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Is a new memorial needed?
A place of immense importance ... the house of Saint Tyagaraja at Tiruvaiyaru.
IN TIRUVAIYYARU is the house where lived Saint Tyagaraja, the senior most of the saintly Trinity of Carnatic Music. It was there that he composed and sang his immortal kritis. It is a house inextricably entwined with all that he experienced and created in life. Surely there cannot be a worthier memorial to him than the restoration and maintenance of this house as a shrine. Yet there is a proposal to pull down the house of the saint and build in its place a temple and a prarthana mandapam.
Or is it intended to add these features to the house, a kind of restoration it would find hard to survive? Whatever be the plans, is there any need for this, except to keep in the public eye the proposers of such new memorials as replacements of the old that they had spent little time and effort on tending?
There is already a shrine to the saint by the banks of the Cauvery. And that shrine gets tended and its precincts cleaned only at the time of the annual aradhana in memory of the great composer. Instead of maintaining this shrine the way it should, instead of maintaining the saint's house that would anywhere else be declared a heritage monument, building anew and big and loud is what is sought by those less interested in the heritage of the saint or how he created immortal music than those moments in the headlines when new monuments are consecrated. Thereafter, the new could go the way of the old for all they care, to judge by how what exists is treated for most of the year.
Is that what we call honouring the immortals? Classical Carnatic is not my cup of tea, but heritage in whatever field is, and so I read the latest proposal with some alarm. Hopefully, greater respect for the saint's memory will prevail — with the restoration, without additions, and maintenance thereafter of his house.
Another aspect of the classical music scene came to my attention shortly after I'd heard of the plans for Tiruvaiyaru. It was during a delightful Sunday morning of storytelling by raconteur Randor Guy, who inimitably chose that as his style of delivery for the first `South Indian Heritage Lecture.' The new lecture series hosted by R.T.Chari and R.V.Gopalan of the TAG Corporation at its splendid mini-auditorium is yet another of the city's numerous talk shows that keep alive culture in Madras among the already committed but are unable to reach out to a wider, or even younger, audience.
Randor Guy's `overview of the Madras presidency' comprised a whole tattle of tales about lawyers, judges and film personalities, as befitting a man who spends much time writing about movies, mayhem and murder. Many of his asides off this beaten track, however, were more significant than the entertainment.
And one of them was about music. He recalled a politician with film connections wondering why the music season had so many singers singing on so many stages the SAME songs. Wasn't there one among them willing to experiment with tried and trusted ragas? Are we destined to hear for all time the same songs sung in the same way, he had wondered. I wonder what the good saint would have thought about that bit of what some might consider heresy.
Another aside brought me up to date on a word all of us mispronounce. It should be `Paanagal' Park, not `Panagal' park. Apparently that's how the Raja of Paanagal liked to be called, but even the Platinum Jubilee Commemoration Volume of the Tamil Nadu Legislature does not take note of that preferred pronunciation — even in Tamil.
S. MUTHIAH
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