The 2024 edition of the December music “season” in Chennai crested with two contrasting recitals bookending Christmas Day. At 9 am, the curtain rose on T M Krishna at the Music Academy to cheers and applause that would not have been out of place at a rock concert. At 6 pm that evening, Krishna’s fiercest critics, the sisters Ranjani and Gayatri (RaGa to their fans), who had refused to participate in the Music Academy’s festival, held their audience spellbound at the Narada Gana Sabha, barely half a kilometre from the Academy. Between them, the two kutcheris showed how the Carnatic tradition can move on, and even thrive, after nearly a year of acrimony.
Krishna had stopped singing at the Music Academy and other Chennai sabhas about a decade ago, accusing them of Brahmin elitism. No community in the world is as closely associated with a high-brow cultural tradition as Tamil Brahmins are with Carnatic music (and its dance sibling Bharatanatyam) and the Music Academy has been their unrivalled bastion. Only Germanic Jews with Western classical music come close.
Therefore, when the Music Academy decided to award Krishna its highest honour of Sangeeta Kalanidhi in March 2024, it caused a kerfuffle. Conservative rasikas accused the institution of pandering to a “woke” leftist who had tarnished the tradition by accusing revered icons — the composer Thyagaraja and the vocalist MS Subbulakshmi — of casteism and undermining its Hindu devotional roots by singing in praise of Allah and Jesus Christ. Carnatic stars such as RaGa and the Trichur Brothers announced that they would not perform at the Academy’s December festival. Behind all this was the politics of Hindutva (‘Hindutva, music and the elite’, IE, March 27, 2024) provoked by Krishna’s mockery of the Ram temple in Ayodhya and his endorsement of Periyar, the Dravidian movement founder known for his anti-Brahmin rhetoric.
Krishna’s Christmas morning performance was therefore a homecoming of sorts (he had sung at the Academy at a lower profile event last year). He had insisted that it be a free concert, in keeping with his campaign for Carnatic music to be more inclusive. Free entry, of course, ensured the hall was packed (unlike on previous days of this “season” when many of the usual rasikas kept away, likely put off by the controversy).
They were rewarded by a trademark unconventional performance. For two-and-a-half hours, Krishna sang, seated cross-legged in a twin-toned lungi, slightly turned towards his violinist. As someone observed, this was rather like Roger Federer turning up at Wimbledon in striped shorts and serving from the middle of the baseline (Carnatic vocalists typically sit at right angles to their main accompanists, clad, if male, in crisp white veshtis).
Krishna served up many more breaks with concert convention: Opening his recital with an extended 22-minute-long exposition of Thyagaraja’s “Karubaru” (rather than a brisk varnam or krithi), starting the next song, “Lavanya Rama”, with the middle verse and then returning to the opening pallavi to improvise upon it, rendering three pieces, including a serene Dikshitar krithi, with minimal accompaniment and skipping a ragam-tanam-pallavi, the highpoint of a Carnatic concert and de rigeur at the Academy.
Krishna’s political leanings also featured in rousing lyrics espousing freedom of expression, by the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. For his closing pieces, he chose a song on the travails of a Dalit devotee of Siva and a composition by Narayana Guru, the late 19th and early 20th century social reformer from Kerala, which referred to Buddha, Christ, and the Prophet Mohammed, alongside Hindu deities, while probing the identity of the divine.
But it was Krishna’s command of the classical idiom that shone through, not least in the three Thyagaraja krithis that he sang, and in his main piece in Kalyani by Swathi Tirunal. Carnatic’s enfant terrible, extended an olive branch to his critics by concluding his kutcheri with “Dhava Vibho”, a Marathi bhajan that M S had popularised; Krishna had also pointedly praised M S in his Academy address a few days earlier. The standing ovation that greeted him at the end suggested that he had made his point: Carnatic music can innovate and be more inclusive without compromising its classicism.
The RaGa sisters’ nearly three-hour concert to a mostly-packed (and ticketed) house was as steeped in tradition as Krishna’s was unconventional. Resplendent in their yellow-and-black Kanjeevaram silks and wearing jasmine flowers in their hair, RaGa looked straight from Carnatic central casting. However, while they stuck to convention in their concert format and musical form, their content was just as political as Krishna’s.
Gayatri set the tone at the very outset with her assertion that Carnatic music is inextricably intertwined with bhakti and the programme was replete with pieces ingrained with Hindu devotionalism. And what glorious music this was, even to my irreligious ear! But no Christ, the Prophet, or even the Buddha figured in their verses — indeed, they sang praising our nation as the land of Rama, Krishna, and Vittala. Their sublime ragam-tanam-pallavi in Jaunpuri had as its pallavi (equivalent to the bandish in Hindustani) a Tamil line celebrating Bharat as an upholder of dharma since time immemorial.
RaGa’s uncritical nationalism tinged with Hindu revivalist sentiments made me cringe but it was hard not to be moved by their stirring patriotic composition in Desh, sung in Sanskrit, Tamil, Brijbhasha and Marathi. The choice of Desh, and Jaunpuri earlier — both ragas derived from Hindustani music — and the multilingual renditions underlined Carnatic’s catholicism and relative lack of parochiality. In one sense, RaGa may actually have been more inclusive than Krishna. They made it a point to announce each of their pieces while Krishna uncharacteristically stuck with the elitist practice of seldom naming his song or its raga.
These two performances demonstrated that Carnatic music is capacious enough to accommodate both a “left wing” Krishna and the “right wing” RaGa sisters. No classical art form can remain relevant without constantly evolving. While bhakti is undeniably foundational to Carnatic, the tradition also has more recent strands that espouse reform and protest, and celebrate other faiths. Likewise, the current Carnatic concert format, while only a century old, already feels stale in certain aspects. Krishna is only the latest artist to push its boundaries; indeed, others have done so without being sanctimonious, as he has sometimes been.
The Music Academy has a crucial role to play in ensuring that Carnatic music thrives. Its leadership showed courage in honouring Krishna for his stellar musicianship, despite him being out of favour with the BJP and the adherents of Hindutva. Now, perhaps, it can reinforce its commitment to musical excellence by naming the equally deserving RaGa sisters as its next Sangita Kalanidhis, despite their public diatribe against the institution for honouring Krishna. Would such magnanimity be too much to ask for?
The writer is a private equity investor and Carnatic music enthusiast
