Sankaran's perceptions and pointed observations are priceless, a rare insider's perspectives on the culture of Karnatak music.""
-PROFESSOR EMERITA BONNIE C. WADE, University of California, Berkeley ""Simultaneously a compendium, a historical text, and a mod-ern scholarly commentary, The Life of Music in South India complicates received histories and foregrounds issues such as caste and the social and political lives of musical production in South India. It is a must read for anyone interested in the anthropology and social history of modern Karnatak music."" HARI KRISHNAN, author of Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam
""This book is both an illuminating contribution to the social history of South Indian music, and an innovative intertextual dialogue between the principal author and the editors.""
T. SANKARAN (1906-2001) was a scholar, vocalist, and an officer at All India Radio and later a director of Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy) in Madras. In later years he wrote for Sruti magazine of Indian music and dance, The Indian Express, The Hindu, and other Madras and national newspapers. MATTHEW HARP ALLEN is professor of music, emeritus, at Wheaton College and co-author with T. Viswanathan of Masic in South India: The Karnatak Concert Tradition and Beyond. He has written several articles and book chapters on the social history of South Indian dance and the classicization of Carnatic music. DANIEL M. NEUMAN is emeritus professor and executive vice chancel-lor and provost at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has published numerous articles and several books, including The Life of Music in North India.
Tanjavur Sankaran (1906-2001) was born into an illustrious hereditary music and dance family who document their lineage to the court of Tanjavur in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu over two hundred years ago. Over the course of his career, Sankaran had wide exposure to Indian culture, having been posted to almost a dozen cities in his twenty-year career at the then-fledgling All India Radio, and then having served in his ""retirement"" for another twenty-five years as director of the music school at the Tamil Isai Sangam (Tamil Music Academy), an organization based in Chennai that promotes Tamil arts and culture. Sankaran moved easily among different constituencies in Indian society and was razor sharp in his observations of the country's glories and its problems. His writing is unsparing in his critique of individuals who in his opinion exhibit ignorance or caste prejudice toward others. He is equally as severe in his critique of societal institutions that have been complicit in perpetuating forms of discrimination.
Does India need yet another critical voice added to the plethora of accounts already written on the history of Indian music or dance? Is it really necessary to drag out once again memories of discrimination that have caused hurt to so many? Sankaran faced this question with respect to Indian society at large, within his extended caste community, and also within his own family. He was known in his family as the one who would always say what was on his mind, not whitewashing or toning it down, often cloaking the intensity of his feeling in a witticism or diverting story. He knew how to get a laugh, albeit often a pointed one. And he knew that some of the stories and musicians' biographies he published (in English, notably in Sruti magazine) made some of his close friends and relations uncomfortable. Once he told me that after he had obliquely alluded in print to the fact that the beloved singer M. S. Subbulakshmi came from a devadasi lineage, she called him and said, ""San-karanna, how could you do this to me?"" Sankaran made a choice not to ignore or dismiss the uncomfortable aspects of life in a country that is in so many ways a society to admire, with its artistic and cultural history and literature of amazing depth and breadth in multiple languages, as a hub of scientific research and technological innovation, and as the world's largest democracy, among other things.
The United States is now actively debating a history of institutional racism. Those of us who are educators are being challenged to create an actively anti-racist curriculum for our students. The experiences I've had make me feel all the more strongly that Sankaran's perspective on the arts in India needs to have a place at the table of Indian narratives today. His is one of a handful of voices expressing the subjectivity of non-Brahmin people connected with the arts in India. They express a reality that, minus his voice, would leave us one step closer to an erasure of this aspect of Indian history. In his writing Sankaran can be strident or caustically sarcastic toward Brahmin people and Brahmin-dominated institutions and social spaces. But I have never found him to be gratuitously mean in his criticism, and his voice is at its root fair-minded. Sankaran expresses views held by many people who cannot or choose not to speak up about their subjectivity in India. When on one page he reports something objectionable done by a Brahmin person, just as often on the next page he is to be found critiquing something he finds objectionable in the behavior of a non-Brahmin.
Sankaran was a lean, scrappy octogenarian when he drafted this book. I wish the reader could hear him speak, his conversational tempo somewhere between fast and super-fast, and his recall of particular things said by particular people at particular times reported honestly with a suggestive flair. After I found Sankaran's original book text, I soon had many questions I hoped he could clarify; this led to my interviewing him for basically a month in 1987 and the subsequent transcription of our 1987 interviews found in the current work. The back and forth of our interviews eventually helped to create a dialogic feel to the current text and gave me the opportunity to ask Sankaran directly for clarification of points in his original document.
"
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist