Aruna Sairam has escaped the conservative mould of the Carnatic musician to embrace the experimental, says Arunabha Deb.
 Aruna Sairam grew up a long way from Chennai, a potential disadvantage for her progress in Carnatic music. But in her Mumbai home, her parents played constant host to the numerous Carnatic musicians who visited the city, which more than made up for any lack of atmosphere. In fact, the earliest musical impression that Sairam carries is of the continuous flow of artist house-guests. “The previous evening I would see them perform and touch divinity through their music, and the next morning they would saunter in and behave like mortals, cracking jokes, enjoying their food and generally giving off this air of being supremely happy,” said Sairam, now a Chennai resident. “It was this happiness, this sunshine glowing through them, you could say, that that gave me an impression that artists were essentially a happy lot. We had all kinds of artists coming over, not just Carnatic musicians, but they all had this air of vitality. That was what had first drawn me to music.”
She began singing under the guidance of her mother, vocalist Rajalakshmi Sethuraman, and as Sairam put it, practicing in the morning was like drinking milk and going to school. As a result, she could sing about 60 to 70 varnams and as many kritis by the time she started her lessons with T Brinda, the legendary vocalist and former house-guest when Sairam was 11. “Brindama would come to Mumbai to teach her senior disciples. Because I was very young, I wouldn’t normally be considered by her. But she heard me humming something she had taught her students and she asked me to sit in for her classes. That was how it began.”
She also went on to learn from veena maestro KS Narayanaswamy, an experience that added a new dimension to her singing. Until she went to Narayanaswamy, she would sing gamaks (fast oscillations between two notes) by rote without really comprehending the nuances involved. “The gamak is a crucial aspect of Carnatic music. In the Hindustani tradition, the main notes are held for longer, but in the Carnatic tradition, the oscillations need to enunciate the microtones between two notes. He would play these microtones on the veena for me to understand,” she said.
In spite of her thoroughbred purist training, Sairam has been quite an experimentalist through her career. Growing up in cosmopolitan Mumbai gave her a varied cultural exposure and this, Sairam feels, fostered the all-embracing attitude in her music. She’s regularly collaborated with international musicians, including Dominique Vellard, the French master of Gregorian chants, and Christian Bollmann of Germany. In India, she’s delved into religious and folk music from a large swathe of the country beyond the south. She has had to deal with her share of skepticism on account of these ventures. “I have grown up with skepticism. I didn’t live in Chennai when I was starting out, and the Chennai music fraternity is really conservative. There was a time when they believed that you could not become a musician if you hailed from outside the Mailapur region. And I was living in Bombay. If I could get used to skepticism about something so fundamental, the later challenges were hardly anything,” she said.
Still, she did eventually feel the need to live in Chennai. There’s always a final frontier that every musician wishes to conquer. Pandit Ravi Shankar, in a letter written to be read out during his friend Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s memorial, had described Kolkata as the final frontier for every practitioner of Hindustani music. There can be little doubt that the equivalent for Carnatic musicians is Chennai. As Sairam said, “Now that I’ve received the appreciation of the music community here, I know that I’ve come full circle. If I had not made this decision, I would probably always have lived with regret.”
Aruna Sairam will perform on Sat Mar 6 at the IGNCA.
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