No one denies the hoary origins and status of these dance and music forms … Even “oppari” and “gaana” music are folk art indeed.
The question here is not however about their origin or cultural credentials .
The MMA is an institution that was conceived and incepted in the first place to promote, preserve and perpetuate the classical form of Carnatic music. It was not meant to propagate other art forms that have the potential to start serving as tool-kits for politically inspired propaganda — whether it is endorsed by prevailing Raja dharma or is otherwise held to be Constitutionally virtuous.
Classical Carnatic was intended to remain classical … I.e. as “saastreeya”… not transmogrify into some kind of tool-kit for a specious brand of “social activism” now being peddled in the name of encouraging folk arts and art forms . It’s all a disguise as treacherous as Ravana’s pious masquerading in the Ramayana to abduct Sita.
The infiltration of non-classical “folksy” art forms into the MMA’s flagship annual show called “December Music Festival”, which was always meant to be an exhibition of the classicism and the high standards of Carnatic music, is nothing but a terrible betrayal of the vision of the founding fathers of this great cultural institution. The present ruling dispensation, both within and outside the Music Academy, has to be held guilty of trampling upon and despoiling the ideals of the founders whose institutional heirloom had been bequeathed to them in the hope that as trustees and posterity they would pledge to preserve and cherish it.
This 2024 cultural infiltration serves only one purpose, to my mind : To signal the opening of the gates for Trojan horses of the MMA to enter the world of Carnatic music and invade its identity and to occupy its unique but already dwindling cultural space in India.
Sudarshan Madabushi