Ravi Shankar

From the pages of Sruti magazine
Issue 296 May 2009

‘Ravindra’ sangeet
Ravi Shankar: the man and his music

V. Ramnarayan

Many of us of the 1960s generation easily identified with the sitar music of Ravi Shankar (sick and tired of the number of Pandits in Indian music, he has renounced the prefix Pandit). We saw in him an iconoclast and a youth icon, an advocate of protest—Make love, not war. We were easily swayed by the purity of sound of his instrument, his fascinating collaboration with Ustad Allah Rakha, his tremendous success with the lotos eaters of the 20th century who flocked to his concerts for all the wrong musical reasons. We didn’t know then that they were the wrong reasons; we didn’t know that for all his dalliance with experimentation and crosscultural collaboration, even film music, he was a highly accomplished exponent of traditional music. We didn’t know then that among his contemporaries he was perhaps the one Hindustani musician who appreciated Carnatic music, not to mention his respect for its practitioners.

Yes, he was a matinee idol among classical musicians. For perhaps the only period in its 80 odd years of existence, the Madras Music Academy broke its own rules in the 1960s to accommodate the spillover of Panditji’s New Year’s Eve concert into the New Year. He would pause at the midnight hour and offer his greetings to his audience to thunderous applause. What could be more exciting for young people straining at the leash to be liberated from the conservative norms of Madras by arguably the most charismatic of India’s classical musicians!

Yet to listen to the lilting strains of the sitar, losing ourselves in the sensitive raga explorations of the maestro, was a transporting, spiritually elevating experience. Even to the uninitiated, it was quite obvious that this was no mere entertainment, not cleverly packaged razzmatazz. There was depth in the music, and the contours of the raga-s were so brilliantly etched, whether in the elaborate alap-jod-jhala that opened the concert, the shorter, brisk piece that followed, the Carnatic raga-s the maestro had made Hindustani music’s own, or indeed one of the raga-s he had created. The mastery of the music and the instrument was so complete, it seemed effortless, though we now know how much devotion, tireless practice and intelligent absorption of all his guru offered him it took to make him a complete musician.

Ravi Shankar travelled extensively in the West as a boy dancer in his elder brother Uday Shankar’s troupe that wowed audiences everywhere, but when he went West again as a sitarist in the 1950s, the audiences were small and unappreciative of Indian music. They dismissed it as limited, repetitive and simple. Ravi Shankar was determined to show the West what a great music he brought from India. He learnt to give it initially in small doses and educate his audiences step by small step. He held countless lecdems at university campuses, and with his natural charm and articulation, he won them over in time, aided in part by the handsome praise the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin showered on him.

Today, Ravi Shankar is one of India’s oldest living musicians of international fame. Awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, he has received some 15 honorary doctorates, the Ramon Magsayasay Award, two Grammys, the Crystal Award from Davos, the Fukuoka Grand Prize Award from Japan, and countless other awards and honours. He has played his music to a great variety of audiences, from the knowledgeable rasika-s of Varanasi and Pune, to wildly cheering young fans at the Woodstock and Monterey pop festivals. He taught the Beatles sitar music and he collaborated with Yehudi Menuhin in creating world music albums. He orchestrated Indian music for All India Radio, composed music for Indian and international ballets and films including Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Godaan, Anuradha, Gulzar’s Meera and Attenborough’s Gandhi, and with Ali Akbar Khan, kickstarted a whole new variety of Indian classical music–the jugalbandi.

Born in Benares on 7 April 1920 as the youngest of four brothers, Ravindra, named after Nobel laureate Tagore, hailed from a privileged background. His father, a bar-at-law, and a minister in princely states, was an amateur singer at local soirees, and there was plenty of music in the family. Elder brother Uday Shankar was to become a world famous dancer, taking his troupe, including his siblings, all over the West. Another brother Rajendra was involved in theatre, and stored his drama troupe’s musical instruments at home. Ravi would play those in secrecy, but his singing at house parties and school parties did not have to be clandestine.

His first guru and first major influence was brother Uday Shankar. Not only did Ravi Shankar travel with his brother’s dance troupe, he was also a permanent fixture at the Almora India Cultural Centre, as a singer and dancer–until one day he answered the irresistible call of the sitar, going from a life of comfort to rural Maihar and gruelling lessons from the great Ustad Alauddin Khan. It was after years of extraordinary hard work and perseverance that he became a successful instrumentalist and achieved fame.

Few of India’s great musicians have had to handle as much adverse criticism as Ravi Shankar has had to endure in a lifetime of constant endeavour to project the greatness of Indian music to the world. For long accused of diluting Indian classical music to please Western audiences, the maestro was deeply hurt by such charges. Over the decades, however, his critics and the vast majority of lovers of Hindustani music have come to recognise the value of his contribution and the purity of the sound produced by his sitar, his brilliance as a composer and creator of ragas, his unparalleled eclecticism that resulted in the transmission of some of the finest ideas and attributes of south Indian classical music to its north Indian counterpart.

Yet another criticism aimed at Ravi Shankar has been his alleged promotion of daughter Anoushka as a sitarist when she first came on the scene, back in the late 1990s. It was perhaps no fault of his that the media made a superstar of her even before she had proved herself in the big league of classical instrumentalists. Any charge of nepotism against Ravi Shankar cannot wash because he produced many excellent disciples, presenting them on stage alongside him long before Anoushka made her debut. And the daughter’s talent is unmistakable.

Ravi Shankar is an old friend of Sruti magazine, of its founder editor N. Pattabhi Raman in particular. His decision to perform free of charge to launch SAMUDRI, an archival initiative of the magazine in 2001 was a magnificent gesture (Sruti 198). So was his warmhearted cooperation with us when we profiled him in depth back in 1996(Sruti 147), a sequel to an issue devoted to his guru Alauddin Khan (Sruti 135). Reading those issues and the material collected for it, it becomes immediately clear that more was to have followed in subsequent issues of Sruti.

Lakshmi Shankar and her sister Kamala Chakrabarty had put down their thoughts on Ravi Shankar for our use. More recently, we spoke to his disciple Janardan Mitta about his “Guruji”.

Lakshmi Shankar first came into contact with the Shankar family in March 1940, when she joined Uday Shankar’s India Cultural Centre in Almora, where she went as a Bharatanatyam dancer along with her guru Kandappa Pillai. Ravi Shankar’s guru Alauddin Khan, his son Ali Akbar Khan, and Uday’s Kathakali guru Sankaran Nampooodiri were all there, each stalwart supervising his part of the ballet.
Soon afterwards, Ravi Shankar, a dancer in his brother’s troupe so far, became a erious convert to the sitar, and accompanied his guru to Maihar, where he stayed for the next four years doing gurukulavasa.

The young man showed rare dedication and grit in his pursuit of music, forsaking his position as a reputed dancer. He was 20 years old when he decided to start from scratch as a musician. He did riyaz for 14 hours a day! Lakshmi said, “I’ve seen blood coming out of his fingers. Baba would ask him to do something and Ravi Shankar would achieve it in the shortest time possible–and Baba would be pleased and give him some more. It was a wonderful guru-sishya relationship.”

Lakshmi was a dancer all right, but was also interested in music and had a malleable voice. Celebrity visitors to the centre, including the Paluskar family, Prof. B.R. Deodhar, Dilip Kumar Roy and Vinayakrao Patwardhan and Pandit K.S. Bodas, all loved Lakshmi’s voice. Through these greats, Lakshmi learnt the rudiments of khayal music and Bengali songs.

