It’s called The Season, the once month-long, now longer-duration, extravaganza—mainly music and some dance—that invades Chennai city around mid-November every year. It’s a festival of classical music like no other anywhere in the world, some 2,000 plus concerts packed into 45 days of entertainment, of transcendence even; for much of the music on offer is an elevating experience.
The classical music of south India is known as Carnatic music. It is a complex, highly sophisticated system that can be called raga music, after melodic modes that make up the basis of Carnatic music. While early references to ragas are said to go back to the 5th century AD or thereabouts, the system was codifi ed in the 16th century. It consists of ensemble music both composed and improvised on stage, with the main performers—vocal or instrumental—backed by strong percussion support.
Indian classical dance, the other component of the Chennai festival, is again an ancient art form, with the rules of the game clearly laid out by our ancestors. Ostracised and stigmatised, even banned by the British government, it was revived in the 1930s and has never looked back since its modern practitioners won national, even international recognition.
Chennai becomes a bustling metropolitan centre of some compelling action at its many proscenium stages during its mild winter, with its top practitioners of music and dance drawing capacity crowds. Many of them are of the peripatetic variety, hopping from one venue to another, though the 80-year-old Madras Music Academy is the more prestigious of themall. The Academy’s Sangita Kalanidhi is considered the highest honour awarded to a Carnatic musician.
The audiences for the many concerts during the Season come from the various parts of Chennai including the suburbs, other cities of India and other parts of the world as well, largely non-resident Indians from the Diaspora. Increasingly, with the west showing a deep interest in Indian classical music and dance, our visitors from abroad during the festival are
getting not only more colourful by the year, but knowledgeable and scholarly as well.
By the time you read these lines, the major part of Chennai’s inimitable festival of music and dance will be over, but you can still catch some of the action, especially the dance festivals of comparatively recent origin.
Welcome to the Chennai Season.
Rukmini Devi Arundale, third from right, founded the world famous Kalakshetra, whose Art Festival in December is one of the highlights of the Season. She is seen here with some of the outstanding individuals who stood by her in her pioneering efforts to put Indian dance and other arts on the world map.
A typical Carnatic music concert, featuring vocalist sisters Ranjani and Gayatri. A percussion solo interlude is in progress (see the left handed mridangam player Arun Prakash, and the ghatam or mudpot player), the tambura, a drone to maintain the pitch, and the violin, given a rest by the violinist while he is keeping the beat for the percussionists.
Accompanying the well known vocalists, the Malladi Brothers, is Umayalpuram Sivaraman who plays the mridangam (a percussion instrument) and received the Sangita Kalanidhi award, the highest honour in Carnatic music.
This photograph was taken at one of the earliest annual conferences of The Music Academy of Madras, founded in 1928.
Vocalist Sanjay Subrahmanyan