When Colors Change : Ragamalikas in Carnatic Music

Nothing like adding a bit of color to pep up proceedings. And if the colors keep changing constantly, you can be assured of audience participation. Ragamalikas perform this function in many of the modern day concerts.

As with any classification, we can have different types of classification for ragamalikas. I will categorize them as two and deal with it in two parts. The first type of ragamalikas are the composed ragamalikas. The second type is the one which happens in 'kalpana sangeetham'. We will start with the ragamalikas which are pre-composed.

To start right at the beginning, we have the Navaragamalika varnam. As the name indicates the varnam is made up of nine ragas. There is a rendition of this by Trivandrum R S Mani, which is available commercially. I haven't heard any other ragamalika varnam as such and I am not sure if more ragamalika varnams exist. Hear MDR sing this Patnam Subramanya Iyer varnam in his inimitable style.

One area where ragamalika comes to the rescue is when composing music for long poems / slokas etc. Each of the stanza can be tuned in a different ragam ensuring you hold the attention of the audience for a long time. It is well known that the Ramayana krithi, 'Bhavayami Raghuramam' had all its stanzas set to Saveri ragam. One problem with such an approach is when the concerned krithi is very long audience tend to lose interest after some time if the raga doesn't change. If the whole 'Bhavayami' is in Saveri, the audience may not worry whether Rama finally rescued Sita or not!!! They would have lost interest by then. Semmangudi and his team changed this into a ragamalika and now, thanks to that rendition of MS, everyone knows and enjoys 'Bhavayami Raghuramam'. Similarly, Jayadeva's poem, 'pralaya payodhijale', which talks about Vishnu's Dasavataram is set to ragamalika. As we can imagine, since these are not 'standard' tunes, multiple tunes exist for the same poem. For 'pralaya payodhijale' we have the rendition by MS, which probably was set to tune by Kadayanallur Venkatraman. This has ragas which are Hindustani oriented. The same Jayadeva's composition is set to a different ragamalika by Semmangudi. Here the ragas used are of more 'classical' carnatic variety. Kadayanallur Venkatraman tuned some verses of Poonthanam Namboothri's 'Gnana Paana' for MS to sing. 'kandu kandu' was a creation which MS relished singing. Then there is 'Sree Chankraraja Simhasaneshwari' which was made extremely popular by Maharajapuram Santhanam. Listen to his rendition.

Another place where ragamalikas help is when tuning religious poems. Undoubtedly the most famous ragamalika in this category is tuning done by Trivandrum R S Mani of the Adi Sankara's poem, 'Bhaja Govindam'. We all know who immortalized it, don't we? There are many more slokas / poems in this category which have been tuned as ragamalikas. Be it the Lalitha Sahasranamam, Shymala Dhandakam, Lakshmi Ashtotram, Ashtalakshmi Stotram or any number of such religious works, we see the composers resorting to ragamalikas. Hear MS sing the 'totaka astakam'. No one probably has her felicity when it comes to singing the ragamalika.

There is another category wherein ragamalikas are used more to bring out different emotions than just to provide variety. The prime examples are the tunes for Subramanya Bharathi's poem. A long poem like 'theeradha vilayatu pillai' gives scope to use multiple ragas to bring out different emotions. Same is the case with 'chinnan chiru kiliye'. All of us know how the raga changes to a sad one when 'un kannil neer vazhindhal' line appears. 'dikku teriyada kaatil', 'malai pozhudinile' are other songs which come to my mind. These are essentially sung towards the end of the concerts, in the 'tukkada' section and each artist has his or her own favourite, which is generally demanded by their rasikas. These are more 'lighter' compared to a composition like 'Bhavayami'. Hear Sudha Raghunathan render 'chinnan chiru kiliye' in this clip.

One category of ragamalikas are what I term as 'concert ragamalikas'. Their only aim is to add 'pep' to the proceedings. And they are composed with this requirement in mind. The idea is to ensure the name of the ragam appears in the line and to change the ragam for every line. Most of the audience waits expectantly for such a line to appear. The line could be as silly as 'kaalai eyundhavudan soodana kapi' (Guess which ragam this line would be sung in.) As soon as the name of the ragam is heard (even if the ragam has not registered itself), you will see lot of blissful faces around you. The performer is assured of a thundering applause once the piece is completed. 'Did you know that piece has 23 ragams in it. What a piece!!!' are common comments. I don't want to point to a particular piece at the cost of incurring the wrath of that ragamalika piece lovers but many such 'concert ragamalikas' exist and many have their own set of steadfast fans. I am not one of them. One of the better 'concert ragamalikas' sung by Maharajapuram Santhanam.

Moving to the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum, we have Maha Vaidyanatha Sivan's Mela Chakra Ragamalika composition. In one of her lectures, Gowri Ramanarayan said it was a 'lakshana' composition. This magnum opus shifts between ragas as per the 72 sampoorna melakartha ragas starting from Kanakangi. The pallavi though is in Sri ragam. One of my friends opines that this is a touch of genius of Maha Vaidyanatha Sivan. After listening to vivadhi ragas one after the other, there is great relief whenever Sree ragam appears after every two cycles. Everyone probably knows that MS recorded this for HMV. What many don't know (including I till some time back) is that MS sang two chakras in each Music Academy concert during the December season for six years completing all the 12 chakras of this composition!!! Here is an outstanding excerpt of SR Janakiraman (fondly known as SRJ) explaining a part of the Melaragamalika composition. What passion, what knowledge and I love the fact he is also opinionated. We are lucky to have such great musicologist amongst us.

Dikshitar fans will bash me up if I do not mention the ragamalikas that he has composed. And how can I forget to mention them, when one of them, 'Sree Vishwanatham' happens to be my most favourite amongst all ragamalikas. We were very lucky to once hear SRJ talk in detail about this ragamalika. (Of the trinity only Dikshitar has composed ragamalikas. He has composed 5 ragamalikas). 'Sree Vishvanatham' is a chaturdasa ragamalika. As the name indicates it has 14 ragas in it. The intensity and seriousness of this composition has to be heard to be believed. Everything that we love about Dikshitar is present in this composition. Every line reveals his great scholarship and this is a text book lesson on how to compose a ragamalika without trivializing it. Dikshitar does every trick that singers nowadays adopt, like coming back in the descending raga sequence but nowhere is this just a trick. It is done majestically, with all earnestness and with such astounding beauty. If you do not yet possess this grand krithi and if you happen to chance upon a CD / tape of MLV singing this krithi, don't hesitate. Just pick it up. This will be a treasure in your CD chest. MLV does great justice to this monumental composition and never have I heard it only once when I have put on the tape. It has to be repeated atleast a few time before I can stop. Such is my addiction to this composition. In case you haven't heard this krithi, time to click on the youtube video below to listen to MLV's rendition.

I will leave you now so that you can listen to this repeatedly!!! I will talk about ragamalikas in 'kalpana' sangitham in my next post.