Every year, as the December Carnatic music season picks up momentum, a frequent topic of discussion is the place of sahitya in Carnatic music. Is sahitya central or secondary?
Instrumentalists of high calibre often rue their apparent marginalization in the concert circuit, when compared to vocalists, even of middling talent. There are also musicians who wonder aloud about the inherent religiosity of the Carnatic music repertoire and its cultural and social implications in today's world. Those who like to make comparisons with Hindustani music point to the appeal of that system to a much wider audience and think that its devaluation of sahitya is a significant factor in this regard.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the concert stage, countless listeners choose their favourites among musicians, based primarily on whether they render specific compositions in their concerts or whether they pronounce words correctly. Only a much smaller section of listeners really looks forward to a musician's ability to render raga alapanas beautifully or maneuver difficult rhythmic complexities with artful grace.
So, how much importance does sahitya really need to have in the world of Carnatic music experience? Is the lyrical content as important as the melodic and rhythmic aspects that pertain more directly to the musical dimensions of the art? In other words, is Carnatic music primarily about poetry set to tune? Or is the lyric only a tool meant to aid the structure of the melody? What is an understanding of the meaning of the lyrics factor into the aesthetic appreciation of the music being rendered? My personal vote goes more to melody over lyrics or even rhythm, but I will highlight a seemingly contrary perspective here.
Compositions in Carnatic music are largely in the south Indian languages and Sanskrit. An occasional song in Marathi or Hindi may raise its head in the ending tukkada section of a concert, but it is curious that such compositions tend to be set to modern ragas, often borrowed from the north, instead of ancient Carnatic ragas like Todi or Varali or Nattai. As a society, we have completely internalized English, but we only use that language to speak about Carnatic music, not to compose in and sing. Of course, Indian languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya and Assamese remain alien to the Carnatic music horizon, even in the context of an occasional bhajan.
This being the case, we should seriously introspect whether Carnatic music is essentially Dravidian music and inextricably tied to the linguistic milieu of the southern states. The presence of Sanskrit can of course be accounted for by its status as the pan-Indian language of high culture, its ancient historical presence in the south and its influence on Dravidian languages. It would therefore seem that there are deep intimate connections between compositional structure in Carnatic music and the structure of words, sentences and poetry in the Dravidian languages. For example, from Purandaradasa through the famed Trinity to living composers, uniquely Dravidian poetic features like etukai (dvitiyakshara prasha or consonance in the second syllable) and monai(alliteration) have been beautifully incorporated not only in the words, but also account for the appropriate tala setting. Where would Carnatic music be without Kshetrajna's mellifluous kaliki chilukala paluku in the Bhairavi padam or Syama Sastri's O jagadamba ... I jagati in Anandabhairavi?
The aesthetics of listening to the sound of these words is an integral part of the Carnatic experience, as the sound of the words blends seamlessly with the sound of the music. Understanding the actual meanings of the words seems quite independent of this musical dimension, almost secondary or even peripheral to the ear that seeks out the music.
But equally so, it seems impossible to transmit that uniquely Carnatic experience as pure melody, perhaps combined with rhythm, but devoid of any lyrics whatsoever. The words provide a solid yet artistic grounding and structure to the melody. In the Hindustani music world as well, the older strata of Dhrupad represents not just melodic music, but raga music structured through laya and conveyed through the anchoring function of sahitya. The more popular khayal genre that deemphasizes the lyrical dimension and the purely instrumental gatcompositions are relatively recent phenomena in Hindustani music history.
Personally, I doubt whether composition in Carnatic music can incorporate other languages that bring very different aesthetic legacies with their structure. A composer in the Carnatic music world is not just a tunesmith nor just a poet, but a vaggeyakara, one who integrates both the word (vak) and the music (geya) in a wholesome act of creativity.
It is too early to judge the success of a musical composition without a lyrical component as this genre has not had time to make its presence felt in any tangible way on the Carnatic music ethos. As such, it seems an inevitable conclusion that there are deep and hidden structures that connect the ragas and compositional structures of Carnatic music to a small family of languages and that these connections are artistic and aesthetic in nature, not merely incidentals of history and geography. It also follows that vocal music will necessarily remain central to Carnatic music and will continue to be dominant in the performance sphere for a long time, making a purely instrumental Carnatic music aesthetic very difficult, if not impossible. I am willing to hear alternate constructions or challenges to this viewpoint!
(The writer is a chemical engineer, Sanskrit scholar and connoisseur of music)
