Sangeetha gnanamu…..bhakti vina?

Mylapore resident S Sivaramakrishnan, who has been listening to carnatic music with a religious fervour for half a century, often points to the difference in the colour of two Thodi’s he heard in the concert halls within days of each other. The Koluvameragada that Seetha Narayanan was like meditating, it filled him with peace. The other Koluvameragada, sung by a more accomplished, more famous, next generation artiste “was much better in terms of technical brilliance” says Sivaramakrishnan. “But it lacked that soothing aspect that Seetha Narayanan’s had.”

Sivaramakrishnan’s experience is but a sample of the reality today. As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, the 2015 saw a soothing, meditative Kiravani by Malladi Brothers, which was their ode for the Chennai flood victims. It was a no-frills, no-wild-imagination, fancy-brikha kiravani, but it stood as one of the best kiravanis ever head. On the other hand, a highly imaginative Mayamalavagowlai by Abishek Raghuram failed to produce that effect.

Is the core of carnatic music shifting from being devotional and meditative to more of technical excellence and egregious display of talent? Is the renaissance of ‘Namasankeerthanam’ the market’s response to this shift?

Few disagree, but views vary on whether it is necessary to hold on to ‘bhakti’ or just leave music to evolve the way it society demands. True, the revered saint-composer, Thyagaraja, stressed that music without bhakti can never be ‘sanmargamu’, or the ‘good path’, but fewer and fewer are today in pursuit of any ‘path’, and look to carnatic music more for entertainment.

Mylapore resident, nanogenarian, Vittal Rao, says music is no more for sanmargamu (the noble path), but sammanamu (award).

Veena artiste Balakrishnan Kannan, sets great store by ‘bhakti’. “Entertainment is the primary responsibility of a musician, but still,” says Kannan, who begins his concerts with a veda- recital, “entertainment should not be at the cost of the supreme meditative power of our music.”

For a diametrically opposite view, we come to R Thyagarajan, founder of the Shriram group, a big patron of carnatic music and a confirmed atheist. Deep devotion may open up creativity in a composer, but linking bhakti with carnatic music, says Thyagarajan, is “undesirable”.  With advances in science, man’s needs keep getting fulfilled and his ‘need’ for God declines. If music is entwined with devotion, it will lose its appeal when ‘devotion’ declines in the society, feels Thyagarajan. Besides, ‘bhakti’ weds you to words and lyrics, consequence of which is preference for vocal music, to the detriment of the instrumental. “Pure music shouldn’t have anything to do with words,” he says.

Between Kannan and Thyagarajan lies the world of carnatic musicians, musicologists, patrons and connoisseurs, each with a different preferred mix of meditative appeal and intellectualism.

Vocalist Sikkil Gurucharan represents the mid-point. “Our music is steadily staying in-between,” he says. “I do sing a lot of emotionally-charged songs and intend to get behind the mood of the lyrics,” he says. Yet, while on alapana and kalpana swaras, Gurucharan likens himself to “an explorer in a forest of notes”.

It might appear logical to assume that while older people bhakti-centric music while the not-so-old love the more cerebral, flashy, splash-on-the-canvas kind of creative music, but a quick sample shows that such profiling is not valid.

Samyukta Ranganathan, a ‘junior’ vocalist (and daughter of singer Aruna Ranganathan), an alumnus of Columbia University, carnatic music has an inherent tendency to be “extremely cerebral”, with alapana, calculations, nereval and so on. “I feel that emotion and devotion that was perhaps the original purpose of the compositions may get muddled underneath these feats of concert singing today,” she says. For her, the “main emotion” is devotion. “It is hard to sing a song that doesn’t draw out your emotions,” she says. On the core of emotion should be an overlay of intellectualism (or, vidwat).

What does our Sangita Kalanidhi Sanjay Subramanian say? Sanjay, never known to be a bhakti-guy, excused himself from replying to questions relating to bhakti. (“Not my cup of tea,” he said.) However, in an earlier, e-mail interaction with me he had observed that carnatic music had always afforded space for both manodharma (imaginative intellectualism) and meditation. “If manodharma (imaginative intellectualism) is the extreme left and meditation is the extreme right, I can be described as slightly left of centre.”

Well, while no musician will truly tell you, like Thyagarajan, that there is no need for the keeping up the meditation quotient, any regular at concert halls knows that not just Sanjay, but the entire world of carnatic music is shifting towards ‘left of centre’. Some believe that the space on the right vacated by carnatic music is being filled by ‘naama sankeerthanam’, which (unlike musical discourse or ‘harikatha’) seems to be on the rise.

“Namasankeerthanam has been topping the charts in terms of audience response for some years now and it is a really healthy trend,” says Sikkil Gurucharan. If artistes are finding a niche market in namasankeerthanam concerts, is carnatic music spinning off a part of it into a separate entity?

Long term rasikas shudder at the thought. “You can still enjoy a very cerebral music,” says Sivarakamrishnan. “But if you diminish the meditative aspect, you are extracting less value from music.”