Kalanidhi

Madurai T N Seshagopalan is this year’s Sangita Kalanidhi, to be crowned by the Music Academy, Chennai in December 2006. This is what I wrote about him 23 years ago. T N Seshagopalan: Mirror to his audience (Excerpts from a profile by V Ramnarayan, Sruti, December 1983 (Issue no. 3) Madurai T N Seshagopalan is confidence personified; he possesses the quality in abundance. He exudes it in every word he utters in conversation just as he does in every syllable he renders in concert. He is thirty-five, a man of conventional good looks, sharp intelligent eyes that can assume a certain dreaminess on occasion, cherubic countenance, long hair, often rather unkempt, medium height and an apparent propensity to put on weight, an ease of manner and friendliness, and an active mind which seems to tick all the time. His Tamil betrays his background, which is non-metropolitan; it is therefore a chaster brand of the language than most Madrasis can achieve. A ready humour, sometimes mischievous but without malice, a quick sense of repartee and a degree of articulation proclaim straightaway that here is an unusually cerebral young musician, who knows where he is heading and will do everything in his power to make sure he will reach there. Seshagopalan might well have been lost to the world of classical music but for some chance encounters with men of foresight and forethought at a crucial period of his life. He appears to have been singularly fortunate in his schoolteachers. Many of them were musically inclined and saw in Seshagopalan an unusual talent, which needed care and nourishment. Seshagopalan was born on 15 September 1948 at Nagapattinam. His father Nambi Iyengar was then employed as a drillmaster in a school there. His father and mother both hailed from Tirunelveli district. While mother Tiruvenkatavalli belonged to a village called Anantakrishnapuram, Nambi Iyengar was from the village Tirukkarunkudi, the home of the famous business house of T V Sundram Iyengar and Sons, whose headquarters were located in Madurai. TVS & Sons helped Seshagopalan’s father to set up a business at Madurai to which place the family moved in 1952, when TNS was four years old. Around this time it was that Seshagopalan first showed musical promise. There was no doubting Seshagopalan’s talent even as a child; he gave it expression through singing semi-classical bhakti verse, but not until his sixteenth year did he have his first lesson in classical music. The boy Seshagopalan was quite famous in Madurai and other district centres as an accomplished lead performer in devotional music concerts in which he sang verses from Tiruppugazh, Tiruppavai and Tiruvempavai, the devarnama of Purandaradasa and so on. Even before he was ten years old, he was a supplementary breadwinner of his father’s household. In Seshagopalan’s own words from that profile: The person whose deeds and words had the most far-reaching effect on my life was Kodoor Rajagopala Sastri whom my father had befriended when I was about eleven. This gentleman from Rameswaram was not only a music lover but counted among his personal friends such giants as Ramnad Krishnan (vocal), Lalgudi Jayaraman (violin) and C S Murugabhoopathy (mridangam)—the trio who performed at his wedding. Rajagopala Sarma was mainly responsible from my changeover from devotional to classical music. The man had foresight; he was a deerghadarsi. He was the first man to suggest I be given formal training to become a concert vidwan of Carnatic music. He predicted a bright future for me. Another person who had some inkling of the future was Sri V Pushpavanam, headmaster of the Sethupati High School where I studied from Form I to Form VI. He was a source of encouragement, offering me every chance to go on stage and parade my talent while at High School. He would sometimes wonder aloud if I would become famous one day as Madurai Seshagopalan just as Madurai Mani did. In fact Sri Pushpavanam who belonged to the Koteeswara Iyer parampara was distantly related to Madurai Mani. Our drillmaster Paramasivam also took a great deal of interest in my music. He and my schoolmates always had a good word for me and were proud of my singing ability. Quite often I wrote songs myself on national figures and the freedom movement of the past, set the songs to some familiar tunes from films as bhajans, and sang them on the stage. There was a song on Nehruji which I sang to the tune of a very popular song from the Hindi film ‘Madhumati.’ My guru (C S Sankarasivam) knew how to bring out the best in you. No doctrinaire approach governed his teaching. His was a voice that was not amenable to brikas. It was best suited to slow elaborations, a solid rock-like voice. But this didn’t prevent him from helping me exploit and develop my natural capabilities. He was quick to assess your plus and minus points and work on their improvement or diminution as the case may be. He never curbed your originality. I owe all my proficiency in chowka kala to him. Seshagopalan’s early apprenticeship in music, in the time-honoured gurukula tradition, is amusing to recollect. Here was this vidwan who was a friend of his father’s, their fondness for betel-chewing bringing them together. During one of these sessions of mastication, the vidwan suggested Gopu (Seshagopalan) be put in his care to be groomed as a musician. Soon the boy was packed off during the summer vacation to the Vadyar’s house. There, his duties consisted mainly in running errands, washing clothes and pressing his poor, tired master’s feet as he reclined on his favourite easychair. Seshagopalan wasn’t quite insightful enough to understand the significance of these aspects of the gurukula system—not quite unique by any means—and so he decided to find his way out diplomatically. He told his father that his throat hurt a great deal from constant singing, something with which he had very little to do at the guru’s house. This ruse worked like magic, for Gopu’s father felt the boy’s health was paramount and terminated the arrangement, although the chewing sessions continued. There is in this youthful veteran the kind of narcissism one often associates with the artists, but attenuating this is his informed appreciation of the several giants who preceded him in this field as well as his own peers and seniors, and ready to acknowledgement of help and encouragement received from various persons at different stages of his career. He goes to any length of trouble to mention every one of them by name, however far removed from the limelight they may be. There is no mistaking his guru bhakti and the depth of his gratitude to his master. Again, there is no deliberate show of becoming modesty, no pious self-deprecation, no pretence of running down his own achievements; nor is there any obvious lack of humility. His assessment of his own ability and successes seems realistic without giving rise to serious suspicion of an excessive self-love.