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Journalism of Courage
To her, music is quantum mechanics. Waves of sur. Notes and the gaps between them. Her friends are ragas Bageshwari, Shudh Sarang and Malkauns. She sings Mazha Kondu Mathram with as much thairaav as she does Mehdi Hassan’s Baat Karni Mujhe Mushkil with sincerity. “This is a singer to watch out for,” said jazzman Louis Banks at a concert last year. And veteran ghazal singers Pankaj Udhas and Talat Aziz are putting their money on Gayatri Asokan, who, at the recent Jashn-e-Rekhta in Delhi, presented songs from her debut album Ghazal Gaze, released at last year’s Khazana festival in Mumbai.
Carnatic was readily accessible to Asokan, 41, at home in Thrissur. Born to doctor parents, she learnt music from her grandmother. Seeing her parrot songs from the Telugu musical Sankarabharanam (1980) at 2, her mother took her to late Carnatic singer Nedumangad Sasidharan Nair. College was about chorus singing and Western pop. But once exposed to Hindustani classical, she would go learn from Alka Deo Marulkar in Pune, Pandit Vinayak Torvi in Bengaluru, and now, in Mumbai, to Pandit Ajay Pohankar to hone thumris. It was a “paradigm shift”, “vilambit khayal isn’t there in Carnatic music,” says Asokan, whose alaaps and bandish made Malayalam film composer Raveendran give her her first break: Deena Dayalo Rama (Arayannangalude Veedu, 2000), a duet with Yesudas. Composers Ilaiyaraaja and AR Rahman collaborated with her later (she’s sung in Tamil films, too).
“When I started playback singing, the queens were (KS) Chithra ji and (S) Janaki-amma (who had already retired), but there were no young voices,” says Asokan, the recipient of the 2003 Kerala State Film Award (Enthe Nee Kanna) and the 2011 Amrita Fefka Film Award (Kinavile), among others.
Up north, ghazal from Kerala was synonymous with Hariharan. “Kerala has a big following. They don’t understand Urdu, but they love listening to Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali,” says Asokan, who has shared the stage with Hariharan on stage shows. Besides ghazals (whose nuances she also picked up from composer Taj Ahmad Khan, who would accompany Hassan on India gigs), Shubha Joshi, Shobha Gurtu’s disciple, also taught her Hindustani classical, and Meera and Kabir bhajans, which Asokan sung at temples (Guruvayur, Tirupati) and Chennai sabhas.
“Unlike Hindustani gayaki, you can’t have gamak-wala taan in ghazals,” says Asokan, whose mellifluous voice while hosting the show Khayal on Malayalam channel MediaOne impressed Udhas. “It’s amazing that these girls from Kerala, Gayatri and Manjari, are interested in ghazals and want to learn the authentic classical ghazals, its ethos and tehzeeb,” says Aziz, whose ghazals Phir Chhidi Raat and Zindagi Jab Bhi Teri Bazm Mein graced 1980s Hindi cinema. “It was a big deal to be recording artistes then,” Aziz says, “Music labels signed you, released your albums and LPs sold off the shelves.” “With the loss of sales of CDs and cassettes, audio labels don’t make money to invest in new talent,” rues Udhas.
Asokan married sitarist Purbayan Chatterjee and moved to Mumbai (from Kerala) in 2016. The city gave Asokan opportunities to perform with the likes of Shankar Mahadevan (at Chatterjee’s fusion concerts, ClassiCool). “Malayalis are critical and hard to please,” she says , “But Mumbai is encouraging.” She laughs while saying that “Not in my wildest dreams had I thought I would serve dal to Zakir (Hussain) bhai.” Hussain told her to sing “without inhibition, with conviction. What differentiates an Ali Akbar Khan or Ravi Shankar from others is not what they played, but the conviction with which they played, unafraid of making a fool of themselves, making music in the moment.” Conviction shows in her ghazals. And with shows in Bahrain, Fort Kochi and Thrissur, December is chock-a-block.
