The Madras Music Academy is to Karnatik music what Carnegie Hall is to Western classical music. The Academy is the citadel of South Indian classical music, and it is just short of a hundred years old. If you have lived in Chennai, it is impossible not to know the M.M.A. It is an unassuming building, white-washed, and nestled in a corner of the famous T.T.K. road. There is nothing that distinguishes this building architecturally from any other. However, It encapsulates within its walls the living tradition of Karnatik music. Its atmosphere echoes with musical vibrations of a hundred years, every corner resonates with the artistry of scores of geniuses who have graced the venue and performed there, and the walls of the Academy are adorned with names of those who have left a lasting mark on the field of Karnatic music. Performing at the music academy during the eagerly awaited December music season( an annual tradition in Chennai) is a dream come true for a musician. If you are an artist lucky enough to be invited to perform at the music academy ( no matter which slot it is, morning, afternoon, or prime time evenings), then you can take it that you have arrived at the musical scene and there is a future ahead for you. Established artists, on the other hand, wherever they are in the world, descend on Chennai in December. They wouldn’t miss performing at the Academy because of the prestige and gravitas associated with the place. Calendars are booked well in advance, and tickets are usually sold out.
This 2024 music festival at the Academy, however, is going to be slightly different. There are rumblings of dissatisfaction and discontent within the music community. A few ” star” performers have publicly withdrawn their participation from this year’s music conference. This is not new; artists are known to pull out due to personal or professional reasons, but this year, the reason is something different. On March 17th, the Academy announced that TM Krishna would be awarded the Sangita Kalanidhi title this year. The Sangita kalanidhi award is the crown jewel in the world of Karnatik music. So far, ninety-eight legendary musicians have received the award since the inception of the Academy in the 1920s. The award’s expressed purpose is to commemorate a musician’s exceptional talent and their long-standing dedication and service to the Karnatik art form. Krishna will receive the citation and the award on the first day of the December music festival, and he will, as is customary at the Academy, preside over the Academy’s musical conferences during the season.
The choice of the Academy this year has irked some artists. Ranjani-Gayatri – the popular sister-duo, the Trichur Brothers, religious discourse specialist Dushyanth Sridhar, and Harikatha exponent Vishakha Hari have vehemently protested the choice of T.M.K. for this revered and prestigious award. They are of the opinion that Krishna has, over the years, consistently voiced anti-Brahmanical sentiments; he is an active evangelist of EV Ramaswamy’s tenets (A.K.A. Periyar), and Krishna himself hasn’t performed at the Academy for many years, holding his musical events during that time. The main objection, though, is against Krishana’s stance against the “brahminization” of Karnatik music. It is worth noting that none of the protesting musicians have anything to say against Krishna’s enormous musical talent or the fact that his evangelical approach to music has helped take the Karnatik art form to a broader audience than those who qualified to attend the Sabhas. In my opinion, from the rhetoric and the posturing of the detractors both in the print and social media, the objection to T.M.K. seems to be more visceral (and perhaps stems from a sense of being overlooked for the award) and not based on any solid musical evidence or reasons. They fume about his anti-brahmin stance, his disrespect for musical tradition, and his audacity to infuse new influences into the art. None of which has anything to do with the award. A few of them have gone a step further and decided to return the award they have received in the past years to the Academy in protest – which, again, is an infantile emotional decision that speaks to the vulnerable/insecure state of the protester’s mind rather than about TM Krishna, his music, or the Academy’s decision to confer the award on him.
TM Krishna has been singing since the age of twelve; he is an alumnus of the Krishnamurti Foundation of India (K.F.I.). It is perhaps this early schooling in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s approach to life that equipped Krishna to challenge received knowledge intelligently. He comes from a Brahmin family that questioned caste, and his parents established schools to break caste-based barriers. He is the great-nephew of TT Krishnamacharii, one of our first finance ministers and, incidentally, a founding member of the Music Academy. Krishna has been one of the most articulate voices in the music space, and he is never shy of speaking his mind. Whenever he speaks, it is usually worth listening to. To call him an iconoclast may be farfetched. But he has definitely broken down barriers in the presentation of Karnatik music without diluting or sacrificing the aesthetics of the art form. From his designer-wear kurtas and the way the seating is organized in his concerts to sharing the stage with his accompanying artists, giving them equal status, to structuring his concerts in a musically different way, Krishna has defied norms. In 2016, Krishna was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his contribution to taking classical music beyond the confines of the elite to the underprivileged. He runs a music festival called the Chennai Kalai Theru Vizha in collaboration with local communities. They are dangerously popular. Krishna is different from the modern generation of Karnatik musicians. He understands the depth and nuances of Carnatic musical tradition as well as anybody else in the field, and he likes to question, reflect, and introspect on the music he performs and not acquiesce unthinkingly with his peers. It is hardly surprising that Krishna has rubbed some of the musical elite on the wrong side. His views are bound to upset those who live within their comfortable musical cocoons. In his writings, interviews, and talks, Krishna comes out as judiciously argumentative, refreshingly articulate, honestly doubtful, not afraid to be inconsistent, and often, even deliberately provocative. It is this truculent attitude that others misconstrue as arrogance.
