the status of its practitioners. Unlike northern India where the actual practice of music was in the hands of Muslim ustads and courtesans, music in southern

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India was practised and preserved by high-caste Hindus and this meant that it was not looked upon unfavourably. There was, of course, an element of exaggeration in Day’s account, which did not reflect the ambiguity of the status of hereditary practitioners like the devadasis who were a significant group and who specialized in certain forms and genres. Equally significant was A.H. Fox Strangways’ Music of Hindostan (1914, reprinted by Oxford University Press, London, 1945) for it combined ethnology with theoretical speculation and attempted to maintain a conversation with actual practitioners. More publications followed on these lines—the association with musicians and their new middle-class patrons—producing works like Reverend Popley’s The Music of India (Calcutta, 1921, reprinted by Low Price Publications, Delhi, 1990), Anne C. Wilson’s, A Short Account of the Hindu system of Music (Gulab Singh & sons, Lahore, India, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd. London, 1904) among others. The point to be noted is that by the early twentieth century there existed a tradition of English language scholarship on Indian music, one which was adopted as a model by Indian writers and one which was responsible for looking at the subject from a particular vantage point. This involved the emphasis on a long textual tradition for Indian music—a tradition that had been ruptured under Islamic rule, when the practice of music went over to Muslim ustads and theory remained in the hands of Hindu pandits with a growing lag between the two. At the same time, there was a continual attempt to contrast Indian music with western music and to posit the contrast in a series of binaries around notation, harmony, melody and authorship. Indian scholarship on music, as Harold Powers so persuasively argued in his brilliant essay, ‘Indian Music and the English Language’, Ethnomusicology, Vol. 9, No.1, 1965, tended to be largely imitative. In Bengal, S.M.Tagore’s publications of the 1880s and 1890s (Hindu Music from Various Authors and Universal History of Music Compiled from Diverse Sources together with various original notes on Hindu Music first published 1896, reprinted by Low Price Publications, New Delhi 1990) offer a patch work of musical terms, features, stress the importance of preserving music as a national inheritance, the spiritual dimensions of Hindu music, the contributions of Muslim rulers towards practice; all these rounded off by a quick survey of folk music traditions and a comparative account of other musical cultures. Both his works drew from European discourse on musicology and on periodization of Indian history. His student Lokenath Ghose was

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more explicit in his appreciation of Hindu music, whose spiritual elements were compromised by the emphasis on entertainment that he associated with Islamic ruler. His work, Music’s Appeal to India: An Original, Instructive and Interesting Story (Complete) Agreeable to the Taste of bothYoung and Old, (M. C. Gangooly & Co., Calcutta, 1873), offers a very interesting insight into the sensibilities of the Bengali bhadralok about music and its place within the middle-class. For southern India for the same period, that is the late nineteenth century, we do not have similar works covering a broad sweep relating to the historical evolution of Karnatik music, but what we do have is a number of important biographies of composers especially of Tyagaraja by his disciples and admirers and music primers and anthologies.William Jackson’s monographs on Tyagaraja and his tradition (Tyagaraja, Life and Lyrics, O.U.P., Madras, 1991 and Tyagaraja and the Renewal of Tradition: Translations and Reflections, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1994) for example, draw heavily from biographies that are exceedingly interesting and useful in reconstructing the life of the saint and the nature of his musical genius. Among the anthologies that circulated about musicians and the description of music in southern India, mention must be made of Karunamirtha Sagaram on Srutis: A Treatise on Music or Isai Tamil which is one of the main divisions of Muttamil or Language, Music and Drama by Rao Sahib M.Abraham Pandithar (Original 1917, reprint New Delhi, 1984). This work besides giving us a standard account of the genres, song types and features of music in southern India, also serves as a directory of musicians and their patrons. In a slightly different vein is the publication of A.M. Chinnaswami Mudaliar’s Oriental Music in European Notation edited by Gowri Kuppuswami and M.Hariharan (Reprint Delhi, 1982). This, like many other works of this period, is unabashedly loyalist, and makes a strong case for notation as the only means to preserve the unique compositions of Karnatik music for posterity. It was in the 1960s that a number of regular histories of south Indian music came to be written. This was partly in response to the needs of teaching departments where histories of music and its theoretical aspects merited study and evaluation. P. Sambamoorthy, the eminent musicologist attached to the Department of History in Madras University, wrote extensively on the subject. Among his works, mention may be made of the following: History of South Indian Music, The Indian Music Publishing House, first edition, Madras, 1960; Great Composers,The Indian Music Publishing House, Madras 1962;

