A Winter of Content
There could be worse places to spend your winter than Chennai. The city’s notoriously unforgiving weather, assumes a distinctly agreeable character for a brief period between November and February, which is also marked by a number of colorful festivals such as Navaratri, Diwali, Christmas and Pongal. Unsurprising then, that this is also the time when Chennai’s entertainment almanac is at its cluttered best…Diwali and Pongal are occasions to pamper its celluloid-addicted denizens with the year’s biggest block-busters. The city’s many colleges add to the colours of the season with the buzz of their festivals and savvy marketers flood the newspapers with advertisements of shrewdly timed fairs and exhibitions. Sports fans, too, get as slice of the action given the a number of high profile sporting events that are attracted to Chennai thanks to its benign winter and its infectious enthusiasm for sports. The most prestigious of these is the recently re-christened Chennai Open, a part of the ATP tennis tour with an odd cricket test or one-dayer being thrown in for added measure. However, amidst all this festive bustle, it is the city’s annual tribute to a hoary and very traditional art form that gets pride of place as the brightest star of the city’s cultural firmament – the December Music Season, a show-case of Carnatic Music and other South Indian classical arts on a scale that has few parallels anywhere in the world.
Soul Searching
A lazy afternoon at a dingy Mylapore auditorium replays the familiar scene of an aspiring Carnatic musician displaying his wares to a frosty audience of elderly curmudgeons, many of whom are peeved at having their afternoon siesta ruined by the raucous youngster. The tenacious musician, however, continues undaunted, inspired by the thought of these very philistines elbowing each other out of the ticket counter to hear him sing, once his assiduity is rewarded with the elusive grace of Godess Saraswathi. Raga Begada is taken up for elaboration and the boisterous artiste breezes his way through its tortuous notes, smugly dodging the raga’s many pitfalls with a knowing smile on his face. The tedious vocal acrobatics last for a while until the singer accidentally glides through a phrase reminiscent of the opening stanza of “Nadopasana”, an evocative krithi (composition) of Saint Thyagaraja, Carnatic Music’s most revered figure. The krithi’s lofty message, extolling the worship (upasana) of music (nada), serves to remind the vocalist of the waywardness of his own musical approach. Chastened, he quickly abandons his exuberant exhibitionism and begins a soulful search for melodic subtlety marked by a complete surrender to his music. In the process, the audience is turned around from its indifference to a state of enraptured bliss – hairs stand on end, goose-pimples ripple across the auditorium, coffee cups at the nearby canteen pause near mesmerized lips…after years of perseverance and toil spent grappling with the intricacies of sruti (tone) and laya (rhythm), the artiste has finally succeeded in tapping the essence of his art…
For all its sophistication and the technical demands it makes on its practitioners, Carnatic Music (or Karnataka Sangeetham as the traditionalists like to refer to it) is finally judged on the basis of the performer’s ability to capture bhavam (emotion) and bhakti (devotion). The unsurpassed popularity of M S Subbulakshmi, for example, is more attributable to the weighty emotional import of her music than its technical complexity.
Flavours of the Season
Given such an amorphous touchstone, it is perhaps only in the fitness of things that Carnatic Music’s most prestigious event is marked by a degree of disorder that would put Babel and Pandemonium to shame. Performances being cancelled at the last minute, artistes finding themselves booked at more than one venue at the same time, accompanists deciding to play truant, amplifications systems going berserk, chairs giving way under the weight of unsuspecting backsides, snakes cozily winding themselves around rasikas’ (music fans) legs, traffic jams outside various auditoria clogging the city’s arterial roads…. to list just some of the innumerable manifestations of Chaos, which grace the “Margazhi Mahotsavam”, to give the December Music Season its proper Tamizh name.
Margazhi is one of the 12 months of the Tamizh calendar and roughly stretches between mid-December and mid-January. The month is considered an extremely auspicious one, appropriate for undertaking activities directed towards the achievement of freedom from worldly bondage. In other words, an ideal time for the practice of art forms with a high spiritual content such as Carnatic Music and Bharathanatyam. Given these diktats of tradition and the temperateness of the climate, Margazhi had no trouble emerging as an ideal time to conduct the Music Season.
“The Season” came into being in 1927 with the inauguration of a Music Conference organized as part of the Congress Party’s annual session in Chennai. This was followed up with the establishment of the Music Academy the subsequent year, which has continued the tradition since. Building on the Music Academy’s lead, a number of “Sabhas”, or institutions engaged in the organization of fine arts performances, sprung up, primarily around the George Town area. However, the epicenter of the Season gradually shifted to Mylapore, largely on account of the area’s high concentration of legal luminaries, who were also great patrons of music. Carnatic Music is naturally the focal point of the Season although it also includes a number of other performing arts such as Bharathanatyam and Tamizh theatre besides providing a sampler of classical arts from all over the country.
