Why Gangubai is gold

She challenged the thin-voiced norm set down for women singers

Nurses at the hospital where Gangubai Hanagal spent her last days used to call her ‘cutie pie’.

At 97, Gangubai was so full of good cheer and optimism that she would wave the nurses at Lifeline Hospital over to her bedside and teach them lines from a song she had learnt at school.

The nurses loved her spirit, and had become very fond of her. “About a year ago, she travelled to Goa and sang at a public event for about 20 minutes,” said Deepa Ganesh, a journalist researching Gangubai’s life for a biography, now in Hubli.

For the nurses' benefit, Gangubai hummed a Kannada song she had learnt when she was nine, but they probably didn't know that she had never sung any Kannada song on stage. Her daughter Krishna (who died in 2004) sang the compositions of the Kannada saint-poets, but she herself wouldn’t because she hadn’t learnt any from her Hindustani gurus. Gangubai only sang raga compositions in the north Indian dialects.

Many who hear Gangubai on the radio think she is a man. She used to employ her voice in the manner of an artist using a thick 6B pencil. Her strokes were bold, and etched out pictures that stood out starkly. A doctor had administered electric shocks for her tonsilitis, and turned her voice that way, but Gangubai wasn't the sort to stop singing just because she sounded masculine.

For many of us drawn to Hindustani music through the medium of film songs, anything that was sung by a woman and that didn’t sound thin was initially a surprise, then a delight, and finally a revelation about the politics of timbre. A delight because it rang true, and a revelation that women who cultivated a thinness of voice for its marketability were artistically shortchanging us!

Lata Mangeshkar’s voice from her golden years defines femininity for listeners of Indian popular music. In the south, we see her lineage in S Janaki, Chitra, Anuradha Sriram, B R Chaya and countless other singers. On the other hand, Gangubai is a high art practitioner of a daring style that Usha Uthup, Shubha Mudgal and Ila Arun attempt with varying degrees of success. Gangubai is the gold standard.

Goodbye Paganini

Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan, who died earlier this week, was a rare combination of violin maestro and clown.

One evening, as we sat listening to him at Bangalore's Visveswarapuram, a plane flew over the Ganesha pandal, making his music inaudible.

He stopped in the middle of his raga exposition and looked skywards. The sound of the plane didn't subside for a long time. The audience waited, slightly puzzled. It then dawned on them that Kunnakudi had captured the exact frequency of the plane, and was bowing out the sound from his violin! His face broke out in a huge smile, and his wiry frame returned to the raga with furious energy.

Kunnakudi loved playing such pranks on his audience. Like Paganini (1782-1840), the Italian violinist who stunned the world with his unorthodox technique, Kunnakudi could do many startling things with his instrument. For instance, while he played a serious Tyagaraja kriti, he could suddenly swipe his bow on a string to mimic the sound of a whistle or catcall.

Kunnakudi lived alongside some great violinists: Lalgudi Jayaraman, T N Krishnan and M S Gopalakrishnan... Lalgudi distinguished himself with his unadulterated southern classicism, while Gopalakrishnan gravitated to northern (Hindustani) classicism, and adapted some of its stylisation in his playing. (Gopalakrishnan's LP record of Bhavanuta is a good example of the path he chose: it has a traditional Karnatak opening, and progresses into Hindustani style elaboration in the later improvisational passages).

As far as I know, the three legends did not play film songs at their concerts. Kunnakudi always played some towards the end of his concerts. He played Rajkumar hits whenever he came to Bangalore. They sounded incongruous in a classical music setting. Some loved it, but those with more conservative tastes found it unacceptable. No one complained at the concerts though.

So was Kunnakudi a pioneer, an avant garde experimenter? I guess not. That last epithet can perhaps describe the veena player Chitti Babu, who created his own harmonic compositions using an ensemble of veenas. The veena is usually played solo, and the idea of a veena ensemble playing western style harmonies is in itself an innovation. Kunnakudi did not attempt such experiments, although his son Shekar is an accomplished member of the Madras String Quartet, which plays a divine mix of classical Indian and Western compositions.

Kunnakudi came from an orthodox Brahmin family, and his father was a scholar in Tamil and Sanskrit. On his forehead, he wore a vermillion mark on top of a vibhuti arch. His orthodoxy did not stop him from romancing the movies. He even produced a film called Todi Ragam. Earlier on, he had played the violin in the movie orchestras. Todi Raga wasn't a hit, and it appears its hero, the famous vocalist T N Seshagopalan, didn't much care for the experience either.

So where does Kunnakudi stand among his peers? The pace of his music was too frenetic to make him a connoisseur's delight. He was vigorous, he was good, he was entertaining, he was lovable, but when I feel like hearing a moving rendering of Mokshamu galada (Tyagaraja, raga Saramati), I play Lalgudi.

(Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan died in Chennai on Monday, September 8, 2008)