Quite literally, ‘Angeyum Ponnu thaan’ translates to ‘there also, only a girl!’ Madurai Pushpavanam Iyer is said to have not hidden his disappointment when he learnt of his wife having given birth to their daughter, Rajam. Pushpavanam, a venerated Carnatic musician of his time who lived until he was barely 35, is widely believed to be M.S. Subbulakshmi’s father – despite her assertion that it was Subramania Iyer, a nondescript lawyer from Madurai. The ‘angeyum’ (‘there also’) is a reference to M.S. Subbulakshmi (hereafter, MS) who had been born about a year ago to Shamugavadivu, of Devadasi lineage. Of Gifted Voice: The Life and Art of M.S. SubbulakshmiKeshav DesirajuHarperCollins (January 2021)Rich in delightful nuggets like this, late Keshav Desiraju’s Of Gifted Voice: The Life and Art of M.S. Subbulakshmi, is a compelling portrayal of how twentieth-century women, MS included, defeated the odds to become the most celebrated names in Carnatic music – a field perceived as a den of Brahminism and patriarchy. Concise yet charming sketches on the lives of other woman musicians and artistes of the time – from Veena Dhanammal and Saraswati Bai to T. Balasaraswati, D.K. Pattammal, T. Brinda, M.L. Vasantakumari, N.C. Vasantakokilam, Rukmini Arundale, Begum Akhtar, Rajam Pushpavanam, and others – make the work an attempt at contextualising their lives in MS’s as much as it is about situating hers in theirs. As the fifth book on MS, none might have given it much of a chance to say anything that had already not been said. Perhaps even less than what Pushpavanam gave to MS. The work is a remarkable attempt to spot the elephant in the room that others before barely noticed. The book promises to tell the story of MS the musician through an almost mathematical summation of the story of MS’s music; with the story of the music in MS’s life; and the story of the lives around MS’s music.The work sets out to explore and present MS as “first and foremost a classical musician of the highest order”. Desiraju has painstakingly combed through recordings and song lists of over four decades of her live concerts, studio recordings, and the few films that she featured in. Desiraju also highlights and presents how some of her concerts were received by music critics at home and abroad. Notes on her recordings and concerts, particularly those that were given at the Madras Music Academy, and the endnotes on the compositions that she sang frequently are an intriguing mix of historical information and Desiraju’s impressions. However, in attempting to present MS, the classical musician, Desiraju repeatedly endorses the much-parroted lament about MS having shed classicism as her music moved from her early years of concert singing to chants, to including many ‘light pieces’ such as bhajans in her concerts. The odd musing about what classicism in music means notwithstanding, Desiraju sticks to the familiar script – that MS began as a truly classical vocalist but progressively traded her classicism for devotional music; perhaps to please her expanding and diversifying audience. It is an attempt to remind everyone that the Bharat Ratna was a Sangita Kalanidhi first – a reclaiming of sorts; an attempt at imprisoning MS back in the Mylapore bubble.The book has Wiki-hyperlinks-esque digressions – from technical aspects of music such as a comparison on the differences in the handling of ragas in Hindustani and Carnatic traditions; to the evolution of the raga taxonomies and the differences in the sampoorna and asampoorna melakarta schemes; to the history of the concert format, the lives of different vaggeyakaras i.e. those composers who also set tune themselves to their compositions; and the author’s own and received impressions on the style and substance of various composers, musicians, and compositions, with Desiraju’s comical disdain for Patnam Subramania Iyer featuring now and again. The book is a breeze. It is a pleasant read – both for someone familiar with the Madras-Carnatic scene, and for the curious. However, when one tries hard enough, it is possible to be creatively discontented about the work – leaving enough room for yet another MS biography.Also read: Let’s Not Succumb to Misremembering M.S. SubbulakshmiFor a work that otherwise has a generous serving of the Desiraju’s personal impressions – including how unflattering he thought MS’s spectacles were – it is disquietingly quiet on his impressions on what MS’s life and music meant to the republic’s politics then and what it means now. Reflections on the devadasi system, its abolition, and ‘human rights’ are repeated, but cursory each time. The politics of the Tamil Isai movement, MS and T. Sadasivam’s support for it, and the conflict that the movement had with the Music Academy are brought in – but only to build up as reasons for MS not singing at the Academy seasons in some of the years in the 1940s. First, the book comes out when art, culture, and, regrettably, religion have taken centre stage in India’s political discourse. More pertinently, when Lord Rama is no longer the inclusive statesman that Thyagaraja celebrated, but one that has been made a symbol of belligerent majoritarianism. It is, without doubt, a