Carnatic in California

CARNATIC STATES (Right & facing page) The IFAASD festival has emerged as one of the biggest Carnatic events outside India

Indians at home may take their culture for granted, but among those in the US, there’s a pervading cultural hunger. The week long festival at the Indian Fine Arts Academy of San Diego is just one of the many ways to satiate that hunger

As India gets a tad more Westernised every day, curious stuff is happening in the US. Among the NRIs, Carnatic music is gaining popularity and flourishing. In the US city I moved to a few months ago, about 750 people pay 200-odd dollars for a year-long engagement with Carnatic music through the Indian Fine Arts Academy of San Diego (IFAASD). Numerous concerts are arranged through the IFAASD every year, and a majority are Carnatic music concerts. The week-long festival this year had so many more Carnatic treats that I felt I was given a crash course, and could suddenly identify more ragas than before.

Carnatic music festivals are organised in any number of cities across the US. Musicians from India typically make a 10-week tour, performing mostly to packed audiences. Is this tryst with Carnatic music for real or is it merely a romance?

While as Indians, we are busy fighting rising prices and corruption, something is up with the software engineers who travelled to places like the USA. It has something to do with the leisure available here (no traffic jams at least), and the perspective made possible by the distance. An interest in learning about the different aspects of India’s culture sans the pressure to appear hip, which still bugs Indians living in India. As a result of this, perhaps, rich diasporic Indians have begun to fund departments of Hindu studies in American universities, while software engineers are reading up on the Vedas, doing yoga and rediscovering, among tons of other things, Carnatic music.

The present generation seems to enjoy the luxury of intellectual pursuit that people a generation ago could not afford. This generation wants to know why ‘we’ are this way and not that. And if you are still the Marxist yet to be converted into Buddhism by age 30, know that there is a ‘we’ despite class, caste, gender, regional, linguistic and other differences, despite the fact we came into being as a nation only six decades ago. They will also tell you that nationality is a European construct and does not matter. And that culture is what you are accessing when you are listening to Carnatic music, even if definitions are murky.

“There is a greater cultural hunger in diasporic Indians,” says Deepti Navaratna, a music teacher in Boston, originally from Bangalore. “Also, identity is a big thing in America.”

Students and teachers

More than 100 young students learn Carnatic music in San Diego alone and the IFAASD hopes to follow the footsteps of Cleveland and its aradhana tradition and expand its work. Many concert attendees here are the parents of children who are learning. And the children bring notebooks into which they dutifully enter kritis and their ragas. Occasionally, you will get to see a small bespectacled girl or boy putting a hand up to identify the raga just sung by the performer. And they get it right! Parents take the effort to bring their children to class and oversee their practice. Navaratna says, “The students are able to value our tradition while holding a multicultural perspective.”

And students make very good use of growing technology, says my sister-in-law Geethanjali Iyengar, who has been teaching in Austin for two decades. There are web resources that provide notations, lyrics and basics. Additionally, YouTube and other music websites make classes and compositions available.

Dr CM Venkatachalam, a music teacher in San Diego, mentors about 60 students from the age of six. They learn for 10 years and may continue into their college years through Skype.

“The demand for teachers is so high that about 40 students are waitlisted,” says Venkatachalam. According to him, children of fourfive years like to listen, while at age seven, they realise music requires serious effort. “I have students who practise for two hours before starting for school. And there are others who listen to the lessons while in the car and then sing for me,” he says.

Students in the US have a lotmore distractions unlike, perhaps, those in India. Some are busy with karate, swimming, tennis, chess and even golf. “Yet, children in India may ignore Carnatic music because it’s easily available,” he says. Children in the US learn Western instruments (guitar, clarionet, keyboard ) as part of the school curriculum. It’s a compulsory subject that is graded. 

Iyengar and Navaratna both say students learn keenly, and the ones learning dance quickly present arangetrams (debut shows). Friends enrol. “They hang out together after classes and even perform together,” says Iyengar.

Teachers estimate about 25 per cent of the students are serious while the rest are forced by parents to take up classes. And yet, the audience here is traditional enough to sometimes squirm a little at the innovations of artistes like Ganesh- Kumaresh, and at L Subramanian’s world music and jazz-Carnatic jugalbandis. Music teachers also learn from other senior musicians in India who teach through Skype— Neyveli Santhanagopalan and Chitraveena Ravikiran are teachers known to generously do so.

One may already know of John Higgins, the late American singer of Carnatic music, and students at the Wesleyan Centre performing at the Tyagaraja Aradhana in Cleveland in 2009 (look up their performance on YouTube). The other end of the spectrum is students travelling back to India to master Carnatic music. Sandeep Narayan, though born and bred in the US, moved back to Chennai and so did dancer Mythili Prakash.

But dissent is there, too. A singer and teacher who doesn’t want to be identified says, “There is fierce competition to win prizes in Cleveland, parents are crazy about arangetrams and trikala pallavis. The gurus are branded on how many prizes they win in local competitions. It’s such a rat race at some level. I feel it’s really fiercer here than in India.”

The week-long festival

This year, well-known artistes such as Lakshmi Shankar, Sikkil Mala Chandrashekhar, Charumati Ramachandran, Malladi Brothers, Gayathri Venkatraghavan, Ajoy Chakraborty and Tanmay Bose were among those who performed at the festival. Some 86 artistes travelled from India, Canada and other parts of the US to stage Bharatanatyam ballets and music concerts at the festival which honoured Pandit Ravi Shankar. Young and ripe-old artistes were all on stage, invoking kritis a few centuries old or presenting their own compositions as a tribute to Ravi Shankar who had made San Diego his home.

The festival is also a time for the semiliterate in music to dress up and show off their latest purchases from their trip to India—saris, jewellery etc. But a whole lot are as modestly dressed as possible, in a pair of jeans and tees.

For artistes who travel from India, the festival means prestige and recognition. Perhaps it’s another kind of rat race for young musicians to be selected by Sundaram of the Cleveland Aradhana (fondly called Cleveland Sundaram) to perform in the USA! The artistes are hosted at Indian homes and a circuit, quite complex and organised, makes sure artistes perform in as many places as possible. Travel fare is a problem, though. Organisations like the IFAASD are non-profits and borrow visiting artistes and negotiate festival schedules with other organisations. Venkatachalam, also the director of the IFAASD, says, “We don’t bring artistes from India. We invite them only when they are here.”

The hosting arrangements remind me of yesteryears. My parentsin- law, connoisseurs of music, belonged to a generation that believed that this devotional music equalled the purest forms of spiritual sadhana. To simply listen to it was enough and there were no expectations for either hosting musicians or giving them gifts—except perhaps that they sing a song or two before starting for a concert venue. Female artistes who performed at the festival this time had strings of jasmine in their hair, gifts from residents here. If you didn’t look at the organised parking lot outside, you might think for a moment you were in India, the Californian weather only adding to the similarities!

Navaratna, not yet performing in the Cleveland concert circuit, says, “Local artistes are left to find their own ways to capture the stage!” She holds a number of music grants and fellowships from US universities and has been part of many collaborative attempts.

My husband, whose interest in Carnatic music revived only after he travelled West, is today a full-fledged rasika. He is not only interested in music but also reads up on rituals and festivals and deeper forms of spiritual sadhana hoping to make up for lost time. There is a tradition of scholarship in the West that studies Hinduism.

There is no such in India. In the name of secularism, we do not study any religions. While the tradition of such study emerged from Christian universities in the USA, it has somewhat diversified now to other cultures and religions. Students do a course on world religions from the undergraduate level and study Hinduism. The Jewish Community Center, the venue for the festival, is beautiful, yes, but why can’t Indians have such a centre? A fellow- rasika tells me it is because Indians like to save money and return to India sooner or later, unlike the people of other communities who see no gain in returning. The lives of many NRIs are intertwined with the story of Carnatic music. Concerts are attended by luminaries such as Dr VS Ramachandran, the neuroscientist, and Ravi Shankar until recently. The San Diego festival is well-attended by Americans as well.

We saw many Americans and their children enjoying the music, applying appropriate talams. How is this possible? It’s the result of a genuine interest in other cultures. And the well-maintained libraries that give you free information about almost anything you would like to learn. Bud, an American who hadn’t missed a single concert, like us, said Carnatic music had not been disturbed despite several invasions, and hence, was precious.

The Trichur Brothers shone the brightest at this year’s festival. Other notable performances were by Trichur V Ramachandran and K Gayathri. But what also rocked was the combination of singers worked out by Cleveland Sundaram. Brothers or sisters singing in pairs brought to the fore layered music. We saw a conscious effort of getting together singers with different timbres. For instance, Amruta Murali and Sankari Krishnan nicely contrasted, countered and supported each other.

“There is no gender on the Carnatic stage, eh?” whispered my husband as we watched Amruta Murali, Ranjani Ramakrishnan and Akkarai Subhalakshmi—all women on the violin— accompany beautifully in concert after concert. It was true. There was just one thing—music!

-Sushumna Kannan is affiliated to the San Diego State University, San Diego

Published in Talk Mag, a Bangalore-based weekly on 18.5.2013.