Carnatic strain | A discordant legacy

The subject of Terada Yoshitaka’s enquiry is the celebrity musician and nadaswaram player, T.N. Rajarattinam Pillai (1898-1956), made up with multiple narrative representations of him as a charismatic musician, as a dilettante, as a rebel who bridged two different performing traditions with flamboyant brilliance. The work draws heavily on the author’s earlier doctoral dissertation; thus, there is a marked tendency to push a central argument insistently and, in the process, play down some of the complexities that marked the world of music performance in South India between the late-19th and mid-20th century. The argument itself is significant, namely that caste and social exclusion in southern India marked off two distinct but related segments of music-making—ritual orchestral ensembles performed by Isai Vellalar castes on the one hand, and public concerts of vocal music dominated by upper-caste Brahmin musicians on the other. The argument is not entirely new. However, what makes it compelling in Yoshitaka’s case is how it’s told through the life of one musician, who, thanks to his charisma, was able to straddle the two domains and reinvent himself as a polymath musician. Yoshitaka also comments on the extraordinary aura that Pillai commanded, which made him the subject of multiple interpretations by admirers and detractors. Where the argument falls short is the reluctance to look at Pillai as someone whose experiments (artistic and personal) were an expression of individual choice.