A friend of mine — an ardent Carnatic Music Rasika of many years — forwarded to me this morning the below news item in the Telegraph of 2014 (which I’m reading now for the first time) featuring an interview with Sangitha Kalanidhi, T. M.Krishna, whose music I once upon time I used to delight in and whose political views I now despise only because they have polluted his music.
Yes, Mr TM Krishna, Carnatic Music is indeed an art form of the Tambrahms, cultured by the Tambrahms and exclusively for the spiritual upliftment of the Tambrahms. Other communities have always been welcome into the club, of course, but make no mistake about it : the club itself belongs exclusively to Tambrahms. This rare musical art-form has been over the last three or four centuries been tended, nurtured and curated with TLC (tender loving care) by the Tambrahm community and by generations of highly accomplished Sangitha Vidwans or artistes who dedicated all their lives, and sacrificed so much, for the cause of this genre of music and its hoary traditions.
Therefore, no self-respecting Tambrahm would have to, or ought to, have any reason to be apologetic about the fact. Au contraire, it ought to be a matter of well-placed pride for every Tambrahm who has an ear for this classical music… and T M Krishna has the insolence to say in the interview that he wouldn’t deign to grant the status of classicism to it!
The fact that you, T M Krishna, want to live down your Brahmin lineage — and hence go about continually abusing, spewing ridicule upon and audaciously trashing the roots of Carnatic music that even History acknowledges germinated only within the Tambrahm culture and community reveals starkly your own lack of self-respect and your deep low self-esteem. It also reveals either your utter ignorance of Tamil Society or your severely jaundiced understanding of it.
Poor you, Mr Krishna ! You are to be pitied not pilloried. Obviously, you’ve still not worked off the effects of the inebriation caused perhaps by that strong shot of heady shandy your kind mother handed you to quaff down when you were hardly out of your knickers. That boyhood rite of passage you underwent has unfortunately left a deep, unhealed scar upon your artistic sensibility and social sensitivity … and you seem to wear that scar on your sleeve as if it were a badge of honour.
Who the hell is going to read your new book, T M Krishna ? Not me, certainly .
M .K. Sudarshan
