M S Subbulakshmi : Who misunderstood her?

In the October 1st 2015 issue of Caravan, Vidwan T.M.Krishna wrote a lengthy article about M.S.Subbulakshmi titled, 'MS Understood' with the subtitle 'The Myths and Misconceptions around India's most acclaimed musician'.  This is a long read and spans 10 pages. You can read the complete article here

Krishna, as his wont, makes lot of sweeping generalizations and hand waving arguments. I just want to react to a few aspects of his article.

First, Krishna starts with a straw man, with some unknown singer stating that MS was a hoax. Then Krishna goes on to elaborate on how critics never considered MS to be a great singer and thought that she was just a singer with a ‘good voice’.  Krishna then traces MS’s origins and talks about how her music changed, how the society affected her and how she could not realize her complete potential and so on. You can read all that in the article. Once you have read the article you will understand what I am saying here more clearly.

Krishna takes up MS’s quest for perfection and her constant need to practice with accompaniments before any concert. “While devotees of MS will argue that the rehearsals only enhanced the listening experience, I must accept that there is some weight to this criticism, since, to my mind, there is a flaw in this conception of what is perfect. MS sought a unified, error-free concert presentation, and accomplished that. Whether that made her concerts great art is another question. The experience of life, after all, is not one of correctness. Perfection is the search for the pure, experiential quality born from surrendering oneself to art. The artist gives her all, and stumbles upon perfection by accident.” This is confused writing at its best and ignorant writing at its worst. It has the same patronizing tone of the patriarchs whom T M Krishna criticizes in his article. The statement is preposterous because it presumes that during rehearsals MS was not surrendering herself to the art. It presumes that her eye was only on perfection of delivery, It also presumes that while MS is practicing she cannot ‘stumble upon perfection’ by accident. You would have assumed that perfection comes from constant practice, which each practice session giving you more insight into the art. As a teacher of technical subjects, I can assure you that with every additional lecture I give I get more insight into the subject, even if I am just rehearsing. So Krishna making this statement is surprising. And if he wants an answer, “Yes, her concerts were perfect and they were also great art.”

My take on the reason why Krishna adopts this rather condescending tone is that the outlook of the older generation of artist vis a vis their audience was quite different from how Krishan views his audience. He is quite well known for his condescending tone while speaking from the dias and for his general lack of 'sabha mariyadha'. Leaving that aside, the older generation thought that their art was their job. ‘Thozhil’ as they call in Tamil. So a concert was ‘thozil dharmam’ for them. In other words, audience were their clients and it was their duty to ensure their clients got their money’s worth. Hence the need for preparation, a need to weed out the unnecessary stuff in in practice session and come to stage with the finished product. Krishna on the other hand feels that the stage is just a place for an internal discovery of his art and the audience can come along in this search. They are not to be catered to. Perfection is not a necessary ingredient here. The philosophical difference is that the older generation considered the audience to be as knowledgeable as themselves whereas Krishna implicitly places the artist at a higher pedestal than the audience. That is the reason why he can talk condescendingly of the elder generation because they never thought of themselves to be at a higher level than the audience. Hence this lecture of ‘surrendering to art’ to someone like M S Subbulakshmi.

 The next point which is troubling is Krishna’s take on M S Subbulakshmi’s manodharmam “A fundamentally more serious charge was levelled against her creativity. Many Carnatic musicians and rasikas will say that MS’s improvisations were rehearsed and pre-planned; that she was a mere reciter. At face value, this rings true. There is no doubt that her alapanas, neraval and kalpanaswaras—all types of improvisational techniques—operated within a frame, and with a kind of route map already drawn within the outlines. She was certainly not a creative genius of the order of, say, the nagaswara maestro TN Rajaratnam Pillai”

One small observation her before I quote the next paragraph. No one, I repeat and you can underline it, no one was a creative genius of the order of Rajaratnam Pillai. So getting him into this argument is unfair.

