Season's Greetings

It’s here again - that brief window when Chennai takes a break from its duties as an equatorial industrial powerhouse - wipes off the sweat and grime and sits back to enjoy a well deserved shower of the classical arts. This will also be my first Season as a tourist after a while (the first was in 1999) which augurs well for the safety of my existing concert record (49, clocked last Season).

I hope not to turn this into another platitudinous compilation of overused facts, figures and anecdotes. That can be found here:
http://vijaysarma.blogspot.com/2006/05/seasonal-melodies-chennais-margazhi.html
And here: http://vijaysarma.blogspot.com/2008/01/seasoned-tourist.html

This “curtain raiser”, if you will, is my summary of trends and talking points. The calendar of South Indian arts can be broadly split into two somewhat unequal phases – 30 days in December, and the rest of the year - which leaves us with the beginning and the end of the Season as the natural stock taking points. Accountants may find that less than satisfactory but then accounting and music have little in common, Sanjay Subrahmanyan notwithstanding. What follows, then, is fodder that has sustained rasikas over the hungry part of the year and which, in all likelihood, will determine the flavours of Season 2008. For reasons entirely related to the limitations of my knowledge, the emphasis will be on music rather than dance.

The media revolution - Oh dear! Did I just break my promise not to sound hackneyed? It’s true, if trite, that the media’s been sniffing around the heels of Carnatic music for quite a while. The internet, in particular, has been a happy hunting ground for those, like me, who can’t walk..err sing/play…the talk. www.rasikas.org, into whose treasures I will be frequently dipping during this post, is one such greenhouse of ideas and opinions. But why does the media deserve special attention in 2008? For two reasons – this: http://sanjaysub.blogspot.com/ and this: http://margazhiraagam.com/ Enough said.

Coming out of the closet – No, we’re not talking about the homosexual musician although I wouldn’t entirely rule out that possibility considering how “straight” carnatic music appears to be, in a world where the Arts attract a disproportionate representation of queer people. The skeletons tumbling out have more to do with spiritual questions and the place of Bhakti in carnatic music. At least two prominent musicians, TM Krishna and Bombay Jayashree, have voiced their ambivalence on the subject this year, while stopping short of confessing their own religious leanings. A flavor of the angst this has generated amongst the rasika community, which is still very conservative, and still predominantly grey haired (oops… that would now include me!) can be gauged from this discussion:
http://rasikas.org/topic/7472/tm-krishnas-preposterous-response-at-nov-fest/

Dance, of course, has always been a little naughtier and while Rukmini Devi Arundale’s cleanliness drive swept the Devadasis away, it was not long before Chandralekhas and Mallika Sarabhais fondled the Art back towards its original Kamasutra-friendly shape. With articulate convent-educated dancers taking over the stage along with their middle class sensibilities, Bharatanatyam’s hide and seek with sex continues. These cycles of prurience and prudishness are, however, united in distancing themselves from religion which in the present context is , at best, of peripheral interest to the secular-liberal ethos of the ruling dance divas. Religious compositions are gradually giving way to secular choreography woven around topics that have more currency. Thus, we have little dance-skits on issues such as women’s empowerment, world peace and the environment once the technical rigors of the Varnam etc. have been negotiated.

Gen Next waits forever – The nineties were uncertain times for carnatic music. The greats from the 50s and 60s were either dead and gone, or well past their prime. TV had, by then, become a staple feature in middle class homes and the cable further strengthened the nation’s collective bondage to the medium.

100 bucks for a month. 100 bucks for a 2 hour concert. Make your choice. Who’s singing? Huh? That crusty old fool who can’t hold a note, or keep his veshti up, for half a second?…Shhh…Saas Bahu are here… Oh, and I hear certain whispers coming in through the ether – the internet they are calling it….

It’s this dismal backdrop that makes carnatic music’s comeback so remarkable. From the jam packed Academy that greeted the debuts of Sudha Raghunathan and Bombay Jayashree, circa 1990, to TM Krishna’s high fives after his cracker of a concert at the same venue in 2000, by the turn of the century Gen X had hijacked carnatic music. The turning point was almost certainly grand show put up by the Youth Association of Carnatic Music, on the eve of the new century – the baton had finally passed.

But that’s where it’s been stuck for a while. Ranjani Gayathri and the Malladis have graduated to the evening slot at the Academy – that great herald of an artiste’s “arrival” - but that’s pretty much it. Schedules are chock full of artistes in their thirties and early forties, few of whom look like exiting in the near future.

It will take more than the inevitability of age for fledgling artistes to find a foothold and the wait is likely to prove too long for most. Youngsters need to be good - damn good - to have any hope of making it to the top. However, Season 08 promises to one in which the juniors sound a warning bell or two in the general direction of the established pecking order. Sikkil Gurucharan, who’s gamely fought it out in the sub-senior slot for 5 years, is one such. The there is Prasanna Venkataraman, whose quicksilver progress is likely to make short work of his tenure in the B-list. TNS Krishna, Balamurali Jr., Abhishek Raghuram, Amrutha Murali, Amritha Venkatesh – afternoons at the Academy this year will be flowing over with talent that is not far removed from the top of the heap.

Unlike 99-2000, 2008 won’t be a watershed year – but it will be one in which the boys play with the men.

Ariyakudi takes a shower – The Ariyakudi format is often credited with moving Carnatic Music out of the stuffiness of royal palaces and into backyards of the unwashed masses. The classic 2.5 hour cutchery starting with a varnam, 2 main pieces, sundry fillers and tukkadas, perfected by the undisputed king of carnatic consumer behavior - Ariyakkudi Ramanuja Iyengar - has been the staple diet of rasikas for close to a century now. Much like the fare on offer at Sabha Canteens, the menu is beginning to go beyond beyond idlis and vadas.

At one end of the spectrum, the tukkadas are pecking away at weightier compositions – women artistes, in particular, are threatening to question the very meaning of the term - on occasion, the tukkada section actually eclipses the preceding items in terms of airtime!

At the other end, artistes are re-inventing the concert format, breathing life into increasingly rare pieces such as Ragam Tanam Pallavis and experimenting with 4 hour concerts. A good part of Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s much written about tour of the US (http://rasikas.org/topic/6748/sanjay-at-south-india-fine-arts-san-francisco-bay-area/ for example) , was spent transcribing the beauty of Hindustani ragas into the carnatic idiom, extending his already well established reputation for handling rare ragas. TM Krishna is another artiste who does not shy away from standing convention on its head – often kicking off with a heavy piece in a major raga and plonking down a varnam in the middle, with an alaapana and swaras added for good measure!

Others are busy building bridges between the classical and the popular. Charulatha Mani’s concerts on film songs set to carnatic ragas are a massive rage with mamas and mamis who’s jumped on to the carnatic bandwagon in the evening of their lives while Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan’s joint venture is a more intellectual one that seeks to fuse western harmonics with Indian melodies.

I will look forward to more of the unexpected in Season 08 and try not to yawn when I hear yet another old-timer bemoan the demise of Ariyakudi’s beleaguered format.

I was hoping to throw in some tips for Season tourists in the unlikely hope that some of them have landed up on my blog for guidance but I think I will save that for another post.