Opinion As much as Ilaiyaraaja’s music speaks, so do his silences

Valiant is not Ilaiyaraaja’s first symphony, even if that is how it is being described. The composer had premiered one in 1993 as well, a year after Mani Rathnam chose Rahman for Roja. But Ilaiyaraaja does not want to acknowledge the untitled 1993 piece as his first symphony. Years later, John Scott, who had conducted this symphony, said, “I believe he was hurt by a critic’s review.”

For South India, Ilaiyaraaja’s music has been a significant part of life for decades. Coming from Pannaipuram in Theni district, he burst onto the Tamil film music scene in 1976 with Annakilli. Until then, Tamil film music was dominated by composers trained in Carnatic music, who were creating “pure art music compositions”, as TM Krishna wrote in, A Southern Music. “He (Ilaiyaraaja) composed tunes based on Carnatic ragas and juxtaposed them with complex harmonics,” writes Krishna. The music was imbibed by the working class and the rural masses, and even the elite who generally classified anything other than classical music as noise. Here was a musician, with tunes rooted in folk music and paired with structures from Western classical music, who found a certain equilibrium despite the tinny quality of the sound he had access to. It wasn’t as if folk hadn’t been heard before, but Ilaiyaraaja brought in a revolution with one film after the other. With an oeuvre that spans more than 8,000 songs, in almost 1,500 films, Ilaiyaraaja brought the music of the village into the mainstream.

Born in a Dalit Christian family, Ilaiyaraja — who was named Gnanathesigan — has rarely spoken of life beyond music. Critics have accused him of “Brahminising” himself by being committed to Hinduism and its lengthy rituals, and the one time he touched upon the subject of caste was in the foreword he wrote for Ambedkar and Modi: Reformer’s Ideas, Performer’s Implementation. He wrote, “Both these striking personalities succeeded against the odds that people from socially disempowered sections of society face. Both saw poverty and stifling social structures from close quarters and worked to dismantle them,” words that earned him much backlash.

The young Gnanathesigan, who was renamed Rajaiya by his father, grew up listening to Tamil film music. At 14, poverty forced him to drop out of school and begin helping his father and brothers in the cardamom plantations of Kerala. This is probably where he came across the workers’ songs. With their plaintive choruses, these songs influenced the music he would compose. This was also the time when he joined his brother Pavalar Vardharajan’s music group, called Pavalar Brothers, and toured Tamil Nadu and Kerala singing political songs for the Communist Party and later for the DMK.

At 24, Ilaiyaraja moved to Chennai and trained under Master Dhanraj, who also taught Rahman and was well-known for teaching Western classical music. Dhanraj gave his disciple a new name: Raaja. Besides training in guitar at Trinity College, London, he also trained in Carnatic classical music under TV Gopalakrishnan and often spoke fondly of M Balamuralikrishna and V Dakshniamurthy. “The Brahmins know music. They traditionally practice music and they know the nuances. I am learning from them every day. Hence, I respect them so much,” Ilaiyaraaja reportedly told the writer Pon Chandramohan.

It was in the 1950s and 1960s, following the rationalist and reform movement, that the upper-caste hegemony over public life began diminishing. Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam, which had come to the fore after a synthesis of ideas and music between people of various castes, however, became the preserve of the Brahmins. One wonders if the Carnatic classical world would have welcomed Ilaiyaraaja then. But films were a relatively democratic space politically as well as musically, with more scope for experimentation. This may be why Ilaiyaraaja was drawn to it.

After working as a sessions guitarist and keyboardist for various composers including Salil Chowdhury, Ilaiyaraaja began assisting Kannada composer GK Venkatesh. This is when he began composing his own music. Finally, in 1975, producer Panchu Arunachalam, impressed by his musical prowess, offered him the chance to debut with Annakilli (1976).

Ilaiyaraja may not have spoken publicly, but one can find an assertion of his Dalit identity in his music, such as the use of the parai drum and nadaswaram (instruments connected with lower castes) in many songs including one in Ellam Inba Mayyam (1981), where an upper caste man is marrying a lower caste woman.

In Sindhu Bhairavi (1985), in the song “Mari mari ninne”, he took a Thyagaraja kirtana and changed the raga from Kambhoji to Saramati, a switch that upset Krishna. “The essence of its being disintegrates. This is not to say that the film version of the kirtana was not beautiful. I am examining what the film version did to the integrity of the kirtana… The film song destroyed it. To me, the film version was unacceptable,” wrote Krishna. To this, one could argue that even if the essence disintegrates, it is assimilated in another way. Both can co-exist.

As for ‘Valiant’, the symphony, which was his dream for almost five decades, Ilaiyaraaja has gone back to the drawing board and synthesised all the different elements of his music – folk, Carnatic, Western classical – into this bright, texturally diverse piece. It’s a great achievement. “There is no good and bad in music. Each and every note is perfect on its own,” he says in a behind-the-scenes video. One can only agree with this. Just like one does with the brilliance of his music.

suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com