A metaphor for cultural transition
LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN
THE DEVADASI AND THE SAINT— The Life and Times of Bangalore Nagarathnamma: V. Sriram; EastWest Books (Madras) Pvt. Ltd., 571, Poonamalle High Road, Aminjikarai, Chennai-600029. Rs. 275
This is an important biography of a remarkable figure, who straddled the world of Carnatic music at a time, when its social context was undergoing a major transformation. Its author is widely known, particularly among those who follow the music magazine Sruti where he has a number of articles to his credit, featuring interesting anecdotal material, mostly descriptive but rich in detail and of immense value to historians and sociologists alike.
Defies categorisation
This book, in my estimation is a slight departure from his usual style for he does attempt to position Bangalore Nagarathnamma (1878-1952) within a larger social study of the changing cultural milieu of music in Madras and southern India, when hereditary practitioners, especially women, were confronting a number of challenges and responding to them in their own distinctive ways.
What one is struck by when reading biographies of people like Nagarathnamma or of M.S.Subbulakshmi, is the extraordinary energy of women artistes living out their lives in full, in times of almost heady change that brought both opportunities and profound instability and dislocation, forcing them perhaps to seek solace in personal devotion. The psychological complexities of a whole generation of practitioners — especially women — escape easy categorisation; and the conventional descriptions that we all resort to, for example, the ones that the author makes of Nagarathnamma as champion of the devadasi practice, or the diehard feminist who took on the strait-laced Virasalinga Pantulu or the pious devotee who answered the saint’s call, all somehow seem emptied out of the travails of history. Having said that let me quickly add that the biography is of enormous value in reconstructing the details of Nagarathnamma’s life as well as of the context in which she lived. Carefully reconstructing bits and pieces about her life and labour, Sriram’s work is a treasure trove of detail that suggests the extraordinary pressures that she and her community had to deal with as individuals and as part of a collective whose value was under threat. He draws his inspiration from an earlier biography by Banni Bai although it is unclear how his own work differs and departs from the earlier work. One would have welcomed a fuller treatment of the earlier biography and its location and which would have in my estimation substantively enhanced the present work. For instance, how did Banni Bai see Nagarathnamma’s defence of Muddu Palani’s work — did she endorse it all? We know from other kinds of writings that members of the devadasi community were very articulate and functioned as cultural translators, enjoying in the process a certain status and confidence. How they deployed this resource is an interesting question to address, and the Muddu Palani case could well be a useful site to examine an older debate about gender relations within the tradition-modernity grid.
Her battle
The section on Nagarathnamma’s battle for refurbishing the sanctuary of Tyagaraja, the saint-composer of Tiruvaiyar, is perhaps the best in the book. The centrality that Tyagaraja enjoyed in the imagination of the Madras elite as well as in that of the community of musicians comes through vividly and speaks for the power of a collective investment in an iconic figure that gestured to the individual, to the community of practitioners, and to the world of the new patrons at the same time. What is not so present in the book is the music and performing style of Bangalore Nagarathnamma. This is not surprising for we do not have too many recordings that would permit a close reading of the audio material. What we do get a glimpse of is the polyphonic nature of Nagarathnamma’s musical inheritance, which was part of an older phase of Carnatic music’s historical trajectory when the emphasis on a particular style of rendering was not severely insisted upon. We are yet to comprehend fully that phase of music’s historical past, and it is to Sriram’s credit that he presents us with information and an analysis that permits us to ask even more questions.
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