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The Teaching of Music, The Indian Music Publishing House, Madras, 1966; A Dictionary of South Indian Music and Musicians in three volumes, The Indian Music Publishing House, Madras 1971. Sambamoorthy’s approach was a practical one and tended to be a straightforward description of the features of music, and in its historical treatment, followed the template set in place by early twentiethcentury publicists. Many of them were important Sanskrit scholars like V. Raghavan, while others were informed amateur musicians with a keen appreciation of its technical aspects as well. Between them they developed through the journals of music associations like the Madras Music Academy, Journal of the Music Academy, Madras (1930) or Tamil monthlies like Karnata Sangeetam edited by S. Kuppuswamy of Coimbatore, a reasonably connected history of Karnatik music but one which tended to draw uncritically from a selective reading of texts and European notices. The uncritical use of European musical terminology and of a nostalgic invocation of India’s spiritual heritage produced an unusual kind of scholarship that was not very analytical. The reasons for such a situation are, as mentioned before, brilliantly explained by Harold Powers, who as a musicologist, along with Walter Kaufman (The Ragas of South India A Catalogue of Scalar Material, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, London, 1976) made major contributions to the history of Karnatik music as a form. Indian writers deployed technical terms borrowed from European music and musicology or else referred to old texts and treatises that had little relevance to the actual practice of music. For the large part, histories of music continued to be written by enthusiasts—an example of this would be T.V. Subba Rao’s Studies in Indian Music (Asian Publishing House, Bombay, 1962) which as Powers commented was not a scholaraly work but one that was replete with very broad generalizations. The 1970s saw some important studies on south Indian music by R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar who wrote both reminiscences and also a historical account of Karnatik music based largely on anecdotes and personal reflections. Both his Musings of a Musician: Recent Trends in Carnatic Music (Wilco, Bombay, 1977) and History of South Indian (Carnatic) Music from Vedic Times to the Present (published by the author, Bombay, 1972) have been extensively used. Ayyangar relied on his understanding, experiences and anecdotes to reconstruct the history of south Indian music. His work is not musicological but tends to explain the features of Karnatik music in simple terms to the reader

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without getting into issues of patronage and politics. There is also a strain of lament and bitterness in Ayyangar’s musings—a critique of the way music was modernized in the twentieth century. It remained for other scholars, notably from North America, to take up the study of music further and attempt a more complex theorization of issues such as patronage and context, technology and its impact on the art, social reform and its implications for the practitioners. Even here the initiative came largely from musicians and ethnomusicologists whose work continues to be an important basis for research and enquiry. Jon Higgins’ essay, ‘From Prince to Populace: Patronage as a Determinant of Change in South Indian (Karnatik) Music’ in Asian Music, No. 7, 1976 is an early illustration of this. The 1990s saw a number of important writings on Indian music. Gerry Farrell’s work, Indian Music and the West, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997 was a milestone of sorts as it provided an exceedingly readable exploration of East-West relations of musical India and the British Empire. A more specific study of south Indian music as it made the fateful transition from the temple and salon to the public stage was provided by Mathew Harp Allen in two essays namely, ‘Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance’ in The Drama Review 41, 3, 1997 and ‘Tales Tunes Tell: Deepening the Dialogue between “Classical” and “Non Classical” in the Music of India’ in Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. xxx, 1998. Joan Erdman’s edited volume on Arts Patronage in India: Methods, Motives and Markets, New Delhi, 1992, brought together a collection of important and interesting articles that theorized patronage and looked at the new functions of institutions in modern India.The following decades have seen a further expansion of scholarship on Indian music with scholars working within an interdisciplinary framework to deepen the dialogue between the art form, practice and its changing context. Lakshmi Subramanian (From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India, O.U.P., Delhi, 2006) and Amanda Weidman have looked at the staging of music in modern south India. These have provided a concrete understanding of the history of ideology and institutions in the making of a new context for classical music and how this was tied up to the projects of modernity and nationalism. For Hindustani music for the same period, we have the excellent work of Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Indian Nationalism in the Making of a Classical Tradition. (O.U.P., New York, 2005) that looks at the challenges Indian Music faced in the twentieth century and

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how the Hinduization of the public sphere threatened the traditional practitioners and brought about important changes in the art form and its constituency. The production of a modern discourse on voice—and on the idealized singer—is developed by Weidman, who examines the strange fascination for vocalization that characterized Indian music. More recently we have the works of Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (eds.) Music and Orientalism in the British Empire (Ashgate, 2007) that looks once more at the validity of Orientalism as a concept and heuristic device to understand processes of representation.This work, in fact, constitutes an important advance in ethnomusicological perspectives and draws from various disciplinary perspectives. A similar effort is evident in another edited volume by Indira Vishwanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji called Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (O.U.P., Delhi, 2008) that teases out the complexities of transformation that the performance traditions underwent. This essay would be incomplete if it does not mention important journals that have constituted the backbone of musical research in the last fifty years. The British Journal of Ethnomusicology, the Journals of the Madras Music Academy and the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the ones in vernacular like the Karnata Sangeetam or the Journal of the Tamil Isai Sangam are invaluable in reconstructing contemporary debates on music reform, aesthetics and history writing. We also have the immense output of music critics like Kalki Krishnamurthi who wrote regularly and extensively for the Ananda Vikatan which also happened to feature the wonderful satirical drawings of Mali whose illustrations were on many occasions more evocative than the scribe’s pen.

