All the ruckus around an MS Subbulakshmi award being given to TM Krishna, outspoken Carnatic musician, appears to have doubled the sound of applause on Christmas Day when he performed as part of the annual conferences and concerts of the Madras Music Academy. Ever since March 2024, when the Music Academy announced him as the winner of this year's Sangita Kalanidhi award, many angry words, declarations, and even a court case had piled up against Krishna. The anger aggravated to certain musicians taking a “pledge” on stage about “respecting the Bhakti and Dharmic roots of Carnatic music”.
The Sangita Kalanidhi, an annual award given by the Academy, has existed since 1942. In 2005, another annual award began to be bestowed upon the winner – a cash prize instituted by The Hindu called Sangita Kalanidhi MS Subbulakshmi award. The court case revolved around the latter, with Subbulakshmi's grandson V Shrinivasan opposing the conferring of an award named after his grandmother to TM Krishna.
Shrinivasan accused Krishna of criticising his grandmother on multiple occasions. He also cited her will in which she specifically asked that no memorials or trusts be there for her.
Initially, a single judge of the Madras High Court passed an interim order, restraining The Hindu from giving an award named after Subbulakshmi, to honour her last wishes in her will. However, on December 13, a division bench of the Madras High Court set aside this injunction and, two days later, Krishna received his award.
Kali Veerapathiran, a noted dancer and teacher of classical and folk artistes, can’t get over his shock that all this should befall a man like Krishna, who brought Carnatic music to his village Kovalam – to a fishing community traditionally barred from the genre of music due to casteist notions of ‘purity’.
Kali, a Dalit man, does not wish to talk about the opportunities he has lost on account of his Scheduled Caste status. He has worked extra hard, he stresses, to reach where he has, and Krishna has played a big part in his education. “I did not know it at the time, but he paid for my post graduation. It is not only financial aid that he has given me; he has been an elder brother and a mentor, advising me about the arts,” Kali says.
So happy to watch Kali grow as a dancer. What a beautiful performance! https://t.co/SbjumXNgEb
— T M Krishna (@tmkrishna) January 4, 2023
Krishna’s efforts in helping people like Kali come up in these art forms is one of the reasons he is facing backlash, Kali says. For Krishna, this has more or less become a way of life: speaking out, writing, expressing his angst against inequalities, and receiving flak for it in one way or another.
For years now, Krishna has been calling out the Brahminical domination in Carnatic music. Coming from a Brahmin family, he has recognised the privilege his caste affords him, and has talked about how he had been oblivious of it. That is, until the questions he was encouraged to ask as a child veered off to graver areas – to the tenets of Carnatic music that he practised and performed with passion.
As he began to make a name for himself, Krishna expressed his concerns about traditions, practices, and inequalities every time he wrote or spoke in public. He called Carnatic music a world dominated by Brahmins, that was male chauvinistic and unwelcoming of other castes and religions. His books and even his acceptance speech when he won the Ramon Magsasay award in 2016 contained his woes about the differential treatment to the less privileged in arts.
Subbulakshmi award row
As several Carnatic musicians, most of them Brahmin, formed a clique against Krishna when he was awarded the MS Subbulakshmi Sangita Kalanidhi, one of the arguments against him was that Krishna should not be given an award named after Subbulakshmi since he had allegedly criticised the celebrated musician on multiple occasions.
They brought up his long profile of Subbulakshmi that appeared in The Caravan in 2015, titled MS Understood. They brought up his story about her in The Wire on the occasion of her centenary. And they brought up his speech during the launch of the Telugu version of TJS George’s biography of MS in Hyderabad. In all of these, Krishna, while pouring out his admiration for the musician, delved into his views on how caste played a role in her life. It’s this that appears to have triggered many Brahmins, both inside and outside of the arts world.
Specifically, Krishna said that MS distanced herself from her Devadasi roots and embraced Brahminism, and posed a rhetorical question: would she have gained the same respect had she not?
In Caravan he wrote: “Her early recordings create the impression of a very contemporary young musician, liberal and feminist, who didn’t care a damn for what people thought. This attitude, as others have observed, is well in keeping with the Devadasi tradition of music.”