By 1945, when news arrived that Ravi Shankar was seriously ill at Maihar, Lakshmi was already married to his brother Rajendra Shankar, and Ravi Shankar to Alauddin Khan’s daughter Annapurna Devi, and the Almora Centre had closed down owing to financial difficulties. Rajendra and Lakshmi had moved to Bombay, and Rajendra brought his brother home and nursed him back to good health. The Rajendra Shankars found a house nearby for Ravi Shankar, his wife and two-year old son. Ravi Shankar’s sitar career just about began then and he was soon performing regularly at chamber concerts. He also found a job in HMV as a sound recordist.

Ravi Shankar joined IPTA (The Indian People’s Theatre Association) hereabouts, composing the music for ballets like India Immortal. Lakshmi sang for some of these ballets and Rajendra dramatised Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India. Lakshmi was the prime ballerina for the ballet which debuted in New Delhi in March 1947. The ballet was a superhit, and Ravi Shankar’s music for it was “unbelievable”, but Lakshmi had health problems, her husband broke a leg, and her son had to be looked after. To top it all, Lakshmi was acting in the Tamil film Bhakta Tulsidas, with music by Veena S. Balachander. Though her mother helped her, she also did all the housework, and paid a heavy price for all the stress and strain. She had pleurisy, which ultimately meant she could not dance any more.

Ravi Shankar had moved to Delhi. He had joined All India Radio but was also a successful concert musician. Not long afterwards, he was so busy performing that he had to give up the AIR job. Lakshmi was singing playback for films. When they met after a gap, he said, “Why don’t you take up Hindustani classical music? Your grounding may be in Carnatic music, but your voice is ideally suited for Hindustani music.”

In her search for a good teacher, Lakshmi was lucky. The music director Madan Mohan introduced her to Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and by April 1954, the classes were underway. The guru was keen on Lakshmi taking the place of his successful disciple Nirmala Devi with whom he had had a parting of ways. In Lakshmi, he found a hard working student determined to make it as a classical vocalist, well supported by mother and husband. He worked as hard as she did, and the lessons and practice sessions went on for hours together. Lakshmi progressed so rapidly that she became an A grade artist of AIR within six months. Unfortunately, Karim Khan stopped teaching her, owing to some misunderstanding, and she then took lessons from Prof. B.R. Deodhar.

An MKT fan
There was a time when Ravi Shankar was crazy about the song Manmatha leelaiyai venrar undo sung by M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavatar for the old Tamil film Sivakavi. The team would be motoring down 200 miles to a concert venue or going by an intercity bus and he would ask Kamala to sing it. ‘Aha, what Charukesi!’ he would say. He even went around collecting MKT’s songs while in Madras.
He was deeply, reverentially appreciative of Muthuswami Dikshitar’s compositions. He had tremendous fascination for the Sanskrit language, too. His love of music was broadbased and generous.

His childlike love for TV was in sharp contrast–especially the way he lapped up serials like Mission Impossible. Sometimes he would be pacing up and down on the veranda, sometimes sitting with a paper and pencil deep in thought. “How can I wait to find the answer to the mystery? Shall I phone TV and ask them?”
This was the time Ravi Shankar came back into Lakshmi’s life, musically speaking. She recalled, “I was fast making a name in Bombay, singing here and there. He told me, ‘I’ll coach you in new aspects of music.’ It was an advanced course in khayal, vilambit and drut, in raga-s like Jog, Behag and Keeravani. There were no songs in Hindustani music in raga-s like Keeravani (Kirvani), essentially south Indian as they are. Ravi Shankar would instantly make up a composition in half an hour, teach it to me and there it was, one khayal in my bag. He did it so beautifully, you’d think he did vocal riyaz everyday! What he could not demonstrate vocally, he played on the sitar. He was terribly busy, but would snatch a few half-hours, come up hurriedly and say, ‘Fine, let’s sit down and do this raga.’ Sometimes we would both be travelling and he would sing on the plane for me to note down.”

Shamanna Kothi was a record based on a small poem by Rabindranath Tagore. Uday Shankar had made a fabulous ballet on the theme, a roaring hit. Ravi Shankar composed the music for it. This was in 1961 during the Tagore Festival. Lakshmi Shankar sang throughout, while Ravi Shankar sang a few pieces in the record. She also sang for his music in a few Bengali films. Back in 1946, she had sung for his music in a few films like Dharti ke Lal.

In 1968, Lakshmi accompanied Ravi Shankar on a trip abroad for the first Festival of India and again in 1974, to sing as well as help him organise. “I was really very fortunate to learn close at hand how his creative genius worked,” Lakshmi recalled. “Most of the time I would write down the music. Like all geniuses, he would forget what he created. Writing down also helped me when I rehearsed with the other musicians.”

Ravi Shankar composed a ballet for a record on that tour. One side of the record featured a piece in Vachaspati, in 7-1/2 beats. Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Shiv Kumar Sharma were part of the orchestra, so the complex piece was shaping well. A shehnai player in the ensemble played beautifully, but his lack of formal training made it difficult for him to grasp the tala. Ravi Shankar made several attempts to teach him, but he repeatedly made mistakes. Finally Ravi Shankar lost his patience and told Lakshmi, “Boudi (sister-in-law), please teach him. Make him understand it.” The shehnai player waited till Ravi was out of earshot and said: “Didi, mujhe to saat hi nahin aati, saade saat kahan se aayegi?” (I can’t get seven beats right, how can I ever get 7-1/2 right?”) Feeling sorry for the poor man, Lakshmi explained the problem to Ravi Shankar. A remorseful Ravi changed the piece for the shehnai into something easier.

The other side of the record was another story altogether. As Ravi Shankar and the two sisters entered the studio, he was saying, “What am I going to do? My mind is blank.” He then asked them both to tune the two tambura-s there. When he said “Play”, the women kept strumming the tambura-s and that was the only sound for ten minutes. And then he said: ‘Ok, here we go.’ “He composed such a beautiful piece, I can’t describe it,” said Lakshmi. “It had a ragamalika which I sang, and Jai Jagadeesa harey sung by Jitendra Abhisheki in the end.”

Ravi Shankar went abroad on a concert tour as early as 1958. As a pioneer, he underwent much difficulty in the West and suffered criticism in the East. He trained Western audiences to listen to Indian music. They had no notion of his music and he had to do the training slowly, little by little. In the beginning, he wouldn’t play a raga for more than 15 minutes; he increased the duration slowly, till there was an Indian music boom of sorts in 1966 in the US–partly because of the hippie movement, partly because the Beatle George Harrison started learning the sitar. The criticism was nasty: that Ravi Shankar was playing the guitar not the sitar, that he was ruining tradition and so on. Lakshmi Shankar defended him. “All wrong. He played sitar to the hippies, yes. But he played good, chaste, Indian music with alap, jod, jhala. He did many experiments, yes. But a creative mind like Ravi Shankar’s cannot be static–it needs some experimentation all the time. His experiments never resulted in any dilution of his music. When he played with Yehudi Menuhin, for instance, or when Zubin Mehta teamed up with Ravi Shankar, Menuhin or Zubin Mehta’s orchestra played Ravi Shankar’s music; it was not the other way around.

Ravi Shankar’s Beenkar gharana goes very deep into the traditional mould and is highly classical. It comes from the dhrupad style. It is not at all light, contrary to all the criticism levelled against his music. “Quite the reverse,” Lakshmi said. “Even when he plays a thumri or a gat, he is strictly classical. It so happens that in a thumri you are allowed to flirt a little bit, stray from the raga’s notes slightly to add colour to the rendering. You can’t call that light music. I think it was just plain jealousy–people just wanted to pull him down. Even newspapers. And he has survived all that, so has his music, our music. He once said, ‘Yes, I did some format changes to basically attract the Western audiences to our music.’ If he had not done that, if he had tried a one-hour alap, jod and jhala to begin with on an audience that didn’t have a clue to our music, it could have meant curtains for our music in the West. Now everyone goes and plays or sings there and people there understand our music. He went to almost every university in the US and explained Indian music through lecture demonstrations. Of course, in the beginning and in the boom period, there were superficial audiences. That’s all gone now. Now you have elite listeners who know what they are getting, who are genuinely interested.

