My earliest memories of M S Subbulaksmi are of concerts at RR Sabha back in the late fifties, when I, Carnatic music ignoramus though I was, could not help being mesmerised by her glorious voice, especially her tremendous reach in the higher registers. She was relatively young, and her voice was still evolving into the majestic form it achieved in her mature years.
The first time I saw her at close quarters was some ten years later at Vasant Vihar, the Greenways Road home of the Krishnamurti Foundation. It was at a mellow, meditative concert for the benefit of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the fortunate few who had gathered there were able to catch a glimpse of greatness up close. Like everyone who has come into contact with MS, I was struck by her simplicity. Equally striking was the beauty, vivacity and humour of her brilliant vocal accompanist, Radha Viswanathan.
My next memory of MS is from a cutcheri at the University Centenary auditorium in 1969. I was seated next to the girl who was to become my wife soon afterwards and her mother, though none of us knew it then. By sheer fluke, I guessed a raga right—it was a close shave, because I debated between two choices, and mentally tossed a coin before stumbling on the right answer—and that must have impressed my companions.
Gowri and I were married not long afterwards, and that is what brought me into the privileged circle of those fortunate enough to know MS on a personal level. It was a fantastic experience to listen to her music in a private ambience, without instrumental accompaniment or amplification. Amazingly, during home visits or at the oonjal at weddings, she would happily sing alone or lead a chorus with no concern for the level of accomplishment of her accompanists. On rare occasions, I heard both MS and Semmangudi in such intimate gatherings. This is a blessing that I have enjoyed, along with other members of my family, as long as they both lived..
One unforgettable experience was listening to MS at the grihapravesam of our home in 1993, when she sang sitting on the rough floor of a house still-under construction. She was in magnificent voice and the whole room was surcharged with emotion as her sonorous tones filled the place with an aura of sheer devotion. My thoughts were full of my father who had passed away months earlier, and it was a rare moment of sublimation such as I had never experienced before.
In the early days of our marriage, Gowri frequently nudged me to compliment ‘Kunjakka’ at the end of her concerts. Naturally, it took me a long time to gather the courage to do that—imagine walking up to a legend of our times and appreciating her performance. When I actually did it the first time, her acceptance of the compliment was so spontaneous and genuine that it was difficult to believe I was talking to someone of her eminence.
In the last decade of her concert career, when poor health prevented the peerless Radha from providing her vocal accompaniment, Gowri had the honour of assisting her. While both of us considered it a proud privilege, as anyone in our position would have, MS never failed to thank me whenever I met her, for “allowing Gowri to help her”. Though we found it extremely embarrassing, we were also touched by her concern for us and her extraordinary humility. To seek and receive blessings from MS and Thatha (Mr Sadasivam) on those occasions was to pause from the frenetic pace of our lives and experience a great sense of peace and calm.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Famil history 1
My father P N Venkatraman was born on 10 April 1919 to V Narayanan and Sarada at Madras. The family was orthodox south Indian brahmin, which among other things, means they were originally from the priestly class, though already in my grandfather’s generation, leaning towards professions of a more secular nature. Grandfather Narayanan was a lawyer by qualification, but an academician and journalist by profession at different stages of his life. He was proficient in three languages—Tamil, Sanskrit and English--in all of which he wrote commentaries on matters spiritual and theological. He was for a while Editor of The Indian Express, an English language daily, in which I worked as an apprentice sub-editor in the sixties.
My boss then, C P Seshadri, a veteran journalist highly respected in the newspaper world, often told me what a good editor my grandfather had been, how much he, a young reporter, had learnt from him. Narayanan was a major contributor to the first Tamil lexicon of modern times, as an assistant to the celebrated S Vaiyapuri Pillai, its editor. He also edited numerous publications of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the spiritual headquarters of the saivite subsect (followers of Siva) of Brahmins to which my family belongs. It is hardly surprising that Narayanan wrote beautiful Tamil, the language he spoke at home, but samples of his English writing I chanced upon some 20 years ago stunned me with their timelessness—they could have been written in this day and age, so simple yet sophisticated his style. (I hope I can unearth those samples again). According to a family tree drawn up for me by the late M Krishnan, eminent naturalist, photographer and writer of fiction and non-fiction in English, and a great-grand uncle of mine, Narayanan’s ancestors were Avadhanis[1] who moved from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh to Tirunelveli in present day Tamil Nadu. Narayanan married Sarada before either of them reached the age of ten, and I believe he was older than her by some five years! She grew up to be a six-footer (a rarity among women even today) and he was a short man, so they were to become quite a physical mismatch in their grown years. He died in his early fifties and she was barely 36 when she died. They had eight children, the eldest a son, Sundaresan and my father, the second. The youngest, Pattabhiraman, was only two when his mother died. In between were five sisters, Janaki, Visalakshi, Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati.
Narayanan was a rather unworldly person who enjoyed hardly any material success. Moving to Madras from his village on marrying Sarada, the daughter of a judge of the Madras High Court, P R Sundara Iyer, he lived in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house built by his father-in-law for his daughter. This was on Murray’s Gate Road, a street in Alwarpet close to Mylapore, an ancient village turned suburb, which had become the home of the Brahmin aristocracy of Madras. Between Mylapore and Alwarpet, on Luz Church Road was Sree Bagh, a vast property that had been Sundara Iyer’s home in the early 20th century before a business misadventure by his sons had resulted in its sale along with much of his other assets. (In fact, his sons had to file for bankruptcy, and the family was able to salvage only property standing in the name of the youngest son P S Ramachandran, who was then a minor). On Murrays Gate Road was another house, Srimukha, belonging to Narayanan and Sarada, and this was rented out in the 1940s to a young executive of Burmah Shell, the oil company which had a major presence in India then.
Ramaswamy was an engineer who qualified from the famous Benares Hindu University of Kasi, the famous centre of pilgrimage in north India every Hindu of the time visited once before his death to attain salvation. (The true believer actually went to Kasi to die there). Ramaswamy was the son of Sivaramakrishna Iyer who had retired as Inspector of Schools in the princely state of Travancore-Cochin (now the state of Kerala), the southernmost tip of India. Like my father, he was the second of eight children including five daughters. The eldest, Sita, is 99 today and all her sisters are alive, my mother Rukmini 79, and the youngest, Saraswati, 78, while Ramaswamy and his brothers Ramachandran and Mahadevan are no more. Sivaramakrishna Iyer (known in the family as Anna or elder brother) and his wife Subbulakshmi came to live with Ramaswamy at Srimukha, and soon there developed a friendship between Anna and Narayanan as the two men shared a common love of literature and philosophy. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two and they spent hours discussing books, both literary works as well as the Indian epics. The two families became friends and before long, Ramaswamy found in Narayanan’s second son, the gentle self-effacing Venkatraman a future brother-in-law! Sivaramakrishna Iyer made a formal approach to Narayanan, horoscopes were exchanged and found to match and Venkatraman married Rukmini, Anna’s fourth daughter.
[1] An avadhani is a person who speaks extempore (preferably in verse) on different topics at a time—to an audience of eight, 100 or 1,000 people who pose a question each to him or her—and answers them all. To an audience of 100, he has to answer questions or create verses based on the questioner's hints, after every 25 questions. The art is known as avadhanam.
My boss then, C P Seshadri, a veteran journalist highly respected in the newspaper world, often told me what a good editor my grandfather had been, how much he, a young reporter, had learnt from him. Narayanan was a major contributor to the first Tamil lexicon of modern times, as an assistant to the celebrated S Vaiyapuri Pillai, its editor. He also edited numerous publications of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the spiritual headquarters of the saivite subsect (followers of Siva) of Brahmins to which my family belongs. It is hardly surprising that Narayanan wrote beautiful Tamil, the language he spoke at home, but samples of his English writing I chanced upon some 20 years ago stunned me with their timelessness—they could have been written in this day and age, so simple yet sophisticated his style. (I hope I can unearth those samples again). According to a family tree drawn up for me by the late M Krishnan, eminent naturalist, photographer and writer of fiction and non-fiction in English, and a great-grand uncle of mine, Narayanan’s ancestors were Avadhanis[1] who moved from neighbouring state Andhra Pradesh to Tirunelveli in present day Tamil Nadu. Narayanan married Sarada before either of them reached the age of ten, and I believe he was older than her by some five years! She grew up to be a six-footer (a rarity among women even today) and he was a short man, so they were to become quite a physical mismatch in their grown years. He died in his early fifties and she was barely 36 when she died. They had eight children, the eldest a son, Sundaresan and my father, the second. The youngest, Pattabhiraman, was only two when his mother died. In between were five sisters, Janaki, Visalakshi, Parvati, Lakshmi and Saraswati.
Narayanan was a rather unworldly person who enjoyed hardly any material success. Moving to Madras from his village on marrying Sarada, the daughter of a judge of the Madras High Court, P R Sundara Iyer, he lived in Suprabha, a two-storeyed house built by his father-in-law for his daughter. This was on Murray’s Gate Road, a street in Alwarpet close to Mylapore, an ancient village turned suburb, which had become the home of the Brahmin aristocracy of Madras. Between Mylapore and Alwarpet, on Luz Church Road was Sree Bagh, a vast property that had been Sundara Iyer’s home in the early 20th century before a business misadventure by his sons had resulted in its sale along with much of his other assets. (In fact, his sons had to file for bankruptcy, and the family was able to salvage only property standing in the name of the youngest son P S Ramachandran, who was then a minor). On Murrays Gate Road was another house, Srimukha, belonging to Narayanan and Sarada, and this was rented out in the 1940s to a young executive of Burmah Shell, the oil company which had a major presence in India then.
Ramaswamy was an engineer who qualified from the famous Benares Hindu University of Kasi, the famous centre of pilgrimage in north India every Hindu of the time visited once before his death to attain salvation. (The true believer actually went to Kasi to die there). Ramaswamy was the son of Sivaramakrishna Iyer who had retired as Inspector of Schools in the princely state of Travancore-Cochin (now the state of Kerala), the southernmost tip of India. Like my father, he was the second of eight children including five daughters. The eldest, Sita, is 99 today and all her sisters are alive, my mother Rukmini 79, and the youngest, Saraswati, 78, while Ramaswamy and his brothers Ramachandran and Mahadevan are no more. Sivaramakrishna Iyer (known in the family as Anna or elder brother) and his wife Subbulakshmi came to live with Ramaswamy at Srimukha, and soon there developed a friendship between Anna and Narayanan as the two men shared a common love of literature and philosophy. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two and they spent hours discussing books, both literary works as well as the Indian epics. The two families became friends and before long, Ramaswamy found in Narayanan’s second son, the gentle self-effacing Venkatraman a future brother-in-law! Sivaramakrishna Iyer made a formal approach to Narayanan, horoscopes were exchanged and found to match and Venkatraman married Rukmini, Anna’s fourth daughter.
[1] An avadhani is a person who speaks extempore (preferably in verse) on different topics at a time—to an audience of eight, 100 or 1,000 people who pose a question each to him or her—and answers them all. To an audience of 100, he has to answer questions or create verses based on the questioner's hints, after every 25 questions. The art is known as avadhanam.
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