Opinion T M Krishna row shows how hard it is to weed out caste orthodoxy in Carnatic music today

The news that he will be back this December must have been music to their ears. Many must be waiting to reconnect at the T T Krishnamachari hall (named after Jawaharlal Nehru’s finance minister and Krishna’s grand uncle). To make up for his nine-year-long absence, he would be here for a full fortnight to preside over the 98th session of the Music Academy and receive the Sangita Kalanidhi award at the end of it.

Concerts have so far provoked the caricaturing instinct more than the cartooning urge. Recognisable musicians have rarely featured in cartoons in the sense in which politicians and film stars do, though you’d hear much aversion to “politics” voiced in the Academy lobby. The “P” word is a bad word that suggests that extra-musical considerations are at play.

You hear this buzz when the Academy’s decisions are questioned, as they always are. Over who is invited or not invited for the prestigious annual festival, over who is elevated or not elevated to the prime evening slot and who missed the ultimate Sangita Kalanidhi title.

This time, the anger is over the hit rather than the miss and it is out in the open, no longer a mere buzz in the backyard. The issue is not the favourite who lost but the rebel who won. Krishna’s best act of staying away has been renunciatory, thereby contributing one more prime slot to the pool. Now, he is back to reclaim it and how. Not meekly as the chastened prodigal but with his rebellion thoroughly vindicated.

The anger is for the first time spilling over from the audible hush-hush to amplified outbursts. Unusual in the city’s music and dance circles, seen as a whole universe of insiders. When everyone knows everyone else, you fret, fume, grin, bear and wait for another day.

But this time, the knives are out. Not over music. Even now Krishna’s detractors are blaming him for doing not bad music but bad politics.

What is new is that this bad politics is clearly spelt out as his admiration for E V Ramaswamy Naicker — Periyar — who pioneered the Dravidian movement.

Musicians who pride themselves on their apolitical self-image and routinely blame Krishna for dragging pristine Carnatic music into politics are taking him on in brazenly political terms. Ironies abound and once they are counted the question remains: Why this open war, now?

The reasons are clearly outside the iconic corner building on Cathedral Road. Almost a century back, the Music Academy came into being as part of the AICC session in the then Madras. The organisation has a Congress past that looks out of place in these Congress-mukt times. The institution managed to surpass an earlier Dravidian challenge without too much internalisation. The threat was clearly from the outside. The city’s music establishment was more coherently upper caste back in the 1960s.

The current opposition is more difficult to handle. It comes from within. Deep orthodoxy emboldened by an emergent BJP in Tamil Nadu is at work.

ep.unny@expressindia.com