New Delhi: “If you stop, challenge or dare to resist, ‘Make in India’, he will lie and insist” — it’s sung (in Tamil) in a style reminiscent of a Carnatic kriti, with the line followed by the inevitable sa, ni, dha, sa, ri… But the words are hardly what you expect to hear. A bit like the singer himself.
A gifted singer from a prominent Brahmin family in Chennai who was one of the last disciples of the doyen, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, T.M. Krishna might have been expected to conquer the heights of the Carnatic music world. That he would so get under the skin of that fraternity — with his attacks on caste discrimination and praise for the likes of Periyar — was less expected.
The announcement that the 48-year-old Krishna will receive the Sangita Kalanidhi — the top award of the Madras Music Academy — this year has polarised the Carnatic fraternity, with several senior artists announcing that they won’t attend the function Krishna will preside over, voicing vituperative criticisms and even returning awards in protest.
According to his critics, his actions and beliefs dilute Carnatic music’s divine essence, traditionally dedicated to the praise of Hindu gods and goddesses.
On the flip side, Krishna’s decision to accept the award from an institution he had been boycotting since 2015 over its “Brahmanism” and “corruption” has also invited scrutiny.
Kamala Ganesh, a Mumbai-based author and sociologist who has written about Krishna’s music, says, “He has raised the issue of caste in Carnatic music but needs to spend a lot of time implementing his ideas. Speaking about it is not enough.”
She was surprised by Krishna’s decision to accept the award from an organisation of which he has been critical but is hopeful that he will work for the issues he has raised from “within the system rather than throw stones from the outside”.
In an article in The Hindu published on 12 January, 2023, Krishna himself wrote that classical music is here to stay but cannot fully evolve unless those within the system accept and actively promote social diversity.
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Quest to break barriers
Thodur Madabusi Krishna has been a part of the Chennai music circuit since he was six. His performing career began with his debut concert at the Spirit of Youth series organised by the Madras Music Academy. He is also the grandnephew of Congress politician and freedom fighter T. T. Krishnamachari, a former Union finance minister and industrialist, who was a founding member of the academy.
Krishna began his musical training under the guidance of Bhagavatula Seetharama Sharma. He later underwent special ragam thanam pallavi training under prominent musicians, including Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer.
In his music, he fuses diverse genres and themes, attracting both praise and criticism. Ganesh says he hasn’t fundamentally changed Carnatic music but is an “innovator”. She describes him as a “very good musician” who does a lot of manodharma (improvisation).
The line quoted at the beginning of this article is from a song that exemplifies how far he has gone beyond the traditional pious subject matter. In 2017, Krishna sang about poramboke (literally, unassessed land kept aside for public use, but also a slur for a ‘useless’ person in modern Tamil slang) at an event to highlight social and environmental issues. The lyrics were penned by singer-songwriter Kaber Vasuki.
He has also sung compositions based on poems by Narayana Guru, and in 2023, to commemorate the beginning of the 100th year of the Vaikom Satyagraha — a major milestone in South India’s social reform movements — he released a song on Periyar titled ‘Sindikka chonnavar Periyar’. The lyrics include words that, translated, go: “question caste discrimination, question scriptural regulations, question injustice and untouchability”.
It’s his praise of Periyar that has made him anathema to some critics, with the vocalist sisters Ranjani and Gayatri telling ThePrint earlier, “Mr T.M. Krishna has glorified EVR aka Periyar who called for the genocide of Brahmins, normalised use of vile profanity on the Brahmin women. His vilification of the fraternity and hurting sentiments and values of the system and insults to the icons are some of the reasons.”
Krishna has also collaborated for performances with Jogappas (a community of transgender musicians) and brought the poetry of the Tamil author Perumal Murugan to the concert stage.
For his efforts, Krishna received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2016, with the awarding body recognising “his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions, breaking barriers of caste and class to unleash what music has to offer not just for some but for all”. In his address at the award show, Krishna spoke about how art must transcend all barriers of caste.
His other accolades include the Tata Literature Award for best first book in the non-fiction category in 2014 for his book, A Southern Music — The Karnatik Story (described on the award’s website as a “first-of-its-kind philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political exploration of Karnatik Music”). He also received the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 2017 and the Professor V. Aravindakshan Memorial Award in 2017.