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Glossary

4

Glossary

This glossary is intended to help the reader make some sense of the technical terms used in the work. Readers are, in fact, advised to consult The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music by Ludwig Pesch (O.U.P., New Delhi, 1999) for the most exhaustive description of Indian musical terminology. This is an extremely valuable addition to the growing corpus of scholarship on music in southern India. Alapana Improvisation of a distinctive tonal pattern or raga. It normally precedes the singing of a composition. Bhava Emotion or feeling. Bhajana Association engaged in collective singing of devotional mandali hymns. These associations were especially visible in early twentieth-century Chennai and have been studied by the well-known anthropologist Milton Singer. briga Rapid passage of notes mostly in the form of musical vowels or akara. Devadasi Literally servant of god; the term, refers to a specialized community of hereditary ritual practitioners attached to temples and performing designated services accompanying the daily worship of the temple deity. Gamaka Various types of embellishments based on individual notes or group of notes that are intended to bring out the fullest expressive potential of the raga. Ghanam A style emphasizing expressive power. Identified as a distinct style of singing and associated with famous eighteenth and nineteenth century composer performers like Ghanam Krishna Iyer and Bobilli Kesaviah. Gurushishya- Traditional system of instruction, music education and parampara apprenticeship, wherein the disciple stayed with the teacher in his/her household. This system fell into disuse in the first half of the twentieth century even though it was recognized

Glossary

Javali

kanakavazakku

kathakalashepam Kirtana/kriti/ Kirtanai

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to be the most effective way of preserving the tradition and authentic versions of song texts. A distinct type of composition with lyrics centred around an erotic theme and rendered in dance and music performances. Some remarkable javali composers in the late nineteenth century have been responsible for extending and expanding this repertoire while specialist families like those of Veena Dhanammal were acknowledged experts in interpreting and performing them. The term conveys mathematical combinations as they are applied to the comprehension of rhythmic syllables. Musicians adept at complex swara patterns and who could hold their own against percussion artistes were seen to be especially competent. See Harikatha.

The most well-known musical form in Karnatik music with three parts—pallavi, anupallavi and charanam—designed to express the fullest potential of a raga through lyrics. The opening theme or pallavi also serves as a refrain at a later stage. The anupallavi or the second part normally using the upper octave is a continuation while the charanam offers the conclusion. This is generally centred in the lower part of the middle octave. Successive composers experimented with the form of the kriti, the most remarkable inputs having come from Tanjore’s eighteenth century composers. Harikatha A musical discourse employing song and scripture. This form of dramatic entertainment had its origins in Tanjore under Maratha rule. Keertanam (keertanam and Kirtanam are used interchangeably) See kriti/ Kirtanai Lakshana Characteristic features of a raga. Lakshya Composition illustrating the features of a raga. Laya Rhythmic aspect of Indian music, tempo or degree of speed. Matha/matham Monastic establishment attached to Saiva temples. Some of these Saiva mathas patronized Tamil scholarship and music. Melakarta The 72-scale system on which Karnatik music is based. This classification of ragas derived from or allocated to a particular scale is first mentioned in the Saangita sara of Vidyaranya. Mettu The musical structure of a song. Mofussil Denotes provincial administrative as distinct from the presidency in British India. The word is often used to indicate a sense of the provincial.

