The Life of Music in South India

By T. Sankaran and Chase Madar

This book offers an account of Carnatic music culture drawing on the knowledge of T. Sankaran, a musician raised in an illustrious non-Brahmin devadasi family, and his long affiliation with cultural institutions including All India Radio (AIR) and the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy). Sankaran examines the cultural and social matrix in which Carnatic music was cultivated and consumed in mid-twentieth century India, including the ways that musicians negotiated caste politics and the double standard for male and female musicians. The memoir provides insight into the way AIR worked as a modern, bureaucratic institution, and how the opening of government music colleges interacted with caste politics and shifted women's participation in public performance. The book is polyvocal, as Sankaran's writing is interwoven with passages from Daniel M. Neuman's book The Life of Music in North India, which inspired Sankaran's project, as well as transcripts from interviews with Sankaran by Matthew Allen. Includes rare archival photos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780819500755

T. Sankaran

T. Sankaran (1906-2000) was a scholar and vocalist, and an officer at All India Radio and served as secretary of the Tami Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy). He wrote extensively for Sruti Magazine of Indian Music and Dance, The Indian Express, The Hindu and other Madras and national newspapers.

Book preview

The Life of Music in South India

Title

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Excerpts from The Life of Music in South India by T. Sankaran

© 2023 Yadav Murti Sankaran

Preface by Daniel M. Neuman © 2023 Daniel M. Neuman

Preface by Matthew Harp Allen and interviews © 2023 Matthew Harp Allen

Notes, appendix, and other apparatus © 2023 Matthew Harp Allen and Daniel M. Neuman

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

Typeset in Minion Pro by Julie Allred, BW&A Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sankaran, T., author. | Allen, Matthew Harp, editor. | Neuman, Daniel M., 1944– editor.

Title: The life of music in South India / T. Sankaran ; edited by Matthew Harp Allen and Daniel M. Neuman.

Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, 2023. |

Series: Music/culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Summary: Sankaran examines the cultural and social matrix in which Carnatic music was cultivated and consumed in mid-twentieth century India, including the ways that musicians negotiated caste politics and the double standard for male and female musicians. Sankaran’s memoir is interwoven with passages from Daniel M. Neuman’s work on music in North India, which inspired Sankaran’s project, and interviews with Sankaran by Matthew Allen — Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023020380 (print) | LCCN 2023020381 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819500731 (cloth) | ISBN 9780819500748 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780819500755 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Carnatic music—Social aspects—India, South—History—20th century. | Musicians—India, South—Social conditions—20th century. | Music—India, South—History and criticism. | Sankaran, T.—Interviews. | Musicians—India, South—Interviews. | BISAC: MUSIC / Ethnomusicology | MUSIC / Philosophy & Social Aspects

Classification: LCC ML3917.I4 S25 2023 (print) | LCC ML3917.I4 (ebook) | DDC 780.954—dc23/eng/20230523

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020380

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020381

54321

CONTENTS

Preface by Daniel M. Neuman

Preface by Matthew Harp Allen

Dramatis Personae

A Note on the Texts

ONEIntroduction

TWOBecoming a Musician

THREEBeing a Musician

FOURThe Social Organization of Specialist Knowledge

FIVEGharanas

SIXAdaptive Strategies

SEVENThe Ecology of Karnatak Music

EIGHTThe Cultural Structure and Social Organization of a Music Tradition

Epilogue

Coda

Appendix

Bibliography (in Three Parts)

Index

PREFACE

DANIEL M. NEUMAN

Karnatak and Hindustani music are typically understood as the related but quite separate raga-based classical music systems of India. Since the two Life of books were written in the 1980s, the terms of what constitutes classical music in India have been somewhat rewritten as it becomes clearer that changes from the mid-nineteenth century onward, in an ever more colonial matrix, have defined many of the conventional truths that scholars engaged from the mid-twentieth century.¹ Nevertheless there is an obvious close musical kinship of South and North Indian systems, not least in basic musical terminology such as rag-raga-ragam, tal-tala-talam, and alap-alapana.² And with the agenda of promoting national unity, there were occasional attempts by All India Radio to sponsor dual Karnatak-Hindustani recitals, typically using parallel ragas such as Yaman and Kalyani. There is, however, precious little research on the significance and extent of such musical kinship. And it is this comparative perspective that makes this present work by T. Sankaran so valuable.

When I first heard that T. Sankaran intended to write a book whose themes and organization parallel my own book,³ I was of course very much flattered. T. Sankaran was a first cousin of what might rightly be called the twentieth-century Trinity of Siblings—T. Balasaraswati, T. Ranganathan, and T. Viswanathan—a first cousin by virtue of also being the grandson of the great Vina Dhanammal. For me it was a great honor and humbling experience to have someone with this great heritage and insider’s knowledge be interested in writing a parallel Life of Music in South India.

Those who know my work may be surprised to learn that my original research in the music of India started with Karnatak music. In 1966, while I was still a graduate student, my teacher, Bruno Nettl, had invited Sangeet Bushanam (S. B.) Ramanathan as a guest artist to the University of Illinois. Bruno designated me as unofficial host and caretaker as I was the Indianist among the ethnomusicology graduate students at the time. It was from Ramanathan that I first learned of Tiger Varadachariar and Annamalai College. Ramanathan taught us voice, the vina, and a few Tyagaraja kritis, one of which I can still remember all these years later because of its beauty.

As an anthropology graduate student I was particularly interested in caste—a major theoretical issue in those days—and how it might affect musical society and the interactions between musicians of different castes. I knew that Ramanathan was a Brahmin, and when T. Ranganathan was to join him as mridangam accompanist for a concert, I observed their interactions with great curiosity, since Ranga was not a Brahmin. As it turned out Ranga’s visit was too short for any real observation, other than enjoying his infectious sense of humor and informality, which contrasted with S. B. Ramanathan’s more serious and formal mien.⁴

What I was so curious about then, namely the significance of caste, turns out to be a major theme in Sankaran’s work. The tension between Brahmins and the emergence of the non-Brahmin, when not actually an anti-Brahmin movement in the South are in general well known. But the manner in which this social tension affected musicians and the culture of Karnatak music is less well known, especially from the insider’s perspective that T. Sankaran brings to his work.

As Matthew has indicated in his preface, this work was originally written in the 1980s by someone born in 1906; it is also important to note that he was not an academic musicologist. But the relatively longue durée that T. Sankaran provides us is, I believe, unique in the annals of English writing on South Indian music culture. T. Sankaran joined All India Radio in 1939, which technically was even before Lionel Fielden published the first major report on broadcasting in India.⁵

The reader will notice extensive quotes from my original 1980 publication. We have kept them in this text as Sankaran originally inserted them, as they provide a literal template for his own thinking about South Indian parallels. Mostly Sankaran would use direct quotes coupled with paraphrased paragraphs, and their source is indicated simply as [Neuman: 000].

My own interest in Karnatak music did not stop with the introduction S. B. Ramanathan provided me. Some decades back, about the time T. Sankaran was writing this work, I published an article called Indian Music as a Cultural System.⁶ It was my own modest attempt at a comparison between these two sibling music systems.

The title, clearly derived from Clifford Geertz’s work,⁷ was inspired by his assertion that art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop. My article was an account of India’s classical music (by which I meant raga-based music), adapted to somewhat different shops, The Islamic and the Brahmanic. There are three key points in this article.

(1) Brahmans dominated musical practice and theory in the South, whereas in the North theory was mostly aural and immanent to hereditary lineages of musicians who were Muslim. In the South, therefore, the key performers (and theoreticians) were at the pinnacle of their social hierarchy, whereas in the North professional hereditary Muslim musicians were mostly far removed from the pinnacle of their social hierarchy.

(2) The significance of text in the Karnatak kriti and its devalorization in Hindustani khayal was one important distiction between the two systems. Furthermore, vocal music as practice and template for instrumental music was absolute in the South. In the North, however, instrumental music developed its own performance practice quite separate from the vocal style, even to the extent of creating a separate and distinct vocal-based instrumental style known as gayaki-ang.

(3) In the South timekeepers are external to the performer for the talam, which contrasts markedly with the evolution of the internal timekeeping function of the theka in the tal system in the North. I hypothesized that these differences were due to the different major sources of patronage, temple and court respectively, between the two systems.

Such comparisons will remind us of how our own discipline of ethnomusicology itself developed from what used to be called comparative musicology. T. Sankaran’s Life of Music in South India is surely an exemplar of such comparison, and refreshingly not one that uses Western classical music as its comparative model.

1. Important works on Karnatak music include Matthew Harp Allen, Tales Tunes Tell: Deepening the Dialogue between ‘Classical and ‘Non-classical in the Music of India, Yearbook for Traditional Music 30 (1998); Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). The article The Ethnomusicology of India in the English Language, which summarizes some of this, can be found in Daniel M. Neuman, Studying India’s Musicians: Four Decades of Selected Articles (Delhi: Manohar, 2014).

2. As most readers probably know, raga and tala are shared between North and South, and rag-ragam/tal-talam are specific respectively to North and South.

3. Daniel M. Neuman, The Life of Music in North India: The Organization of an Artistic Tradition (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

4. Another little note of a connection is that my major teacher, Ustad Sabri Khan, began his decades-long career in All India Radio in a Tamil-based orchestra at the Delhi radio station in the 1940s. There he had to learn to read Tamil-based notation in order to read the orchestral score, an achievement of which he was always proud.

5. Lionel Fielden, Report on the Progress of Broadcasting in India: Up to the 31st March, 1939 (Delhi: The Manager of Publications, 1940).

6. Daniel M. Neuman, Indian Music as a Cultural System, Asian Music 17, no. 1 (1985): 98–113.

7. Clifford Geertz, Art as a Cultural System, Modern Language Notes 91 (1978): 1473–99.

PREFACE

MAT THEW HARP ALLEN

Tanjavur Sankaran (1906–2001) was born into an illustrious hereditary music and dance family who document their lineage to the court of Tanjavur in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu over two hundred years ago. Over the course of his career, Sankaran had wide exposure to Indian culture, having been posted to almost a dozen cities in his twenty-year career at the then-fledgling All India Radio, and then having served in his retirement for another twenty-five years as director of the music school at the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy), an organization based in Chennai that promotes Tamil arts and culture. Sankaran moved easily among different constituencies in Indian society and was razor sharp in his observations of the country’s glories and its problems. His writing is unsparing in his critique of individuals who in his opinion exhibit ignorance or caste prejudice toward others. He is equally as severe in his critique of societal institutions that have been complicit in perpetuating forms of discrimination.

Does India need yet another critical voice added to the plethora of accounts already written on the history of Indian music or dance? Is it really necessary to drag out once again memories of discrimination that have caused hurt to so many? Sankaran faced this question with respect to Indian society at large, within his extended caste community, and also within his own family. He was known in his family as the one who would always say what was on his mind, not whitewashing or toning it down, often cloaking the intensity of his feeling in a witticism or diverting story. He knew how to get a laugh, albeit often a pointed one. And he knew that some of the stories and musicians’ biographies he published (in English, notably in Sruti magazine) made some of his close friends and relations uncomfortable. Once he told me that after he had obliquely alluded in print to the fact that the beloved singer M. S. Subbulakshmi came from a devadasi lineage, she called him and said, Sankaranna, how could you do this to me? Sankaran made a choice not to ignore or dismiss the uncomfortable aspects of life in a country that is in so many ways a society to admire, with its artistic and cultural history and literature of amazing depth and breadth in multiple languages, as a hub of scientific research and technological innovation, and as the world’s largest democracy, among other things.

The United States is now actively debating a history of institutional racism. Those of us who are educators are being challenged to create an actively anti-racist curriculum for our students. The experiences I’ve had make me feel all the more strongly that Sankaran’s perspective on the arts in India needs to have a place at the table of Indian narratives today. His is one of a handful of voices expressing the subjectivity of non-Brahmin people connected with the arts in India. They express a reality that, minus his voice, would leave us one step closer to an erasure of this aspect of Indian history. In his writing Sankaran can be strident or caustically sarcastic toward Brahmin people and Brahmin-dominated institutions and social spaces. But I have never found him to be gratuitously mean in his criticism, and his voice is at its root fair-minded. Sankaran expresses views held by many people who cannot or choose not to speak up about their subjectivity in India. When on one page he reports something objectionable done by a Brahmin person, just as often on the next page he is to be found critiquing something he finds objectionable in the behavior of a non-Brahmin.

Sankaran was a lean, scrappy octogenarian when he drafted this book. I wish the reader could hear him speak, his conversational tempo somewhere between fast and super-fast, and his recall of particular things said by particular people at particular times reported honestly with a suggestive flair. After I found Sankaran’s original book text, I soon had many questions I hoped he could clarify; this led to my interviewing him for basically a month in 1987 and the subsequent transcription of our 1987 interviews found in the current work. The back and forth of our interviews eventually helped to create a dialogic feel to the current text and gave me the opportunity to ask Sankaran directly for clarification of points in his original document. (I tried to capture his speech rhythms, the caffeinated tempo with which he delivers his thoughts, and the way he moves from topic to topic, informed, one might imagine, by the Cubist sense of a Picasso or Braque.)

FIGURE 1. Matthew Harp Allen and T. Sankaran. Photo courtesy of Julie Searles.

Sankaran is not simply a passionately opinionated social critic; he is a storyteller who writes with compassion and humor. He flags important problems that were not resolved during his lifetime, any more than they are being resolved today. His voice needs to be heard and not pushed away. We cannot let this history, uncomfortable as it may sometimes be, vanish.

Having been born in 1906 meant that Sankaran personally knew musicians and dancers who had been active as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, and he was active in musical circles up to close to the time he passed on in 2001. The observations he shares with us from his own direct experience therefore span a full century and a half of intently watched musical life. His stories, coming as they do one on top of another in rapid-fire succession, carry a mischievous smile, with hands gesturing and eyes gleaming.

It has been a great pleasure and privilege to collaborate with Daniel M. Neuman on the preparation of this book. Dan’s 1980 monograph The Life of Music in North India was what gave Sankaran the idea to write a book in the first place and was also directly responsible for my beginning to think about Karnatak music as social practice. So this project has become a three-decade, three-legged stool of a project for us, with Sankaran providing the core text; Dan supplying incisive editorial comments, revisions, and photographic and design expertise; and he and I then working to put Sankaran’s manuscript into its current form. I know of no other book quite like this one. It’s amazing it has happened as it has, and that we can now present Mr. Sankaran’s work to the public.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve had the great fortune to be associated with T. Sankaran and his cousins, especially T. Viswanathan, T. Muktha, and G. Sulochana, who freely shared many aspects of their family musical property with me over a period of decades. Friends in Chennai who watched out for us and taught us how to live and thrive there include N. Ramanathan and Hema Ramanathan, Smt. G. Saraswathi and her daughters Usha and Vidya, Trichy and Lalitha Sankaran, B. M. Sundaram and our music teacher T. Muktha, her daughter Lakshmi, and Lakshmi’s daughters Vardhini and Uma, whose house we visited daily and practically lived in for a year. For all their help and support along the ethnomusicology road, I’d like to acknowledge the families of T. Sankaran, T. Viswanathan, T. Muktha, T. Ranganathan, G. Sulochana, T. Brinda, G. Saraswati, and Lakshmi and Douglas Knight, as well as my parents Kenneth and Doris Allen and siblings Roger and Martha. Many thanks also to T. Sankaran’s son, Yadav Murti Sankaran, who has been unstinting in his support of this project.

My academic mentors guided me in incalculable ways. They include T. Viswanathan, T. Ranganathan, Mark Slobin, David McAllester, Jon Barlow, John Davison, Bill Barron, Jon Higgins, Bill Lowe, Akos Ostor, Greg Schrempp, and Phillip Wagoner.

I have also benefited from the wisdom and help of many colleagues, including, over the years, Samuel Araujo, Carol Babiracki, B. Balasubrahmaniyan, S. Theodore Baskaran, Aranyani Bhargav, Charles Capwell, Amy Catlin, Shubha Chaudhuri, Josepha Cormack, George Felton, Marcie Frishman, Philip Greene, Dorothea Hast, William Jackson, Saskia Kersenboom, Aniruddha Knight, Gordon and Jean Korstange, Ellen Koskoff, T. M. Krishna, Hari Krishnan, Rob Lancefield, Peter Manuel, Amie Maciszewski, Dilip Menon, Mel Mercier, G. R. McIlhenny, Sarah Morelli, David Nelson, Daniel M. Neuman, Michael Nixon, T. S. Parthasarathy, Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Svanibor Pettan, Jayendran Pillay, Mahalakshmi Prabhakar, Regula Qureshi, Savitri Rajan, V. Ramnarayan, Pappu Venugopal Rao, N. Ravikiran, David Reck, Tim Rice, Sam Ang Sam, Nancy Schoeffler, Stanley Scott, Ann Sears, Anthony Seeger, Zoe Sherinian, Usha Sivakumar, Davesh Soneji, Amrit Srinivasan, Sriram V., Lakshmi Subramanian, B. M. Sundaram, Yoshitaka Terada, Ric Trimillos, Guy Urban, S. Vidya, Bonnie Wade, Margaret Walker, Gordon Walmsley, and Susan Williams. I was also fortunate to have unforgettable conversations with Harold Powers, a scholar’s scholar.

And finally I wish to acknowledge the special inspiration I have received from my partner Julie Searles and our next-gen daughters Kayla and Emma.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ALANGUDI K. RAMACHANDRA AYYAR (1912–1975), ghatam, student of Nidamangalam Minakshisundaram Pillai (tavil).

ANNASAMI SASTRI (1827–1900), composer, son of Subbaraya Sastri, grandson of Trinity composer Syama Sastri.

AZHAGANNAMBI PILLAI (1863–1939), mridangam.

BALACHANDER, S. (1927–1990), vina, film actor, artist

BALAMURALI KRISHNA, M., (1930–2016), vocalist and multi-instrumentalist

BALASARASWATI, T. (1918–1984), dancer, student of Kandappa Pillai, daughter of T. Jayammal, granddaughter of Vina Dhanammal, sister of T. Viswanathan (flute) and T. Ranganathan (mridangam).

BALASUBRAMANIAM, GUDALUR NARAYANASWAMY (1910–1965), known as GNB, vocalist.

BANGALORE NAGARATHNAMMAL (1878–1952), vocalist, benefactor of Tyagaraja Aradhana.

BRINDA, T. (1912–1996), vocal, vina, granddaughter of Vina Dhanammal, student of Kancipuram Nayana Pillai, elder sister of vocalist