Whether abroad or at home, classical music is an acquired taste, you have to develop an ear for it. That to this day Ravi Shankar is heard and revered everywhere is proof that he gave nothing but top class classical music, not light music. He’s still tops in terms of pulling crowds.”

“Ravi Shankar’s music has remained largely unchanged, except what Father Time has dictated,” Lakshmi Shankar continued. “As you grow older, you get weary of speed, the body doesn’t cooperate. So you substitute depth for speed, spend more time in leisurely, reflective, analytical music. Maturity, refinement, bhakti rasa–these come automatically with age.”

“The creative urge is still there in him, very much alive. The one sensible outlet for him is teaching. As you grow older, you cut down performances and start teaching. When you teach your mind opens.”

Lakshmi’s sister Kamala met Ravi Shankar first in Almora. She was twelve then and he 19 or 20. She remembers, “He was with Dada (Uday Shankar) in his troupe and even then he would compose little songs and make us all sing. As a dancer he was simply fantastic, which is why he was able to make so many memorable ballets. He knew every little step. I was fascinated by his music, his dance, his way of putting things. I was one of the dancers in the troupe too at the time. We did two tours then all over the country. I was the baby of the troupe–Dada selected me as the best dancer among 60 girls.”

“After Raviji went to Maihar, he came to Almora once in a while and even participated in the tours. After some years I lost touch totally, except for seeing him in his concerts in Bombay. I got married and everything changed.”

“I then met him in 1959-60. My husband Amiya Chakrabarty had made the Hindi film Seema for which he won five national awards posthumously. (Daag starring Dilip-Nimmi, Patita with Dev Anand and Usha Kiran–were also great hits he directed. All of them had music by Shankar Jaikishen). Raviji saw my photograph and the news of my husband’s death in the Illustrated Weekly in London, and sent me a condolence message–he keeps in touch with people despite all his schedules. Our contact was revived when he came back to India. As my sister happened to be his sister-in-law, we met at family reunions.”

Kamala accompanied Ravi Shankar on a 13-month tour all over the world in 1967–Europe, the U.S., Russia and Japan, playing the tambura for him. She was a constant companion and came to learn the amazing range of Ravi Shankar’s music.
Subsequently she was with him for almost 24 years, travelling with him, anticipating his needs and attending to them. A perfectionist to the core–he went through the minutest detail from rehearsal to final programme. He made no compromises–every item had to be rehearsed meticulously. “I can sing a bit though I’m not a professional singer. He taught me many compositions but I had a handicap–I couldn’t write notation, unlike Lakshmi Akka. I had to be taught the whole thing. It would be a part of the daily routine, almost–he would be singing, I’d be cooking or making tea and ask him to sing louder. But this way I learnt a great many compositions of his.”

Performing or traveling with Ravi Shankar exposed the team to so many facets of his personality including his sense of humour. One scene in the ballet Labour and Machinery, portrayed the confusion of the common man–whether to take to machinery and adopt it as a way of life, or to stick to farm labour. In that scene, all the actors were supposed to shout meaningless syllables vaguely and aimlessly. They were directed to go round and round on the stage mumbling, shouting. The idea was to convey the confusion. Raviji would say “Dosai rendu, onnu murugal, onnu saada!” (Two dosa-s, one roasted, one plain!). The cast would start laughing, but he kept repeating his chant with a straight face.

Mistaken identity
A taxi driver kept stealing glances at Ravi Shankar on his way from Bombay city to the airport. At the airport, there was a glimmer in his eyes and Ravi Shankar told his companion, “I’ve had it now. The chap has recognised me and is going to ask me.” Raviji checked the meter and took out his wallet. The cabbie stopped him and said “Saab, I don’t want money, but please give me a ticket to your movie Jhanak jhanak payal baje.” He thought he was speaking to the actor Gopikrishna! “There goes my ego!” Ravi Shankar said. “Not only is he ignorant of Ravi Shankar he can only see Gopi Krishna in me!” The best proof of a person’s sense of humour is when he can laugh at himself. And Ravi Shankar could do that.

There were several instances of how seriously Ravi Shankar took his role of propagator of Indian classical music. He once performed at Omea, a very small town in Rotterberg, Switzerland, which the musicians reached by ferry. It was a mini-concert of about 90 minutes. It was terribly cold, Alla Rakha and Ravi Shankar were both freezing and wondering how they were going to play their instruments. The organisers offered some brandy to warm up, but Ravi Shankar demurred, naturally. Somehow, battling the cold, he played a superb Charukesi. The organisers did not arrange any food for the party, and when they returned to the hotel, they found nothing to eat, not even water to drink. The restaurants closed at seven. Alla Rakha was literally in tears–he could never withstand hunger pangs. Ravi Shankar sat quiet, apparently lost in deep thought. Upset by his demeanour, Alla Rakha demanded to know, “What’s this? We’re stuck in this godforsaken place with no food or drink. What are we going to do?”

Ravi Shankar’s response was typical of the maestro: “I feel neither hunger nor thirst. All I know and am happy about is, we’ve brought Indian music to such a remote place, made quite a few people sit through and enjoy our music in the biting cold. That’s enough reward for all the suffering.”

On another occasion, Ravi Shankar’s troupe returned from a concert to the hotel and found there was no power. They had to climb the stairs to their room on the fourteenth floor. All of them had heavy luggage–sitar, tanpura, tabla and so on. Ravi Shankar walked briskly up as if it was a simple, natural thing to do. The rest of them were trudging along far behind, painfully and slowly. Around the tenth floor, a couple of them sat down, unable to walk any further. Ravi Shankar went up, opened the room and tried to egg them on to finish the climb. When that failed, he came down four floors, took two tabla-s and went up, came down again and took the tanpura, and finally one more time to fetch his colleagues! When they started walking back, he said, “Don’t you realise what a great thing we’ve done? We are in Rio de Janeiro, exhibiting our music to the Brazilians and making them love it. It’s no small feat. Be happy and think of that. All our troubles are minor. We’re taking our music to every nook and corner of the world. Nothing else matters.”

In his mature years, Ravi Shankar became quite an addict of television serials. He usually slotted the time for different items in his concerts so that the curtain could come down precisely at the end of the allotted time. In one concert, however, every item was going faster–each finished with a few minutes to spare. The concert was supposed to be till 8.30 but he was through by 7.45 pm. It was the day of Mission Impossible, a serial he loved. As soon as the curtain came down, he snapped, “Come, come, we’ve got to rush. We’ll be just in time for the programme.”

‘Hemangana’–the house of his dreams–was built in Varanasi in 1973-74. It was called RIMPA, the Ravi Shankar Institute of Music and Performing Arts. Every year 20 to 25 students from all over India would assemble there. There would be teaching sessions morning and afternoon. Evening and night would be time for fun and games. And music. Ravi Shankar taught the students through many media–including these games. The next morning, he would be a different person–a hard taskmaster, very demanding, a perfectionist. “Is this the man who laughed and joked with us last night?” the students used to wonder.

Ravi Shankar held festivals there. For five days, eminent musicians and dancers assembled there every year and performed. Ravi Shankar played on the last day.
The concept of Hemangana was something like the gurukula system, but it did not last beyond three years. It needed the guru to be in one place and the sishya-s to be with him throughout. Ravi Shankar could never be bound to one place. He was always on the move. “If he comes to a place and stays even for a week he gets fidgety and says ‘Chalo let us go to Bangalore’, Kamala said. And at Bangalore after a few days, he’d say, ‘Come, we’re off to Calcutta’.”

The atmosphere of Hemangana was fabulous. Satyajit Ray said, “I’ve never experienced anything so Indian.” There were student quarters, beautiful orchards, arches. Attention was paid to every little thing.

Janardan Mitta, whom Ravi Shankar once described as “my favourite student”, was born into a musically inclined family. His father Mitta Lakshminarasiah, was a leading lawyer of Hyderabad. Keen on music, the senior Mitta would come home on Thursdays (Friday was a holiday in the Nizam’s Hyderabad) and close his office for the weekend, to play the tabla or the harmonium and sing with his wife and six children for an audience. “Vakil sahib’s” home was the gateway to the twin cities for most visiting musicians.

Janardan, who joined the film industry in Madras back in 1956 and became a permanent fixture as a sitarist in films made here for over four decades, picked up his sister’s sitar once she left home after marriage. By 1952, he had successfully auditioned before stalwarts Pandit Ratanjankar and Veerendra Kishore and started playing for Deccan Radio. He first heard Ravi Shankar live in 1955, when he came to Hyderabad for a Sangeet Sammelan concert. Janardan had completed his M.A. and was now doing his second year in engineering, but was dying to take up music full time. His father said he had six sons and so didn’t mind one of them taking to music. He took Janardan to meet Ravi Shankar. “Are you crazy?” was Ravi Shankar’s response when Lakshminarasiah said he would take Janardan out of engineering college if Ravi Shankar would take him as a disciple.

Ravi Shankar came to Hyderabad again in 1956, and this time he did listen to the young sitarist. He said, “You seem to know some of the advanced things without knowing the basics.” He appreciated the way Janardan played the raga, the taan and the meend, but corrected a basic mistake he was making in the number of front and back strokes. “That’s why I need a Guruji,” the young man shot back in all innocence. Ravi Shankar asked him to apply for a government scholarship, but though he did not get it, Janardan still went to Delhi in 1956 to learn from Ravi Shankar. It was a busy year for Ravi Shankar. He had just quit the AIR job and become a full time musician. That year he travelled to Afghanistan for the first time on a concert tour. “Whenever he found time to teach us in the midst of his travels, he opened a treasure box,” Janardan remembers.

Janardan was one of the students to take part in the annual camp in Benares. Kartik Kumar, Shamim Ahmed, Rama Rao and Arun Bharat Ram were some of the others. At the classes, Ravi Shankar was a strict disciplinarian. “He was never satisfied until you got every nuance right,” he said. “Outside the classroom, he was a friend, mixing freely with everyone. At Benares, we always had lunch with him. ‘Today, we have an apology for sambar,’ he would apologise. In the evening, we were free to go where we chose, but sometimes he would accompany us on outings, taking a childlike pleasure in simple things. He took us on boat rides to watch the sunset, even liked to go to movies. Once after a concert in Chennai, he said, ‘Let’s go to Bobby’, referring to the Hindi superhit film of the 1970s.

“Guruji had been trained in the tough school of Ustad Alauddin Khan. He taught him dhrupad, the surbahar, complicated tala-s. It was Guruji who reintroduced the complex laya techniques of Carnatic music like tisra nadai and khanda nadai to Hindustani music, which had lost them over time. Even last year, he played a composition set to a tala of 10.5 beats at a Hyderabad concert. Every Sunday for a whole year, he presented a programme of ‘aparichit’ or new raga-s, 52 different raga-s.”

Janardan has the greatest respect for Ravi Shankar’s intellect. “For instance, Guruji had an original explanation for the relative simplicity of laya in Hindustani music. In the north, we sang for the king, while musicians sang for God in the south. At the temple, they sang without inhibition, exploring the entire range of raga and tala, with no fear of displeasing their compassionate God. But in the durbar, you did not dare to go beyond teen taal for fear of offending the king who would not then know how to keep the beat along with you.”

Ravi Shankar’s respect for Carnatic music and musicians is well known. “He still keeps track of what’s happening here,” says Janardan. “He keenly watches the careers of young musicians like T.M. Krishna, Vijay Siva and Sanjay Subrahmanyan.”

Editor, be not proud

Pathfinders is the name of a book on Indian art, literature, music, dance, theatre and cinema brought out by Ace Publication of Mumbai, to which I have made a small contribution, doing some half a dozen profiles of Indian classical musicians. Along with me, S Janaki, Executive Editor of Sruti, the magazine I edit, and Gowri Ramnarayan—who contributed substantially more than I did—were the other two writers from Chennai featured by the book.

The book is really mammoth in size, weighing 5.5 kg as it does, and is a visual treat. It has contributions from some very eminent artists besides critics and experts. It is by and large readable and rich in content. It should be a collector’s item that will make its owners proud, if only they make a suitable stand on which to place it and turn its pages. It was released in Mumbai sometime last year, when I got to browse through it.

Last evening, the publishers collaborated with Taj Coromandel to launch the book in Chennai, amidst some fanfare. The programme started half an hour late, unusual for Chennai book releases, with a jugalbandi concert by Rakesh Chaurasia (flute), Purbayan Chatterjee (sitar) and Satyajit Talwalkar (tabla), a pleasant enough affair appropriate to the occasion.

This is when Shashi Vyas, musician-music critic and son of eminent vocalist Pandit CR Vyas—whose brainchild the book was—took over. Welcoming a number of celebrity guests from the music world seated in the front row, he went on to thank a number of people who had helped bring out the book. He also made frequent references to Vijayabai, who was like a mother to him and who was writing her biography (“She’ll fire me [sic] for revealing this secret”), leaving everyone in the audience who did not know Vijaya Mehta, the theatre personality, guessing Vijayabai’s identity. He also went into raptures about the greatness of Vikkuji, (Vinayakram) and Sriniji (Mandolin Shrinivas), but missed out on Lalgudi GJR Krishnan who sat next to Shrinivas in the audience. Later, he spotted Chitravina Ravikiran in the audience, thanked him for accepting his invitation, and recalled the exciting interactions they had had at the National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai. Followed speeches by Ravikiran and Vijaya Mehta, which were well received by the audience.

Now I come to the central part of the evening’s proceedings: the book release.
Vyas had both Vijaya Mehta and Vinayakram release the book, in the presence of all the celebrity guests who were asked to ascend the stage. Shrinivas was very reluctant to do so, but we soon found out he was only drawing attention to the noticeable lack of an invitation from Vyas to GJR Krishnan to join the crowd on the dais. Once this omission was repaired, both Krishnan and Shrinivas joined the star spangled daispora—to coin a word—of the evening.

Now Vyas launched into a fairly comprehensive vote of thanks, in which he expressed his gratitude to a number of actors—from the publishers and Taj Coromandel to the stenographer and the light boys—before condescending to mention the editors and at long last the writers from Chennai. He finally remembered the name of Gowri Ramnarayan and of course “her husband Mr Narayan.” Some of us then loudly reminded him that he had omitted to mention the name of my Sruti colleague and fellow contributor S Janaki.

Obviously horrified to realise what he had done, Vyas then went into overdrive and profusely thanked Janaki and Sruti (we had helped the book with many photographs from our archives). “How can I forget Janakiji and her Sruti Foundation for all their help, blah, blah, which was all very well but for his obvious ignorance of the fact that besides being Mr Narayan, Gowriji’s husband, I happen to be the editor of the magazine which gave him permission to use all those photographs.

As it happens ever so often in life, here was another instance that brought me down heavily from whatever imaginary perch of self-importance I had assigned myself.

Prasanna again

Gamaka and all that jazz
(The Hindu Businessline, 13 February 1995)

The air was thick with expectancy. The open-air theatre at the suburban sabha was more crowded than usual. Most of the regulars were there—plus a number of new faces, drawn apparently by the novelty of the programme. The first half would be Carnatic music, while the second would feature jazz—with the lead musician playing in both styles.

