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Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (19 May 1890 - 23 Jan 1967) was the doyen of Carnatic music and the leading vocalist of the 20th century whose

125th birth anniversary was celebrated on 19 May 2015. He developed a unique style of his own; it represented a drastic, epoch-making departure from the prevailing concert in both form and content. The architect of the modern concert format, he was a source of inspiration and a role model to great musicians after him. His concerts used to great advantage the skills of three generations of the greatest accompanists.

His music was a compendium of diverse but quintessential features of sound, tradition-based Carnatic music. These included a rich and choiceful repertoire of the compositions of a wide array of composers, with central importance accorded in the concert to the inspired creations of the Trinity; the central role of the madhyama kala; the primacy of gamakas, the lifeblood of Carnatic music; an intelligent voice culture which kept the voice consistently musical; facile modulations of the voice (thick gliding seamlessly to thin without making a laboured point of it) facilitating blending with the sruti without the shouting effect, especially in the tara sthayi; the scrupulous avoidance of all ugly and unseemly mannerisms; the importance of finesse in enunciation with just the right amount of stress so as to be intelligible but never so harsh as to degenerate into speech and mar the musical continuity; the vital role of laya, not as mere finger-counting arithmetic but as the very sheet anchor on which to mount the lilt and majesty of the melodies; the knack of drawing the best out of the accompanists, be they stalwarts or beginners; the antenna for assessing the expectations and absorption level of the audience almost like a mind reader; and last but not the least, the hallmark of true mastery – the fine art of making the difficult seem deceptively simple.

When Ariyakudi became a disciple of Ramanathapuram “Poochi” Srinivasa Iyengar, he acquired the privilege of belonging to the sishya parampara of saint Tyagaraja. Poochi Iyengar’s guru was Patnam Subramania Iyer, whose

guru Manambuchavadi Venkatasubba Iyer was a disciple of Tyagaraja.

Ramanathapuram Srinivasa Iyengar was often accompanied by Tirukodikaval Krishna Iyer on the violin. Young Ramanujam playing the tambura at these concerts was greatly attracted by Krishna Iyer’s style, which was one of the profound influences in shaping the Ariyakudi bani. Other important influences were Veena Dhanammal, Malaikottai Govindaswamy Pillai, Sarabha Sastri and Sakharama Rao among others. From Dhanammal he learnt not only

padams and javalis, but the sense of visranti and an awareness of gamakas with which he tempered the racy style of Poochi Iyengar to fashion the Ariyakudi style. Such close association with the great masters of his time, helped evolve a unique, distinct style of his own, judiciously synthesising the aesthetic graces in the music of his gurus and other inspiring role models.

The concert scenarioIn the early years of the 20th century, music sabhas and other institutions featuring Carnatic music concerts were few and far between. Carnatic music thrived mainly on the patronage of the kings of the princely States, notably Mysore and

Travancore, as well as the zamindars of various principalities of south India. Concerts were infrequent, audiences small and general level of awareness of nuances low. The gurukula system was exploitative of disciples and generally frowned upon youthful enthusiasm and aspirations as presumptuous and upstartish. Even at age 20, one was not considered concert material.

Such was the music scene that Ariyakudi took by storm in the second decade of the 20th century. It is noteworthy that he started performing only in 1909.

The pre-Ariyakudi formatTypically, the concert lasted rarely less than four hours, often stretching to 5 or 5-1/2 hours. Strangely, this format accommodated only a varnam, 4 or 5 kritis and a ragam-tanam-pallavi. The reasons were twofold. In the first

Pathfinder of Carnatic music Alepey Venkatesan

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place, raga alapana, niraval and kalpana swara tended to be lengthy, repetitive, sometimes boring and monotonous. Secondly, there were at least two percussion interludes, each taking up 30 to 45 minutes. Such was the concert format which Ariyakudi revolutionised and transformed into the “modern concert format”, which has stood the test of time and is still going strong, with minor modifications dictated by the march of time and changing lifestyles of the rasikas.

Ariyakudi’s concert formatThe most challenging part of the task, which he executed with consummate skill, consisted in drastically reducing the length of raga alapanas. The raga essay had to be brief, but without leaving the rasika dissatisfied or with a sense of incompleteness. Ariyakudi was the very man for this mission; for, he had both the fecundity of ideas and the fluency of voice to take us through a major raga like Sankarabharanam or Todi in a matter of four minutes, and amazingly, give the listener a sense of wholesome experience of the raga.

Having done that, he successfully prevailed upon his violinists never to exceed his own duration of raga alapana, even if the violinist happened to be a senior artist like Malaikottai Govindaswamy Pillai. Too, he did not countenance the persussionists hogging a disproportionate part of the concert time. He quietly asserted the primacy of the singer and his prerogative as to time management for the success of the concert. His charisma and leadership were such that even senior accompanists had to fall in line.

When he reduced the length of the alapana, his innate sense of proportion led him to suitably prune the time spent on niraval and kalpana swara. For example, if he sang a raga for 3 minutes and the violinist would play for 2- ½ minutes, the kriti was rendered in 4 minutes, he would sing kalpana swara for no more than about 4 minutes. If niraval was sung, that might take another 4 minutes or so. Contrast this with what we often find even in 2-1/2 hour concerts. The musician goes on with a single suite (raga, kriti, niraval and swaras) for almost an hour, and as a result, is forced to make short shrift of the ragam-tanam-pallavi in under 15 minutes. Such intelligent apportionment of concert time as he practised is more relevant today, since the concert duration has shrunk to less than half.

Though he sang many scholarly, complicated pallavis, he also composed an array of short, entertaining pallavis, to be deployed according to the time available for the pallavi in a particular concert. This usually happened in concerts in which he had not planned to sing a pallavi but a belated request cropped up. As a policy, he would not turn down rasika’s requests, even if the timing was not too good. Once

such a request came, the concert time would automatically get extended, enough to do justice to a small pallavi.

All these measures freed up a substantial chunk of time. He utilised it in two ways. In the first place, he could present many more ragas and kritis in each concert than would have been feasible under the previous dispensation. Secondly, he made the tail-end miscellany longer, far more varied and interesting.

The first and most obvious effect of his format was that there was no ennui in an Ariyakudi concert. With one stroke, he transformed desultory, bored, yawns into joyous enthusiasm, keen interest and edge-of-the-seat anticipation. The listeners were delighted to be treated to a wide variety of songs of different composers in many more ragas than had been in vogue in concerts. It also helped that he sang in Sanskrit and in all the south Indian languages as well as a few bhajans in Hindi and Gujarati.

Secondly, he brought a striking novelty, variety and popular appeal to the post-pallavi miscellany segment of the concert. His famed concerts at Gokhale Hall, Madras in the 1920s and 1930s used to start at 4.15 pm on Sundays. At 8 pm, he would launch the miscellaneous fare, by which time the hall was overflowing with college students, ready to raucously shout for an encore on every item. He used to present javalis, Tiruppavai, Tiruvembavai, Tiruppugazh, Arunachala Kavi’s Rama Natakam, (he was the tunesmith for most of these), nationalist/patriotic songs inspired by the Freedom Movement in different languages. The young men who came in droves to listen to this light fare later came to the earlier part of his concerts and learnt to appreciate his ragas, kritis, niraval, swaras and even ragam-tanam-pallavi. In this manner, Ariyakudi educated at least two generations of music lovers, by gradually raising their awareness and levels of appreciation.

But the most significant consequence of the concert format Ariyakudi created and perfected was this. But for such a format which accommodated several songs even in a 2-1/2 hour concert, many great and precious compositions of the Trinity and other great vaggeyakaras might have gone out of currency and been lost to us.

Salient features of his musicAriyakudi was a past master of gamakas. Even so, he rightly rejected the notion that gamaka richness implies indiscriminate oscillation of every note to the point of distortion. He recognised that certain ragas, if deprived of the plain note or two required for their sustenance, sound withered. Aesthetic discrimination was the keynote of his artistry.

Even as the bowing/blowing/fingering technique determines the character of instrumental music,

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pronunciation determines the character of vocal music. The type of pronunciation which, in the name of bhava, muffles, distorts, chews and mangles the words, making them unintelligible, may be considered ‘tamasic’. True bhava neither needs nor justifies this transgression.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the spashtam (clarity) zealots, whose pronunciation is so harsh as to rob the music of all finesse and continuity of melody. Such “recitation” of music may be considered ‘rajasic’. But the manner of enunciation of lyrics which is distinct enough to be intelligible but soft enough to be musical may be called ‘satvic’. My revered guru was an exemplar of satvic pronunciation. Tributes to the master, written by the likes of Musiri, GNB and Palghat Mani Iyer bear eloquent testimony to this important aspect of his excellences.

The maestro’s mastery over laya was phenomenal. Palghat Mani Iyer said that Ariyakudi’s music was a constant challenge to the mridangist and an exhilarating one at that. He confessed to finding the kalapramanas adopted by Ariyakudi tricky and elusive in the early years of their association until he got used to them. The kalapramana may be called the most appropriate speed at which to render a particular kriti. This is determined by trial and error, taking into account various factors, such as the mood of the raga, the sentiments expressed in the lyrics, the distribution of the syllables in the time cycle and the richness or otherwise of the raga in gamakas.

A stable kalapramana is one of the high ideals of Carnatic music. Once you start rendering a kriti in a particular kalapramana, you are expected to maintain it through the kriti-rendering, niraval and kalpana swara singing. Ariyakudi, more than any other singer we have heard, was the musician who could do justice to the widest variety of kalapramana. He had the vocal dexterity and versatility to execute easily and flawlessly a wide range of speeds, ranging all the way from Neekelana (Devamanohari), Nee padame (Navarasa Kannada) and Ninnu joochi (Saurashtram) at the fast end of the spectrum to Sree Subramanyaya (Kambhoji), Akshayalinga vibho (Sankarabharanam), Amba nannu brovave (Todi, 4-kalai Desadi), and padams like Sundasepu (Sankarabharanam), Upamu gane (Yadukulakambhoji) and Magadocchi (Sahana).

Though he was at home in so many different kalapramanas, he found that while in the vilamba kala, you get a greater scope to express gamakas, too many slow songs tend to make the concert boring and tiresome for the average listener, while offering a treat to the musicians and connoisseurs. On the other hand, pacy songs rob the concert of a sense of repose and fullness. In the medium tempo (madhyama kala), while his voice had the ability to execute many gamakas which would have been difficult for others, it also served to avoid the feeling of drag and keep the concert lively. Therefore, he hit upon the madhyama kala as the recipe for a successful concert. He devoted a substantial portion of the concert time to the medium tempo, judiciously interspersing such songs with a slow, ponderous item here and a brisk, flighty number there. The proof of the pudding, after all, is in the eating – the success rate of his concerts was pretty close to 100% !

He had to his credit many an innovative take-off point for his niraval and swara singing and a wide variety of pallavis, from simple entertaining ones to long, scholarly ones. In recent memory, he was the first musician to successfully attempt the novelty of a multi-raga pallavi, with his famous 4-raga pallavi, “Sankarabharananai azhaittodi vaadi Kalyani, darbaarukku”. While arithmetic has a special place in a pallavi, he showed that there is much more to pallavi singing. Tanam and niraval, in which you can find any number of musicians puffing and stumbling, came naturally to him with full-throated ease. Above all, he never allowed the laya arithmetic to transgress the acceptable musical standard of “sraavyam”, maintaining that the pallavi need not and should not leave the uninformed listener bewildered.

The depth and range of his repertoire have few parallels. But what is noteworthy here is that he practised a kriti a hundred times and thoroughly internalised it before presenting it in a concert, with the result that it glowed with

The composerHe composed a tillana each in Bilahari and Kanada. He also composed a few Tamil songs to commemorate special occasions. These were:

Golden jubilee of the Tamil Daily Swadesamitran: Sundaramaana Sudesamitran, in Kalyani.

Diamond jubilee of Swadesamitran: Seer perugum siranda Mitran, in Surati, and Kondaduvom in Sindhubhairavi.

A song in Khamas at the 60th birthday celebrations of Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar.

The tunesmithIn this activity, his output was much more prolific. He was a tunesmith of rare sagacity. For many years in the 1930s, the Tamil weekly Swadesamitran used to publish one kriti of the Trinity or other great composers notated by Ariyakudi every week. But his most significant contributions consist in his setting to music and popularising in his concerts the 30 Tiruppavai of Andal, as well as the Rama Nataka keertanams of Arunachala Kavi. Many other sahityas, including Alarsara paritapam of Swati Tirunal (Surati) were set to music by the master.

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a mellow perfection and also that he never had to carry notebooks, textbooks or bits of paper to any of his concerts, least of all to the hallowed samadhi of Tyagabrahmam, as has become the unedifying fashion these days.

The remarkable thing about his career is not so much that he became famous with a short gestation period but that he remained famous and the acknowledged leader, right up to the end of his days. Right from being the first Carnatic musician to receive the Presidential Awards when those awards were instituted in 1952 to the privilege (accorded by consensus of the galaxy of musicians) to perform the abhishekam to Saint Tyagaraja’s idol in Tiruvaiyaru on his Mahasamadhi Day, he had it all, as a matter of well-earned right.

His contemporariesIn the first half of his career, his notable contemporaries were the Madurai Brothers (one of the brothers died young; the surviving brother Srirangam Iyengar continued to perform off and on for many more years), Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, Musiri Subramania Iyer and Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar.

In the second half of his career, his famous contemporaries were Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, G.N. Balasubramaniam and Madurai Mani Iyer. But Ariyakudi was an admired and revered margadarsi and manaseeka guru to all of them. GNB hailed him as “the Sangeeta Dharma Paripalaka” for upholding the pristine classical values and his music as the “Gita of Sangeeta” because his music typified the “Golden Mean, an ideal of the Bhagavad Gita”. Madurai Mani Iyer, who had been hailed as “Mohana Mani”, shed tears listening to Ariyakudi’s sonorous mandara sthayi panchama in Nannu palimpa. Semmangudi, at the fag-end of his long and distinguished career, was asked in an interview what his highest ambition would be, if he had his

life to live all over again. Pat came the reply, “To sing like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar”.

His favourite accompanistsWhen it came to mridangam, there was a special chemistry between Ariyakudi’s artistry and that of Palghat Mani Iyer. It was a synergy that had no parallel. Therefore Mani Iyer was easily his most cherished mridangam partner on stage. As for the violin, Ariyakudi did not favour the technique of accompaniment, wherein the violin is silent through half a minute of vigorous alapana by the vocalist and then plays just the tail-end phrase. He expected the violinist to be always on the alert, follow him closely like a shadow, reproducing most of what he sang at his usual challenging pace and fluency. T.N. Krishnan fit the bill perfectly, not only because of his felicity of expression and robust tonal quality supplementing those of Ariyakudi but also because he brought with him a good insight into the Ariyakudi style and repertoire, having been, for some years, as a boy, under the care and tutelage of a senior Ariyakudi disciple, namely, Alleppey Parthasarathy. No wonder, then, that T.N. Krishnan was his preferred violinist.

Ariyakudi and Palghat Mani IyerAriyakudi and Palghat Mani Iyer were made for each other. They were the finest example of shared ideals, matching excellence and mutual admiration. Their first meeting was perhaps in the early 1920s at the home of Rathnachalam Iyer in Tiruchi, a good friend and admirer and host to many musicians of the time. Ariyakudi was about 34 and Mani Iyer 12. The introduction, heralding a historic partnership destined to take audiences by storm wherever they went for the next 40 plus years, was made by Flute Sanjeeva Rao.

Ariyakudi was known to have a special affinity for the mridangam, as well as an uncanny insight into its potential, in the right pair of hands, to raise the concert to dizzy

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Ariyakudi in concert with T.N. Krishnan (violin), Palani Subramania Pillai (mridangam) and Madurai N. Krishnan (tambura)

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heights. A fact not widely known is that Ariyakudi used to play the mridangam at home, for the love of it. And when he ran into Mani Iyer, it was as if he had found the very man he was looking for. Mani Iyer was instantly swept off his feet because he felt he was in the presence of the trail-blazer of the times and a legend in the making.

Ariyakudi’s aesthetic refinement, his adherence to wholly dignified methods of holding the attention of the audience, his natural and effortless voice culture and last but not least, his laya prowess created an abiding, reverential admiration which was to last literally upto Mani Iyer’s last breath.

