Padams that shone like gems
PRADEEP CHAKRAVARTHY
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Today is the birth anniversary of T. Brinda, who made Kshetrayya's padams immortal.
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SPECIALIST: T. Brinda brought alive the mood through melody and emotion.
The normally pleasant countenance of Vijayaraghava Nayak had a worried look. From his couch carved from the finest ivory, across the stately pillared sangeetha sabha the view of his capital in Thanjavur was indeed a grand sight. But he had a problem with his court poets, who were seething with jealousy.
"Your favourite poet Kshetrayya is no match for all of us. We have been loyal to your court for ages and yet you patronise him, he who has come here as a visitor from elsewhere." Kshetrayya rose to the occasion with a challenge. "Let me begin a padam and your court poets can complete it for me," he said, and sang —
"It all happened so long ago, in a different age, another life... Who is he to me anyway... " The birdsong I heard from the passing seasons gave me joy no longer... "
``Perhaps your poets will complete it when I am back," Kshetrayya went on a pilgrimage. When he came back months later, the poem remained incomplete and in a jiffy he concluded: "I asked for the omens to tell me my fate, I asked them for Muvva Gopala's coming, As I saw others enjoying their company. Oh God! Will he ever come? Will I ever see his face? Perhaps our first meeting itself was more than enough!" ("Vadaraka Poopoove," Yadhukula Khamboji). The poets were humbled and the monarch was ecstatic with relief.
Perhaps it is wrong to question the veracity of these old tales, but the monarch did exist and he did patronise a poet but were the events in the story true? Was there really a Kshetrayya who was a master of padams — poems that seek to unite the singer and listener to the divine consciousness through sringara rasa? But this is certain; the music that he composed will live with us for ever, not just as beautiful Telugu lyrics but in the voice of T. Brinda.
If MLV did much in the last century to put Purandaradasa's works to their right place among music fraternity and MS did to Annamacharya, T. Brinda and T. Muktha did so to Kshetrayya. This was not because their grandmother, the redoubtable Veena Dhanammal, was the repository of several rare padams and javalis. Dhanammal herself learnt most of them from Baldas Naidu and others in Madras. The link was more providential. Vijayaraghava wrote an epic on the life of his father Raghunatha Nayaka, who invented the Jayantasena raga, and added additional frets to the veena that still exists in the Sarasvati Mahal Library.
Brinda, born in 1912, had a rich repertoire of songs but it was her padams and javalis that gave her the special stamp. The padams of Kshetrayya were particularly polished till they shone like gems. "Ninnu Juda Galigene" (Punnagavarali) talks of the Nayika waking up after a dream and dissolving in tears at her loneliness. "Moratopu" (Sahana) elaborates on the theme with the Nayika requesting him to come back. "Rama Rama" (Bhairavi) where Krishna speaks of the pain Rama endures in his separation of Sita, and so on. The padams of other composers such as "Muddu Natesa" ("Ososi" Mukhari) and "Paatakura" (Sarangapani) were special too.
The slow style and the immaculate attention to melody and beat brought out the emotion that the songs expressed. Even those who did not understand the powerful phrases Kshetrayya used, experienced the mood and that was Mukta's greatness. She gave no commercial recordings, but private recordings and archival sources such as Sampradaya in Mylapore, Chennai, have collections of her concerts. (Sources — "Muvvagopala Padavali" — Dr. B. Rajanikantha Rao and "When God is Customer," A. K. Ramanujan et al; Indira Menon - Madras Quartette).
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