V Ramnarayan
The Chennai ‘season’ is a unique festival of classical music of ever-growing proportions, in which every known musician of repute and every young aspirant in this highly evolved and sophisticated system, take part. Audiences congregate from all over the world, especially the Indian Diaspora, and the excitement continues for more than a month. Here’s an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek view:
Some years ago, the Indian cricket selectors had the unenviable task of announcing two teams for simultaneous participation in tournaments in two different parts of the world. Both the Sahara Cup at Toronto and the Commonwealth Games at Kuala Lumpur demanded India’s best team, a knotty problem that the selectors tried to untangle by fielding what they called two equally formidable sides—in the event, both came a-cropper.
The cricket selectors would have done well to consult that uniquely South Indian body of men, the ubiquitous sabha secretaries. These miracle makers manage year after year to conduct hundreds of Carnatic music concerts packed into a fortnight of frenzied programming, featuring equally formidable teams, at not two venues but dozens of far flung theatres of war.
In a marvel of logistics, time and resource management, they detonate an explosion of rhythm and raga razzmatazz that leaves whole suburban populations stunned. Their weaponry? Antiquated amplification systems whose noise levels create world records on the Richter scale.
The early morning lec-dems investigate in minute detail such compellingly seminal topics as “The Influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the Development of the Mela Karta Scheme” or “Rap, Raga and Rachmaninov:
Were They Y2K Compliant?” That is where demure damsels, fiery feminists, voluble vocalists, and intimidatory instrumentalists vie for top honours with obstreperous octogenarians and superannuated scholars. These are followed by the virgin volleys of child prodigies and teenage tyros, unleashed at an unsuspecting public straying idly in after a hearty repast at the cafeteria.
In fact, in some circles it has been suggested that the Chennai December season should be renamed the Food ’n Frolic Fest.
Some of these postprandial somnambulists settle down into deep slumber even as the next batch of curious onlookers fights its way towards the rare empty seat. By now they are hampered by the growing crowd, and overzealous ushers who learnt their job by correspondence and never got beyond lesson two, to borrow a simile from “English literature’s performing flea”, P.G. Wodehouse. This is the high point of the unfolding drama—the last chance before the next season comes round, to pass judgment on the stars of tomorrow without paying for admission.
Suitably stirred by the vigour of the vocal gymnastics on display during the next two hours, these devout worshippers of the divine music of our ancestors, spring into action even as the last strains of the mangalam begin to fill the auditorium. To make a quick dash for the door, and head straight for the canteen is for them as effortless as drowning the vocalist’s feeble attempts at being heard is for violinists and percussionists. After reviving themselves with a stiff coffee or two, they then cleverly take a detour around the ticket window towards the exit, to rest and recuperate before they hit the roads on the morrow.
For this is the hour that produces the man—the supreme optimist at the ticket counter who hopes against hope that this season’s share of the uninitiated will pay to listen to the senior vidwan featured here, and not gravitate towards a free cutcheri elsewhere.
What infinite variety this indefatigable band of music lovers present! An endangered species is the doughty old warriors whose first season coincided
with the debut of Ariyakudi Ramanuja Ayyangar, the trailblazer whom critics have charged with inventing the modern concert format.
These are the most admirable segment of the audience, for they have braved the rigours of classical music in the severe Chennai winter for over half a century, sweater-and mufflerclad, and remaining stolidly critical of succeeding generations of vidwans. Anno Domini is catching up and alas, this species will soon be extinct, replaced entirely by more thick skinned listeners whom the December cold leaves untouched.
To earn the applause of a Chennai audience is not easy unless you happen to be a Hindustani instrumentalist with long hair, purple kurta and an American accent with which you announce that you will treat them to the exotic delight of raag Hamsadhwani. The Carnatic musician may occasionally mesmerise audiences abroad. But his manodharma is scarcely equal to the irresistible lure of the 8.35 bus home. Every percussionist from Palghat Mani Iyer down to Vikku Vinayakram has lost out to the fatal attraction of the aroma of coffee wafting in from the canteen at tani avartanam time.
Increasingly, devotees from the wicked West descend on staid old Chennai during the December season. Some of them look more Indian than Indians, veshti-jibba, sari-pigtails, jolna bags and all, but what really distinguishes these seekers of nirvana through raga and gamaka is their glazed expression. And they, like their Indian counterparts, keep coming back for more, such is the addictive power of the season for all seasons.
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