Twenty-four year-old Ramaswami Prasanna, slight of build, bespectacled, tousled hair, clad in kurta-trousers, soon occupied centre-stage, accompanied by Sikkil Bhaskaran (violin), Poongulam Subramanian (mridangam) and TH Subhashchandran.(ghatam). E sat before the mike, guitar in hand, in traditional south Indian style.
He then proceeded to play punctiliously orthodox Carnatic music—full of the gamaka so difficult to achieve on the guitar. The violinist, slow to come to terms with the creativity of the soloist, warmed up as the evening progressed. The percussionists exercised restraint, yet lent imaginative rhythmic support. The ragas delineated were carefully chosen to highlight scales common to the two systems as much as to accentuate the uniqueness of Carnatic music.

At the end of the first session, the secretary of the sabha took over the microphone and dropped a bombshell. The jazz part of the concert would last no more than 45 minutes, as the residents of the neighbourhood had vetoed the prolonged assault on their eardrums. This, even though the drummer even promised to play softly!
What followed was a minifeast. The jazzmen packed into their brief programme an incredible amount of variety. Prasanna showed why he was considered special. His prowess in an alien musical system was as impressive as his ability in Carnatic music. Handling the jazz idiom with apparent ease, he embellished the music with improvisations based on ragas. He had the audience—a good half of them either grey-haired or bald—glued to their seats, at least those who were not swaying or tapping their feet.

This was Prasanna’s first jazz performance in public. After graduating in naval architecture from IIT Madras, he is now studying international music, specializing in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music, Boston. His brilliant accompanists in the jazz part of the concert were Keith Peters (bass guitar) and Sivamani (drums). Prasanna, who has about five years of concert experience in Carnatic music, played ragas that form part of the major pentatonic scale of western music as well as at least one vakra raga to illustrate a scale without parallel outside Indian music.

Prasanna’s display raised a number of questions. How often do we come across talents such as his, proficient in more than one system of music? What could have prompted a youngster to attempt the seemingly impossible? Could it be the prospect of stardom, or the lure of wealth? What are the financial implications of studying music in an American university?

We have known some rare exponents like Jon Higgins, L Subramaniam and L Shankar who have mastered western as well as Indian classical music, and others like MS Gopalakrishnan, equally at home in the two major branches of Indian classical music. Prasanna is that rarity, an accomplished Carnatic musician, specializing in a Western instrument and a serious student and practitioner of jazz. He also belongs top a small group of musicians attempting genuine fusion as different from hastily put together hotchpotches.

In conversation, Prasanna comes through as an articulate, thoughtful person with a clear idea of where he is headed. Enjoying no formal financial assistance to pursue his expensive musical education, following a punishing academic schedule, he is driven by fierce commitment to complete his course with credit. He supports himself by doing campus jobs and performing at weekend concerts, often traveling out of Boston. “I could earn more money working at Burger King or MacDonald’s, but it is important for me to keep performing Carnatic music.” In fact, Prasanna sees his training in Carnatic music as a great asset in jazz. In modal jazz, the form jazz has taken today, the harmony is a stable, defined base pattern from where the soloist launches into an exploratory journey of altered scales much in the manner of sruti bhedam, a sophisticated usage in Carnatic music.

This is where knowledge of ragas is such a tremendous advantage. Armed with a mere 150 ragas for the course, even a debutant vidwan would be far, far ahead of his western counterpart in jazz—provided he can make the harmonic connection with jazz. Prasanna is one of those who can make that connection with the harmonic structure, ‘the cornerstone of jazz.’

It is the challenge of Carnatic music that converted Prasanna from participation in ‘light music’ orchestras years ago, via a stint playing Santana and the like with rock bands. At his mother’s initiative, he began taking lessons in Carnatic music from Tiruvarur Balasubramaniam who was teaching Prasanna’s sister to play the veena. Gradually he moved from neighbourhoods to full-fledged cutcheris.

Again a few years later it was this quest for challenges that made jazz attractive to Prasanna who was looking to study music abroad. Already an accomplished Carnatic guitarist, he was able to convince the visa authorities that learning western music was a serious pursuit with him, not a mere passport to the US.

Jazz is so complex that it does not enjoy the large following of pop or rock music. “It has such a complicated harmonic structure that it doesn’t appeal to the layman, who likes to hum the tunes he has heard. Even trained western classical musicians find it difficult to understand jazz.” Practitioners of jazz are dedicated to their art: they are not millionaire celebrities. It is the challenge, intellectual and musical, that it poses, the devotion it demands, that energises and motivates Prasanna.

“It will be so easy to give up and find a job, but I want to be perhaps the first Indian to complete what he has undertaken to study at Berklee.” This is the reference to the number of dropouts at Berklee, which is renowned music college with a tough curriculum.

Prasanna finds his teachers inspirational. “They are so giving, so interested. At school, I learn music, but my personal interactions with my teachers give me perspective.” Among the teachers are some great jazz musicians who have invested their ward with a keen sense of history and an ardent desire to explore genuine fusion.

Prasanna teaches his teachers Indian music, a major undertaking given the sophistication of our system. One of his teachers has created a jazz composition that includes a Bhairavi raga interlude, a case of well-informed fusion music.

Prasanna admires the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John McLaughlin who came to Madras to learn Carnatic music, and Frank Bennett, accomplished as a Carnatic vocalist, mridanga vidwan, jazz drummer, jazz pianist, and a classical composer! Bennett is known to followers of Carnatic music as a student and son-in-law of the late Dr S Ramanathan.

Twentieth century western classical music and the impact it has had on jazz inspire Prasanna. In Mozart or Bach, the music keeps coming back, resolving itself into the basic tonal identity of the composition, much like the sruti in Indian music. Composers like Debussy and Strowinsky led the revolution in 20th century classical music, in which conventions are broken. Jazz, a direct derivative of such influences, has been enriched by them.

Setting high standards and dedicating himself to his studies and his Carnatic music, Prasanna is determined to graduate with distinction. In the end, he knows he will be a unique practitioner of a complex art, strengthened by his rich legacy.

He will bring to jazz a capacity for variation and concepts such as gamaka, which no western musician can match. Through it all, he will continue to perform Carnatic music unblemished by external influences. Only time can tell which of these areas of specialization will bring him greater recognition.

When I first met 'Guitar Prasanna'

Guitar Prasanna is now the president of the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music, a world class institution some two hours from Chennai, where he is doing commendable work, shaping the music of students from around the world and across genres. I met Prasanna at SAM a month ago and plan to write a comprehensive profile of the institution he heads in the near future. In the meantime, an enquiry in Facebook about Sukumar Prasad, the first Carnatic guitarist, led me to this story—one of two I did on Prasanna in the 1990s.

Have guitar, will travel

Ramaswami Prasanna received rave reviews during the last Madras 'Music Season' for his guitar concerts at various sabhas. The 24-year-old engineering graduate is not the first South Indian classical musician to specialise in a Western instrument. Generations of violinists have made a European instrument their own, while the saxophone, clarinet and mandolin are now a regular part of the Carnatic music scene. The guitar itself was exploited as a concert instrument by young Sukumar Prasad a few years ago with considerable success.

Prasanna, who is now a well-established musician in the South Indian mode, has a keen interest in fusion music. South Indian audiences are familiar with the attempts of mridanga vidwan T V Gopalakrishnan to offer ]azz-Camatic music fusion concerts. TVG has been responsible for introducing Camatic musicians, of the calibre of saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath, on stage as exponents of such fusion efforts. Prasanna has gone a step forward by opting to study jazz as part of his higher education and by learning to introduce elements of Camatic music in jazz. He finds that his proficiency in the sophisticated classical music system is a great advantage in the improvisational aspects of 'modal jazz', the most prominent form of jazz today. Where the traditional jazz player has to be content with the limitations of his musical imagination within the framework of his upbringing, Prasanna has hundreds of ragas to choose from, to give free play to his manodharma.

