Sadanand Menon: Chennai's annual 'mad cow' syndrome

The famously irreverent “Curd-Seller Quatrain”, by poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay, went: A monkey found a mirror/ and gazed into its glass;/ and said, “I certainly belong/ unto the ruling class”.

This is perhaps the unashamedly smug, self-satisfied conclusion that Chennai’s elite arrives at every time it gazes lovingly into the giant looking-glass called the “Music and Dance Season” – six weeks of year-end festivities beginning early December and lasting well beyond Pongal in mid-January – when some 500 classical musicians, dancers and scholars present over 3,000 performances, seminars and “lec-dems” at some 30 venues rigged up by almost 100 sabhas, supported by at least 300 high- and low-end commercial enterprises and state agencies investing a collective sponsorship amount of (a conservative estimate) over Rs 3 crore.

 

It is a gigantic pageant of contradictions. The pious and the credulous, the amateur and the professional, the soul-pure and the techno-contaminated, the enchanting and the prosaic, the captivating and the abhorrent, the connoisseur and the dilettante, the resident and the non-resident are all assembled into a mega sin-phony of contraries, to briefly hold hands, lock together in a tight embrace and syncopate under the compulsive and charismatic baton of a good conductor called “Our Culture”.

Quantity belies quality. Lucky are those who might manage to catch even half-a-dozen high- standard cutcheris in an ambience that serves up the raagam-thanam-pallavi of a Shudha Saveri or the kalpanaswaram of a Hamirkalyani like quick-fix dosas at a fast-food stall. The resultant concert-fatigue has initiated a stimulating new mode of musical consumption among connoisseurs called “cutcheri-nibbling”, in which even 15 minutes is an unfashionably long amount of time to invest in any one concert. Cutcheris are savoured in swift nibbles like pakodas or bhajjis, and that one bite is enough to reveal spiciness or blandness.

All the self-congratulatory euphoria and the conspicuous crony-collaborations for awards and other sumptuous benefits – besides the creaming off of resources by a few – only indicate the rampant ghettoisation of this aspect of culture. While from the outside it exhibits glitter and gloss, at best it is haphazard, unprofessional, unwieldy, repetitious and notable mainly for the mad race for numerical one-upmanship between sabhas.

The well-known Carnatic flautist Shashank, one of the increasing number of very articulate youngsters in the field, poked a hornet’s nest this Season by pointing out a range of “unfair practices” infesting the scene due to the whimsical and ad hoc manner in which the performances are managed. He said that there is an urgent need for forming artists’ unions that set down minimum requirements for accountability and transparency in the conduct of the events, as well as preventing the sprouting of sabhas which cannot boast of even basic infrastructure. Funders, he said, should introspect about whether their contributions reached deserving musicians.

Most negative comments this season have been about the pathetic acoustics in a majority of these makeshift venues where, as the leading vocalist K N Sashikiran points out, the artist’s rendition of Raga Hamsadhwani “begins with Hums, with the dhwani only coming in much later”. There is very poor technical backup and a woeful shortage of acoustic engineers or audio experts who know anything about amplification, balancing instruments and vocalists, or enhancing timber and tone. Of course, this has led to an increasing number of musicians carrying their own Shure condenser or dynamic microphones to the concerts. But, overall, the scenario is defined by a hankering for progressively higher volumes through the concert, leading to obvious desensitisation.

This is particularly surprising as the Carnatic scene has been invaded by all the latest hi-tech innovations from online guru referral services to live webcasting and video-on-demand services. This year, artists like T M Krishna and Sanjay Subrahmanyam sought audience interaction on their mobile apps. Many musicians now conduct classes for outstation and international students on Skype, and their latest recordings are being feverishly uploaded to YouTube.

Despite all this, the event seems to exist and flourish in a bubble, entirely unrelated to the real issues besetting art practice in this country. It is inconceivable that this festival can lead anywhere without addressing issues of pedagogy, practice, critical discourse, archiving and so on. While it may continue a little longer as some hot-house flower, it increasingly resembles “mad cow disease”, brought on by cows being fed on their own kind. Here it is art forms that are forced to feed on themselves in the absence of other nourishment. The cow is bound to buck.

My worst disgust this Season was with the poster for the Dance Festival of the Music Academy that opened this Tuesday. A collage of mugshots of some 28 identically gaudy and over-decorated female dancers, interspersed with an odd male or an odd (even more grotesque) group picture. If this is to be taken as the “picture of Indian dance” circa 2012, one must say it beats the “Picture of Dorian Gray” by a mile.

It is this sort of decadence that seems to be the real problem with this festival, which offers us so much pleasure. What the scene perhaps needs is urgent rationalisation. A co-operative approach could lead to annual earmarking of specific amounts by rotation to each venue for improving infrastructure and facilities to benefit artists, audiences and the environment of the arts in general. It would also help in setting up scholarships, welfare schemes, endowments, printing literatures related to the arts in many languages, translating, commissioning specific cultural history projects and so on — all of which have to be integral aspects of any healthy, responsible and visionary attitude to arts promotion to help it mature. Otherwise the cows are unlikely to come home.

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The writer is a Chennai-based cultural critic.
Every week, Eye Culture will feature writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance and film