A Dalit’s eternal night

By V Ramnarayan

I am ashamed to say that I did not know who Cho Dharman was when I went to a book review event relating to his novel Kookai last evening at TAG Centre, Chennai, organized by the Puthaka Nanbargal Kuzhu.

My worst fears of having to suffer a barrage of platitudes and being bored to death were more or less confirmed until a passage from his novel was read out. In the author’s own voice, the words sprang to life, full of raw power, honesty, humour even. It was a truthful telling of the lives of Dalits—oppressed, reviled, ill-treated and crushed by a cruel society—by someone who knows them and other marginalized people intimately. The passage is about two young Dalit men, who dream of a hearty meal at a roadside ‘club kadai’, bathe and dress grandly for it, and actually live their dream, only to be thrashed to death by their caste superiors for their intransigence.  

When it was the ordinary looking, moustachioed Dharman’s turn to speak, he did so with quiet confidence, in a clear, ringing voice. He spoke of his craft and his desire for anonymity for fear celebrityhood would prevent people from opening up to him as they do. “If you come looking for me at Kovilpatti, my neighbours will want to know if you are looking for the man with the ancient bicycle,” The people in his books are people he knows personally, and he does not want to interfere with the supply chain of raw material for his writing. “That is why you won’t find my photograph in my books. Only in my eighth book have I given my address following a request from a scholar who referred to me in the past tense in her MPhil thesis. ‘Please give your address in your books,’ she said. ‘Otherwise more students of your works will murder you as I did,” she warned.

“I write stories from my own life,” Dharman continued. “I believe the novel is the best form of recording our history. There is nothing new under the sun, and it is my writing, my style that will make you read my novel, not the story itself.”

Dharman illustrated the point by telling us how he would describe the forest in just a sentence or two. “You may enter the forest a hundred times to sight the tiger and come back seeing it only once, but the tiger saw you each of those hundred times.”  He gave us a sample of his indirect depiction of the decimation of a forest by man by following the flight of a parrot that cannot find a tree tall enough to offer a nook for its eggs, so leaves the jungle to deposit it in a neighbouring palm.

Dharman is fascinated by the marginalized among us including nomads and tribes. They have so much wisdom to offer the rest of us, we misjudge them so badly, he believes. He has been trying to befriend nari kuravas and other tribals for some years now in an attempt to understand and learn from them. “Polish, for that is his name, is my kurava friend,” he told yesterday’s audience. “He is of course unlettered, but quite a philosopher. I first met him when he and his fellow kuravas were camping near my house, and a number of clothes went missing from the clotheslines of our colony. Most of my neighbours suspected the kuravas, and I decided to meet him and check it out. I took my son with me, and found Polish cleaning his rifle, and the birds he had shot lying in a heap near him, with ants crawling all over them. There was no sign of the stolen clothes anywhere as Polish and the other kuravas went about their business clad in nothing more than their loincloths. My little son saw peacock feathers lying near Polish and asked him if he could have one. ‘Why do you need one?’ Polish asked him. ‘I’ll keep it with me and collect its fledglings when it gives birth to them,’ my son said. ‘Will you give me one of the little feathers?’ Polish asked him. Once my son nodded in the affirmative, Polish gave him the feather. He refused to accept the five rupees I offered him. ‘This is not for you. Between you and me it would be business, but this is a transaction between your son and me. He has promised to give me a feather in return.’ However, as we prepared tro leave, he shouted to my son, ‘The feather won’t deliver any more feathers.’ Polish is such a gentle, wise person, and we are so ready to brand his tribe as dirty, cunning, dishonest,” Dharman concluded.

When Dharman asked to accompany Polish on a rabbit hunt, the gypsy’s retort was immediate. “Why do you want to share my burden of killing lives? It is natural for a tiger to kill his prey, and it is in my nature to hunt, not yours.” Dharman managed to convince Polish, and did accompany him on the hunting expedition at night. Wearing goggles on his forehead, Polish went in search of rabbits, but when he sighted a couple of young ones, he did not shoot at them. “I will not kill the young,” he explained to Dharman.

There is so much in nature that we do not understand, Dharman told us. He spoke of tailorbirds whose nests have windows opening to one side or the other, depending on which monsoon the northeast or southwest would arrive first in a particular season. He also marvelled at how nesting birds can tell male palmyras from female palms—something no human can—and always build their nests on the male trees, as the female ones rich with fruit are prone to climbing and fruit plucking depredations from humans.

Dharman shared some of his rare experiences with hill tribes with the audience. “The tribals leave untouched overripe jackfruit hanging from the trees for the birds and the bees, never plucking them, and content with the fruit that fall to the ground on their own.  At an annual festival, men and women alike get drunk and dance merrily, dressed in strange bat-like costumes. ‘Without the pollination these creatures do, we would have no forest. Should we not show our gratitude to them?’ the tribals explained to Dharman.

The award winning novel Kookai (Night Owl) is the story of Dalits today, as we can see from this passage from Dharman’s foreword to the novel:

It was some forty years ago. The noon sun was blazing hot. It was perhaps the month of Chittirai, as the neem trees in our woodshad blossomed into a canopy of shade. The neem only blooms in summer. My father and I were standing in another part of our land.

All of a sudden a whole variety of birds, crows, mynahs, karichans and vultures, started surrounding the neem and screaming. Watching the scene wonder-struck, I asked my Ayya what it was all about. Ayya said, “There must be a kookai sitting on the neem tree. Have you seen one?” When I said, no, he took me to the neem tree, walking rapidly.

Ayya bowed before the neem tree with folded hands. When my eyes followed the direction of his obeisance, I saw a big, ugly bird seated there.The other birds flew repeatedly towards it and poked his head with their beaks. The kookai (kottan or owl) kept turning his head to each side and opening his mouth. Every time he opened his mouth, I saw a red  ball of fire inside it.

As Ayya shooed the other birds away, I asked him to explain the horror of the attack on the kookai. “Why do the birds poke the kookai?” He explained that even the smallest of the karichans could attack it. “Why can’t the kookai retaliate?” I asked him. He said, “The poor kookai cannot see during the day. That’s why all these birds attack him at daytime. At night no bird can dare to approach him.”

“Ok, but how do the birds know that the kookai is sitting in this tree?” I asked Ayya.
”There is so much in God’s creation that we don’t know but these birds seem to know.”

The story of the kookai continued to surprise me. After that first sighting, I saw it many times under different circumstances. Every time I see a kookai, I realize I am a kookai too, with an identity inerasable for millennia, an identity that is invisible to me but everyone else can see, an identity that I carry as my burden everywhere. Nights are the most important events of these night owls, nights are when their happiness and sorrows occur. In my novel Kookai, all important incidents must needs be centred around night. 

I believe that the novel is the most appropriate medium to demonstrate how a society, a community moves beyond itself in the space of time. I still see kookais. They slink in holes, hide in tree branches, pierced by other birds, just the way I saw them forty years ago.  

(This passage was translated from the Tamil original by V Ramnarayan).

Remembering PB Srinivas

By V Ramnarayan

Visitors to Chennai’s iconic Woodlands drive-in restaurant near the Gemini flyover during the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium came to expect the presence there of another icon of the city—PB Srinivas, the man with a mellifluous voice who had entertained film music listeners for decades earlier. Srinivas was already a senior citizen but with his creative instincts intact and his productivity as a composer of semi-classical and devotional songs amazingly high. Grandly attired in traditional south Indian clothes topped by a resplendent zari-bordered turban, he sat through the day at one of the tables of the restaurant surrounded by files and his pocket filled with pens of different hues. Over the years, some of the restaurant’s regular clients picked up the courage to go up to him and engage him in conversation, discovering in the process that his voice was still as strong and resonant as when he sang his immortal melodies in films.

When the drive-in restaurant was taken over by the state government in 2008, not only were residents of Chennai deprived of a popular meeting place where students, salesmen, entrepreneurs and executives wove their dreams and planned their projects, they were also denied the pleasure of running into a much-loved celebrity of the city. Srinivas shifted his informal office to other Woodlands cafeterias in the city, but it was never the same again.

Srinivas, popularly known as PBS, was arguably the most versatile, cerebral and well-read musician in the film world for the six decades he was part of it. He was a fluent linguist, for one thing, with mastery over the enunciation of lyrics in Tamil. Telugu, Malayalam. Kannada and Hindi, among other languages. For those not familiar with Indian films, they often have songs in them (six to ten songs in a movie was par for the course for several decades until recently), with the actor lip-syncing with the recorded voices of ‘playback’ singers. Tamil cinema was dominated by a handful of stars when PBS entered the scene, and singers like TM Soundararajan lent their voices to the leading stars of the day, like Sivaji Ganesan and MG Ramachandran. PBS’s voice was not a good match for those of these stars, but fortunately for him, it suited the voices of some other actors like Gemini Ganesan and Muthuraman, for whom PBS sang some of the most memorable melodies in southern cinema.

Born to P.B.V.L. Phanindraswami, an inspector of cooperatives, and Seshagiriamma, in coastal Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh, Srinivas grew up in a sprawling house belonging to his grandparents. He was in his early teens when he fell in love with Hindi film songs composed by such wizards as Naushad.

In the early 1950s, PBS and film music composers GK Venkatesh and M.S. Viswanathan—who brought out Srinivas’s best in Tamil cinema—made a trio of musicians who swore by Naushad. Encouraged by maternal uncle Kidambi Krishnamacharya, a theatre actor and director, Srinivas dreamt of becoming a playback singer like the famous Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh and Lata Mangeshkar of Hindi cinema.

His disciplinarian father discouraged him, even tried to forbid him, and insisted he obtain a degree even after he tripped twice in his school finals. Thanks to tutorials in Madras, PBS finally earned a BCom degree, but his father now wanted him to study for a law degree. Moving to Madras to join the Government Law College, PBS spent more time on music practice than law classes, even winning inter-collegiate singing competitions in the process. He enlisted the services of an astrologer to convince his father that his future lay in film music rather than a conventional job!

Veena virtuoso Emani Sankara Sastri, one of the music directors of Gemini Studios in charge of Hindi films, and a family friend, recognised merit in Srinivas’s lovely voice, and started employing Srinivas as his assistant. Emani proved a loving benefactor who tended to the younger friend like a father, showering him with warmth and affection. Sastri mentored him in growing into a sensitive purveyor of raga-based songs. (“A few decades hence, Emani was to witness the mature Srinivas compose and sing a ragamalika tribute to Tyagaraja. Srinivas even stumbled upon a new raga, which he named Navaneeta Sumasudha,” says film music expert Vamanan in his obituary).

Adinarayana Rao, G Ramanathan and MB Srinivasan, great composers of film songs with a classical touch to them, were some of the music directors to spot the talent in PBS and give him early breaks in Tamil and other southern cinema.

Through the 1960s and seventies, PBS enjoyed success as the most delicate and sensitive voice in Tamil cinema, with his duets with woman singers of the calibre of P Susila winning him a sizable number of admirers, but without the fanatical following of the likes of TM Soundararajan. He was at his evocative best while rendering sad or philosophical songs. He became part of a popular trio that included the music directorsViswanathan-Ramamurthy and lyricist Kannadasan, and delivered some of the most tuneful and emotive songs of the era.

Competition soon caught up with PBS, with some brilliant new voices in KJ Yesudas and SP Balasubramaniam and music directors like Ilaiyaraja transformed the film industry altogether with a predominance of SPB and Yesudas songs. Fading away from the playback-singing world, PBS reinvented himself as a composer of semi-classical and devotional music, exploiting his proficiency in languages, poetry and compositional ability. Though no longer a star singer in the films, he continued in the music field almost till his death in April 2013.

A man of many interests, PBS was a regular at many classical music concerts in the city, Hindustani music in particular, and invariably made it a point at the end of a performance to applaud the artists with some choice phrases of praise, including verses he composed on the spot. This writer was among those who marvelled at his devotion to music that made him nonchalantly climb a steep spiral staircase to attend a Hindustani vocal recital at a suburban venue one evening just a couple of months before his death.

Among some of the quirky sidelights of PBS’s life was a song he composed when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, PBS sent a recording of the song to Armstrong and Richard Nixon, then president of the US. He treasured their replies to him.

According to his devoted wife Janaki,  ‘He lived a carefree man; he has departed just as he lived’. The singer had had close brushes with death earlier, once butted by a cow with fierce horns on a busy Chennai street. When the end came, however, he had just sat at the dining table and passed away peacefully.

First published in Matrix, the house journal of The Sanmar Group

The KVN bani

In one of his last concerts, KVN  moved listeners to tears with the depth of feeling of his rendering of Gopalakrishna Bharati’s, Varugalamo Ayya, Nandan’s desperate plea before the lord.

It was hardly surprising, for he was known for the emotional impact his music had on listeners, but he was himself always in control of the sruti- and laya-perfect music he purveyed.

Sangita Kalanidhi KV Narayanaswamy’s music continues to have a huge impact on many of the present generation of singers, the youngest of whom probably never heard him live.

I asked some of them why they liked KVN’s singing so much. None came up with an answer that really answered my question. It is as if the young musicians, both men and women, have turned to the quietude and bhava of his singing almost intuitively in their quest for beauty in their art. One of them said she admired KVN’s vocal technique, which he had devised to suit his voice; it put no strain on his voice or physique.

She described his style as a blend of melody and vishayam, with in-built rhythm and without undue emphasis on kanakku.

All the young musicians I spoke to agreed that his niraval singing went beyond stitching words and melody together to seamlessly integrate the rhythmic dimension as well.

Was his voice ever a powerful rather than a mellifluous one? Few recordings prove the existence of such a reality. His career is generally believed to have been divided by a heart condition into two distinct phases. Some of the early recordings hint at a more full-bodied, slightly more akaram-oriented style of singing than the later KVN voice.

But the KVN way has been a continuum uninterrupted by stylistic changes. It is already becoming evident that a number of young vocalists, of his and other sishya paramparas, are proving to be exemplars of his melody-rich school of music. I’m sure we shall soon be regularly speaking of the KVN bani.

His was effortless music of a kind we rarely come across. It has been said that he became “immersed in his music, thoroughly forgetting himself and thereby providing a divine experience for the listener.”

This effortlessness could be very misleading. I generally avoid cricketing metaphors, but I cannot resist the temptation today. Sir Garfield Sobers, arguably the greatest cricketer of all time, did look effortless while batting, bowling or fielding in a Test match. He indeed rarely practised in the nets in his mature years. Hidden, however, were years of strenuous practice, or rather sheer enjoyment of playing the game endlessly on the beaches and grounds of his native Barbados.

Likewise, KVN was known not to labour too much over pre-concert sadhakam in his mature years but to go on stage and sing spontaneously. The effortlessness was therefore more than mere appearance. What were not visible were the years of effort behind it.

His sishyas and associates knew that though he was blessed with natural fidelity to sruti, he was never satisfied during practice until he was certain he had got the notes absolutely right. In fact, sruti perfection was an article of faith with KVN, and lack of it in a sishya was the only thing that ever made him angry. The best tribute an aspiring vocalist can pay to KVN’s memory would be tireless practice to guarantee sruti suddham, not imitation of his style of singing.

Gowri Ramnarayan once said, “Some musicians appeal to the mind, to the intellect. Other musicians appeal to the heart. But only a very few in the history of music appeal to the soul. They charge the spirit within.” She was obviously referring to the rare musician that KVN was.

Could such soulful music rooted in all the vital aspects of music come together in a single musician by serendipity? Perhaps, they can, in one so naturally musical as KVN. But his teachers and mentors other than his Gurunathar Ariyakudi–whom he worshipped—included his father Kollenkode Viswanatha Bhagavatar and Papa Venkataramiah, both violinists, and mridangam maestro Palghat Mani Iyer. (A rare photograph of KVN playing the tavil indicates the extent of his laya proficiency). His love of the Dhanammal school of music and his experience of learning songs from the family were also a significant influence on his music.

