Opinion Boy with the mandolin

Until a nine-year-old took it on stage for the first time, the mandolin was alien to Indian musical traditions. As a child prodigy, U. Shrinivas could match the maestros in playing difficult ragas, that too on an instrument new to Carnatic music. He not only adapted the European instrument to the Carnatic tradition, but also convinced its largely conservative audience that the ragas would not lose their soul on the mandolin. The only “foreign” instrument to be wholeheartedly welcomed into the Carnatic tradition until then was the violin in the early 19th century. While the violin was introduced in Carnatic music by Baluswami Dikshitar, the brother of Muthuswami Dikshitar, one of the trinity who shaped the musical tradition, Shrinivas was a teenager with no great music legacy.

Shrinivas mastered the mandolin and peaked as a musician in his teens. Perhaps stifled by the conservatism inherent in the Carnatic tradition, in his later years he started to explore and collaborate with other musical styles. When he performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1983, where he had Miles Davis for company, he was just 14. He then experimented with jazz artistes and Hindustani musicians. The music school he established in Chennai promoted “global music”. Chennai was home but the world was his stage.

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In many ways, Shrinivas was representative of his generation of Carnatic musicians including N. Ravikiran, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Bombay Jayashri and T.M. Krishna. Creative and flamboyant, they ensured that Carnatic music would not lose out on listeners. Rooted in tradition and committed to its mastery, these musicians have not been afraid of innovation. Shrinivas’s death at 45 is like an exquisite alapana left incomplete.