Fears
that some of our senior musicians may go unrewarded as Sangita Kalanidhi by the
Madras Music
Academy have receded somewhat with the announcement of vidwan T.V.
Gopalakrishnan’s elevation to that coveted honour this year. A versatile artist
of many dimensions, TVG has been a youthful, energetic presence in the world of
Carnatic music, sometimes beyond it, for some seven decades, now. As a mridanga
vidwan, vocalist in more than one genre, composer, guru and proselytizer, the
man from Tripunithura has been known to be a swashbuckler among the orthodox, a
traditionalist amidst the pro-changers, reverent towards his gurus and
questioning of taboos, all at once. His admirers and critics may be about equal
in number, but no one who has followed Carnatic music closely for a long time
will question his credentials. He has been consistently hard to ignore, and
many of us who had given up the hope – after he crossed 80 – that he would
follow in his guru Chembai’s footsteps, now rejoice in this richly deserved
recognition. Knowing his articulation, we can expect him to bring flair to the
conduct of the academic sessions at this year’s conference.
Musicians
of the calibre of M.S. Anantharaman, T.H. Vinayakram, V.V. Subramaniam,
Vyjayantimala Bali (though essentially a dancer, like Sangita Kalanidhi T.
Balasaraswati), P.S. Narayanaswami, Suguna Purushothaman, R. Visweswaran, and
Tanjavur Sankara Iyer are some other names that come to mind as artists
deserving of high honours. While the Music Academy has decorated some of them
as Sangita Kala Acharya, there may still be a case for a Kalanidhi or lifetime
achievement award for a few of them. Synonymous with the ghatam, Vinayakram,
would, in particular, seem to be a perfect candidate for the ultimate award.
It
is no easy task to select one honouree every year from a large pool of
contenders, we know, and this is no attempt to offer criticism or gratuitous
advice to an institution that has been grappling with it and generally giving
satisfaction to all but its most strident critics. We must, however,
acknowledge the very real danger that among a vast variety of specialists,
vocal and instrumental – lead and accompanying, wind, string and percussion –
some outstanding vidwans can escape the radar altogether. Some, like M.D.
Ramanathan, were ignored for far too long, while others like Rajarathnam Pillai
and Ramnad Krishnan perhaps did not live long enough.
The
truly great may care little for worldly success. We know from the extraordinary
lives of the Van Goghs, Gauguins, Monets and Manets of the Western artistic
world, that many geniuses went unsung and unhonoured in their lifetime, but we
do not often hear of giants of Carnatic music who led impoverished lives of no
reward, and whose greatness the world came to appreciate only after their
death. There is a high probability that there were several such instances that
went unrecorded, quite literally before the advent of the gramophone, and owing
to our lack of rigour in documenting our history, though there may be stories
galore floating around in the realm of legend.
V. RAMNARAYAN