All these varied influences must be the background behind his mastery of raga and tala as well as his superb team ethos that invariably energized his accompanists to give of their best in his concerts.

It was my good fortune that I had several interactions with KVN and his family and a whole brood of sishyas—towards the end of the 20^th century, right up to a few months before he passed away.

Assigned the task of editing and publishing his biography in Tamil by journalist Neelam of Swadesamitran fame, and an English translation by Justice VR Krishna Iyer, as well as several tributes by his admirers, I ended up also interviewing his family and his disciples including Prashanth Hemmige, Balaji Shankar, Pattabhiram Pandit, Karthik and Sudhir—to add weight to the slim volume.

Through many informal sessions at his home, I got to see at close quarters evidence of his endearing qualities of heart, his natural musicality (including his tendency to even speak in his singing sruti), his lovely habit of whistling some raga or kriti, and his affectionate hospitality. His students, a constant presence at the Narayanaswamy residence at Mandaveli, termed it “sishyakulavasam”. It was KVN and Padma who looked after them with love and concern, not the other way around.

KVN’s son Viswanathan confirms that KVN forgot the world in his pursuit of music. “He did not even know which branch of engineering I was studying,” he told me. He praised the Sruti commemorative volume on KVN soon after his death as the best tribute he read, Pattabhi Raman’s interview with Padma Narayanaswamy in particular.

He drew my attention to a reference in it to a conversation between KVN and Jon Higgins. Higgins wanted to know why audiences sat entranced when KVN was rendering Tyagaraja yoga vaibhavam, but tried to slip away when Higgins sang it. KVN explained to Higgins how to go about investing the song with appeal, but startled him by saying he learnt the song from a Higgins record.

Viswanathan also spoke of KVN’s mastery of concert music. He never asked anyone what he or she thought of his music. Once on stage, he was absolutely confident. He lifted the audience to a different plane when he sang songs like Varugalamo, Krishna nee begane, Enneramum, Aliveni, Mayamma and other favourites like Kana vendamo or Tiruvadi saranam, songs of total surrender. 

The listener was invariably moist-eyed, but KVN was in full control. According to KNV, a famous mridanga vidwan said he never had to worry about an exodus during tani, because everyone stayed to listen to KVN’s soul-stirring post-main pieces.

Another devoted sishya has been a close friend of mine. The self-effacing, now US-based Tulsi Ram (he was then known as Toufiq Tuzeme) was a French-Algerian disciple completely devoted to KVN, who in turn showered his affection on him. Tulsi fondly recalls how KVN once introduced him to the sage of Kanchi, proudly declaring that the young man was a vegetarian who shunned leather.

He also recalled how KVN enjoyed watching films like Maya Bazaar and Nandanar Charitram at Kapali or Eros cinemas, or during his Berkeley California days watching a kung fu tv serial up to the point sometimes of almost being late for the weekly concerts at the Center for World Music, fortunately only a few yards from the flat. He also remembers with gratitude how KVN and Padma looked after him spending their own money when he was seriously ill and again when he met with an accident. Tulsi never made it as a concert musician, but he could laugh at himself. 

When I once asked him about his progress in music, he said: “I must be improving. People ask me to stop singing these days. Earlier they would ask me to stop making noise.”

After the book I edited was done, I made an anxious phone call to KVN inquiring about it, as he had not called to comment on the just published book. Reassuring me, he said, “Bookkai aaraakkum undaakkiyathu? Ramanarayanan allavo?!” (Who produced the book? Was it not Ramanarayanan?)

It was typically kind of him; I had myself not been satisfied with the outcome of the project. He was perhaps making allowances for something the two of us shared: Ramanarayanan had been his given name at birth!

In conclusion, I’d like to say that KVN has left a unique legacy of music rooted in bhava, technically perfect but never designed to show off technical prowess, a model for present and future practitioners to adopt for its total adherence to sruti suddham. Equally important is to remember that KVN’s pure music came from his pure heart and good nature, as Sruti Pattabhi Raman said.