South Indian Musical Culture

By C. Subrahmanya Ayyar, B.A.

(A discourse between KUMARA GURU, an amateur violinist and a student of music and another student of music, considerably younger, who calls himself NADA SUDHA, and travels with the elder in the realmsof melody.)

KUMARA GURU: You have been long desirous to know my views on South Indian Musical Culture and the best that the public has derived from it. At the outset let us make ourselves definite about the meaning of culture in relation to music. You recollect, I dare say well, what Clive Bell has to say of civilisation and culture.

NADA SUDHA: Culture is that quality of the human mind in which it is at peace with the world and enjoys the pleasures of the intellect and the emotions, and those of the senses a little in the rear–from a charming ground. Or, it is a living tree which has its roots deep in the soil, making itself felt both by the rural and urban civilisation.

K.G.: Quite. And it also means a leisured class producing a highly civilised and civilising elite. Our great music makers, a hundred years ago, belonged to that leisured class, that civilising elite. Our famous musical Trinity took the ragas of the folk-songs like Anandabhairavi, Bhairavai, Nadanamakriya, Yadukula Kambodi, and Arabhi and created pieces of infinite glory and grandeur out of them. But their means of maintaining themselves were very scanty.

N. S.: What then was the object of their musical activity?

K. G.: It meant that they spent their best and happiest moments in the superior activity of creating music, though perhaps not with the intent of informing their experience to the lesser minds. For, they as musicians ‘knew’; it was for others to ‘reason and welcome.’ And the peculiar feature of the melodies of the Trinity of South India who lived in Tiruvaiyar is that not only was the subject-matter of their compositions a lyric outpouring in praise of Rama, Iswara, or Iswari as mother but that they revelled in the aesthetic flow of pure sound in vowels, thus raising music to the level of art, embodying raga concepts or forms though couched in words with soft consonants and vowel-endings.

N. S.: Good. In the larger world how do you bring in South India?

K. G.: South India is the land south of the Vindhyas in its historical settling. It can hardly be a nation geographically.

N. S.: Do you then apply Mazzini's test to South India which speaks even today the four Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Canarese, and Malayalam besides the Sanskritic-derived Marathi, and Sanskrit itself which has its home in the land’s innumerable shrines and temples?

K. G.: Exactly. South India has been a United Nations Organisation by itself in regard to its musical culture. The South Indian Tamil is a colonist and has an international mind. Has he not carried the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the island of Java and to the fareast? He has absorbed all that is best in the religious and mythical lore of the peoples speaking the six languages. Do we not in our Harikathas, though the townspeople may be ignorant of this religious activity in the last half century, sing Purandara Dasa’s kirtanas, Tukaram’s abhangs, Tyagaraja’s kritis, in the bhagavatar’s narration of the lives of our saints, bhaktas, heroes, and heroines? Dikshitar composed melodies in Sanskrit several centuries after Jayadeva, the author of Gita Govinda.

N. S.: What then is the function of music, broadly?

K. G.: Thinkers are many both in the East and in the West who have defined the function of music in relation to the individual and the State. For instance, Plato. Plato said that through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm and an even disposition to justice. For how can he who is harmoniously constituted be ever unjust? Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful. By music Plato meant the Nine Muses. G. Lowes Dickinson in his book After Two Thousand Years puts the following words in the mouth of Plato who comes to the modern world from Elysian fields after his decrying the orchestral, military, and sentimental music of the West. He speaks: “Music should be carefully chosen so as to correspond to that training in Reality, which my citizens were to undergo, so that it should be neither an enchantment, evoking illusory expectations, nor yet a premature unlocking of the gate through which all must pass in the end, but rather an evocation of those emotions which are fit to sustain and inspire the very actions, which reason tells men they ought to be learning to perform, and which will lead them in due time, to the great change we call death, fit to encounter its menace or its reward.” Thus music should lead man to tattva gnana, a Hindu ideal clearly enough.

N. S.: What is the view of Confucius who until the recent past was the moulder of Chinese history and civilisation?

K. G.: If we should abridge his ideas, we find that music, to his mind, represents the spirit of man to interpret the harmony of the universe which can best be exemplified in the harmonious government of a State. “It is by the odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the rules of propriety that character is established. It is from music that the finish is received. It should not be said of the King by the music of the land: ‘Why does he reduce us to this extremity of distress?’ for happiness of the people is the aim of a good State.”

N. S.: Have not the modern American philosophers anything to say on the subject?

K. G.: Santayana says: “Music is a rationalisation of sound and a mathematics become audible and the dialectic that moves sensuously and thrills.” John Dewey in his Art as Experience says: “Music is on one hand the history of making of musical instruments.”

N. S.: Surely, the reason why the greatest vocal music of South India is akin to vina music is now quite apparent.

K. G.: Ours is melodic music, unsophisticated, pure and simple, unaided by any harmonic orchestration as in the West, that can be sung by a single human voice or played on a single instrument like the vina, the gottuvadyam, the nagaswaram, the flute, and the violin–the latest adjunct in our music-hall concerts–besides the tambura or othu which keeps the drone and a musical drum, either thavul or mridanga.

N. S.: You began by saying that the intention of creative music was to communicate the joy of the creator to all the listeners. Have our musicians who are the interpreters of the melodies achieved this end in society?

K. G.: Till now I have talked only of the highest composed music in praise of Iswara, but there are other types current both in the north and south of our country which are erotic in character, like the gazals and the padams and the javalis. Music in the early stages of sociological evolution was always connected with dance and sex rituals, although latterly dance itself had become the interpretation of the Cosmic Rhythm of the Lord in Creation and was sublimated for higher purposes. Nevertheless, there was and still is a tendency in dance music to descend to the sensual plane. It must be said to the credit of Purandara Dasa, Tukaram, Tyagaraja, Syama Sastri, and Dikshitar and a few of the earlier and later composers in Tamil like Arunachala Kavi that they composed songs which delighted the ear alone and separated them from dance music enrapturing as well the eye. Thus music became intensely devotional and religious, an atma vidya bringing us nearer in our absorption in the godhead.

N. S.: But you haven’t yet replied my question about the interpreters?

K. G.: To carry on the tradition is not a simple affair. It has been in the past that every composer had a band of pupils who could sing and imitate the master, imbuing his individual music with the best of his talent, and the master-pupil–guru sishya parampara–system is still in vogue where the middle-classes are learning these high art-songs. For instance: Within living memory Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar is the pupil of Ramnad Srinivasa Iyengar who in turn was a pupil of Pattanam Subrahmania Ayyar, a contemporary of Maha Vaidyanatha Sivan, who imbibed his musical knowledge at Tiruvaiyar on the banks of the Kaveri where the great Tyagaraja lived. And no student has yet appeared to continue the tradition of Sri Ramanuja Iyengar. Isn’t this a sorry state of affairs? Within the last about two decades the University of Madras has taken on Music in the curricula of studies, not indeed of a very high standard, but has been responsible, in its own humble way, of bringing out a band of teachers for school education like the Teachers’ College of Music run by the Music Academy of Madras which started similar activities a couple of years earlier than the University. But let me tell you frankly, though my honesty may be a little disconcerting to you, that these interpreters who sing in concert halls have not lived that intense life of religious devotion and ethical character, to communicate that supreme joy of god-intoxication as also nada, delicate and balanced, to a wide public. They have, however, fairly preserved and displayed to us good technical mastery of music on the purely aesthetic plane of sound and that only when they sing the melodies.

N. S.: How then will be the direction of our musical education in the coming years as the State has taken over this subject, in accordance with the modern ideas of the functions of the State?

K. G.: I am afraid we will have to make a fresh start with a larger vision. The University education in music awarding degrees, diplomas, and certificates has of late shown certain evil tendencies noticed in Great Britain where such mass education in music has been in vogue for centuries, such as liability to mechanical reproduction, text-book analysis, and historical gossip–the class teaching containing very little incentive to active personal experience and participation. When the practical examination should carry a higher percentage for declaring success and not a mere thirty-five per cent in this practical art, the study of theory swallows a large amount of time of the students. So simple indeed is our theory of melodic music when expressed in the terms of the twelve swaras or frets to the octave or sthayi of the vina. The talas are only seven in the highest art-music of the Trinity. Yet all crude mathematical excrescences working up to hundred and eight talas are a burden to the memory of the young student, besides dabbling in words such as quarter tones, gramas, murchanas, all of them bearing no meaning in relation to living music. Yet the art is difficult for the shades of sound and pitch have to be learnt by the ear and initiated by a guru. We shall have to think of the art of playing on instruments or of singing as vocations having ‘standards without limit.’ It should be the function of academies to find out and encourage such superlative talent.

N. S.: Do you think that the National Academy of Music proposed by the Union Government for South India in the wake of the freedom of the country will serve the purpose you are driving at?

K. G.: I am afraid not to a large extent, as the Committee which has been constituted does not represent the living torch-bearers of our musical tradition, and many who are there now have no business to be there for they have no qualifications that made our great masters of music. All those custodians of the music of the several languages have to be represented in the Committee, including those top-ranking musicians who belong to the guru sishya parampara system, I mean not only the vocalists but the instrumentalists–vainikas, nagaswaram players, flutists, violinists, etc.

It should be a place where invidious distinctions of caste, religion, or language cannot cast their shadow; it should be holy ground. I am not talking as a politician for our master composers like Tyagaraja taught all castes and creeds, including a Muslim Durwan, I understand. Dikshitar has created a school of nagaswaram players who carry on the tradition from father to son–two of whom are Sri Nataraja Sundaram Pillai, the nagaswaram player, and the flutist Sri Swaminatha Pillai. The scions of Syama Sastri have carried the tradition of vina and vocal music, it is said, to the temple-girls in Kanchipuram and elsewhere. The present repertoire of songs of the Tamil singers is not restricted to one language as Tamil. It should be the function of that Academy to resuscitate the folk-songs in the several South Indian languages, to build a library of gramophone records, the copper plates becoming the nation’s property, not to speak of the art-songs of the great composers rendered by our best vocalists and instrumentalists, for ours is a great heritage of music. Here shall not be any parochialism or narrow nationalism, here in this hall of music. And it is absurd to think of every regional language constituting a nation. The province of Madras including Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Mysore, and Cochin has a historical ground of common joys and sorrows, and there can be no musical balkanisation.

N. S.: What should be the nature of the research to be conducted in the new Academy?

K. G.: We should not be content with quoting an old-world sloka of the second century B.C., vaguely defined without any scientific verification of the theory of twenty-two srutis and no more–which however arise in the process of the fixation of frets on the vina and can mathematically be deduced–when I can identify, exemplify as many as thirty-two pitches within the octave or sthayi in my violin play of the raga themes and Tyagaraja’s melodies. Research must be conducted by modern physicists in collaboration with high artists in relation to the living music of today, on delicate, scientific instruments such as the Cathode ray oscillograph and others. The orchestral fiend in imitation of Western style has possessed the A.I.R. for Indian Music. The same melody or tune is played on several instruments, some of them Indian, the violin, the cello and even equal-tempered instruments like the clarinet and the saxophone, creating a muffling sound akin to noise so that the succeeding generation will have lost its fine sensibility of the musical ear. And they have done this without any scientific investigation as to the coalescence of the musical sounds arising from the several instruments in relation to their upper partials. All such monstrosities should be set aside immediately.

N. S.: Talking of Tyagaraja you complained that his songs were escapist in character; and if then man doesn’t want to be seduced by the luxury of forgetfulness what are the means of his attaining an active joy in music? Do you want it to be martial or community singing?

K. G.: Certainly not. Our music is full of the highest aim in life, the realisation of shanti or peace by the individual soul. Our music is an individual music and art music cannot be sung in chorus, for graces are individual. We in India are all agreed that world peace should be ushered into being, and psychologists of the West say that the inner conflict of the individual soul expresses itself, when brought to the end of the tether, into the making of war on a global scale. The mystic music of Tyagaraja has very largely all the painful impressions of separation from the godhead. I am afraid even our age-long escapism taught by the Buddhist religion and absorbed by the Hindus should be given up while not following the Semitic ideal of conquest and exploitation of other human races. While not giving up the shanti ideal, we have got to fall on the Rig Vedic ideal of an active joy and participation in life, its human instincts and senses. We have to create a new type of melodic music where joy shall prevail, its deepest core being a universal harmony. The Vedantic teaching of the One manifesting itself as the Many, and the Many being absorbed in the One, is largely depicted to my mind by the play of the aesthetic sounds on the vina, for the four strings have got their own pitches merging in the drone, as the music coming out of the frets does. And in the wake of our new-born freedom let us rise to the great international level of joy in human life and song.