The story of the Press in Tamil Nadu

(A new series)

by V Ramnarayan

Probably born in Calcutta in the 1780s, Indian newspaper publishing spread to Madras and Bombay soon, within a decade or so. By 1800 several dozen English newspapers were being published, catering mainly to the British. The Armenian monthly, Azdarar, published in Madras in 1794, making Madras the birthplace of Armenian journalism, was the first non-English journal.

Language journalism probably had its origins in 1818, with Digdarsana, a bilingual English/ Bengali newspaper published by the Serampore Baptist Mission. The Bombay Samachar first came out in 1922 in Gujarati and English. It is published today as Mumbai Samachar, the oldest continuously published paper in India and one of the oldest in the world.

Issues from 1829 of the Kulasa-i-akhbar-i-lateef, handwritten in Persian and read daily to Emperor Akbar Shah II  can be seen in the Red Fort Museum in Delhi.

Eventually papers came to be published in all the languages of the subcontinent as well as Dutch, French and Portuguese.

Journalism in Madras

The Government Gazette was established in Madras 1831. The St George Gazette, whose first issue appeared in 1832, the various military orders, the Queen’s orders and other such official publications were printed by The Madras Asylum Press, originally meant for the children of ex-soldiers and officers  to learn printing as a craft.

ENGLISH JOURNALISM

Of all the newspapers published in Tamil Nadu, The Hindu (1878) is surpassed in circulation only by the Tamil newspapers Dinakaran and Dina Thanthi. It is one of three English language dailies from Chennai, the Tamil Nadu capital. The New Indian Express and the Deccan Chronicle are the other two.

As KP Viswanatha Iyer, Assistant Editor, The Hindu, writing in the Madras Tercentenary Commemoration Volume, 1939, says, newspapers in the city “had their origin in the needs of the small but growing European Colony of the Presidency.” In “the first century of the city’s life, it had no newspapers,” yet to be born even in England.

The earliest newspapers of Madras were The Government Gazette, the Madras Gazette and the Madras Courier, all weeklies. They covered mainly news of the social life of the community. They also carried extracts from European newspapers, especially reports of parliamentary proceedings. The news was often hopelessly out of date, thanks to the erratic steamer service between Europe and India. The months between October and December were particularly slack periods.

Modern journalism of Madras was a byproduct of politics, political newspapers coming to be established towards the mid-nineteenth century, with The Spectator (1836), The Madras Times (1860) and The Madras Mail (1867) all established with a view to promoting European interests in the presidency. The Madras Times, which,  had a stormy existence before it was absorbed by The Mail, represented the European trader, the planter and the small merchant. The Madras Mail was aristocratic, supported by Europeans in the services and captains of commerce. It was modelled on the serious newspapers of England, ‘and under the Lawsons and Mr. Henry Beauchamp, reflected the mind of the European intellectual.’

The Madras Courier, established on 12 October 1785 and edited by Richard Johnson, was the first newspaper from Madras, while Maasa Dina Sarithai (1812), published by Gnanaprakasam, was the first Tamil magazine to be published in Madras, and perhaps the first periodical to be brought out in any Indian language, even before the Bengal Gazette (1816) published in English by Gangadhar Bhattacharjee, and the bilingual Dik Darshan (1818) in English and Bengali.

William Urquhart, the founder of The Madras Courier started it as an advertising half sheet in large types, known as the Commercial Circulator, in Stringer Street. Its young editor C H Clay, a clerk to the Chief Justice and Court Sealer, made it famous.

The first competition to the Courier came in 1793, in the form of the short-lived new publication, the Hircarrah, edited by a former Courier editor, Hugh Boyd. The Government Gazette—which from 1800 onwards was printed at the first Government Press—and the Madras Gazette (both 1795) were followed in 1836 by The Spectator—first published by D Ouchterlony and later by C Sooboo Moodely and
C M Pereira from the Spectator Press.

Started as a weekly, The Spectator became a daily in 1850, only to be taken over by the Madras Times (1835), the first paper from Madras to establish a strong journalistic tradition. The Madras Times, located in Broadway, benefited substantially from the cable link with England established in the year of its launch. A father and son pair called Gantz took over the paper in 1859. The paper went back to its 1835 beginnings as a biweekly, but appears to have had a chequered career till it began thriving under Charles Lawson and Henry Cornish in the 1860s. When they quit after a proprietor-editor dispute, the Madras Mail was born. Late in the 19^th century the Times grew in power under the editorship of George Romilly. 

(TO BE CONTINUED)

My column in DNA

http://epaper.dnaindia.com/story.aspx?id=44828&boxid=16572&ed_date=2013-5-04&ed_code=820009&ed_page=10

A 21st century essayist

Foreword to KN Rao's 'A Mosaic of Human Thought'

I first came across Prof. K N Rao’s writing in a column he wrote for the city portal Chennai Online on the trees of Madras. Little did I know at the time that I would one day be involved in an editorial capacity in publishing a book on the subject by the professor. Not only is he an expert on trees, in Chennai and elsewhere, and botany at large, but also the archetypal polymath we do not come across nowadays. They don’t make them like that anymore!

During the course of that interaction, I came to develop a comfortably warm relationship with Prof. Rao, a friendship between two people interested in literature and the arts. He is more than twenty years my senior, but more energetic than many of my age. I was at the time responsible for Indian Writing, an imprint of New Horizon Media, which was then publishing Indian, notably Tamil, literature in translation into English. He was a great supporter of our initiative and bought every title we brought out. Not only did he read all of them, he also commended us for the great trouble we took to maintain quality. He was probably more hurt and disappointed than we were when some of our efforts did not measure up to our own standard. He took the liberty of scolding us when he thought poorly of our choice of works to translate.

Over the last few years, I have come to know the many facets of Mr Rao’s creativity. He has written several short stories in Telugu, which I have not read as I do not know the language, but his writings in English have been delightfully varied. William Shakespeare is a particular favourite of his, as we can gather from a number of essays included in this volume. In a chapter entitled Wit and Wisdom of Shakespeare, Prof. Rao refers to the chair in which he lounged and spent the “happiest hours of my otherwise drab and long life.”  “And thank God, I chose to read the bard without the help of Verity, Arden and such others,” he continues, a tribute to not only his excellent taste in literature but also his superior intellect. “The Shakespeare bug bit me in the early fifties of the last century. Play after play, I devoured, refusing to seek outside help.” 

Prof. Rao is no ordinary devourer, though. He draws parallels between literature and life, literature and philosophy, literature and nature, so on and so forth. For instance, quoting Nerissa from Merchant of Venice (The ancient saying is no hersy/ Hanging and wiving goes by destiny), he finds resonances with the Hindu doctrine of Karma.

Or take the pathetic plea of the much-maligned merchant of Venice, “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions…If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If we poison us, do we not die?” Rao says, “This has been the plight of Dalits in our own land, for centuries. Now after millennia, they speak the language of Shylock.” They “eke out their livelihood by manual scavenging, cleaning the cesspools, going down into the drains braving poisonous gas…”  

While on his Shakespearean journey, Prof. Rao is in his element when he compares “the noblest Roman of them all”, Brutus with the politician of today, of whom he says: “Do such men have a chance of succeeding? More often than not, men with ideas of cleansing politics are likely to meet the fate of Brutus. This Brutus had had the satisfaction of dying for his cause. It is more likely a modern day Brutus will end up as a Cassius.”

Prof. Rao’s explorations of Shakespeare lead him to an analysis of the motivations and psychology of three murderers from Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet.  “Othello had the makings of a murderer in him: Iago was merely the stage director for the action,” he observes. Macbeth “was at first a murderer by instigation, through suggestion next and finally a callous, cruel and wanton bloodbather.” “Hamlet’s murders were the fruition of the workings of a highly cultivated mind through its conscious and subconscious moorings,” he says, drawing clear distinctions between the three protagonists

While on the subject of Shakespeare, Prof. Rao is really in his element when he carries out “a brief botanical survey of Shakespeare.” He takes us on a tour-de-force of the many-splendoured vegetation that abounds in the Bard’s plays, starting from acorn cups and burr to the willow and yew trees of Much Ado about Nothing, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Titus and Andronicus.”

The essay, “Harbingers of Indian awakening” provides proof if proof is needed of Prof. Rao’s expansive range of interests that cover far greater ground than nature or literature. A man of science, one who swears by science, Rao does not fail to acknowledge the role played by two outstanding spiritual gurus in Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda. He says, “All leaders from Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose and Rajaji downwards agree that the political struggle they launched had gained substance, thanks to this great work of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Their memory will forever be enshrined in the Indian consciousness.”

In ‘Three great men of Athens”, Prof. Rao writes with awe about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Unsurprisingly he says no other city has nurtured such great sons through the millennia. Socrates was so fond of truth that he questioned the wisdom of the wise.  He resisted unjust commands at the risk of his life. “One might say that Socrates was the father of definitions. But it required great courage to pursue his path.”

In another chapter, Rao tries to grapple with the problem of what is or is not truth. He calls it the most elusive element of things in human experience. It is elusive because it stems from the perception of an event, implying understanding of an observation. “Obviously, what appears as truth to one may appear quite differently to another.” He goes on to claim that the truth of science is not the truth of socio-ethical colour. “Rather, it is a bundle of facts, every one of which is incontrovertibly demonstrated as true by observation and experiment.”            Yet, Rao refuses to dismiss the truth as experienced by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.

Rao, the compassionate human being and Rao the man of science seem to coexist without much conflict. In the chapter “On Death”, Prof. Rao is able to speak of the devastating personal tragedy of his son’s death in an accident as well as the continuity of creation, of species, including the human race. If after that terrible loss, he could console his wife by narrating a story of Buddha to demonstrate the inescapable fact of death, he could also marvel at the “wonderful mix of mortality and immortality” that began in a group of green algae called Volvocales.”

Death need not be bemoaned, he goes on to conclude. “It is a mechanism which made possible senescence and consequently organs with a lesser degree of efficiency of vegetative functioning die out. The mortal coils of the individual are shed so that the immortality of the species is ensured.” And the last sentence of the book says it all. “”. Whichever way one looks at the question, the thought of God has to reign our minds: maybe not a personal God, but a principle which is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.”

I often meet Prof. Rao at events connected with books or the performing arts. I have invariably been struck by his youthful joie-de-vivre and positive outlook. And though he often has a good laugh at his own frailty and mortality, maybe because he does so, he fills me with inspiration and hope for the morrow. That he has brought out this volume at such an advanced stage of his life is proof of his immortal spirit.

V RAMNARAYAN

10 July 2009

Chennai

‘What do they know of music?

(First published in SAMAHIT, the Natya Kala Conference souvenir, 2012)

The day after Priya Govind and Akhila Ramnarayan asked me to write on cricket and music—unfortunately not as separate topics, and therefore complicating my life no end—came a telephone call from Carnatic vocalist Unnikrishnan, a call that straightaway lightened my burden considerably. As many of you know, Unni is a good sportsman who continues to play recreational tennis but also someone whose cricket is of a very decent standard. His phone call had nothing to do with either cricket or music, but my thoughts immediately went back to the time some years ago when our paths in these two fields intersected. Unni and I played some cricket and less tennis together. He is of course much younger than I, so much younger that I have also played cricket with his father Radhakrishnan, who, besides being a qualified Ayurvedic physician, was a pretty useful batsman in the 1950s and 60s, even into the seventies.

To cut a long story short, Unni’s quite promising cricket career started when mine was already over, though I continued to play from memory, to enjoy the perverse pleasure of competing with men half my age. By the time we first played against each other, I for Alwarpet CC and he for Madras CC, I had heard him on the concert platform, starting with a recital at the wedding reception of a fellow cricketer. I still remember the pride with which Radha informed me that the singer of the evening was his son, and the resemblance I noticed in the early Unni voice to that of Yesudas. Later, by a strange quirk of fate, I was invited to first play for and later captain the Parry’s Recreation Club when well into my 40s, though I had nothing to do with the Parry group. Unni, a business management graduate, was by then a management trainee in the company, and a leading member of the cricket team. During one of our matches, I told Unni how much I enjoyed listening to his first film song (a fairly straightforward rendering of Venkata Kavi’s Alai payude in a Malayalam film). Unni’s response was quietly modest: “I’ve sung some 50 film songs already, Ram.”

My most memorable Unnikrishnan experience was to follow in about a year’s time after this episode. I had organized a chamber concert of his at home (the second or third such occasion) one Sunday, when we cam e to know that the programme was clashing with a league game for Parry. As captain, I could not relieve Unni from the match, nor did he, as a competitive sportsman, want any such privilege. I toyed with the idea of postponing the concert, but too many people had already accepted our invitation with great anticipation, as Unni was at the very peak of his popularity. Domestic discord was a serious possibility even a probability if I did anything so foolish as to call off the performance. To complicate matters more, it turned out Unni had a wedding concert at Nagercoil the previous night.

The match was at distant Pallavaram, at the English Electric ground, which proved to be a small mercy, as Unni was able to get off the district bus (after travelling all night) very near the ground. I lost the toss, and the good soldier he was, Unni fielded in the hot sun with the rest of the team. He was dependable no. 3 batsman, perhaps our highest run-getter that year, but I asked him to open the innings—a role to which he was not a complete stranger—so that he could go home early and rest after his batting. Unfortunately, Unni was dismissed for zero or thereabouts, but simply refused to go home, waiting for us to complete the match in the evening. We happened to win the match, so we all went home in a happy frame of mind, but poor Unni had to go all the way to his Royapettah home, shower, change and come to my Kottivakkam home on the East Coast Road. We started the concert half an hour late, but it was a superb performance by Mr. Dependable.

Unni was not quite the first professional classical musician to have played competitive cricket I personally knew. That honour went to the late Ravi Kichlu of the Hindustani vocal duo the Kichlu Brothers. Ravi often entertained me with snatches of alap standing next to me in the slips on the maidan of Calcutta. We were both playing for Rajasthan Club in the 1969-70 league season. But I almost forgot wicket keeper Sivakumar my Mylapore Recreation Club teammate, mridanga vidwan, son of DK Pattammal and father of Nithyashree Mahadevan.

At the national level, I knew or knew of a few musically inclined cricketers. The great Vijay Manjrekar was a good singer and so is his son Sanjay. Padmakar Shivalkar was another Bombay player who gave vocal performances on stage. Some of us have heard Bapu Nadkarni do a more than passable imitation of KL Saigal. The late ML Jaisimha, under whose captaincy I played for Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy, had an impressive voice with which he belted out popular songs. He brought the roof down at a restaurant at Bangkok back in 1978 when the house orchestra handed him the microphone and he gave a few lusty samples of his Frank Sinatra repertoire and Louis Armstrong’s When the Saints Go Marching in.

Also seated at the same table was an accomplished vocalist in Shanti Hiranand, disciple and biographer of Begum Akhtar and sister-in-law of former India captain GS Ramchand. Mr & Mrs Ramchand were the gracious hosts that evening and Jaisimha, Murtuza Ali Baig and I the lucky guests during a Hyderabad Blues cricket tour (Thailand has some cricket and on our way back from Australia, we played a game at The Royal Bangkok Sports Club). We even got Ms Hiranand to sing a song for us.

