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CREATIVE JOURNEY T. N. Seshagopalan

With due respect to many in my generation, this stereotyping was not too far off the mark. A huge chunk of us have grown up feeling closer to the Beatles, Floyd, and even Bach than those performing at the sabhas in our neighbourhood. This was largely because the semantics of Carnatic music, for us, formed an impenetrable cloud. You had to be able to detect and distinguish ragas, intellectualise a singer’s manodharma, and your heart almost skipped a beat out of fear if the person in the next seat caught you getting the tala wrong! While deferring to the complexities of a highly evolved tradition that Carnatic music embodies, I naively wondered if the uninitiated and unfamiliar could have a wholesome, musical experience without feeling a rather humbling lack of comprehension. Vidwan Madurai TNS (as he is fondly called) showed me you could, and how!

With these doubts plaguing me and reluctant to switch off Roger Waters’ voice that was crooning in my head, I walked into his concert. I even wondered: why TNS? Couldn’t someone younger and perhaps of my generation help me make the transition more easily? I couldn’t have been more wrong. TNS’s overpowering music transcends form, genre and even generations. It is, simply put, a pure tribute to creativity and sound.

For the first time, it seemed like the raga and the laya were just a framework. At the heart is sheer magic with sounds, woven effortlessly and with a level of honesty I had never witnessed before. The sounds could have formed any pattern and accordingly belonged to any tradition. It really didn’t matter because what was being evoked was your basic human instinct to connect with music.

This also explains why TNS’ concerts are full of pleasant surprises. His is not a typical concert for a clean three hours with a few ragas packed in - distributed evenly, and a fair amount of aalapana. Apart from the lack of predictability which has its own charm, one actually doesn’t want him to finish his raga delineation, however long it may take, until all those intractable notes that a listener is only sub-consciously able to sense, are conquered. You only had to look at the gratified faces around to realise that this was an artist who had the audience with him, every minute of his journey.

A rather unexpected connection I made during the course of the concert was with George Orwell’s description of a good book in his political masterpiece “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The protagonist, Winston, is moved to realise that the best books are those which tell you what you already know, which you yourself could have said. TNS’ music is somewhat similar. Upon the pronouncement of every note, you feel that it is exactly what was lurking in the nuanced sphere of your mind. I was left to wonder how TNS had, in a few hours, managed to undo more than two decades of my conditioning; conditioning which had put me and many of my age and kind, miles away from Carnatic music and its construct, which we found imposing. Was it the fact that the music was so original and powerful that it rendered its form irrelevant? After all, I suppose that it is only form which separates the great music of Bach from that of TNS. Or could it be the fact that with TNS, the music that emerges is itself the product of a seminal mind? There is a complete absence of posturing and presumption with TNS. His message is simply that he is on a wonderful trip and you can join him. Even if you don’t know your Mohanam from your Hamsadhwani!

If I came back with a sharpened sense of music that led to a more refined enjoyment of the Beatles and Floyd, I have TNS to thank for it. More significantly, TNS had become my vehicle to visit tradition with renewed imagination.

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