From the 3-4 sabhas that used to conduct fortnight long programs in December during the formative years of the event, the Season has expanded to a mind-boggling number of over 75 at last count, cramming in close to 2500 performance in the 4-5 weeks between late November and early January. However, many of these grandiloquently titled Sabhas are nothing but fronts for pushy parents to promote their children, leaving the worthier objective of promoting genuine talent to a couple of dozen more reputable institutions. The season really revolves around the “Annual Festivals” of these established sabhas, some of which are of relatively recent vintage while many others, such as the Parthasarathy Swami Sabha, go back more than a hundred years. Irrespective of its history, each sabha brings its own unique flavour to the Season….thus, the Krishna Gana Sabha leans towards dance programs while Bharat Kalachar, lays an emphasis on promoting youthful talent. Some recent entrants into the fray have sought to create niches for themselves by broadcasting performances on television and in keeping with Chennai’s stature as an IT stronghold, there is a also a bunch of Sabhas which have started web-casting concerts for the benefit of tech-savvy music lovers who are unable to make it to Chennai for the Season!
If music be the love of food
The daily program typically commences with a lecture-demonstration, which is an opportunity for bookish musicologists to engage in esoteric discussions that can rapidly descend from the musical to the unprintable! Morning concerts following the lec-dem are reserved for ageing senior artistes or critically acclaimed musicians whose caliber is beyond the comprehension of all but the most discerning listeners. Emerging talents with good PR skills and an access to the Sabha Secretary’s ear sometimes manage to corner this slot. Else their lot is consigned to the ignominy of the “afternoon concert” which is Carnatic Music’s equivalent of the Purgatory...the inconvenience of the timing and the artistes’ own lack of marquee-value mean that the masses, alongwith their generous purse strings and easily won applause, are nowhere to be seen. That leaves the poor youngsters at the mercy of irascible geriatrics whose continual gripes swing back and forth between the abjectness of the performance and the meanness of the sabha secretary’s decision to switch off the air-conditioning! Matters are not much improved by the heady aromas of sambaar and coffee wafting into the hall – the artiste’s lengthy afternoon ordeal is often compounded by the sight of his few supportive friends and family members jettisoning a wearisome alaapana in Shankarabharanam for a delicious plate of Masala Dosai at the adjoining Sabha Canteen!
The Sabha Canteen! The butt of many a joke but perhaps more integral to the Music Season than the music itself, for many Sabha secretaries sheepishly admit that the gate receipts are unable to offer any meaningful competition to the cash registers at the canteen! Artistes emerging from empty auditoriums are often taken aback by the sight of huge crowds voraciously wolfing down the delicacies thrown their way by the caterers and debates about the best-run canteen are usually much more passionate, not to mention better-informed, than any discussions on X’s Thodi or Y’s Kalyani. Big names from the catering business such as “Arusuvai” Natarajan, Gnanambika and “Mountbatten” Mani set up their gastronomic extravaganzas at various Sabhas with huge banners and billboards that tower over the inconspicuous black board on which the day’s concert schedule is listed. It would seem that the soul has a considerably smaller appetite than the stomach!
Rough Weather
For the performers, the Season is a bit of a necessary evil. The hectic concert schedules, the pressure to perform, the capriciousness of the audiences and the notorious “December Throat” take their toll on the hardiest of souls. Yet, for Carnatic Musicians, there is no bigger stage – it is the “Season concerts” that are most talked about and it is Margazhi, which makes or mars musical careers. However, while all artistes seek to bring out their best during the event, strategies to get the most out of it can vary considerably. Some fit in as many concerts as possible with an eye on probabilities whereas others, more circumspect about the capacity of their vocal chords, decide that quality is better than quantity. While one school of thought advocates that the best accompanists be enlisted to liven up concerts, others point out the dangers of allowing star accompanists to hog the limelight!
The artistes’ anxieties are not without foundation. Chennai, probably one of India’s most musically enlightened cities, is known for its hard-to-please audiences. Seasoned vidwans are often shaken up by frail looking “mamis” blessed with tongues as keen, although decidedly not as musical, as their ears! The large number of concerts also means that the rasikas are distributed among the various sabhas, putting the onus on musicians to make their performance stand out from the crowd. This inevitably leads to accusations of spurning traditionalism and playing to the gallery. In an art form that depends as much on the opinion of masses as that of the cognoscenti, performers have a hard time balancing their acts. Yet, some of them manage to get across simultaneously to the layman as well the connoisseur – Madurai T N Seshagopalan, one of the living legends of Carnatic Music, for instance, can keeps the crowds happy with his moving renditions while at the same time tripping up the experts with complex “kanakkus” (mathematical calculations based on rhythm) and expositions of arcane ragas. This ability to relate with the audience on different musical wavelengths is often what separates the great from the good in Carnatic Music.