Prasanna's present preoccupation with fusion can be explained by the unusual path of his career. Not until he had been performing regularly in light 'music orchestras for years did he begin to learn Carnatic music. He had been playing film music and Western popular music with great success before he decided to learn South Indian classical. He had shown unusual talent as a boy and guitar-playing came naturally to him, with hardly any need to practise his numbers before performances. Enjoying perfect pitch, Prasanna would often learn songs in the car on the way to a concert.

The turning point was Prasanna's mother's success in persuading Tiruvarur Balasubramaniam, Prasanna's sister's music teacher, to accept him as his pupil. Soon, the guitarist found he could coax the instrument to produce the gamaka-Iaden notes typical of Carnatic music. Before long, he was performing in cutcheris to appreciative audiences.

During the past year, Prasanna has been studying jazz composition at Berklee College of Music, Boston, one of America's prestigious institutions offering higher education in music. Enjoying the guidance and encouragement of his teachers — top-flight jazz musicians — Prasanna is fast proving to be an outstanding student of the complex art form, thanks to his rich, legacy of training in classical Camatic music. Prasanna's jazz .compositions include improvisations based on South Indian ragas which serve to enhance the sophistication of his compositions.

To Prasanna, the strenuous efforts to pay his way through college, the complexity and nuances of jazz, the need to keep in touch with Camatic music through weekend concerts, all these pose a challenge that spurs him on towards excellence. He knows that his classical music base will be a great asset in jazz, while his academic pursuits have enriched his appreciation of the technical aspects of Camatic music. His is already a success story in which talent has been burnished by intelligence and industry,

V RAMNARAYAN

Chandru Anna

First published in The Bengal Post on 12 Feb 2011

When CV Chandrasekhar, Bharatanatyam guru and this year’s Padma Bhushan awardee, dances before the beautiful Panduranga idol at Tennangur, a hamlet in Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu, it is an act of total surrender. What is special about this offering is that its sense of abandon is accompanied by total control and precision, perfect abhinaya or expression and nritta, or footwork, in the best classical traditions. The dancer is a mere 75.


For Chandru Anna, as every dancer young or old addresses him, it is part of an annual ritual in which he leads some 30 to 40 students and teachers of his art form in a three-day workshop, held at a large facility adjacent to the temple in this centre of pilgrimage. On two evenings during the workshop, all the participants dance before the deity, swinging into ecstatic action during the dolotsavam, when the idol is worshipped in a cradle, and the garudotsavam, a procession around the temple, with the local residents and visiting pilgrims joining them. So many professional and amateur artists coming together in such a joyous celebration of their art in a temple ambience must indeed be a rare spectacle



The workshop called Natya Sangraham, now in its twelfth year, with Chandrasekhar presiding over eleven of them (he missed one through illness), is organised by Natyarangam, the dance wing of the Narada Gana Sabha, one of Chennai’s major sabhas, typically south Indian institutions that conduct music, dance and theatrical programmes for their subscriber members and the general public. Experts from the fields of dance, music, poetry and theatre engage the participants, mostly young dancers and dance teachers, in academic and practical sessions on predetermined topics. The daylong activity is stimulating and rigorous, but the delegates are housed in considerable comfort and served delicious vegetarian food. The informal post-prandial ‘tinnai’ sessions at night are an opportunity to listen to stories from the rich past of the stalwarts and discuss current issues affecting the performing arts scene. The whole event has the blessings of the movement behind the temple, the GA Trust—founded by the followers of the late Swami Gnananda Giri—which among other things extends the best in education and healthcare to a number of villages in the vicinity. Adding to the atmosphere is the architectural beauty of the temple—built under the auspices of the late Swami Haridas Giri, Gnananda’s disciple, in the authentic old style of the Puri Jagannath temple—and its gopurams in the Pandya style.



I first came into contact with Chandru Anna, when he and Leela Samson, at present director of Kalakshetra of Chennai and Sangeet Natak Akademi, gave a thrilling performance of a tillana—the southern equivalent of a tarana—in praise of Rukmini Devi Arundale, founder of Kalakshetra on her 80th birthday, more than a couple of decades ago. A youthful fifty-something then, Chandrasekhar was then head of the department of dance in Maharaja Sayajirao (MS) University, Baroda. An alumnus of Kalakshetra, which he joined as a boy in 1945, Chandru Anna later went to Benares Hindu University where he did a masters in botany and taught for a while before moving to MS University, where he eventually became Principal. He served there till his retirement, relocating at Chennai some ten years ago. His wife Jaya and daughters Chitra and Manjari are Bharata Natyam dancers, too, and the Chandrasekhars are well known for their many productions that include both solo performances and dance drama. Chandrasekhar has choreographed and produced many dance dramas including Bhumija, Meghadutam, Ritu Samharam and Aparajita, showing a marked liking for the classics of Kalidasa. Jaya learnt Bharata Natyam from Lalita Sastri of Delhi, Kathak from Birju Maharaj, the maestro of the Lucknow gharana, and Odissi from the one and only Kelucharan Mahapatra. She too taught at BHU, MS University and later at her own institution Nityashree in Baroda.



Chandrasekhar is a rare amalgam of varied influences. A south Indian who started school in Delhi, he graduated in dance from Kalakshetra and botany from Vivekananda College, Madras. Well versed in Carnatic music, he grew comfortable with Hindustani as well as folk forms of music during his long years in Gujarat. His travels overseas, beginning with his tour of China in the 1960s as a member of a cultural delegation, brought him a sophisticated awareness of art forms and trends everywhere. While quite at home in so many diverse milieus, Chandrasekhar remains firmly rooted in the austere traditions of the classical dance he learnt from great gurus at Kalakshetra. Clean lines and good taste characterize his every move.



A vastly experienced performer and guru, and among the most accessible veterans of his art, Chandrasekhar is superbly fit and still able to dance like a young man. He is a giving teacher, holding nothing back while sharing his accumulated wisdom with his students and the participants at the annual workshop.



The high point of this year’s Natya Sangraham was his demonstration of a complex, physically demanding composition of his to the accompaniment of thunderous applause from students and faculty. It was a memorable moment that brought tears to the eyes of the onlookers.

The Bhimsen Joshi gharana

The day we received news of the maestro’s death, a friend, Jayaram, called to share his memories of Bhimsen Joshi with me. He recalled a 1970s concert on the Health League grounds of Hyderabad. He remembered in particular the unforgettable Purya Dhanashri of that evening that lasted an hour and a half and was primarily responsible for the concert going on well past midnight. I did not know Jayaram then, but we were connected forever by that concert, for I too sprawled on the sands and listened transported to another realm that night.

My wife and I were fortunate to be in Hyderabad for a decade starting in 1971. Through my classmate and close friend Gourang Kodical, a disciple of tabla ustad Shaikh Dawood, we were exposed to some of the finest Hindustani music the twin cities offered then, not all of it in large halls or fancy venues. The ritual Guruvar mandal, a homage every Thursday to their teachers by local musicians was in the form of impromptu recitals by some of the finest local musicians in a tiny little apartment in Hyderabad’s own version of the chawl. The place was the residence of Bhaskar Rao Udgirkar, and the congregation had commenced in 1954. My wife’s music teacher Vajendra Ashrit, Shanker Daspremi, Vasudeva Rao Lasinkar, U. Govind Rao and Ramesh Hyderabadkar were some of Gourang’s friends and associates behind the mandal.