But Krishna is actually more lenient on MS here. He continues, “But the truth is more nuanced. This did not mean that every alapana MS sang was a photocopy of a previous rendition. It is worth noting, too, that others of great repute have followed the same custom no less assiduously. The improvisations of Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, the godfather of twentieth-century Carnatic music, also adhered to a plan and structure. There was most certainly ideational repetitiveness in his performances. But I have rarely heard anyone bravely proclaim that he lacked the creative spirit”. He then goes on to say that singers like KVN and DKJ followed a template.

I have two problems here. The first one is about neraval. You can say that MS’s neraval was built on a template but it would have been great had Krishna shown a non-template neraval of _any_ singer which rose to greater heights than the neravals of MS. I have heard a lot of singers and I can confidently say that no one can grip you and draw you into a neraval like MS can. Be it ‘kadamba vana nilaye’, ‘sama gana vinodhini’, ‘kara abhaya mudram’, ‘hari ayanum kaana ariya jyoti’, o jagat janani’ and many more. In each of these neravals MS creates an atmosphere which no other singer of her time or later has been able to create. An atmosphere of tension mixed with tremendous bhava. Something which having a good voice and great knowledge alone cannot create. For when you hear her sing ‘amba’ in ‘kadamba vana nilaye’ you are taken to a different plane alrogether. So casually pushing neraval of MS under the ‘template’ carpet does no justice either to MS or to the listeners who understand and enjoy these portions.

My second argument is more nuanced. While critics may crib about MS’s creativity, what needs to be asked back to the critics is why is it that creativity is alone the governing aspect for rating an artist. Carnatic music has both kalpita(pre composed) and kalpana (creative) aspects. So why do critics always relegate the kalpita aspects to the background and talk only about the kalpana aspects. Here is where the patriarchy that Krishna talks about comes to the fore.

Unlike Hindustani music, where the words and tune of the khayal are a starting point (an important one at that) for the singer to launch his/her manodharma project, the krithis in Carnatic music are pieces of art which stand on their own. Singing a grand krithi like ‘O Ranga Sayee’, ‘Akshaya Linga Vibdho’ or any of the swarajati’s of Shyama Sastry would suffice and satiate a listener without the need of any of the kalpana aspects. The same can be said of the grand padams that Brinda and Mukta sang. So we need to consider the ability to render the kalpita pieces beautifully as one important aspect of the singer's music. This would mean that we need to understand and appreciate how the singer structures the krithi, how well the singer is able to beautify the krithi without destroying its soul and how close to the composer’s intent the rendition is. If we take these aspects into consideration then ladies start taking the first place. You have to give the gold medal to the likes of Brinda Mukta, M S Subulakshmi and D K Pattammal. This is disturbing to the patriarchy. How can women occupy the top places? Hence these aspects are quickly brushed aside as ‘template driven’, ‘well rehearsed’, ‘singing like a parrot’ etc. So if someone says that MS was no GNB because she could not match his creativity, the answer should not be that ‘Oh she did have creativity. Maybe not as much as GNB’. Rather the answer should be ‘GNB was no MS when it came to singing a krithi with bhavam’. This is as true a statement you will ever hear in your life but it is bound to piss off lot of ‘critics’. That ofcourse will be a matter of joy for us.

The other aspect which Krishna doesn’t touch upon as a genuine metric to measure in Carnatic music is ‘bhavam’. This is both raga bhavam and the religious bhavam aka as bakthi bhavam. Mentioning bakthi bhavam as a genuine aspect of Carnatic music to any critic or to Krishna is like waving a red flag in front of the bull. (Krishna, in the very first page says that MS’s later day music was, “spiritual revisionism”. ) It is quite surprising because in the west spirituality is an accepted aspect of many arts. The movies of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Dryer etc are seen as spiritual movies either endorsing or questioning faith. Similarly we have the great books of Dostoyevsky and others which are spiritual in nature. You cannot talk about Bach’s music without talking about its connection with the church. In the present day, people like Krishna want to strip Carnatic music of its religious overtones and want to make it secular. They want to make it ‘pure art’ owing nothing to religion. (Good luck to them.) Unfortunately that is not an easy thing to do given the history of Carnatic music.

‘Bakthi Bhavam’ formed an important aspect of M S‘s music and while critics may or may not acknowledge it, the common listener does. I am not just talking about an ‘uneducated rasika’ but about those who know the intricacies of music. My mother can sing quite well and understands the nuances of Carnatic music. She is a big fan of Semmangudi. She cannot stop smiling when Semmangudi sings those long breathless phrases during alapana as well as during the kalpana swaras. Once I put on Semmangudi ‘Akhilandeswari’ for her and we enjoyed the rendition. At the end of his rendition my mother said, “While I know his music has more weight(‘ganam’) in such songs there is something in what MS does. I can’t describe it but when MS sings it has that extra devotional component. Can you put on MS’s record of this krithi?” My argument is that when we take up Carnatic music criticism, bakthi bhavam should also be one of the aspects which must be considered.

Whenever I make such an argument, I am generally told, ‘If you want bakthi, go to a bhajan’ in a dismissive tone. People do not understand that the bakthi bhava in bhajani is quite different from the bhakthi bava in a concert. In a bhajanai you are involved as a participant. The main goal is not music but participation and when the group as a whole reaches a crescendo there is a certain satisfaction for the participant. Whereas in the case of Carnatic music, you are touched spiritually. Here it is not the energy or the crescendo that you are looking for. Here you are looking for some inner peace. M S was one artist who adopted the perfect middle path in this aspect. At one end of the spectrum there were singers like GNB who stripped off most of the bakthi bhava from the song. At the other end there were dramatic renditions of singers like Musiri. MS was the perfect center, instilling the bhava in the krithi without ever moving into the territory of sentimentality or melodrama. That balance is not easy to achieve but then MS was no ordinary singer.

In an excellent article, the dancer Alarmel Valli (a decade or older article which I am unable to link) argued that there was a need to evaluate an artist based on the aesthetics of the art. She was responding to western criticism about Indian dance. She said that westerners claim that Indian dancers don’t use the stage well. She said that the answer to that should be that the western dancers show no bhava on their faces. So who decides which is aspect is important? It is the same with Carnatic music. We need to expand the parameters of criticism to include all aspect of our art. Our aesthetics has kalpita sangeetham as part of it, it has spirituality as a part of it. Ignoring this and holding only kalpana sangita at a higher pedestal does injustice to our art. Krishna unfortunately dismisses kalpita sangita’s need for perfection and he feels spirituality is not necessary in our music. Hence rather than being the self confessed iconoclast, he becomes a standard patriarch.

The other important aspect of the article is the insistence by Krishna that MS was ‘subdued’ deliberately. He refuses to accept that her music ‘matured’. Rather he feels that they tied her legs and cut her wings. She had no option but to give up her talent and become docile. 

Here is what Krishna says,“Musically, the carefree abandon disappears. She still does sing those beautiful “runs,” but they sound more structured. All of a sudden, the kite is tied down by a heavy boulder.

Some may argue that this was the result of Subbulakshmi’s maturing, but I beg to differ. In the maturing of a musician, the spirit behind her music is not manipulated. With MS, there seems to have been a kind of reverse engineering: the core was dislocated in order to accommodate the realignment of mind and voice. After Meera, and her becoming a quasi-saint across India, her music had to reflect her new status.”

I really don’t know what Krishna is referring to the ‘spirit behind her music’ here but I do believe MS did mature as an artist. This ‘spirit behind her music was lost’ is a nice argument, especially to hit out at the patriarchal society but the way MS sang it is clear she understood her music very well and that she did not change for the sake of others. She was infact charting her own course. Krishna feels she would have come up like GNB had she continued singing the way she used to in her earlier days. I for one am happy that she didn’t. I will give you two krithis sung by her. One is a krithi which she sang when she was young, another much after she has changed her style. I will leave it to you conclude if her ‘spirit behind the music’ was indeed killed.