While the Season is always a challenging time for musicians, a series of unfortunate incidents resulted in its becoming a particularly trying one this year. The first among these was the passing away of Carnatic Music’s biggest superstar, Bharat Ratna M S Subbulakshmi, fondly known as MS. Although the end was pretty much expected given her failing memory and deteriorating health over the years, the demise nevertheless cast a pall of gloom over the proceedings with some sabhas canceling their programs for a day or two. As if the loss of one institution were not enough, the city gloomily braced for the end of another – The venerable Music Academy, which is said to offer the most prestigious platform a musician can aspire for, came close to canceling its Annual Music Conference this Season. The Academy, also a Chennai landmark, has been the victim of contentious legal battles between rival factions for sometime now and while the Courts had been granting temporary reprieves to the management to conduct the Conference for the last couple of years, it was feared that such an exemption would not materialize this time. In fact Season 2004 was well underway without the familiar buzz around the Academy, when a last-minute order from the Courts rescued this once-glorious institution from the ignominy of being a mute witness to an event that it was instrumental in creating. Finally, just when it appeared that things were back on track, came the killer Tsunami that wreaked havoc on the Tamil Nadu coastline, extinguishing more than 5000 lives. The season continued despite curtain calls from certain ill-advised quarters, which failed to realize that Carnatic Music, with Bhakti as its core element, was not quite comparable to discos or music videos, all of which continued without protest! In fact, the tragedy, combined with the passing away of MS, moved many artistes to come up with their soulful best during the latter part of the Season. Sabhas and musicians also chipped in by contributing generously to the meet relief efforts in the state.
To some, the ills plaguing the Season are symptomatic of the end of the road for Carnatic Music itself. The older ones among these doomsday prophets are quick to hark back to memories from the early to mid twentieth century, which witnessed a particularly impressive effusion of genius in the field. G N Balasubramaniam, Ariyakkudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Madurai Mani Iyer, Maharajapuram Vishwanatha Iyer, M L Vasanthakumari and DK Pattammal besides, of course, MS were just some of the many giants who strode the stage during this “Golden Age” which also saw the blossoming of such legendary instrumentalists and accompanists as T N Rajarathnam Pillai (Nagaswaram), “Flute” Mahalingam and the Mrudangam vidwan Palghat Mani Iyer whose playing has been compared to Nandi, the divine Mrudangist!
The Crystal Ball
While it has to be conceded that Carnatic Music can no longer boast of so many luminaries performing contemporaneously and that it is having a hard time competing with the easy entertainment provided by endless TV soaps and mega-budget movies, an unbiased assessment of the state of the art would have to be one of guarded optimism: Star performers still command full-houses, even when their performances coincide with one other. The infusion of fresh blood into the music scene is another trend that inspires confidence - since the late eighties, fresh faces have been steadily breaking into the “senior ranks”, accompanied by the rise of a number of gifted instrumentalists and percussionists. Many of these youthful artistes are also professionally qualified leaving them to deal with difficult career choices at a very young age. Some, like Sanjay Subrahmanyan, a qualified Chartered Accountant, manage to walk a tightrope between a career as a front ranking-musician and a partnership in one of Chennai’s leading accounting firms, besides promoting and co-editing an online music forum called www.sangeetham.com, which is gaining popularity as much for its musical content as the gossipy nature of its delightful bulletin board!
Given the plethora of gifted performers and the increasing support of ardent rasikas across the world, Carnatic Music seems to be doing reasonably well for itself and is one of the few Indian classical arts that still enjoy a mass base. The portents for the Music Season, in turn, would appear favorable despite the knocks it received this year. Yet, one is sometimes left wondering whether things ought to be a little better…
Unpleasant Notes
As yet another satisfying concert draws to a close, the percussion artistes perform the “tani avartanam”, a part of the performance reserved exclusively for the rhythmic accompanists. The Ghatam (Clay Pot) vidwan seems to have been gifted with an “Akshayapattiram” (Vessel of Plenty) as one magical pattern after another emerges from the mysterious recesses of his humble instrument, eventually culminating in a thunderous applause from the spellbound audience. Lost in the sublime nadais (tempos) of the Ghatam as I drive back home, I notice the vidwan, who was the object of a thousand cheers just a few minutes back, patiently waiting at the bus-stand, pot in tow, for his transportation home. Although my vehicle is a modest one, I suddenly find myself utterly inadequate at its wheel, groping in vain to rationalize the bizarre choices of society that lead to such a distorted distribution of its fruits. I am unable to do much better than recall Thyagaraja’s rhetorical question, underlining the transience of material well-being, which forms the opening line of his immortal krithi in Kalyani, “Nidhi Chala Sukhama?”
Vijay
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment