An Unequal Music

T M Krishna (2013), A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story, 

HarperCollins, pp. 588

When TM Krishna speaks of music, it is ‘…the intimate, gentle, profoundly emotional character’ that is central to Carnatic performance. Carnatic music is the form of Indian classical music that has been practiced in southern part of India for more than thousand years.  And TM Krishna himself has been involved in this tradition for more than three decades - as a singer, teacher, researcher, critique and a receiver of music. By analysing musical performance in theoretical frame and historical contexts, the author unravels the evolving tradition of music both as an involved practitioner and as serious researcher. For him, the archives are as wide-ranging as documents, inscriptions, recordings, temple paintings, traditions and conversations with musicians (as bearers of an inheritance passed on from teacher to the student orally through generations).  To him, music is meant as an artist’s way to create time. To him, tradition is when structures cease to be a set of rigid rules; and rather becomes a set of competing orthodoxies, open to experimentation and interpretation. He is irreverent and provocative, deliberately spreading facts before us, asking us to test it in the light of reasonableness. He is in search of the origins and philosophy of music and he goes in a quest to find meaning beyond the visible surface of the concert to the depths of an artist’s heart from where all music springs.

The Intent of Music

One of the central arguments of the book is to look at music beyond technicality to other sources that renders music its musical ‘quality’ at a time when technical prowess is taken as musical genius. Krishna alerts us to the original intent of music and indeed all art forms. The author begins with his definition of aesthetics as going beyond just ‘conditioned comprehension’. He brings out music as both an impersonal sense of experience and as a manifestation of personal feelings and needs. At the beginning of the book, he remarks, ‘There are two types of experiences that art can give us: one is about ourselves, and another is purely about the created.’ Lack of either of these qualities makes the experience of art incomplete.

Then he makes his second observation that the intent of music, especially Carnatic music, has an externally constructed emotional charge called ‘social intent’ as well as the deeply intimate ‘personal intent’. This social intent of music has been the source of inequality- of gender, caste, class- that has systematically barricaded majority of the people from being the receivers of this musical form. Krishna  also openly criticises the reluctance of practitioners to introspect about the unequal acknowledgement of other artists based on their caste and gender identities that reinforces their art as lesser music. Krishna’s social critique of Carnatic music also needs to be seen in the musical projects that he is involved in- to take Carnatic music out of the pristine halls of concert to the wide-open spaces of streets and public spaces in and around the southern Indian city of Chennai.

One way Krishna attempts to bring change is to alert the performer to his role in relation to the composer and his texts. The performer interacts and interprets the composer throughout the rendering of music, being his contemporary partner yet retaining his autonomy. Krishna compares the expectation and defined role of the western music performer and a Carnatic musician. He highlights the responsibilities of the performer to his composer and his intentions, to the historical context of his piece (that sometimes relegates music originally rendered by women or those having erotic content as secondary to other compositions), to his fellow performers of various musical instruments and the receivers of music that includes the performer himself. Krishna also alerts us to the ever-changing landscape of music that is changed by evolving traditions, method of sponsorship and training, technology and new research that brings out various streams that erupted from the vast tradition that we simplify as Indian classical music.

Towards a more equal music

This book has twenty-seven essays, all of it eminently readable. In this book, there are questions for everyone - a scholar of Carnatic music, to a sensitive practitioner as well as a discerning enthusiast. The language is conversational - indeed you are in the presence of a serious scholar, committed musician and a witty companion. His arguments are well backed with evidence, his humour is self-deprecating, his frankness disarming. There are parts of the book on the philosophy and social returns of music that speaks to a universal audience. You may read select part of this work and still take home something new and refreshingly radical. What you cannot miss is the place where Krishna’s music and his musical intent come from- this book is a journey with one of the finest practitioners of Indian classical music, whose heart goes beyond performance to the politics and sociology of his art.  He stands as a rebel trying to democratise tradition, introspect on his inheritance and attempts to widen the various streams that enrich the music he is a part of. To that end- to bring a more inclusive music- he looks at the ideas of beauty, philosophy and aesthetics. To work toward a more equal music, he searches the heart of our society and the people for who all art is created.