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On a curve

Rohan Krishnamurthy

There are lots of NRI children who learn some Indian classical art and garner praises from their doting elders both in India and the country their parents have adopted. What is noticeable though, is the high respect in which they hold the art, as wel l as almost all things Indian and old. Young artistes here may be searching for contemporary relevance in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, but the NRIs are content to delve into them with a genuine, sometimes unquestioning faith. For every generalisation though, there is an exception or two. Take the Michigan-based Rohan Krishnamurthy, young mridangam player. Leave aside faith and humility, Rohan turns his lack of sustained training into a virtue.

“I don’t have a teacher constantly breathing down my neck,” he says nonchalantly. If reverence is absent from his conversation, clichés are not. Describing his mridangam training as a young boy under Damodaran Srinivasan in a small American town, he says when his teacher left town, he was dependent on the speaker phone to get his lessons. Then, says Rohan, he “just happened to meet” celebrated mridangam exponent Guruvayoor Dorai. This was when Rohan was all of 10. Curious about the speaker phone lessons, Dorai offered to teach him whenever possible. “And the rest as they say, is history,” says the 19-year-old without a trace of irony.

Tall claims

Youngsters can be forgiven their swollen heads. What is more disturbing is his teaching “all the South Indian percussion instruments” in the U.S. Though he has never learnt Carnatic vocal music, he has apparently accompanied several leading names in their concerts.

Then there is Rohan’s claim that he has invented a new type of mridangam that can be tuned for shrutis ranging from the male to the female in the space of 10 minutes. It is not “artisan-dependent” as he puts it, and it combines the tuning method using leather strings with the nut-and-bolt system.”

Mridangam maestro T.V. Gopalakrishnan, known for his experimental bent, has already made this type of mridangam and other innovations. When told of Rohan’s claims, he says, “Who can stop people from talking? My own student appeared on TV and claimed some of the innovations I had taught him to be his own. He even said I praised him for this ideas! I watched it on TV helplessly. There is nothing for it but to do one’s work.”

But with Rohan applying for a U.S. patent on the product, it is no laughing matter. And does that mean Indian artistes will soon have to buy their mridangams from the U.S.? “Yes,” says the U.S. citizen smugly.

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