M. S. Subbulakshmi

M. S. SUBBULAKSHMItc "M.S.SUBBULAKSHMI"

The make-shift auditorium at the Loyola Public School at Nallapadu near Guntur was packed to capacity and the audience eagerly awaited the arrival of the reputed musician who was at the zenith of her career.

Pin drop silence prevailed as the singer took the dias. It was a charity performance by M. S. Subbulakshmi.  This concert was held in the late sixties.

Subbulakshmi was dressed in a green Kanchi silk saree with a red zari border in the traditional South Indian style.  Diamond nose studs shone brightly in the lights as also the ear studs.  She looked modest, serene and composed, with a hint of a smile on her face, a typical middle class woman of about fifty, unassuming and unostentatious, the very personification of dignity and simplicity.  She was accompanied by her husband, tall and imposing Thyagarajan Sadasivam.

Thyagaraja, Muthuswamy Deekshitar and Annamacharya Keerthanas, Narayana Teertha’s tarangas, Meera Bhajans etc., followed one after the other in a mellifluous flow.  She sang with effortless ease, feelingly, bringing out the moods of the compositions in the modulation of her voice.  Her performance, a memorable one, was a perpetuation of the bhakti cult relegating technicalities to the ground.  Her soulful melodies wafted over the surrounding green fields, fruit and tree gardens, over the rocky boulders and reverberated on the hillocks beyond.  It was an evening to remember in one’s life. Music was the food on which she was fed from her childhood and she gave more and more of it to her countrymen and the world.

A koel burst into ecstatic song and Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi was born on 16^th September, 1916.  Her mother Shanmukha Vadivelu was a Vainik vidwan and her father, Subrahmanya Iyer, a lawyer, was a devout person.  Her grandmother Akkammal played the violin.  The family lived a spartan life in a small house in a narrow lane leading to the great temple, economically not well off but musically rich. Subbulakshmi the child listened attentively the temple musicians who stopped at their house and played on their nadaswaram and mridangam and sang keerthans.  She listened to the music on the neighbour’s radio, sitting on the terrace of their house, for the family could not afford a radio set.  Singing came naturally to young Subbulakshmi, divinely gifted as she was.  It is said a flower emits fourth fragrance the moment it blossoms.  Even as a child in pigtails, her sruti and raga were perfect. She sang as effortlessly as one breathes.  Her father called her “Rajathippa” meaning princess little realising that his pretty princess would one day reign as the empress of music.  It was her father who inculcated into her the bhakti part in singing. She was called “Kunjamma” at home affectionately.

Subbulakshmi learnt her first lessons in music from her mother.  When the family shifted to Madras, they lived in a garage house in George Town.  Her mother recorded songs for the HMV company established by H.M. Reddy.  Subbulakshmi also recorded her songs to HMV, when she was hardly ten.  It is said she gave her first concert about this time at a wedding celebration.  When seventeen she held the ardent music lovers of Madras, including the redoubtable stalwarts of music, spell-bound, when the famous Araikudi Ramanuja Iyengar could not turn up to give his concert.  That concert turned the tide in her favour.

Sri Rajagopalachari introduced Subbulakshmi to Gandhiji and Nehru.  “Her music will cross the barriers of culture” said Nehru listening to her music.  The prophesy came true. “I am only a prime Minister. She is the queen of music” he added.

Behind every successful man there is woman, goes the saying.  In the case of Subbulakshmi, endearingly called M.S., it was a man who moulded her career to the pinnacle. The man was Thyagarajan Sadasivam who was closely connected with the popular magazine Ananda Vikatan. M.S married Sadasivam when she was twenty and played the dutiful wife adjusting herself to the dictates of commanding Sadasivam and carried out her mission of a devout singer of devotional songs.

M.S. had a short stint as an actress and proved her mettle on the screen as a singing star and delighted the audiences with her melodious voice.  But she could not stand the rigours of film acting, sensitive as she was, and gave it up with no regrets and concentrated on singing.

Though a South Indian Karnatic musician, she won the hearts of audiences in the North as well with her keerthanas and Bhajans. Her rendering of “Ghana Shyam Aayere”, a Meera Bhajan, won great acclaim in North India.  “Vaishnava Janato..” was immensely liked by Gandhiji. She soon became a household name all over the country, her voice invoking gods and goddesses to bless mankind in the Suprabhatams and Sthothras rendered by her through recordings and cassettes.

To make her singing perfect she learnt the meaning of each keertan, tarang, bhajan, ashtapadi or the sthothras.  By practice she perfected the diction and pronunciation, whatever the language, be it Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Hindi or even English.  She tried to catch the mood of the music as well as the composer and conveyed it in her renderings through her golden voice.  She had the unique distinction of having rendered the Sanskrit slokas composed by the Paramacharya of Kanchi, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi and later the song written in English by C. Rajagopalachari at the UN.

Awards came pouring in seeking her, once her talent was recognised in the country and abroad.  She started winning awards from the fifties with Padma Bhushan in 1954 which culminated in her being awarded Bharatna Ratna in 1998, the first musician to win the honour in the country.  Sangeetha Kalanidhi from Madras Music Academy (she was the first woman artist to win this distinction), Raman Magasasay Fellowship, Padma Vibhushan, National Professor, Member de’Honneur by the International Music Council are some of the honours, to mention a few, won by her.  The Universities vied with each other to honour her with doctoral degrees.As awards came   pouring in, Rukmini Arundale said to Subbulakshmi  “Kunjamma, leave some of the awards to others”. 

She hopped around the globe and sang in London, Frankfurt, Geneva, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Manila, Moscow and many other centres and covered the distance from coast to coast in the U.S and gave performances for the construction of temples in the U.S.  She sang before Queen Elizabeth II. Helen Keller felt her throat with fingers while M.S sang and remarked “she sang like an angel”. Decades earlier, Karaikudi Sambasiva Iyer, the veena maestro had said to young M.S. “Child you carry a veena in your throat”.  Not only a veena, a cuckoo had also made her throat its nest.  Sarojini Naidu once told M.S. that she (M.S.) was the true nightingale of India and not herself.  She was prepared to give away the title to M.S.! Bade Gulam Ali Khan called her “Suswara Subhalakshmi”.  It is said that Zuben Mehta was reluctant to perform after a M.S. concert.

What was the secret behind the success of M.S as a musician?  Apart from the fact that she was a born musician and was blessed by Dame Luck, her dedication, devotion, commitment, religious fervour and humanness supported by humility and modesty made her the queen of vocal communication which “transcended words” as the New York Times commented.  Though times changed, her values remained unchanged.  It were these qualities that carried her from the tin roofed garage in Madras to Cornegie Hall at the U.N., to the Albert Hall in London and other famous Halls the world over.  Practice was her religion. In the seventh and eighth decades of her life she practiced claiming that she was still a student.  She earned crores of rupees through her renderings and concerts but she gave away her earnings for noble causes, to institutions, to temples and other such bodies.  The satisfaction of helping others kept her spirits up and made her long innings for seven decades as a performing musician a memorable record.

India lost a true ‘ratna’ in her demise, a jewel that represented the quintessence of Indian music.  M.S. is no more with us.  But her name and music will “resound for ages”.