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Glossary

Mooladhara

Literally, the root or base and the location where the cosmic sound or nada is meant to emanate. Nadaswaram a double reed wind instrument. Natya sangeet Literally, music for dance and drama. Marathi natya sangeet was especially popular in the late nineteenth century and was largely responsible for popularizing many melodies of the Hindustani variety. Padam A devotional song that may or may not deal with erotic themes. These songs were designed for dramatic interpretation within a dance recital. Typically padams were sung in a slow and relaxed tempo enabling the artiste to bring out the emotional content effectively and elaborately. Peria-melam/ Melam signifies an ensemble of temple musicians who were Chinna-melam seen as purveyors of an ambient auspiciousness in the temple and in all festive occasions. There was the Peria-melam— an all male affair—consisting of Nadaswaram players and their accompanists and the Chinna-melam which involved the dancing girl and her troupe. Pranayama Breath control as part of yoga. Raga/m A recognizable and specific melodic entity characterized by a combination of notes (swara) and specific intervals and phrases. Ragam Tanam A Ragam Tanam Pallavi is the most elaborate form of creative Pallavi music in south India. It involves the fullest exposition of a raga through an appropriate line or lines of lyrics that are divided into two parts. The division between these parts is marked by a point (arudi) where a stressed note of the chosen raga can be extended by a pause or karvai. The first part consists of a detailed alapana.The second part of the exercise consists of tanam singing which is an accentuated extension of an alapana but executed faster involving the repetition of characteristic syllables. This is followed by the actual pallavi or lyrics concluded by improvised singing of notes or svaraprastara. Rasika Connoisseur. Sadhakam/ Practice but the word is generally seen to have esoteric sadhana connotations as well. Sampradayam Tradition. Sangati Melodic and rhythmic variations on a theme and an integral element of Tyagaraja’s compositions. Shastra Scriptures, could also be used to indicate grammar and musicology. Sruti Term used in various ways to mean pitch, micro intervals or quarter tones.

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Swara prastara/ Swara singing/ A form of improvisation also called Kalpana Swaram consisting of arrangements of notes strung together in intricate patterns. The main task before the performer is to return to the starting point of the theme within the time cycle or tala. Swara avruttas When swara singing completes a cycle within a rhythmic structure. Talam The structure underlying the rhythmic aspect of Indian music. Tevaram Hymns of Saivite composers based on melodic entities or panns. Sa An abbreviation of the Shadja, a mnemonic swara syllable. Sabha/ These terms were often used interchangeably in the samajam twentieth century to mean cultural associations or music clubs. Sadas Traditional musical displays. Sarva laghu Free flow of musical notes in a swara kalpana improvisation without pre-arranged patterns. Tumburu A celestial musician or deva-gandharva. Varnam A type of musical composition designed largely to demonstrate the basic characteristics of a raga. Vidwan A maestro. Vilambit Slow tempo.

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Index

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Index

Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar 47–52, 55, 56, 90–3, 99, 100, 105 Besant, Annie 117, 118, 119, 120 Bhatkhande, Vishnu Narayan 114, 115 Cousins, Margaret 57, 59, 62, 63, 72, 73, 104, 106, 117, 120, 121, 123, 137 Desikar, Subramania (also see Thiruvavuduthurai matha) 19, 20 Devadasi 38, 39 Dhanammal, Veena 52, 83, 87, 99, 101, 102, 103 Diksitar, Muthuswami (also see trinity) 24, 102, 125, 144, 145 Gayan Samaj 11, 111, 112 Gurukulavasam 3, 91–3, 105, 106, 107, 123–6, 128, 132–4, 137, 138 Harikatha (see also Katha Kalakshepam) 24, 26, 28, 30, 36, 37, 42, 55 Kalki Krishnamoorthi 10, 16, 17, 57, 72, 75–90, 142–6 Katcheri 2, 6, 7, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32– 61, 101

Kathakalakshepam 7, 24, 26, 32, 111 Keertanam (also see Kriti) 13, 14 Krishna Iyer, E. 64, 65, 70 Kriti 28, 44, 50, 135, 144 Madras Music Academy 15, 16, 17, 27, 29, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 66, 73, 74, 75, 76, 87, 96, 98, 103, 123, 124, 125, 131, 135 Mathas (also see Thiruvavuduthurai matha) 6, 13, 14, 19, 20, 23 Melam (music) 19, 28, 34 Narayanaswami, K.V. 92, 93, 100, 101, 124, 132, 133 Padam 28, 38, 44, 50, 102 Pandithar, Abraham 10, 12, 14, 27, 112 Pattamal, D.K. 79 Sabha 1, 3, 5–18, 20, 23, 27–9, 36, 38, 45, 52, 57, 58, 67, 98, 142, 143, 147 Sadas 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 35 Sambamoorthy, P. 58, 113, 121, 122, 124, 126–31 Srinivasa Iyer, Semmangudi 79, 93, 97, 99 Subbulakshmi, M.S. 99 Subramania Iyer, Musiri 79, 99

Index

Syama Sastri (also see trinity) 24, 25 Subbudu 9, 86, 88, 90–3, 97 Tamil music movement (Tamil Isai) 75, 78, 79, 86, 87, 103, 104 Tanjore 6, 9, 12, 19, 20, 24, 27, 28, 33, 36, 41, 56, 108, 109, 112, 122 Theosophist 57, 70, 71–2, 106–7, 117–20, 137

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Thiruvavuduthurai 13, 19, 20, 21, 22 Trinity 24, 28, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 56, 61, 97, 112 Tyagaraja 24, 41, 43, 51, 72, 73, 104, 125, 139, 140, 144 Vasantakumari, M. L. 99