My first brush with TM Krishna’s musical ideas and interpretation happened in 2016 during my trip to India. I was at Kochi airport to catch a flight to Delhi and then from there to Atlanta. On the shelves of the Kochi airport bookshop, I noticed TM Krishna’s book, ” A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story.” The Azure blue front cover of the book was beautiful and sported a picture of T.M.K. in an ecstatic singing mood. He looked lost in music; there was an aura of sanctity about the picture – perhaps due to the lighting and the use of soft focus. On the upper right-hand side of the cover, Amartya Sen’s one-line comment, ” One of the best books I’ve ever read.”, was printed. I thought that it was an exciting publishing stunt to have a world-renowned economist comment on a book about music. It made me wonder what Sen, widely known for his stand on equality, distribution of wealth, and leftist leanings, and, of course, a Nobel laureate in economics, found so attractive in a book about music. His comment made the book became more interesting to me. And I also liked the fact that a practicing musician had written about music instead of a theorist. I had run out of books to read on the flight, so I bought the book and read most of it during the flight and the layover in Amsterdam. It was a fascinating read overall. The prose was definitely ponderous and repetitive in some places, but that was fine with me in this case because, as a novice in the intricacies of Karnatik music, it only helped me understand things better. For the first time – since I began listening to Indian classical music decades ago – I understood what it took to appreciate Carnatic music and, more importantly, why I struggled to appreciate it for so long. Krishna had managed to demystify Karnatik music for me. He talked about the intent and aesthetics behind Karnatic music, especially the concert-style performance, as something that can be experienced without the shadow of spirituality always following it. It felt liberating, strangely. I realized the reason why I didn’t quite enjoy Karnatik music as much as I did Hindustani was not my fault at all. Thank God for that.
Karnatik music I listened to was filled with saccharine devotion, and I have never really felt the beauty of the music hidden behind such overwhelming devotion. I may be tone-deaf. But if so, why do I not have a similarly diminished experience while listening to Hindustani music? One of my most memorable musical experiences remains listening to Kishori Amonkar, the iconic Hindustani singer. This was about a decade ago. It was a live recording of Raag Bhoop posted on YouTube. Kishori Tayi sang the alap of the Raga for nearly an hour with the tabla gently following her. No words, just her voice ebbed and flowed, carving out intricate and spontaneous melodic phrases. I remember feeling like someone was painting an acoustic- picture for me, stroke by stroke, color by color, contour by contour, until my being was suffused with a musico-spatial image of melancholic enchantment, of profound peace, at once inexpressibly moving and soothing. Bhoop is a raga for the evenings, when things slow down, and Kishori Tayi’s performance slowed down time for me. I had never had such a deep and immersive experience with Karnatik music until I started listening to TM Krishna. In Hindustani music, the focus is on the aesthetics of Raga, and words are used only to embellish the music, not the other way around. It is the sound that is divine there. The overarching purpose of Karnatik music, as it has come to define itself, is that it must serve God through lyrical compositions, and anything that distracts the artist from this goal is a digression from this goal. In Western classical music, there is a clear differentiation between religious music and secular music. An audience can sit through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and not draw any religious inferences from the piece; they don’t have to. It is the sheer emotional beauty of the symphony that draws in people. However, the same audience listening to Bach’s Cantatas, which is essentially church music, will focus on the religious emotion it invokes. In India, however, all art is deeply riddled with spiritual connotations. We begin each performance with a prayer and end with another one, and everything in the middle is some variant of a prayer. The only secular music we know is light music or film music and folk songs to some extent. Krishna’s book got me thinking along these lines. It raised a lot of essential questions and answered many of them. I began listening to Krishna’s recordings, and before long, I had fallen in love with his style of music.
