Scholar vidwan extraordinaire - Dhvani

COVER STORY
TRICHY SANKARAN
Scholar vidwan extraordinaire
V. Ramnarayan
T
he mridanga vidwan is
a picture of dignity and
controlled rage. He brings his
tani avartanam – at the conclusion
of Sanjay Subrahmanyan’s expansive
main kriti – to an abrupt halt, and sits
ramrod straight, expressionless, but
quiet like a volcano about to erupt,
as an eminently visible portion of
the audience at the Music Academy
begins an exodus.
The silence, deadly as it is, does not
deter the army of deserters striding
purposefully towards the exotic
delights awaiting them outside.
The percussionist waits till the last
of the offenders stops polluting the
air inside the auditorium, and then
gives his instrument a magnificently
resounding slap. The thunderous
ovation that greets the symbolic
gesture of disapproval rooted in
the moral high ground prefaces a
brilliant tani by Trichy Sankaran and
his fellow percussionist. The applause
restores your faith in the listeners
– at least those that stayed back.
This was at a Season concert a few
years ago.
The Sangita Kalanidhi award has
come not a day too soon. Though
Sankaran is only the second nonresident Indian, after Tanjore
Viswanathan, to receive the highest
accolade in Carnatic music, his name
has been in the reckoning for the last
few years. His art not only belongs to
the highest class recognised by hoary
tradition, but has also acquired the
sophistication of the most modern
expression and explication, through
the four decades he has spent in
the West, developing and fine-tuning a pedagogy and vocabulary for Carnatic
percussion that have made it accessible to knowledge seekers worldwide.
Though he has lived outside India for four decades, teaching and performing
in traditional Carnatic music concerts as well as in a variety of fusion efforts,
Trichy Sankaran has been an annual visitor to India during the December
season, to perform and lecture in Chennai as well as other southern centres. He
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COVER STORY
has for several decades been a major draw
among the knowledgeable audiences
here for his own grand, uncompromising
methods and style as well as the chance
he provides old time listeners to savour
again the inimitable style of his guru
Palani Subramania Pillai, the left-handed
genius of the Pudukottai school. In the
hierarchy of top percussionists, Sankaran
occupies a very high place among such
giants as T.K. Murthy, Umayalpuram
Sivaraman, Vinayakram and Vellore
Ramabhadran. With audiences knowing
that he is capable of embellishing and
enhancing any concert, an expectant hush
invariably precedes the beginning of his
appearances on stage.
Sankaran’s career can be neatly divided
into three parts: the initial years spent
as a child prodigy in the sleepy town of
Trichy, as a student of his cousin Poovalur
Venkataraman 18 years his senior – who
also took him to distant Delhi to continue
his mridanga training; the second part
when he graduated to gurukulavasam
with Palani Subramania Pillai, moving
to Madras, and simultaneously acquired
a master’s degree in economics, a period
during which he also accompanied his guru
in concerts; and finally his emergence as
a soloist and his move to York University,
Toronto, Canada, where he has taught
Indian music for the last four decades. It
has been a unique amalgam of the best of
Indian and Western traditions of teaching
and learning.
nonagenarian mridanga vidwan Madras A. Kannan describes as an avatara
purusha – and mridanga vidwan Palani Muthayya Pillai took the tradition
forward in grand style.
Sankaran hails from the acclaimed
Pudukottai school of mridanga – whose
undoubted star was Sankaran’s guru
Palani Subramania Pillai – as opposed to
the other famous, more common school,
the Tanjavur bani of Vaidyanatha Iyer,
which produced stalwarts like Palghat
Mani Iyer.
Like Papanasam Sivan, who did not hail from Papanasam, Sankaran too
was not born at Tiruchirapalli, the Trichy in his name, but at Poovalur, a
small village near Lalgudi, on 27 July 1942 to Subbaraya Iyer and Ammalu
Ammal. His parents moved to Trichy, short for Tiruchirapalli (Tiruchi is
the current abbreviation of the name but Sankaran prefixes the older Trichy
to his name), when he was three.
Manpoondia Pillai, known as the author
of many original rhythmic compositions,
was the ‘founder’ of the Pudukottai
mridangam bani. His sishya-s, khanjira
artist Dakshinamurthy Pillai – whom
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Young Sankaran
Muthayya Pillai’s son was the left-handed Subramania Pillai, whose fame
was to rival that of the legend among percussionists – Palghat Mani Iyer.
For Carnatic music aficionados of the first half of the 20th century, the
name Palani was synonymous with the ‘rettai kai’ or two-handed style of
mridanga playing, the hallmark of the Pudukottai school. It was this muchloved exemplar of all that is best in Carnatic music and Carnatic musicians
that Sankaran had the good fortune of inheriting as his guru, when he was
a mere stripling.
Sankaran’s talent as a percussionist of promise came to light when he
was barely four, thanks to his proximity to his older cousin Poovalur
Venkataraman’s mridanga at home. Venkataraman was an accomplished
percussionist who first learnt mridanga from Tanjavur Sami Iyer and later
from Palani Subramania Pillai. He also qualified with a Sangita Bhushana
degree from Annamalai University.