It’s been nine years since she moved to Thiruvananthapuram. But Pushpavathy’s Malayalam still belongs to Thrissur, there’s that sing-song quality about it, and that innocence. You can’t wipe off what’s inherent, she quotes an old Malayalam proverb (Jathyal ullathu thoothal pokilla) by way of explanation. And after listening to the latest of her songs, you wonder if it there is more to those words than that. Azadi was uploaded on Youtube at 2 pm on Friday, and 10 hours later, there were already 5,000 views, and several hundred shares on Facebook. For those of you who thought of JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar now, you are right, this is no coincidence. It is the same azadi that he spoke of. Pushpavathy has been singing for years and had debuted in movies with ‘Kaathu Kaathoru mazhayathu’ in Nammal.
She has sung some 15 songs subsequently in films, some of her most popular ones being Chembaavu in Salt and Pepper and Maanathe in Vikramadithyan. But it is Azadi that’s taking her name across circles. She first sang it at the Manushya Sangamam recently held in Thrissur. “There, I saw cultural activists and students raising this slogan of ‘Azadi’ purely by coincidence. When I began singing the song, people flocked around me and asked me to keep singing,” says Pushpavathy, who was overwhelmed by the response. That’s when she decided to make a music video, with keyboard programming by Anoop, with flashes of the recent student protests and a picture of Rohith Vemula next to candle lights.
The idea for the song began with some lines of a post made by CPM leder M.A. Baby. Journalist-activist Shahina told her there are more lines to Kanhaiya’s Azadi slogans at JNU. Together they planned the song. “It had to be in Hindi because it shouldn’t be limited to Kerala. The situation of Dalits is worse in other states,” says a woman who had to face a lot of discrimination herself in life, owing to colour and caste distinctions. For someone who has come out with first rank for PG diploma from the Chembai Memorial Govt Music College in Palakkad, Pushpavathy has had very few stages to sing Carnatic. “I am an avarna (person of low caste), right?” she asks.
This is not the first time she makes a song for social issues. There was an album in 2004 called Kabir Music of Harmony about religious terrorism. There have been other compositions on Sree Narayana Guru’s kritis and Tagore’s Gitanjali. She’s also making music for five songs that her friends wrote out of the lines taken from Madhavikutty’s stories.
