If both the content and the practice of carnatic music are bad and regressive, is there a point in appreciating such an art? Such a projection could indeed put off a lot of potential music lovers because art with purposely discriminatory, exclusivist, and religiously conservative values sounds awful. Besides the exclusive ecosystem, which was indeed a justifiable charge, he now had problems with its content, elements such as devotion and divinity, compositions by masters, classicism and even the way it was sung (the format, the audiences and the settings).įrom a potentially constructive insider-iconoclast who could have found some leads to a transformative change, his repetitive overzealousness has made him look like a demolition man. As he expanded the argument and teased out his peeves, an extremely sophisticated and scientifically organised art form appeared ugly, discriminatory and exclusivist. Almost all the top ranking performers in the carnatic circuit were, and are, Brahmins and the markets were/are also dominated by them.īut the argument became problematic when he started disaggregating it as a mere problem statement. When he initially made those noises of carnatic music being the preserve of Brahmins because of the lack of opportunities for training and performances, it did make sense because he was factually right. This is where the ongoing rant by TM Krishna against carnatic music system goes off on a tangent. The significance of the story is that it broke the caste stereotype in carnatic music, not in the recent past, but many years ago.
He in turn, trains an upper-caste Hindu, who also makes it big in classical music, including in Chennai, and carries forward his legacy, and indirectly even Ramand Krishnan’s Bani. So, this is the summary of the story: A poor Dalit boy from Kerala becomes a carnatic musician thanks to a Tamil Brahmin guru and then gets into the bigger league thanks to another Tamil Brahmin guru.
Without Semmangudi’s early help and tutelage at the Swathi Thirunal Music College in Thiruvananthapuram, Vasudevan wouldn’t have gained entry into the world of classical music and survived the initial years because the socio-economic odds against him were too steep. It was not just Krishnan that helped Vasudevan rise in terms of skills and stature, but also another Brahmin - the iconic Semmangudi Sreenivasa Iyer - under whom he cut his teeth.
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