For two years in a row now, I have had the extraordinary luck of being in Chennai on winter days when my friend Aruna Sairam’s concerts have been scheduled. Last year, it was at the Mylapore Fine Arts Club and this year, at the Narada Gana Sabha, both bastions of classical music. The concerts were packed (standing room only) with listeners who actually paid for tickets. What a contrast to philistine Delhi, where even with the distribution of free passes, great artistes find half-empty halls. Aruna and several of her contemporaries are living proof that Carnatic music, while firmly rooted in classical traditions, has an amazing capacity to rejuvenate itself in multiple directions.

My aunt once told me that Telugu was the only “sweet” language that could help extract the rasas of our music. She was dead wrong. Aruna, among others, has gone back to astonishing mediaeval Tamil compositions from Thevaram to Divya Prabandham. She has rediscovered Uttukaadu Venkata Subba Iyer and his wonderful Tamil compositions. She has come out with a CD appropriately called Kshetra Chennapuri. The beauty of this CD is that it covers tributes to not just the well-known Parthasarathi and Kapaaleeshwarar temples but also to that little gem in the heart of “town”, Kandakottam, where the nineteenth-century immortal Ramalinga Adigalaar lived. (As an aside, just before he passed away, he wrote the following, my loose translation: “We set up shop, exhibited our wares; finding no customers, we packed up and left.”) She has included Tiruneermalai, a temple of pre-Pallava times on the outskirts where the Aalwaars described Krishna in enchanting Tamil as “Neer-vannan” — he who has the colour of water — referring to Krishna’s blue hues. And when one listens to Aruna singing the lesser-known Kannada composition of Sripaadaraja “Kaveri Ranga”, even an atheist will turn a believer. The inclusion in concerts, of unusual raaga maalikas and the erstwhile humble tillaanas from the repertoire of dance confirms the capacity of our music forms to innovate, expand and grow. Many thought that when Aruna started singing Marathi abhangs praising Vitthala (set to Carnatic raagas) there would be a pushback. Guess what, that’s the number the audiences love most; they keep asking for repeats.

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