Women find their pitch

"WHEN IT comes to taking note of artistic work, women make up only a small fraction of those who receive due recognition," thus began Sakuntala Narasimhan's presentation last week. Her focus was Indian music, and women who had contributed to its richness.

The idea for such a presentation came to Sakuntala when she was in Europe in 1995. She saw a TV series on the women composers of the West, many of whom were unearthed and performed for the first time. "It was deeply researched. They had found manuscripts of symphonies and sonatas which were as good as those composed by men," she said.

Ananya in Malleswaram was the venue of her presentation. Organised by Network of Women in Media, Sakuntala's commentary was meticulously researched, and gave a brief profile of each composer. With a group of students, she sang one representative song from each of the eight composers she had chosen. The lecture-demonstration was meant for March 8, to mark World Women's Day, but that date was ruled out because far too many events were happening and the audience would find it difficult to be present.

The 1995 journalistic effort on European television, to coincide with the UN conference on women in Beijing, was a turning point, and made available biographical details of women composers who had either been forgotten or neglected. Their work was revived and recorded, and is now part of major collections in the West. That set Sakuntala thinking, and she started researching women composers our own country.

"What I saw was a weekly series. Some of the women composers turned out to be related to famous men composers such as Schumann and Mozart, but there were others who had never been heard of," she said. Sakuntala came back to India and started looking around for material on women in Indian music.

It was a good time for research in this direction because, she says, "there was a lot of focus on women and women's creativity". Sakuntala knew some compositions of Mira Bai and Andal, and had heard vaguely of Akka Mahadevi.

One thing struck her instantly: "Women have been singing and making music for just as long as men have, and yet very few women figure among the composers whose contributions have been acknowledged as part of our cultural heritage."

Sakuntala's first presentation on Indian women composers took place in 1996, at the India International Centre in Delhi. She had by then started reading up on Akka Mahadevi. "I found her songs, asked around for the authentic versions, and then started learning the tunes," she says. She soon found more women poets in the languages of the north. Her second presentation was for All India Radio, where she sang with a tabla and a mridangam. Her third presentation, at Ananya, had her students singing along.

Sakuntala says she got some folk tunes for Akka's compositions from elderly women. The tune for "Akka kelavva", which she sang at Ananya, is Mallikarjuna Mansur's. In the case of Andal, the tunes were based on traditional Carnatic ragas, composed by great musicians such as Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar and M. L. Vasanthakumari. For a Tallapaka Thimmakka song Sakuntala made her own melody. Lal Ded, the Kashmiri composer, prompted her to make trips to Kashmiri Pandit homes in Delhi. That is where she got samples of Kashmiri music and worked on her pronunciation. Thus almost all tunes Sakuntala presented were created by people other than the poets. The original tunes, as sung by the composers, have been lost in the passage of time.

In Marathi, Sakuntala found the poetry of Janabai, Muktabai, and Bahina Bai, after rummaging through the Asiatic Society library. She first found books on them published in the 19th Century, and then located their songs.

The 45-minute presentation covered a huge span, from Vedic times to the 20th Century, and put the poets and their work in a feminist perspective. Bahina Bai was beaten by her husband for writing poetry and singing the verses of a "low caste" Tukaram, Lal Ded's mother-in-law put a stone on her plate and then covered it with rice to give the impression that she ate a lot.

And in Telugu country, women were whipped and tonsured for writing erotic poetry.

In Mira's Gujarati poem, Sakuntala came across the same ecological concerns as in Salumarada Thimmakka, who planted and watered hundreds of trees along a highway near Bangalore.

Excerpts from an interview:

Andal, Mira, and Akka devote all their lyrical attention to a god who they see as a lover. Is this particularly Indian or is there a similar tradition in the West as well?

No, I have not come across Western counterparts of these poets. As far as my knowledge goes, women who wandered around and sang in ecstasy are particularly Indian. In the West, women wrote music, and their symphonies were not considered worthy of attention. I haven't gone looking for it... but this must be a cultural thing. Even our devotion is particularly Indian. Men composers like Tyagaraja also sang and danced in ecstasy. Our music gets this devotional dimension.

In the West too housewives were expected to look after the men. Nobody invited them to perform in public because of their ideas about modesty and womanly submission. All over the world, they ghettoize women, who are never judged on a par with men.

How did you come across Thimmakka's work?

She was Annamacharya's wife, and wrote in the same colloquial style. She is in no way inferior to him. In Tirupati, they hold huge festivals in his honour but no mention is made of Thimmakka. She could embroider stories from the Mahabharata. In the poem I sang, she talks about a parrot Subhadra sends to Arjuna. This must be her own imagination. In fact, she wrote a long opera. I made my own tune because I found no existing tune.

Since when have you been doing Sangeet Sarita? I remember hearing you on the programme 15 years ago.

I just came back from Bombay after recording some slots on Swati Tirunal. I must have been recording for them for something like 20 years. I did a 30-part series on ragas, a ten-part series on talas, some single episodes on the gharanas. We also did some slots on incidents connected with Carnatic ragas.

Musicians don't sing raga Ahiri if you haven't eaten, because they believe if you hear it you will go hungry the whole day. Sangeet Sarita is meant to take classical music to lay listeners. They rotate their presenters, and sometimes get well-known musicians such as Shivkumar Sharma, Hariprasad Chaurasia, and Zakir Hussain to do some episodes.

In Hindustani music, you find thumris written by women, like the one you sang from Gauhar Jan, "Bansuri baj rahi". How is it that in Carnatic music even the padams and the javalis, love poems comparable to the thumris, are written by men?

That's true. I am quite sure we can locate some written by women. After I wrote about my women composers project, at least three people brought cassettes to me and said their grandmothers had been composing but never got any publicity. Could be lack of confidence, fear of public ridicule... I wouldn't be surprised to find padams written by women which have not been publicised. Women have composed varnams and tillanas, so why not padams and javalis?

What is the difference between a thumri and a bandish ki thumri, which is what you called Gauhar Jan's composition?

It has the same romantic form, but a bandish ki thumri is treated almost like a chhota khayal. Most thumris are in Deepchandi, but this one is in teen taal. I have been taught two bandish ki thumris, one by Gauhar Jan, and another written by my ustad. Both are composed by Muslims and on Krishna.