He added later on that her marriage to T Sadasivam, a Brahmin film producer and freedom fighter, in 1940 became the point when everything began to change: “What happened next can be called the transformation, or the psychological realignment, even the taming, of Subbulakshmi. The free-spirited young woman was to become the embodiment of the ideal Brahmin housewife, seen among the elite as the epitome of purity and devotion.”
A year later, when MS’s centenary was celebrated, Krishna wrote in The Wire a story titled ‘Let’s not succumb to misremembering MS Subbulakshmi’.
“What does MS’s metamorphosis into the perfect Brahmin housewife say? I, myself, have criticised this make over, but was there any other way for her? She sought respect and dignity and that she got only because she erased her past from her life and mind,” Krishna wrote.
But it is his speech in 2017, for the launch of the Telugu translation by writer Volga of George’s MS Subbulakshmi: The Definitive Biography, that would kick up a storm. He asked: “If MS’s voice came from a dark, non-upper-caste beauty-ish lady, would all of us celebrate her like we do today?” and added: “I don’t want an answer to that question. I just want us all to think about it.”
These three instances – The Caravan, The Wire, the speech in Hyderabad – were quoted in the petition by Subbulakshmi’s grandson Shrinivasan, against conferring an award in her name to Krishna.
The evolution of TM Krishna
Krishna grew up in a family privileged enough to have a union minister and Congress leader like TT Krishnamachari in the flock. TTK was his grand-uncle.
In 2007, his mother and uncle began a school for educating children from disenfranchised communities. Krishna himself is an alumnus of the prestigious Krishnamurti School of Chennai. He could have, if he wanted to, continued with his privileged ways, indifferent to the systemic oppression going on in front of him. But he chose to speak out, knowing the reactions and repercussions it would bring him.
Krishna had addressed some of his concerns in his book A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story that came out in 2013. While going in depth into the study of music (from a question as basic as ‘what is music’), Krishna also dedicates chapters to the questions of caste, religion and gender.
In 2015, he announced that he would not perform in the sabhas — or organisations promoting classical music and dance — for the Madras music season, which is one of the largest cultural events in the country. In a column he wrote for dailyO, he said his decision was neither sudden nor triggered by any specific occurrence. His own evolution as a musician has been through the processes of this festival, he wrote, yet, he felt that the “music season today has reached a point where music has almost disappeared from it”.
He lamented the popularity of only a few (and he would definitely be among them) while many wonderful musicians go unnoticed and “discarded”. The music season has become NRI-driven, lacking aesthetic diversity, with paid reviews appearing in newspapers, he claimed, while admitting that he had no proof to offer.
Krishna, repeating his earlier stance, wrote that Carnatic music was socially stifling when it should be made accessible to the larger society. He also brought up the issue of underpaid accompanying musicians.
After this, he began to lose concerts, they’d be called off. This happened at least twice in 2018 after right-wing Hindu social media handles volleyed hate messages at the organisers. The first time, a temple in Maryland cancelled his concert, and the second time, a kutcheri organised by the Airports Authority of India, in collaboration with SPIC MACAY, was called off.
Both times, Krishna was approached with alternate arrangements — a group of music enthusiasts in the US organised a concert in Washington, and the then deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia offered to host him in the capital.
The online abuse that led to the cancellations in 2018 was triggered by Krishna’s support to Carnatic singers OS Arun and Nithyasree Mahadevan, who were criticised by Hindutva activists for performing Christian hymns in the Carnatic style. Most Carnatic compositions are in praise of Hindu gods and goddesses. Krishna reacted to the hate by announcing that he would release a Carnatic song on Jesus or Allah every month.
The backlash against Krishna did not stop with the cancelling of concerts.
In 2020, when Krishna wrote a book called Sebastian and Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers, the Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai withdrew permission to host the launch of the book, as it had earlier agreed to.
The decision came after an excerpt of the book was published in The Hindu, in which Krishna points out that while Brahmins worship cows, the mridangam, a percussion instrument used in Carnatic music, is made of cow skin. The book, which explores the little-celebrated role of Dalit Christians who create the instrument, exposes the reluctance of the privileged caste mridangam artists in acknowledging that the instrument comes from the skin of a cow.
Years later when there were sexual harassment allegations against Kalakshetra staff, Krishna wrote a letter to the chairman to express his disappointment on how the institute had handled the issue. “No process of enquiry will be effective unless the atmosphere is caring and compassionate towards those who are alleging sexual abuse, in these cases, young students and alumni,” he wrote.
Krishna has even before that stood up for survivors of sexual harassment, once again going against the sabha when names of several Carnatic musicians cropped up during the #MeToo movement in 2018. Sharing a post by singer Chinmayi Sripaada calling out the musicians accused in Me Too allegations, Krishna said, “For years we have heard stories about these issues within the Karnatik and Bharatanatyam world. I vividly remember that about 10 years ago a young girl came out on Facebook describing her horrid experiences and I am ashamed that we ignored her. Male power structures, hierarchies and our own conservative fears resulted in the trivialising of her complaint. We have all been complicit by our silence.”
“He has always been in support of women speaking up in sabhas. He was stonewalled by the Carnatic music group and others. But the Music Academy was proactive and in that year, they didn't have any men who were named as molesters, performing in the sabha. After that it was business as usual because others did not take the stance that the academy did,” says Chinmayi.
One of the men called out at the time was Ravikiran, a popular Carnatic singer and chitravina player. Former students of Ravikiran alleged that he had sexually harassed them while they were training under him, after which they quit his class. Ravikiran denied the allegations and claimed it was “paternal concern” that was misunderstood.
“I have been calling out the hypocrisy of the Carnatic music space for a while. They would be okay with molesters or drunk people appearing on stage but not someone like TM Krishna,” Chinmayi says.
In 2024, when the Music Academy declared TM Krishna as the winner of the Sangita Kalanidhi award, Ravikiran returned his own Sangita Kalanidhi award that he had received in 2017.
Taking Carnatic music to fishing villages
“Why can’t they just let him be? This is a person who has gone out of his way to take Carnatic music to people who could not access it. Not everyone is privileged enough to go to the sabha and enjoy hours of music,” says Kali.
Following his boycott of the sabha, Krishna began performing and putting together music festivals in Urur-Olcott Kuppam, a fishing village in Chennai, along with his friend and environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman. The idea was to take it to places where Carnatic music has always been kept out of reach. Together, Nityanand and Krishna also began a campaign to bring focus on the encroached land at Ennore Creek – the Poromboke song that Krishna sang for it became viral.
“I met Nityanand and TM Krishna when they came to our village Urur Kuppam. They met people from the village, including me, to talk about the music festival. I told them that organising such a festival would really do good for the village, remove the stereotyping of fishermen as rowdies, in addition to bringing music and dance to our place,” says Saravanan, a fisherman belonging to a Most Backward Classes community in Urur Kuppam. Most villagers belong to the MBC.
In four years, the festival has made a big difference in the village, he says. Classical dance and music forms were no longer out of reach for the people there, and they now exist along with the traditional art forms of the fisherfolk. “A real artist would not only respect the art that they practice but also give the same respect to other art forms. TM Krishna is a real artist,” Saravanan says.
Thilagavathi Palani, an artist who performs the traditional art form of Kattaikoothu, came in touch with Krishna when she won a grant, as part of which she interacted a lot with Krishna.
Thilagavathi Palani will be premiering her work at Art, Unfettered!
— T M Krishna (@tmkrishna) March 1, 2024
Come support and engage with her on March 3 at the M.S. Subbulakshmi Auditorium, Asian College of Journalism.
All are welcome!#SumanasaFoundation pic.twitter.com/4QtHwk2G2H
“I am grateful to him for bringing the art forms closer to us. Everybody can’t go to enjoy the music at the sabhas. He took it upon himself to come and perform on the Kuppam side, making it convenient for us to be able to watch. He brought music to the local people. I never felt like he was a member of a privileged caste, but like a cousin who would stand by my side,” says Thilaga, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste.
Kuppsamy Aasari, one of the mridangam ‘thol’ (leather) makers mentioned in Krishna’s book Sebastian and Sons, says that Krishna calls him a specialist. Kuppusamy has been making shells for mridangam and other percussion instruments for many years for many artists. After his father Vadivelu was trained in shell making, they began working on mridangam, tavil, chenda, pambai, and other percussion instruments.
“He has written about my family doing this work, visited my workshop and watched it. He is a great singer and I have travelled with him to many places,” says a proud Kuppusamy.
This story was republished from The News Minute as part of the NL-TNM alliance. It has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
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