Here is MS singing 'enaganu rama bhajana' the Badrachala Ramadas keerthana in Pantuvarali. This is the young MS.

This is the older MS singing the Madhava Manohari krithi of Dikshitar, 'mahalakshmi karunarasa lahari'

The major narrative in TJS George’s book as well as in this article by Krishna is that of MS being a woman who was under the iron grip of Sadasivam, a woman who was probably not happy with the arrangement but probably had to stick on because she was vulnerable and she needed the safety provided by Sadasivam. She was probably internally angry, frustrated and rebellious but she could not outwardly show her emotions. Krishna tries to find evidence of this in her music. It is a nice approach: of trying to find the soul of an artist through their art. Unfortunately it is not an easy task.

Let us take this paragraph by Krishna, “In MS’s case, the signals were all too confusing. Her sincerity was unquestionable, yet there seemed to be so many acts and facades. These were not put on to cheat her listeners; she internalised her roles to such an extent that she was subsumed within”

If I have to paraphrase this for you, what Krishan is saying is that he believes MS was sad within, for she was restricted by her husband. He goes to look for evidence in her music and finds…. NOTHING. He doesn’t want to admit it. There must be “so many acts and facades” but it is not evident in her music. So “she internalised her roles to such an extent that she was subsumed within”. It is like a scientist saying that I have theory, I looked for evidence, I got none but since I believe in my theory strongly whatever I saw as non-evidence must be evidence.

This has been the problem with this narrative of Krishna and earlier of TJS George. They want to portray M S Subbulakshmi as a long suffering lady. Unfortunately they get no evidence for that. Neither from her behavior nor from her art. Both her behavior and her art show contentment and this is puzzling to all those who want the narrative to be true. Somehow this narrative does not do justice to the outstanding intellect of MS. For what she achieved is beyond just repeating what her guru taught. She must have analyzed it and made subtle changes which put her stamp on the music, all the while understanding the basic structure of the krithi and the composer’s intent. All this is not possible without a highly evolved musical sense within an original mind. This ‘she was always controlled by Sadasivam’ may be right in terms of what the concert would be like,how much time she would take for each piece but what should be done in each piece was her own individual decision. It was not a protest but rather a way of life for her. For she internalized every song and she perfected every song. Over and above the basic swaras, she poured something unique into the song. Call it bakthi, call it bhava or call it spirituality, call it whatever you want. That indescribable quality came from her within and it is this within many want to reject and see her as such following orders. You can’t do more injustice to her than believe in this narrative.

So the question then comes up whether she was not sad being lorded over by Sadasivam?  Was he not an autocrat? So why did MS not fight with him? Why did she not rebel? Was she so scared? Was she insecure? Everyone can have their own theory but as I said earlier there is no evidence that she was totally upset being Sadasivam’s wife or that she wanted to rebel against his dictatorial ways. Everything points to the contrary. My own theory is that inspite of Sadasivam’s domineering nature, MS probably knew deep within her that he was a nice man and he really loved her. This theory would be scary to a lot of people. After all every story needs its villain, doesn’t it?

The chief problem for all critics is simple. M S transcended the genre called Carnatic music. Her best music took people to a different spiritual plane. There the names of ragas didn’t matter. The technicalities didn’t matter. What mattered was the listener had the feel of his soul connecting to some higher power. Ofcourse, the more rational people would dismiss this as drivel but to the believers it is true that MS touches them in a way no other musician does. That is what scares most critics who hold Carnatic music dear. When MS starts singing music becomes incidental and time ceases. For that short period of time the listener gets hope that they can be a better person than what they are. That is one reason why a real listener will never have any misconception about the music of MS. For she did not sing for our ears, she sang for our soul.