Any musical form is identified by three components: form, content, and intent. If the purpose is to sing the lord’s glory, then musical forms, such as bhajans namasankirtana, facilitate that mood. If it is film music, then the intent, content, and form must lie within the context of the cinematic frame. In the same vein, Karnatik music, in its concert format, has to explore the abstract aspects of musical aesthetics, namely Raga, laya, and tala. No Karnatik concert is complete without performing one or more compositions of the trinity: Tyagaraja, Muthusami Dikshitar, and Shyama Sastri. They were great musical geniuses, no doubt, who skillfully inserted their devotional poems within the musical idioms of Karnatic music. If they intended to spread the devotion, it would have been easier for them to make these songs less technical and more accessible to listen. Karnatik concerts are, in Krishna’s opinion, riddled with the ghosts of the past. While reverence for tradition is necessary, it is debilitating to be strangled by it. Krishna also questions the role and dignity accorded to the accompanying artists. Why should they play second fiddle to the lead vocalist? Does caste play a role in who among the accompanying artists gets attention and who does not? There are exceptions, of course, but looking at the history of Karnataka music over the last hundred and fifty years, the trend is clear. There is a clear Brahmin majority. Krishna asks these uncomfortable questions of an art form that has, over the decades, become a bastion of the Brahmin community, and he asks them without mincing words.
On March 20th, 2023, on the centenary of the Vaikom Satyagraha, Krishna sang a poem on EV Ramaswamy’s ( aka Periyar) philosophy written by Perumal Murugan, a novelist. The conservative musical community was shocked that he could do this. How could he sing at an event that celebrated E.V.R., a man who disrespected Brahmins? Krishna would answer that content should not be inextricably mixed with music. The song is an exhortation to think independently. One wonders what is wrong with that message. This is precisely the problem that Krishna has been highlighting throughout his career: this Brahmanical hegemony over what is and what is not suitable for Karnatik music. The Sangita Kalanidhi Award is a commemoration of excellence in music and not about Brahmin or Brahminism. This uneasiness among artists is itself a sign that they consider Karnatik music to be Brahmanical-entitlement, and they find it hard to digest that the award is going to someone who does not value such Brahmanical entitlement as sacrosanct. K.J. Yesudas, a singer who straddled the world of Karnatik music and light music with equal skill and passion, was never given a Sangita Kalanidhi award even though he was as good as anyone else in the field. The only reason that comes to mind is that Yesudas is not a Brahmin. Honoring Krishna is a step in the right direction for the Academy. It is a signal, I hope, that music is not the treasure of any single community.
Reading the above paragraphs, one may get the impression that I agree with everything T.M.K. says or does. Not at all. However, I defend Krishna’s right to practice what he says, and I absolutely love his performances. I am attracted to his music and the force of his deep convictions. It is up to listeners to decide if they want to listen to him or not. Nothing is etched in stone, and more so in art. Evolution and progress in any art form have always been about redefining boundaries and questioning existing approaches. One cannot disagree that Karnatik musical concerts have ossified into set patterns, steeped in religious symbolism, and entrenched in conventions. Innovation has become rare, and the typical audience who attends such concerts like their sacred compositions repeated over and over again. To say: Oh, this is Tyagaraja Kriti, a Shyama Sastri composition, or a Muthusamy Dikshitar piece” And revel in it. Attending Karnatik music concerts, like visiting a temple, has become less of a stage where musical experience is explored than bowing heads in prayer. Respect for the lyrics is vital, but it shouldn’t become a cage that restricts the art from expressing the full range of musical experiences possible.
I have been reading with interest the Twitter exchanges between the Ranjani-Gayatri sisters and the President of the M.M.A. regarding the award. I can only chuckle at the sisters’ vehemence in protesting Krishna’s caliber to receive the award. The tone of their languages suggests that they are not able to digest the fact that a deserving singer has been honored. Interestingly, last year, the sister-duo sang at the birthday celebrations of Ilayaraaja, showcasing the maestro’s raga-based compositions. In fact, they took this musical idea across the U.S.A. in a series of concerts. There was a performance in Atlanta as well, which I wanted to attend but couldn’t. If the sisters are against musicians who misuse the aesthetics of classical music, then they should have known that many Ilayaraaja songs contain atheistic and erotic lyrics tuned and rooted in Karnatik ragas. Should the master have refrained from composing tunes for those songs? More importantly, should they not protest against Ilayaraaja for his disabuse of Karnatik music idioms? Ridiculous!. We love Ilayaraaja’s compositions, and the last thing that comes to mind when we listen to them is what raaga or tala it is based on. The musical emotion matters more.
As I was finishing this essay yesterday night, I took a break and was surfing through YouTube. I accidentally landed on a live recording of “Bhaja Govindam” by T.M.K. It was part of a more extended concert hosted on the First Edition Arts Channel. I was mesmerized by the bhava ( emotion) that Krishna brought to this remarkable poem by Adi Shankara. I have heard countless renditions of this song in solo, in chorus, and fusion music. What I heard yesterday was special. Krishna sang the poem with simplicity, clarity, and a deep understanding of the words. Please listen to it if you can. It is for music of such ethereal quality that TM Krishna is this year’s recipient of the Sangita Kalanidhi Award.
In my opinion, it is a rich and deserving tribute to an extraordinary singer and intellectual of our times.