If Mani Iyer could “play the song itself” (quite a few notes, while he was at it), there is a solid reason for it. He made it a point to learn the songs inside out. Whenever Ariyakudi cut a disc, Mani Iyer was thorough with it by the very next week. It was this habit of internalising the melodies that enabled Mani Iyer to reproduce on the mridangam the mood of the music, be it sedate or spectacular.

For me, personally, Ariyakudi and Mani Iyer are the most special duo in the world of Carnatic music, since they were, respectively, my guru and my mentor.

Since I had the privilege of a close association with the mridangam maestro for many years, I have heard him speak with deep insight about nuances of my guru’s music.

Ariyakudi and Semmangudi The overall impression I have gathered is that through the decades of a long association, the two musicians shared a professional relationship which was generally cordial.

Back in 1935, when preparations were under way for the four-day celebrations of my cousin’s wedding in Alleppey, my father told Ariyakudi: “I will have the muhurtam on a date convenient to you, so that you can sing the main concert; but whom would you suggest I invite for the other three days?” Ariyakudi said, “There is this very promising youngster Seenu, a disciple of Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer. Why don’t you invite him to perform at Alleppey?”

Thus, obviously, Ariyakudi considered Semmangudi a talented junior professional who deserved his encourage-ment. For his part, Semmangudi was an ardent admirer of Ariyakudi all his life. He always had his picture next to his guru’s in his living room. He spoke in glowing terms about his upholding classical values. He was grateful to the doyen for educating two generations of music lovers and making Carnatic music accessible to a wider audience, in the same manner Subramania Bharati made Tamil poetry accessible to the common man (a simile he frequently used). When Semmangudi was the asthana vidwan at the Travancore palace, there were many occasions when Ariyakudi and Semmangudi performed in tandem for the royal family.

Ariyakudi and GNBGNB looked up to Ariyakudi as his manaseeka guru, and Ariyakudi always treated him with a paternal solicitude. But GNB’s rise in the 1940s was so meteoric that there were rasikas who believed he had eclipsed Ariyakudi. But the doughty veteran was unfazed. When asked whether the Ariyakudi Samrajyam was over giving place to the GNB Samrajyam, the consummate diplomat that he was, he replied, “No doubt, Mani has a gandharva saareeram, he is a buddhisaali and nalla chittam ulla payyan” (a young man with his heart in the right place); but, even so, I have something called anubhavam.

My reminiscencesMy earliest recollections of the Master go back to the late 1950s, when I used to go to the temple festivals in Kerala, whenever an Ariyakudi concert was scheduled. Usually, for any concert anywhere in Kerala, our home in Alleppey was his headquarters. Attending on him, learning from him during the day and going with him to the concert venue were all cherished experiences. The temple concerts used to start by 9 pm and go on till 1.30 am or beyond. I remember sitting behind him on the dais and looking around at thousands of people seated all over the vast temple grounds, listening silently and with rapt attention. Applause was not a routine ritual in Kerala at the end of each alapana and each song. But whenever he shook them up by effortlessly hitting the tara sthayi panchama, there was thunderous ovation.

Even at an advanced age, he conscientiously avoided the afternoon siesta on concert days, in order to keep the voice warm and ready for flight. Once his mandatory Gayatri japam and Sundara kanda parayanam were done, he would spend the daytime, humming music or teaching or narrating anecdotes. It seems Raj Kapoor once asked him what special care and nourishment he gave his voice to sing so effortlessly, traversing the octaves even at age 74. He replied that the main nourishment was music.

Many of his rasikas know he was fond of spending hours on his favourite swing. My last recollection is seeing him taking an afternoon nap on that swing in his Mandaveli house in Madras, in the first week of January 1967, a few days before he passed into history. But he remembered to bequeath his tambura to me on his deathbed.

At the feet of the Master.(The author is a disciple of Ariyakudi, has been performing in India and abroad for over four decades. His areas of specialisation are theme concerts, lecdems and pallavi singing. His website is www.alepeyvenkatesan.com)

For the unabridged version go to www.sruti.com andwww.sruti.com andandwww.srutimag.blogspot.in

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