Savithri Satyamurthi: devoted to her music

By Rasika Viswanath

Every once in a while there comes a person whose life and accomplishments touch you very deeply. Savithri Satyamurthy’s life and musical journey touched the hearts of many accomplished musicians, students, music connoisseurs as well as  rasikas across eras and cities.

Born to Meenakshi and Ramanathan, Savithri started learning music in the town of Hosur with violin lessons from Madurai Subramania Iyer. A move to Trichy opened up a whole new world of music for her. She earned her stripes under the strict tutelage of Erode Viswanatha Iyer. Her growing  years involved spending three years as an inmate of the Ariyakudi household, when she also honed her violin technique under guru RajamanickamPillai. Imagine the wealth of musical experience she would have gained in those early years with these stalwarts as her guiding light, RajamIyer, K.V.Narayanaswami, Madurai Krishnan as co-disciples and as a regular accompanist to Dhanammal.

Right from her childhood, Savithri was a meticulous stickler for discipline and punctuality. She learfnt these lessons from her primary school teacher in Trichy and lived by it all through her life. Marriage and a move to Bombay changed the direction of her music career, and the birth of “Teacher Savithri”. Her musical knowledge and urge to keep learning combined with her inherent qualities made her set exacting standards and expect nothing short of perfection from her students.  Her music education continued in Bombay through the visits of stalwarts like Kumbakonam Rajamanikkam Pillai, Madurai Mani Iyer and Ramnad Krishnan, who stayed at her residence in Mumbai. Madurai Mani Iyer was especially fond of Savithri’s special idlis for breakfast.

After seeing her children well settled in life, Savithri came  to Chennai in 1972  and  the move resurrected the concert artist in Savithri.  The musicians she began to accompany in concerts represented the who’s who of the Carnatic music world. M.S.Subbalakshmi, D.K.Pattamal, T.Muktha, Mani Krishnaswami and R.Vedavalli were examples.

The shift also saw her blossoming as a teacher under the guidance of Dr. S. Ramanathan to whom she had also become a regular concert accompanist.  Her students would tremble at the thought of facing her even if they were a minute late to her classes or unprepared from the previous lesson. The quality of her teaching was the same regardless of where when and how she taught. Her students from across generations having learnt from her several decades apart could come together and sing the compositions learnt from her in perfect unison. It was this rigour that produced from among her students a number of concert artists as well as music lovers and connoisseurs. A strict disciplinarian as a teacher, she was a deeply loving person and friend to her students outside of her classes.

Complete devotion to music and her gurus as well as implicit faith in Lord Krishna were facets of her life that really stood out. Her meticulous maintenance of her music notations drew admiration from not only her students but many stalwarts as well. A number of Dr. Ramanathan’s compositions are alive today, thanks to her painstaking notation. She will be fondly remembered by all her students as well as the music fraternity.

(Rasika Viswanath is a granddaughter and disciple of the late Savithri Satyamurthy)

That sixties feeling

By V Ramnarayan

‘Alas the Jam Sahib is fat!” wrote AG Gardiner when Ranji turned forty. Those of us walking wounded of the 1960s who had recently gathered to catch a glimpse of the handsome, fiery young student leader of our generation at Mylapore, Chennai, were relieved to see Tariq Ali had not grown fat, though not any more the dashing, slim figure of the decade of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The sparkle in his eyes had given way to a thoughtful gaze beneath glasses, a frown made him look almost magisterial, and he fitted in perfectly amidst the collection of grey eminences on stage.

The air of near-anonymity ends the moment Tariq Ali stands before the microphone, his weapon of destruction all those decades ago, when he spewed fire on the capitalists of the world, when he led the occupation of the Sorbonne by over 30,000 students, protesting against the Vietnam War among a host of burning issues of the day. He may not be fiery any more but he does make every word count and grips the listener’s attention from start to finish.

Today, as he addresses students of the Asian College of Journalism and other guests, he speaks in the measured tones of an elder statesman, with every word, every turn of phrase pregnant with meaning and purpose, witty, precise, quietly impassioned. “At Oxford in the 1960s, a distinguished Indian was a couple of years my junior. I haven’t changed since then, nor has Montek Singh Ahluwalia. He remains as deeply conservative as ever,” he took a sly barb at the economist, instantly winning over the young audience.

In a lecture titled ‘The State of Journalism in the 21^st Century: Celebrities, Trivia and Whistleblowers,’ Tariq Ali deplored the assault of the mainstream media by celebrity trivia—which he described as a phenomenon that began at the end of the Cold War—and the rapid subsequent decline in journalistic standards. He had predicted—rightly—at the time of the intense hyperbole over Princess Diana’s death, that in ten years’ time there would be no memorials for Diana, that she would disappear from the memory of the media. In contrast, there had been intrepid, principled correspondents and commentators, he said, who dared to criticise the double standards of the West whenever it went to war against nations like Korea and Vietnam, in total contrast to the capitulation of the western media to their governments at the time of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Describing India’s attitude in the matter of asylum seeker Edward Snowden as supine, he described the likes of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Snowden as freedom fighters, and not fugitives as the western press has shown great haste to call them.

It is evident from his writings and utterances that Tariq held and continues to hold the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in the greatest esteem. In his death, he believes the world has lost one of the political giants of the post-communist era. His bluntness and courage drew Tariq Ali to him, as did his thoughtful observations that could at times seem impulsive and “depending on the response, enlarged by spontaneous eruptions on his part.” 

According to him, Chávez lit up the political landscape, at a time when young voters cannot tell the ideological difference between one party and another, with all politicians obsessed with making money. Tariq Ali remembers Chavez “speaking for hours to his people in a warm, sonorous voice, a fiery eloquence” and stunning resonance, his speeches littered with homilies, history, quotes from the 19th-century revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar, pronouncements on the state of the world--and songs, that he sang with great enthusiasm and persuaded his audiences to join in.

A playwright and filmmaker in addition to being a prolific writer of essays, articles and books of non-fiction today, the passionate rebel and intellectual has never been far from the arts, music in particular. Disappointingly for this writer, he prefers the Rolling Stones to the Beatles (“more exciting, more sensual, better to dance to”). The women of his youth, according to him, might have worshipped the Beatles, but the “real men”  followed the Stones. He recalls with something akin to glee how sitar maestro Ravi Shankar dismissed the media hype that his music had any impact on that of the Fab Four.

The first play Tariq Ali saw in England was Joan Littlewood's Oh What a Lovely War, “a moving homage to music hall culture and Brecht.” London was the most exciting place for the theatre enthusiast in the 1960s,with Beckett and Ionescu, Pinter and Peter Brook, all doing or preparing to do monumental work at the Royal Theatre and elsewhere.

His despair of Pakistani politicians—plunderers with no concern for the welfare of the people—is no different from his contempt for its military dictators, just as corrupt and greedy.  Expressing great sadness in an article in The Guardian, soon after Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt were caught cheating in a sting operation, he wrote: “Yes, WG Grace was a cheat on and off the field. Yes, captains of other teams – India and South Africa – have engaged in similar practices. Yes, the betting syndicates are a major part of the problem. So what? Since when has one crime justified another? How many times have I heard apologists for corrupt Pakistani politicians justifying their pillage by arguing that Europe and America also have corrupt politicians. The problem is that in Pakistan that's all we have, with few exceptions – one of whom is Imran Khan, who was also Pakistan's finest and most incorruptible captain.”

The all-round social degeneration has not made Tariq Ali a cynic, or lessened his resolve to try to change the world. At the recent Chennai lecture, he encouraged his young audience to stick to their principles: “It is important for you not to forget the history of journalism and its development.”

Sruti Editorial

FROM THE EDITOR

Fears that some of our senior musicians may go unrewarded as Sangita Kalanidhi by the Madras Music Academy have receded somewhat with the announcement of vidwan T.V. Gopalakrishnan’s elevation to that coveted honour this year. A versatile artist of many dimensions, TVG has been a youthful, energetic presence in the world of Carnatic music, sometimes beyond it, for some seven decades, now. As a mridanga vidwan, vocalist in more than one genre, composer, guru and proselytizer, the man from Tripunithura has been known to be a swashbuckler among the orthodox, a traditionalist amidst the pro-changers, reverent towards his gurus and questioning of taboos, all at once. His admirers and critics may be about equal in number, but no one who has followed Carnatic music closely for a long time will question his credentials. He has been consistently hard to ignore, and many of us who had given up the hope – after he crossed 80 – that he would follow in his guru Chembai’s footsteps, now rejoice in this richly deserved recognition. Knowing his articulation, we can expect him to bring flair to the conduct of the academic sessions at this year’s conference.

Musicians of the calibre of M.S. Anantharaman, T.H. Vinayakram, V.V. Subramaniam, Vyjayantimala Bali (though essentially a dancer, like Sangita Kalanidhi T. Balasaraswati), P.S. Narayanaswami, Suguna Purushothaman, R. Visweswaran, and Tanjavur Sankara Iyer are some other names that come to mind as artists deserving of high honours. While the Music Academy has decorated some of them as Sangita Kala Acharya, there may still be a case for a Kalanidhi or lifetime achievement award for a few of them. Synonymous with the ghatam, Vinayakram, would, in particular, seem to be a perfect candidate for the ultimate award.

It is no easy task to select one honouree every year from a large pool of contenders, we know, and this is no attempt to offer criticism or gratuitous advice to an institution that has been grappling with it and generally giving satisfaction to all but its most strident critics. We must, however, acknowledge the very real danger that among a vast variety of specialists, vocal and instrumental – lead and accompanying, wind, string and percussion – some outstanding vidwans can escape the radar altogether. Some, like M.D. Ramanathan, were ignored for far too long, while others like Rajarathnam Pillai and Ramnad Krishnan perhaps did not live long enough.

The truly great may care little for worldly success. We know from the extraordinary lives of the Van Goghs, Gauguins, Monets and Manets of the Western artistic world, that many geniuses went unsung and unhonoured in their lifetime, but we do not often hear of giants of Carnatic music who led impoverished lives of no reward, and whose greatness the world came to appreciate only after their death. There is a high probability that there were several such instances that went unrecorded, quite literally before the advent of the gramophone, and owing to our lack of rigour in documenting our history, though there may be stories galore floating around in the realm of legend.

V. RAMNARAYAN