Udhay has a pet phrase, throwing Shuriken in all directions, that
reflects both his conversational gambit and his love of cheesy Hong
Kong flicks.
Nothing exemplies this better than Aakar Patel's latest column in
livemint,
http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2012/03/29200444/Why-it-is-better-to-live-in-th.html
Udhay, shouldn't we have Aakar here? Would be a good counterpoint to
our resident master troll.
Ram
--
Why it is better to live in the south
The south’s urban culture is more intellectual. My hypothesis is that
this is so because its culture is dominated by the Brahmin
I prefer south India to north India. I also prefer south Indians to
north Indians. I wish Mehmood had defeated Kishore Kumar in Padosan’s
singing contest. The audience thinks Kishore’s Vidyapati trounces
Mehmood’s Master Pillai. But Vidyapati is on home ground singing in
Khamaj to a tabla playing Keherva and Teen Taal. Pillai is singing the
other man’s music. What if it had been the other way around?
The south Indian can access the north Indian’s music easily. Often he
even masters it. Witness Kannadigas Kumar Gandharva and Mallikarjun
Mansur in Hindustani music. Or Tamilians A.R. Rahman and Shankar
Mahadevan in Bollywood.
Classics: It takes merit to understand the true greatness of
Subbulakshmi (centre). Photo by Hindustan Times.
The reverse isn’t true. North Indians have little access to Carnatic,
being able to neither penetrate its rhythm nor absorb its melody. Few
can even bear listening to it because it is so foreign.
Historian Ramachandra Guha once described reading an editorial on M.S.
Subbulakshmi in a Hindi newspaper, I think it was Dainik Bhaskar. He
reported that the writer accurately and knowledgeably illustrated the
difference between the two music systems, and was able to locate the
Carnatic singer’s greatness.
This is exceptional and it is the rare north Indian writer who has
interest in, let alone knowledge of, the south’s music. On the other
hand, the best writer on Hindustani music I have read is a south
Indian, Raghava R. Menon.
The north Indian caricatures the south Indian in his popular culture,
his movies. This caricature is an accurate reflection of his own
crudeness and lack of subtlety. The south Indian has no such
caricature for the north. In fact, he is inclusive, and Bollywood
movies are shown in Chennai, to say nothing of Bangalore and
Hyderabad. I don’t think it is only the northern expatriate who
watches these, but again we cannot say the same of southern movies in
the north.
Clearly, the two cultures are different. Let’s look at some of the
substantive ways in which they differ.
The first thing that strikes us is that south Indians have a written
classical music. This has enormous implications. It separates them
from north Indians who have no canon of music. The average southerner
can assess a performance of his classical music better than the
average northerner can. This is because he knows how a particular song
is to be sung. He understands how long it must be, where and how the
thing must be modulated. And he knows how others have sung it, because
the works of Purandaradasa, Thyagaraja, Syama Sastri and Muthuswami
Dikshitar are standards.
To appreciate Hindustani music other than instinctively, a northerner
must study the deep form of his music, which few can. Else, he must
just nod his head at the mood emoted by the singer, which is what most
do, saying: “Wah!”
Writer Sheila Dhar observed that even here the southerner was
different. On first encountering it, she described the sound of
appreciation made by listeners of Carnatic music thus: “Whenever the
listener was smitten by something particularly wonderful that the
performer was doing, he would raise his chin, bring his lips together
in a protruding ‘O’, and make a series of little clicking sounds by
striking the tongue against the back of the front teeth, gently
shaking his head from side to side in mock helplessness.”
Their canon makes south India’s classical tradition like that of
Europe’s, where also the music of the classical period is recorded by
note and reproduced in exact fashion.
The second thing that strikes me as being different is that south
India’s high culture has little influence of Islam. It is Hindu
culture, not a mix. There is not as much secular music in Carnatic as
there is in Hindustani. There’s no equivalent of “Ganga Jamuni”, as
the northerner refers to his high culture, a mix of Hindu tradition
and the aristocratic Perso-Arabic tradition produced during Muslim
rule.
This might be seen as a bad thing. But the south Indian is actually
quite tolerant.
There are five loud mosques around my house in Bangalore, and some
robust proselytizing on the billboards surrounding them. However, this
carries on without any sense of friction.
North India’s high culture is Indo-Persian, whether in music or
poetry. Even some of the popular culture is influenced by Islam, such
as Amir Khusro. What is the south Indian
