A song for all times
SANGEETA
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Pushpam Elias recalls the day she sang the evergreen song ‘Aanathalayolam Venna Tharameda.’
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It was an old folk song that was remixed to the rhythm of an udukku.
SONGSTER: Pushpam Elias had sung one of the earliest chart toppers in Malayalam films.
When Pushpam Elias entered the premises of the legendary Udaya Studio to watch her father, Sebastian Kunju Kunju Bhagavathar, at work, she had no idea what playback singing was all about or any intention of becoming a playback singer. Dakshinamurthy and Abhaya Dev who were on the lookout for a female voice for their compositions in ‘Jeevitha Nauka’asked her to sing a few lines when they learnt that the youngster was trained in music. After hearing her sing, the duo selected her as the singer for their very next recording . Thus happened one of Malayalam playback’s early super hit songs, ‘Aanathalayolam Venna Tharameda.’
“I was to sing with my father, but I was nervous and shy. So they shut the doors to make me feel comfortable. I still remember Dakshinamurthy Swamy, clad in a micro-thin white kurta, working on the tune of the song. It was an old folk song that was remixed to the rhythm of an udukku. No instruments other than a sruthi box was used,” recalls the 80-year-old singer.
Box office hit
‘Jeevitha Nauka,’ produced by Kunjacko and Koshi, was perhaps the first box office hit of Malayalam cinema. It played for more than 200 days and was remade into four other languages, including Hindi.
“I sang the Tamil version of the song too although I could not speak the language. The crew helped me out with the pronunciations. Tikkurissi, B. S. Saroja and S. P. Pillai were around when we recorded the song. My dad and I sang together and the song was recorded straight away. The Studio did not have any sophisticated noise-proof systemthen and since Udaya is near the seashore, there were crows hovering around all the time. They had people especially recruited to shoo them away,” she recalls.
Pushpam also remembers getting a whopping Rs. 200 as remuneration for the recording.
“I heard the song played at the studio after the recording and was quite pleased with it,” says the singer, who opted out of a career as a playback singer to look after her family. Pushpam has vivid memories of her father’s close association with theatre.
“‘Karuna,’ in which he played Upaguptan, was the most popular of his plays. ‘Rajaputhra Raktham’ and ‘Amrita Pulinam’ were the other popular ones. I still remember an occasion when the climax of ‘Amrita Pulinam’ was staged. My father was supposed to render a dialogue and fall dead on the stage. The crowd was so moved by his performance that they asked for an encore. He rose, said the dialogue and fell down. And it was encores once again,” she remembers.
She recounts that her father’s brother Alleppey Vincent was the co-poducer of Balan, the first talkie. “He, along with Chettikattu Harshan Pillai, had started Udaya Studios; T.V. Thomas had supported the venture. Udaya eventually was taken over by Kunjacko,” she recounts.
The family, though not into film-related work any more, still retains their passion for the art. “We maintain close ties with my father’s associates. Malabar Gopalan Nair’s (M.G. Radhakrishnan’s father) family and Augustin Joseph’s (Yesudas’s father) family are very close to ours,” she adds.
“I did sing a song for the film ‘Navalokam’ but then we moved out of Alleppey [Alappuzha] and I was busy with family matters. Though my father was active in films, the rest of the family was orthodox. Christian girls seldom pursued singing as a career then. Their music was always limited to choirs in church. But I was lucky my father was exposed to different kinds of music and insisted on us getting exposed to it too,” she signs off.
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