challenge to project MS’s life onto present-day political happenings. For an author who was a former civil servant and saw the power-play up close; and whose reflections on this aspect might have been valuable, this is a noticeable miss. There certainly are enough clues in her public utterances (granted, all of them greatly shaped by Sadasivam). For example, her Sangeetha Kalanidhi acceptance speech gleans from two of Thyagaraja’s popular compositions ‘Kaddanu Variki’ (Todi) and ‘Sukhi Evvaro’ (Kaanada) to indicate that suswaram (good music) emanates from the purity of heart that sees no distinction between different gods and deities. Again, her Bharat Ratna acceptance statement once again reflects on the need for Indian citizens to bury all their differences and shed hatred. There is also a story I have heard about her having clarified that the Rama she sings on is ‘our Rama’ and not ‘their Rama’ just after singing her habitual number ‘Rama nannu brova’ ra at a chamber concert in Late Musiri Subramaniya Iyer’s residence at the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Second, the work’s somewhat summary dismissal of modern feminist content in MS’s life is questionable. From eloping from a devadasi household to follow her calling, to marrying under the Special Marriage Act without the ritual of the kannikadhanam, to shattering one of the hardest of glass ceilings of the time in becoming the first woman Sangeetha Kalanidhi, to accepting the award as a representative of womankind and on behalf of all women, there still is some room to indulge in creative reinterpretation, well short of hagiographic revisionism. One cannot help but feel that the book plays to the Mylapore Tamil-Brahmin groupthink that MS Amma had become one of their own and the few non-conformist aspects are aberrations that do not merit too much attention. Also, the book does not reflect enough on the enormity of the moment when a woman born into a Devadasi household collected a performing musician’s first Bharat Ratna from India’s first Dalit President – and that for excellence in an artform that progressively came to be occupied by the Brahmin communities of the southern states. It speaks to the strides that the republic had taken in the greater part of the now-vilified 60 years. After all, MS and K.R. Narayanan had both been exemplars of Anulomam in their own ways. Anulomam, as Desiraju explains, in the context of music refers to singing the pallavi at progressively increasing speeds keeping the thalam constant. In a sociological context, anulomam refers to a person achieving something higher than what is ordinarily expected of them – marrying into an upper-caste household for instance, or in the case of Narayanan, rising to be the head of the State. Another interesting feature of MS’s pallavi singing, which may be of note is how she performed anulomam and always left pratilomam, the diametrically opposite musical idea with the composition speed remaining the same for with the speed and per-beat count in the thalam progressively increasing, for her daughter Radha to perform. Was there a message there? Overall, the book considers all controversies – including whether D.K. Pattammal ought to have been given the Kalanidhi earlier; the real reasons behind Sadasivam’s tiff with the Academy during the Tamil Isai movement years; and the long-standing duel on whether to shringara or whether to not shringara between the Rukmini Arundale and the Balasaraswati schools of thought as digressions best not delve on. The work presents MS’s music as one that was not only not influenced by these controversies, but also not influenced or shaped in any way by the political happenings post- independence – including the emergency, the political success of the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, and later, the rise of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In some cases, it also presents MS to be taking the middle ground – for instance, placing Rukmini and Balasaraswati’s framed photographs at the same level in her drawing-room. Even more curiously, Desiraju dismisses her earlier biographer’s attempt to translate and present MS’s letters to GN Balasubramaniam as ‘inappropriate’, for not having sought MS’s consent – which is a fair comment. However, it is possible to reflect on their relationship and their mutual influences without the aid of those letters – even if she did not formally learn any numbers from GNB. She did present Dharini Telusukonti at her 1958 concert, the year GNB was awarded the Kalanidhi, with many of the trademark sangatis that GNB is known to have engineered into the Kriti – albeit for a different stanza. The affectionate tribute, at least to this listener, was striking, yet beautifully subtle. To be fair, the book starts on the premise that enough has been said of everything else about MS and that it is her music that ought to be the focal point of this work. It is entirely another matter that the socio-political context in which one lives and loves, does and must shape one’s music – even for MS. That story equally deserves to be told – even if it first needs to be created. Prasanna S. is a Delhi-based lawyer. He tweets @prasanna_s.