Jai was the life and soul of the party during cocktails after my brother V Sivaramakrishnan’s benefit match, which was between two teams of star-studded veteran India players of the past. He completely replaced the band of the evening at the Connemara that night. My own personal highlight was to be part of an improbable trio of MLJ, Sunil Gavaskar and I. Only cacophony resulted, but nobody in the audience seemed to mind.

Jaisimha’s friend and teammate MAK ‘Tiger’ Pataudi, whose last season for Hyderabad in the Ranji Trophy was my first, had a keen ear for music, and could play the tabla, according to some of his close associates. I had this habit of whistling constantly in the dressing room, and Tiger caught me whistling a song from the film Jahan Ara—which had some exquisite music by Madan Mohan—and gave a stentorian interpretation of Phir wohi shaam in sharp contrast to Talat Mahmood’s dulcet tones. Another verse he was fond of bellowing in a voice that threatened to shatter the windows went Gulshan, gulshan, shola-e-gul ki. I was intrigued and curious to know the rest of the song, but I had to wait for quite sometime before I solved the mystery. It turned out, of course, to be the opening line of a gentle, romantic Mehdi Hassan ghazal, the first I was to hear from that master of the genre.

The ubiquitous two-in-one dominated the recreational needs of the cricketers of the 1970s, and thanks to the great leg-spinner BS Chandrasekhar, the Hindi film songs of Mukesh were the most popular choice of a whole generation of cricketers. Chandra must have been all of 18 or 19 when he first heard a Mukesh song wafting in out of transistor radios in the crowd during a match. ‘Tu kahe agar’ I believe was the song to cast a spell on him, and he actually mistook Mukesh’s voice for KL Saigal’s. That Chandra became a diehard fan and later a close friend of Mukesh is part of the cricket lore of the period.

If the reader is left wondering why I chose this topic or what my credentials for the task of writing on it are, let me explain. I was an active, sometimes semi-professional cricketer for some 30 years, and have been writing on music and editing a magazine on performing arts during the last decade or so. People sometimes ask me to explain how a cricketer like me took to writing on the arts, and I sometimes tell them that I was dropped on my head as a child—which sometimes causes startled, incredulous responses. The real answer is that if you were born in the Madras of the 1940s in a middle-class brahmin family (even if you are a bad brahmin like me), chances are that you grew up in the midst of much music and much cricket. This is probably still true of most households that come from similar backgrounds. Add to that a love of language and you can end up writing on both music and cricket, as I did after failing at several other vocations!

There have been a few—though all too few—great writers through history whose gaze focused on these two great arts and sciences. You may raise an eyebrow or two at my inclusion of cricket in the category of art and science, but you would then be indirectly doing that to possibly the first writer to excel at both—Sir Neville Cardus, who described the batting of Sir Garfield Sobers thus: His immense power is lightened by a rhythm which has in it as little obvious propulsion as a movement of music by Mozart.” Yehudi Menuhin once said, Cardus “reminds us that there is an understanding of the heart as well of the mind… in Neville Cardus, the artist has an ally”.

According to writer, broadcaster and biographer Robin Daniels, Cardus believed in the power of great art to change lives from within. “Genius is a miracle to be revered whether in fashion or not,” Cardus said, and he did revere genius in cricket as well as music. Daniels also said that Cardus fought the good fight for Gustav Mahler when the composer was largely unknown. He rated him as a great critic “because he combines deep feeling and imagination with an eye that saw symbolically”.

Cardus was knowns to exaggerate, even accused of writing on matches and concerts he did not attend, but he brought literature to cricket writing as much as to music criticism. “To go to a cricket match for nothing but cricket is as though a man were to go into an inn for nothing but drink,” he said

He described CB Fry, the great English all rounder, as “a national gallery and a theatre and a forum”. Of the inimitable KS Ranjitsinhji, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, he said “he never played a Christian stroke in his life”, in praise of his delightfully unorthodox ways.

One of the most remarkable personalities of English cricket was the radio commentator John Arlott, the man responsible for Cape Coloured cricketer Basil D’Oliveira’s entry into English cricket and eventual ascent to world fame. Arlott had an unconvetional voice for BBC, "a sound like Uncle Tom Cobleigh reading Neville Cardus to faraway natives", according to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, his drinking buddy.

Arlott was a most unusual all rounder whose career included stints as a policeman, in a mental hospital, as a wine-taster, poet and hymnist, and above all a humanist of the best kind. He was the epitome of the ultimate cricket person whose breadth of vision extended far beyond the boundary.

In more recent times, John Inverarity, former Test cricketer and chairman of selectors for Australia has such impeccable academic and artistic credentials that the John Inverarity Music and Drama Centre in the city of Perth has been named after him in honour of his sterling contributions. (A side story is that he was once recalled after being bowled by Greg Chappell, because the umpire realised the ball had hit a sparrow on its way to the batsman. Unfortunately the sparrow, did not live to watch the rest of the match).

Tony Lewis, the last cricketer to captain England on his Test debut, and an ace rugby player, was also an accomplished violinist (he was once a member of the Welsh Youth Orchestra). He later distinguished himself as a man of letters and a broadcaster who came to be known as ‘the face of BBC’.

Did not CLR James, the West Indian author of Beyond a Boundary say, “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”s

And indeed may we ask, ‘What do they know of music, who only music know?”

When raags become ragas

First published in The Hindu

Charukeshi, Kirvani, Hansdhwani… (note the spellings). We heard them all this season or in the months leading up to it. So did we listen to Sohni, (Hindustani) Todi, Hindol, Durga, even Shudh Sohni. In case you are wondering if a constellation of Hindustani musicians crashlanded in Chennai, we heard all these ragas in Carnatic music concerts. Some of these north Indian avatars of ragas have been masquerading as Carnatic ragas in cutcheris of recent vintage—as Charukesi, Keeravani, Hamsadhwani, Hamsanandi, Suddhasaveri, Vasanta and so on. Not to mention Kafi, Patdeep, Behag, Bairagi, Brindavani Sarang, Madhmat Sarang and Shudh Sarang, besides the notoriously popular Ahir Bhairav, Kedar, Madhuvanti and Bhairavi, with or without Carnatic monikers.

The crowning glory was achieved by Yaman, that staple offering of Hindustani musicians visiting Chennai, when one southern star made it the piece-de-resistance of an epic journey of winding, gliding twists and turns through three octaves.  Kalyani was however the raga announced.

Jugalbandis and fusion concerts may be popular among a section of our audiences, but others—no doubt hidebound in their views—find that these concerts are ill rehearsed, and offer no new music. New music can only emerge from the collaboration of masters of their genres who have also worked hard at learning another, these critics say. Their usual tired joke is that fusion concerts produce more confusion than fusion. The idea of presenting Hindustani ragas in Carnatic concerts is therefore perhaps an attempt to avoid the fusion tag, yet appeal to a youthful audience.

I do not refer to the bhajans, thumris or abhangs that dot the tukkada section of the concert, but main or “sub-main” ragas being presented in typically Hindustani style, deficient in, even shorn of, the gamakas and azhuttam so typical of their orthodox delineation. 

Vowels and consonants of undoubtedly north Indian origin sometimes replace the standard tadarina, cooing or exploding forth from the vocal chords of our futuristic tyros accoutred in flashy kurtas and splendid saris with blazing earware to match. Some even adopt the typical Hindustani opening sally in deep mandra sthayi tones, as well as ultra fast taans during raga alapana.

On their way out are stern countenances or unseemly gesticulations on stage, demonstrating the next aspect of the makeover cutcheris seem to be undergoing. In their place are bright smiles to ostentatiously demonstrate the extent of enjoyment of one another’s music on stage, and carefully choreographed mudras and arm-stretches to pinpoint the note struck or emotion emoted—just in case you missed it in the listening. Beatific smiles and bheshes, sabhashes and bale-s (a friend swears he actually heard the exclamation ‘kya baat hai!’ on the stage in a recent concert) in praise are not just reserved for accompanists but also bestowed on your singing or instrumental partner, sometimes in mid-phrase or sangati. This can create new sounds for the rasika to mull over, on top of the confusion created by mridangam, ghatam/ khanjira and morsing. 

The whole effect is one of bonhomie, a convivial jam session among friends, calculated to win applause every three minutes, standing ovations after every two kritis and a thunderous mega-ovation at the end of the concert. Fortunately, the habit among some rock musicians and fusion bands of demanding applause from the audience (“Don’t be shy, give us a big hand!”) has so far not caught on in Carnatic music.

One welcome development has been the general reluctance to burst into applause when the vocalist touches a dramatic high note. (I remember a Hindustani pair of vocalists a few years ago pleading with listeners to defer applause to the end of an item, as during a piece it interfered with their manodharma). Recently a Carnatic vocalist so interrupted signalled a silent appeal to stop, followed by a eyes-closed namaste to his listeners. They immediately acceded to his request, even sportingly laughing at themselves. Polite courtesy seems to work better than a show of annoyance. 

Returning to the original theme, Chennai audiences have this year also had to suffer Hindustani musicians trying their hand at Carnatic compositions. The popular cry as a result has been “Give us Hindustani ragas in Carnatic concerts any day!”

Sruti Magazine: Train House

Sruti Magazine: Train House: By MV Swaroop "Park your car in that corner, you won't be able to take it inside the street," the old lady said, hauling a mridangam...

Noises off

Reproduced from the pages of Sruti.

A recent concert had the audience running for cover from the explosive decibellage of voice, strings and drums. The volume levels were unprecedented even for a city inured to unwholesome assaults on the listener’s eardrums in the name of amplification considered de rigueur in the urban milieu of large halls with non-existent sound engineering. Sadly the concert was taking place at the Music Academy auditorium, once famed for its perfect acoustics designed to accommodate mikeless concerts—before alterations to its structure changed that somewhat—but generally accepted as one of the better halls in the city for listening pleasure.

This was one of the first issues Sruti decided to address on the eve of the greatest spectacle of Carnatic music on the planet—the Chennai music season, which used to be called the December season before it expanded forwards and backwards some years ago to straddle the calendar in a fusillade of concerts. We decided to pose a number of questions and invite responses from all parties concerned, with the hope that we can start a process leading to a whole new aesthetic experience: Why are audiences subjected to murder by sound by people who should know better—practitioners of nadopasana one and all, from musicians to mikemen to sabhanayakas, to steal a couple of phrases from Sruti’s founder? Why do musicians regularly agree to perform under acoustically unsatisfactory conditions, musicians who are used to the state of the art in sound systems on their travels abroad? Why do listeners put up with tympanum threatening noise instead of the divine music everyone promises Carnatic music really is? Why are organizers of concerts impervious to criticism and apparently reluctant to invest in equipment and personnel that can ensure such an experience? Why is a sound test at the start of a concert such a rare occurrence, if ever attempted in Carnatic music?

Not long ago, The Hindu commented editorially: “There is little doubt that the standard of acoustics at most venues falls short of a minimum assured quality. Improvements in this technical area will go some way in sustaining interest in live performances as a socially worthwhile experience in the age of mass-produced compact discs. Moreover, acoustic quality is a real concern to artistes, since the overall impact of a performance depends on the symmetry between appropriate amplification and feedback on the stage. Debate on some of these wide-ranging issues will shape the future of Carnatic music in the 21st century. At the same time, it is vital for the mega event — the extraordinary Chennai music season — to retain the character of a self-regulating enterprise, something it has managed to do over many decades.”

Back in the 1990s, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer told Sruti: “...it is neither necessary nor desirable to have separate mikes provided to the accompanists. A single mike should do, preferably the sensitive kind that is hung from the ceiling. Where is the need for a forest of mikes planted on the platform in front of the artists taking part in a concert?"

“The number of loudspeakers used and their placement also contribute to the quality of sound. ..It is better to use several smaller speakers and place them judiciously around so that each part of the hall gets to hear the musicians as if there were no amplification."

“Ideally, of course, I would like the kutcheri to take place in a small air-conditioned hall without any sound amplification.”

“Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a concert tour of India, laid down a few conditions at the Swati Tirunal Sangita Sabha, Trivandrum. There should be no amplification; all doors should be closed once he started performing; all fans should be switched off; no member of the audience should be permitted to move about during the performance; so on and so forth.” Menuhin was heard clearly at every part of the hall throughout the concert, Semmangudi continued.

Vocalist Vijay Siva spoke up for the right use of technology (Sruti December 2001). State of the art microphones could help to get the purest sound reproduction in recordings and also in the auditorium.

When we asked vocalist Sanjay Subramanyam for his views on the standard of acoustics in Carnatic music cutcheris, he wondered aloud if instead of writing about the unsatisfactory situation, someone would take the initiative in organizing a workshop by an international acoustics expert on proper sound management at concerts. He said that he never let poor acoustics or other inconveniences affect his performance on the concert platform. “I focus on my job—that of singing—regardless of the conditions. The only thing that can bother me is the recalcitrance of my voice if and when I run into such problems.”

Speaking in a similar vein, Aruna Sairam had not long ago informed a small private audience that she would be willing to participate in any effort to educate sound engineers on the best contemporary practices in acoustics for music concerts. She was replying to a query from a Hindustani music aficionado about the high noise levels in Carnatic music concerts.

Audiences, sometimes even music critics, believe that the musicians are accessories after the fact, often the instigators of the excesses perpetrated by the soundmen. P Orr wrote in Sruti, February 2001: “Poor acoustics is characteristic of a majority of the sabhas. Many don’t have really top class sound amplification systems and arrangements either. ..The musicians performing on the stage are the ones who usually tell the sound technician what to do. They always ask the volume to be jacked up.”

Young vocalist Savita Narasimhan clarifies that the musician on the stage rarely asks for the volume to be turned up for the listeners. He or she is actually asking for help with the feedback (or fallback) so essential for the performer on stage. “Often the vocalist cannot hear the percussionist or violinist and vice versa. The musician’s request to increase the volume of the monitor is misunderstood and the technician increases the volume for the audience.” In the West, mikes are provided for the vocalist as well as the accompanying instrumentalists and the amplification is perfectly balanced. The result is aesthetically pleasing. For instance, even in concerts where two microphones are provided for the two sides of the mridangam, the overall balance is maintained perfectly, and the percussion does not drown the voice. It is this balancing, giving due weightage to different types of voices and instruments, that is vital for correct sound amplification.

That brings us to the need for sound checks before the start of a concert. How often do we see artists reach the venue in time to carry them out? Is it their fault that they don’t?

We’ll soon be witness to the frenetic programming of the “season” in which each sabha will pack three to four concerts into each day of the festival. The artists of one programme will ascend the stage barely minutes after the previous performers have left it. What kind of sound check can be done in the time available? And, increasingly, sabhas seem to despatch their sound engineer—if such an animal exists—to some unknown destination minutes before the concert begins, not to surface until the end of the programme.

Is it time then to organise workshops on aesthetically acceptable acoustics in Carnatic music to be conducted by experts in the field of sound management? For every self-respecting sabha to hire a full time acoustics engineer available round the year or at least during concerts to ensure listening pleasure? For auditoria specifically designed for music concerts to be built or for existing halls to be redesigned to suit the purpose? For audiences to behave themselves as they are forced to everytime a Yehudi Menuhin or Zubin Mehta descends on us?