‘For me, music is still Kalyani, Kamboji, Todi’: an interview with T.M. Krishna

We meet on the cool, wide veranda of Chennai’s Amethyst café and head indoors to find a sofa. The wiry, always wired up Krishna, dressed in dark blue tee and jeans, carries nothing but a pair of dark glasses — he doesn’t use a mobile phone. We fall into instant conversation, almost as if taking off from chats we’ve had on the fringes of festivals, at friends’ homes, or on the beach where he fronts Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha, his famous attempt to create common cultural ground between castes, classes, locales.

Krishna buzzes. That’s the only word. His latest book on art, a long essay really, is just out, and he has already begun to transcribe interviews for the next book. He tweets an April schedule that sees him singing in Bahrain, Chennai, Bengaluru, Thrissur, Tiruvarur, a litany of places. He is writing articles and rebuttals, giving talks and interviews. “I am doing so much my head spins,” he says, but that’s not true. It’s my head that spins. The 42-year-old is happy directing his energy in a dozen directions at once.

And when it does get too much, he heads off to the mountains. The slim singer is an avid climber and wants to do a mountaineering course someday. Meanwhile, he is off next month with his daughter on a Himalayan trek.

A careful balance

Before meeting up, I was reading Krishna’s response to an essay on art and caste by sociologist Kamala Ganesh, and a few days ago I had heard him on YouTube singing, in Carnatic style, a verse written by novelist Perumal Murugan on statue vandalism. Is the balance tilting towards activism, I wonder. “I might be performing a little less now, but music is always the centre of my life,” he says. “I might be looking at a treatise, tuning something, relooking at a raga… something around music is always happening. Recently my students and I took eight Dikshitar compositions from old treatises and re-presented them.”

Krishna is attracted to causes, and not only sang Kaber Vasuki’s piece on Ennore creek, the famous ‘Poromboke Song’, but also sets Perumal Murugan’s poems to music, and hints that he might be working with rapper Sofia Ashraf on a project. Will the ‘cause song’ become his trademark?

“For me, they run together,” he says. “Projects related to issues go parallel with traditional concert work.” Krishna doesn’t have a grand plan and isn’t too sure of where it will all culminate, but he isn’t thinking ahead either. “In my journey so far, one thing has led to another, triggered something else. You move in a direction, you course-correct. That’s what works for me.”

Spontaneous combustion

It sounds chancy, but Krishna’s jaunty optimism is infectious and I think this spontaneity has played a significant role in his work so far. What makes some fans uneasy perhaps is how pat some of his recent responses have appeared. I ask if he is afraid that songs such as the one on statue vandalism put him at risk of sounding Facebookish.

He disagrees. “That song wasn’t a planned response. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s do something about it.’ Murugan and I were at Kochi Lit Fest and I spoke about the statue vandalism. Two days later, Murugan sent me a poem. I loved it but forgot about it. One night, I tried singing it. It fell into place and I mailed it to Murugan. He loved it, so we decided to put it out there. I recorded it at home on my daughter’s phone. An artistic endeavour cannot be planned; it has to happen organically.”

This effort to find fresh, impudent content—and venues and formats—has been a constant for Krishna, raising the hackles of the establishment. He breaks the orthodoxy of the form with a song on Allah, or a church as venue. He brings in songs written on subaltern gods like Mariamman or Ayyanar. He takes a padam or varnam, usually secondary pieces with shringara themes, and makes them the centrepiece. “I have taken an extremely erotic line and elaborated on it for 20 minutes. It made traditionalists uncomfortable.”

But he used to once describe himself as a traditionalist. “It depends on how you define tradition,” says Krishna. His new book says tradition is not gospel. “You are handed down signposts and within these are the contexts of the people who handed them down — their world view and sense of self. For me, it is not about discarding Thyagaraja or Dikshitar. It is about allowing them to contest this space.”

This conflict and “mess” is tradition, according to Krishna. “The problem is, we sanitise something and then call it tradition. If you allow it to play out in all its messiness, allow the present context to contest the given context, that is art.”

So he thrives on book-ending a Thyagaraja kriti with two radically different pieces, but what about the musical smorgasbord this creates?

I remember feeling disoriented when a deeply meditative viruttam was followed by the boisterous Poromboke song. “This multiplicity of signals hitting you, that’s art,” he says, eyes gleaming with a convert’s zeal. Not that he admits to having shifted loyalties. “I am a Carnatic musician, let’s be very clear about that. Music is still Kalyani, Kamboji, Todi. To me that’s the soul of the music — the play between raga, rhythm and text.”

Who sings, who listens

Within that, he challenges the order, the conformism of the experience. And in the Carnatic context, this includes where a concert is performed, what is sung, who sings, and who listens.

Krishna agrees that every Carnatic singer doesn’t have to sing a Poromboke song, but he or she must be willing to recognise the complexity of the practice. “I am not saying that art’s ends are socio-political, only that art allows you to go beyond the socio-political.”

One might not love everything Krishna writes or sings, but his efforts are grounded in sincerity and a disarming honesty. He doesn’t deny that even his rebellion stems from privilege. “That is the whole sad irony — if I speak, people listen. I have been critiqued for that. It’s a fair criticism. I don’t have a right answer to that; it’s a struggle.” His eloquence, fame, caste, affluence, even his gender, are entitlements. “But does that mean I cannot question it? That, I am not willing to accept. You’re saying all privileged people should shut up. That doesn’t work.”

What he is careful about is staying conscious of it, and of the dangers of appropriation. “It’s a minefield. When we first did the vizha, we got a mail saying, ‘Ok, you’ve brought the classical to the village. When will the non-classical come to Mylapore?’ That’s when we started the shows in Raga Sudha Hall and Ayodhya Mandapam.”

That little push

Taking the margins to the mainstream might be harder to pull off but he isn’t baulked. “Yes, we’re going to make mistakes. I welcome criticism. It’s great when we have this discourse and the Dalit movement says ‘That’s bollocks, you’ve no clue what you’re talking about’.”

And then he does step on a live mine. With his head cocked to one side, he asks “Why can’t we have affirmative action in Carnatic music?” It’s a cheeky idea in an age when reservation is a bad word. He describes how he worked with sabhas to include 14 nadaswaram-thavil youth concerts in the Music Season this year. “The sabhas were open to it — sometimes you have to push a little.”

And how was Krishna himself, from an upper class, upper caste family, pushed? When he first looked at musicology, he says, and began to question continuity, beauty and authorship.

Then, something else happened. He was singing in the Krishna temple in Mavelikara in Kerala. “I remember this guy in a dirty lungi, drunk, beedi in hand, sprawled in front of me. I remember being irritated, thinking he doesn’t belong, this is obnoxious, he doesn’t know music. Then he took his beedi out and said, ‘Saami, Kamboji’. I felt like an ant. After I sang Kamboji, he came up, placed a ₹10 note and a lemon [form of respect] on stage, and went away. Kerala gave me the wake-up call on who actually loves music, who listens to it.”

The questioning that started at age 27 has brought Krishna this far. Would it be fair to say that he hasn’t really changed anything yet? “If there’s one thing I might have changed, it is how many in the next generation — especially among the privileged — have started looking at culture. They may not agree with me, that’s not the point, but at least they are investing time on these ideas.”