‘Aware of his privilege’
After he distanced himself from the academy, Krishna launched another Carnatic classical music festival, Uroor Olcott Kuppam Marghazi Vizha, in 2016, with several volunteers from the fishermen community including social activist Nityanand Jayaraman, who describes Krishna as an “honest” person.
Jayaraman has known Krishna for 11 years now. He says Krishna has an intellectual honesty that he is also willing to engage with himself while examining his art. “He is aware of his privilege and has been quite effective in putting his privilege into action.”
While praising Krishna for being a “grounded person”, Jayaraman said he does not know the Carnatic maestro as a celebrity but as a “friend who is very funny and laughs out loud and that too, quite a lot”.
The festival is hosted at a fishing village in Chennai, Urur Olcott Kuppam, and showcases a variety of art forms performed by people from different backgrounds.
R. Sundaramurthy, who belongs to the fisherman community in the village, says Krishna is a “good human being” who keeps everyone in the “same category”. “With his music, he took the fisherman community to a stage, where now everybody knows us,” he says.
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Book on mridangam & ensuing row
Krishna has written several other books, including Reshaping Art (2018), which raised questions about how art is made, performed, and disseminated while addressing socio-cultural and political issues; and his latest, Sebastian & Sons: A Brief History of Mridangam makers (2020).
The latter — which traces the history of Dalit Christian makers of the mridangam, the percussion instrument in Carnatic music — triggered a controversy. It details how the instrument is made of cow, goat and buffalo hide and how the largely Brahmin performers are at a remove from the process that involves cow slaughter.
In the book, Krishna narrates instances of discrimination faced by the craftsmen, including an account by one mridangam maker about how he never ate with the legendary percussionist Palghat Mani Iyer. At the time, Iyer’s grandson, Carnatic vocalist Palghat Ramprasad — who had been Krishna’s friend — accused him of not making his intentions clear while collecting information from the family.
Ramprasad and his family have now decided to return his grandfather’s Sangita Kalanidhi award, a decision they announced in a Facebook post. Speaking to ThePrint, Ramprasad recalls the time when he and Krishna worked together on the executive committee of the Youth Association for Classical Music and how that was the “high point” of their association.
But he felt “misled and hurt” when he read the book. “I have been critical of the narrative of the book, but there are certain chapters that are extremely useful and every musician must read it,” he said.
He also questions Krishna’s decision to accept the award, saying, “Actions beat the thought.”
Activism & backlash
Krishna has also came under fire for his comments about Carnatic music legend M.S. Subbulakshmi. He had discussed her Devadasi lineage in a 2015 article in The Caravan, writing that her personal life was marked by tragedy and she felt compelled to detach herself from her origins to conform to the archetype of the “ideal Brahmin woman”.
He faced a backlash after he repeated these assertions in a 2017 speech. Sudha Ragunathan, a Carnatic vocalist, argued that analysing M.S. Subbulakshmi’s life choices was unjust and raising the point of upper-caste hegemony was overdone. She said that raking up man-made social distinctions was unnecessary.
Then, in 2018, the singer O.S. Arun decided to cancel his participation at a Christian event — ‘Yesuvin Sangama Sangeetham’ — after he faced online abuse over his decision to sing Carnatic songs about a non-Hindu deity. Krishna subsequently wrote on social media that he would release one Carnatic song on Jesus or Allah every month.
Months later, the Airports Authority of India cancelled a concert that was to feature Krishna after he faced boycott calls by Right-wing trolls.
Krishna has not only used his music as a tool to express his socio-cultural stances but also his political ones. In 2020, during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the Carnatic singer sang Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Hum dekhenge’ at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh in four different languages.
In 2021, he moved the Madras High Court, challenging the new Information Technology Rules. He is also a critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In a Facebook post in April 2019, during the Lok Sabha elections, he urged the people of Kerala not to believe in the “lies being propagated by Mr Modi and the BJP that Hinduism and tradition is in jeopardy in Kerala”.
It’s in light of this history of activism that S. Anand, an Ambedkarite and publisher of the anti-caste publishing house Navayana, criticises Krishna’s decision to accept the Sangita Kalanidhi award, calling it ghar wapasi — a return home. Others, like Ganesh, may hope he can bring change from the inside.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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Krishna is a sycophant of the DMK. The writer is scared to state this well known fact.
Already, bigoted Brahmin haters are spreading rumors that this page of yours has a virus. That alone should tell people something.