Vials in his violin
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Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan who received the Padma Shri from the President of India this week, shares his beliefs on raga therapy.
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Kunnakudi vaidyanathan receiving the Padma Shri from the President APJ Abdul Kalam.
IT SEEMS eminently fitting that renowned Carnatic violinist Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, among the Padma Shri recipients this year, should have received the award from the hands of President APJ Abdul Kalam rather than any other President. With his vibrant persona radiating undimmed enthusiasm, even five decades into the thick of a profession he entered as a child, he seems the right match for the dynamic first citizen everybody loves to praise. Kunnakudi, who flew in to Delhi from Chennai this week for the investiture ceremony, is characteristically speedy in both mentioning and then discounting the idea that he was considered for the Padma award rather late in the day.
"Be that as it may, I consider this a great honour not only for myself but for Carnatic music as a whole," says he, recapping his experiences over a career that began dramatically when he was nine, after his father Kunnakudi Ramaswami Sastri took up his training as a challenge to the haughty remark of another artiste.
Therapeutic potential
For the violin maestro, the greatness of Indian music lies not merely in its recreational and elevating qualities but in the therapeutic and medical potential of the ragas. "With financial assistance from the Tamil Nadu Government I have been running the Raga Research Centre since 1992. The research is about what powers the ragas have. For example, the raga Amritavarshini brings on rain. Why? If you sing Kamboji, it will not rain. Nor will it rain if you sing Sahana. What is special about each raga?"
The maestro, who also runs the Kunnakudi Sangeetha Gurukulam in Chennai, explains that just as Vedic mantras have powers to invoke certain results, so also the science of music contains powers in the form of ragas. "We give lecture-demonstrations on the powers and properties of the ragas each month," he relates. "A few years ago we found Ananda Bhairavi is useful in reducing high blood pressure. Similarly, raga Shankarabharanam is good for mental illness and for bringing prosperity. It is best to listen to instrumental music, and that too continuously."
The names of the ragas, he points out, are significant in deducing their properties, and likens the naming scheme of the 72 main ragas of Indian music, formulated by scholar Venkatamakhi, to modern-day numerology. "There are 72 melakarta ragas, and thousands of janya (derivative) ragas. But in all, there are only seven notes holding them all together," he says, elaborating the wonder of it. These notes hold the key to wellbeing. They are like beeja mantras, provided the singer pronounces them properly. "It can't be, for example, `Pa, Da,' it has to be Dha, like the Hindustani singers intone it," he emphasises, his sonorous voice ringing it out.
"So far I have experimented with 100 ragas. I also refer to different specialists, like Ayurvedic and Unani practitioners, astrologers, doctors and so on. The great composers, Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, Shyama Shastri and others like Papanasam Sivan have hidden messages about the efficacy of the ragas in their compositions. It is as if they have given us sugar-coated tablets," says the artiste, whose introduction to music therapy was through his own father's sudden recovery from a coma of 26 days after a 14-year-old Kunnakudi played Bhairavi raga on the violin.
The seeds of inspiration planted that day, as his father awoke to live for another seven years, are being nurtured with great care now. Besides research and performance Kunnakudi, who is Member Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Iyal Isai Nataka Manram, runs a three-year violin and vocal music course at his gurukula. "I teach all the students myself," he stresses. "There are about 15 of them, and they all play in the Kunnakudi style. Cassettes and CDs can't do what a guru can."
ANJANA RAJAN
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