In addition to the up and coming, we also heard renowned musicians like Bhim Shankar Rao or Pandit Jasraj’s disciples like Girish Wazalwar and Chandrasekhar Swamy at the Guruvar Mandal. Promising young sitarist Pandurang Parathe was yet to migrate to Madras and the film world, while his senior M. Janardan had already done so, and Kartik Seshadri, Janardan’s younger fellow shagird of Ravi Shankar, was winging his way to the USA.

The whole gang from the mandal was present at all the major concerts held at Hyderabad during those years of relative plenty in terms of classical music there. They were generous to praise good music but caustic in their criticism of shallow imitation or artifice of any kind. Of course, they were biased as hell—aren’t we all?—and God save the musicians who strayed from the strait and narrow path! Countless cups of tea were imbibed, not to mention cigarettes and bidis—the self-effacing tabla wizard Ustad Shaikh Dawood led the bidi brigade—as some of the soirees we attended tended towards all-night affairs. The nip in the winter air as we sat mostly in the open at these concerts added to the excitement of the whole experience.

It was through our wonderful friends at the guruvar mandal that we became regulars at the Pandit Motiram Punyatithi that his sons celebrated every year in Hyderabad. All three of Motiram’s sons Maniram, Pratap Narayan and Jasraj had sung together in the early anniversary concerts, while I managed to hear the duo of Pratap Narayan and Jasraj and later Jasraj by himself. Those were memorable concerts, the best live vocal performances I had heard up until then. We were also to be thrilled by the virtuosity of four young instrumentalists answering to the names of Amjad Ali Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain.

One unforgettable Ravi Shankar concert at Ravindra Bharati in 1974 was made more so by an announcement the sitar maestro made midway through the recital. “I regret to bring news of the death of two great musicians today,” he said. He was referring to the incomparable Amir Khan and southern film music legend Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao. The news meant that I would never listen live to one of the greatest Hindustani vocalists of our time, certainly my personal favourite musician. It was deeply depressing.

I was much more fortunate in the case of Bhimsen Joshi, who was the second member of a mutual admiration society whose other half had been Amir Khan. Legend has it that Amir Khan asked his students to listen to at least 25 concerts of Joshi before they ventured to ascend the performance stage. And Bhimsen Joshi always maintained that his Abhogi was Amir Khan’s gift to him.

At the concert Jayaram described, no one left the venue even as it stretched to some four hours. The singing was sheer joy, with Bhimsen Joshi traversing three octaves with seeming effortlessness. It was an amalgam of meditative depth, incredible taans, perfect laya control and absolute swara precision, so typical of the singer’s non-drinking years. His subsequent performances in the twin cities during my years there never equalled the pristine glory of that concert.

I had to wait until he came to Madras in the 1980s, when he had banished the demons from his life, to savour the old Bhimsen Joshi magic again. When he mesmerized Madras audiences at the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, he had for decades worked assiduously at making the Kirana gharana his own, incorporating the influences he had sought all his life from all the masters he admired no matter what school they belonged to. It was the Bhimsen Joshi gharana.

The good grandson

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the hills of Kerala to the Himalayas
From the vale of Kashmir to the Almond Islands
This land was made for you and me

I first heard this Indian version of Woody Guthrie’s patriotic verse from my sister, who like thousands of other young Indians, had come under the spell of the charismatic young man who led the idealistic Moral Re-armament or MRA in India in the 1960s. I was to hear several such inspiratio
nal songs that my sister and her friends brought home from MRA meetings, which centrestaged that unlikely icon with a squeaky clean image and a fan following that threatened to rival that of the Beatles.

Tall, handsome Rajmohan Gandhi—the eldest grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari—of the aquiline nose and aristocratic features and bearing had come under the influence of Frank Buchman, the American who called for 'moral and spiritual re-armament' as the way to build a 'hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world', following World War II.

MRA India came into being on 2 October 1963, when 70 volunteers led by Rajmohan Gandhi marched across India advocating a clean, strong and united nation, covering 4,500 miles in 40 days. It was a programme of moral and spiritual reconstruction to foster change in private and public life based on a change in motivation and character.

Another unlikely hero of the movement was the late West Indies opening batsman Conrad Hunte. Like born again Christians, they had seen the light, but theirs was a message of world peace and moral rectitude that went beyond personal religion; it claimed to be one of transformation of the world that began with the individual.
As a slightly cynical young man, I had been a somewhat amused onlooker of what appeared to me to be a propagandist movement that sought to indoctrinate young people everywhere with grandiose ideas of changing the planet by adopting what Rajmohan Gandhi calls “the moral high ground”. Worse, some of us skeptics suspected ulterior motives, even a CIA plot to wean youth away from Communism, behind the whole movement.

Yet despite my intuitive skepticism, I could not help developing a sneaking admiration for my sister’s idol. When he spoke, he spoke with passion, conviction, a sincere desire to change the corrupt, warring ways of the world.
Soon MRA went out of my world, as my sister grew out of it and moved on to watching cricket and following the fortunes of a certain Nawab of Pataudi. And there, my indirect association with Rajmohan should have ended—but for my discovery of Himmat, the brilliant little weekly magazine he founded in 1964 and edited for the next 17 years. The moral high ground was still the fuel of Rajmohan Gandhi’s spiritual engine, but his splendid prose and the irrepressible courage and optimism of his writings made a huge impact on me and some of my friends. Himmat was a no-frills, monochromatic (literally) magazine which met national and international issues head on. It covered itself with glory during the Emergency declared in June 1975, while most of India’s press “crawled when asked to bend”.

I first met Rajmohan Gandhi many years ago during his mother Lakshmi Devdas Gandhi’s funeral. “Oh, the off spinner,” he said to me when someone introduced us, a flattering acknowledgement that he knew I was a cricketer. When I met him last week, he again talked cricket briefly before we went on to other subjects. “I only know your cricket, not your later incarnations,” he said.

It was a moment for my family to get his latest book A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 & the American Civil War autographed, and inform him that our library included his biographies of his two grandfathers, besides many of his other works. “Must be groaning under the weight,” he said.

A visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gandhi was visiting Chennai for a brief lecture session for the benefit of visitors from the Netherlands. At 75, he still looks fit and alert physically and mentally, with no loss of the probing honesty that characterises his writings on his illustrious ancestors.

To my pleasant surprise I learnt from Rajmohan that MRA is still alive and kicking—recovering from the downslide caused by rampant materialism post-globalisation—but rechristened Initiatives of Change International. And its conference and training facility, Asia Plateau, a “verdant 64-acre centre of reconciliation, dialogue and introspection,” in the hills of Panchgani, Maharashtra, is still frequented by people from all over the world.

Rajmohan Gandhi is prominent in a number of initiatives to improve relations between Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan and the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. A true inheritor of the moral and intellectual qualities of both Gandhi and Rajaji, he believes, “One step of reconciliation, one step of bridge-building, one honest attempt to restore a divided relationship – and terrorism, extremism, receive a blow.”

And he is convinced that “if we demand rights and equality only for our group and not for all, they are no longer principles but just a political platform.”

A Kathakali maestro turns 80

It was a surreal morning. The venue was the beautiful cottage-like auditorium inside the late dance diva Chandralekha’s residence facing Elliots Beach in south Chennai. Most of those who had gathered to celebrate Kathakali maestro K.P. Kunhiraman’s 80th birthday were either close to or past his age, in spotless white dhotis or saris. The others present were young dancers and students of music and dance, trying to drink in the atmosphere of a bygone age.

Kunhiraman sat inside the cottage with Buddha-like calm, accompanied by his American kathakali dancer wife Katherine—Keki to all—by his side and their daughter going around taking photographs. There was a gentle hush as forgotten memories were rekindled and recalled, as silent tears were shed for a way of life that would never come back—a way of life that one speaker of the morning described as a shining example of simple living and high thinking.

The great actor K. Ambu Panikkar, Kunhiraman’s father, had spent the last eight years of his life at Rukmini Devi Arundale’s Kalakshetra, teaching Kathakali. After his death, Rukmini Devi invited Kunhiraman to come and learn the art in the gurukula system, with his father’s friend and colleague T.K. Chandu Panikkar. Kunhiraman stayed at Kalakshetra for the next thirty years becoming one of its most celebrated and revered dancers, with unforgettable performances in the Ramayana series and other dance drama programmes. He also helped his guru train some of the greatest names among male dancers to perform at Kalakshetra and elsewhere in the decades to come.

Keki and Kunhiraman moved to Berkeley, California in the 1960s, “with one change of clothes and one set of Kathakali purushavesham costume in his suitcase,” as Keki wrote in a recent tribute to her husband. “I had told him we would be ‘missionaries in the jungle’, and at times would find ourselves in the cannibal’s pot,” she continues. “Friends came to meet him, tiptoeing silently into the bedroom to see the hundred-year-old crown hanging in the closet as if it were a new baby.”

Five days later, after his first performance in the US, at the Gala Galactic Festival of Martial, Healing and Performing Arts, Kunhiraman was shocked to see hippies leaping around the park playing music, and bearded yogis standing on their heads in the grass.

Recovering from the eerie experience in time, the Kunhiramans made many friends and settled down to start their school Kalanjali. Over the years, they had a steady stream of students Indian and American, and they kept recharging their batteries by visiting India annually to watch and participate in the Kalakshetra Art Festival and other events.

According to Keki, Kathakali never really caught on in the US: it had too much dancing for theatre people and too much theatre for dancers, “but there were triumphs and adventures with Kathakali that we had never anticipated.”

“We performed at the American Theatre Convention, numerous community events, our own productions, we took Kathakali to New York, Texas, Nebraska, Arizona, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and many other places.”

When Kunhiraman received the first choreography fellowship ever given to an Indian artist from the National Endowment for the Arts, the duo produced Keechaka Vadham, which was to be repeated many times over the years.

Embarrassingly once Kunhiraman mistook his daughter’s Halloween makeup for his green Kathakali makeup, and when he was dancing the role of Keechaka, and sweating profusely, his whole face ran off with the sweat!

The Kunhiramans have graduated from performance through teaching to “looking back.” To start from almost nothing and make a life in the US in Kathakali was a satisfying experience, despite the disappointment at not establishing the art more deeply in that country. “Perhaps if we had been willing to use the tradition as a language to express new ideas, and create new fusion theatre using the robust technique it would have survived in a mutant form, but neither of us wanted that, and in retrospect, we do not regret holding on to our original resolve, “ Keki says.

One of the speakers at the birthday celebration described how helpful the Kunhiramans had been to her when she visited Berkeley in the 1990s, and remembered her shock at being woken up by Kunhiraman in full Kathakali mask and make-up one morning. “I have made nice sambar for you. Please don’t wait for us for lunch as we are going out for the whole day.”

Rukmini Devi Arundale integrated Kathakali seamlessly into the dance drama format that she invented at Kalakshetra. It was a triumph of innovation that gave male dancers a great platform. Kunhiraman was perhaps the greatest exponent of the art form in a long line of distinguished performers the institution spawned.

His 80th birthday celebration, initiated by the renowned husband and wife team of Shanta and VP Dhananjayan, served to bring together several members of the large extended Kalakshetra family in a poignant reunion filled with memories of a glorious past. Keki and Kunhiraman were overwhelmed by the love and warmth of the exchanges among the participants, some of whom had come from as far as the US.

A glimpse into Kathak training

The Natya Kala Conference of the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, a major event of Chennai’s annual music and dance season, has over the years attracted some of the finest exponents of India’s classical dances and other dance forms. The title Nrithya Choodamani was this year awarded to Gopika Varma, a practitioner of Mohiniyattom, a dance genre from Kerala.

One of the highlights of the Conference has been the conduct of lecture sessions in the morning, which have for decades drawn experts ranging from Singhajit Singhji and Astad Deboo to Kalanidhi Narayanan and CV Chandrasekhar to engage in lively discussions of topics crucial to their art, followed by even livelier interactions with the audience. Many of these discussions generate a great deal of debate and audience participation, even if half the time the only heat that results is in the form of hot air.

This year the discussions focused on the abhyasa-sampradaya or the evolution of teaching-training traditions of the five major systems of Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Kathak, traditional natya, “culminating in today's repertoire and presentation”. A contemporary acharya of eminence led each deliberation, while both well known performers and students demonstrated the path traversed by the art form to reach its present status. Each day’s deliberations proved to be an eye-opener to those not familiar with the rigour and science behind the training methodology unique to each genre of dance.

The popular vote for the best session went to the last one on Kathak, because it served not only to showcase some of the brilliant techniques and levels of accomplishment attained by today’s practitioners, but also to dispel a few myths about the perceived lack of sophistication of the art form relative to the southern dance forms.

Anchored by Sangeet Natak Akademi secretary Jayant Kastuar, himself a past Nrithya Choodamani, the session was led by senior gurus from the two major gharanas of Kathak—Jaipur and Lucknow—and made eminently watchable by dance demonstrations by three representatives of each school, veterans, current stars and senior students. Jai Kishan Maharaj, past master of the Lucknow gharana, and Rajendra Gangani, pillar of the Jaipur gharana, led their disciples on a thrilling journey from the first exercises they practised as young students to the most complex compositions they perform on stage today.

In addition to the Birju Maharaj clan, which was represented by two of Jai Kishan’s brothers, and three musicians from the Gangani family who assisted Rajendra, there were vocalists, sarangi players and percussionists on stage. Gauri Diwakar did the star turn for the Lucknow gharana while Swati Sinha played her role to perfection from the Jaipur side.

Remarkably, there was perfect coordination between the two different gharanas on display. The camaraderie and chemistry were to be seen to be believed, the Ganganis appreciating and encouraging the Maharajs and vice versa. We learnt how at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi, where the teaching methods have through the decades been codified and structured to develop a common vocabulary, the two gharanas have gained by observing absorbing each other’s ways. It was most heartwarming to see the two senior gurus working in tandem to make the demonstration meaningful and fruitful for an audience largely untutored in the nuances of Kathak. Two senior students of the Kendra, Dhirendra Tiwari and Quincy Kendell Charles, gave a high quality display of expression and footwork.

The high point of the lec-dem was the impromptu display of footwork by Jayant Kastuar in his south Indian silk veshti—which he had donned in his capacity as anchor for the morning—at the instance of the Ganganis, who even managed to persuade the portly Jai Kishan Maharaj to magically transform himself into the thieving boy Krishna caught with butter all over his face.

To those of us who believed Kathak offered no more than fast-paced footwork and twirls and pirouettes, the variety of expressions and the poetry—even if largely based on the Radha-Krishna theme—the two teams demonstrated that morning were quite a revelation. Accustomed over the years to rivalries and claims of superiority made by the different schools of classical dance, it was refreshing for a south Indian audience to see how well nearly a dozen artists belonging to two different gharanas worked to a common purpose, illuminating the lecture with some outstanding nritta.

That the youngest were students and the oldest over sixty, that they came from different parts of India, and that one of them was a UK-born mathematician turned dancer of African descent made the whole experience even more enjoyable.

Just a day earlier, MS Dhoni’s men, with fifteen years separating the oldest and youngest team members, again from different parts of India, coached by a South African and supported by staff from different parts of the world, had beaten South Africa comprehensively in their own backyard.

Jayant Kastuar, Jai Kishan Maharaj, Rajendra Gangani and their talented artists won over the hearts and minds of a highly demanding Chennai audience. Amidst the general gloom surrounding the future of the Indian classical performing arts, thanks to lack of support from the government and the media, such events give us hope.