A Living Tradition of the Karaikudi Vina
Sarali, Jantai and Alankaram, as embellished by the Karaikudi Vina Brothers, have been nurtured through nine generations of our family and are central to our bani. Karaikudi Veenai Subbarama Iyer and his younger brother, Veenai Sambasiva Iyer, carried forward the accumulated wisdom of this tradition, enriching it through their individual contributions and their work together.
The elder brother played the vina in a vertical position. He was known for singing as he played and for his pallavi explorations on stage, accompanied by the legendary mrdangam player Pudukkottai Dakshinamurthy Pillai. The younger brother supported him in these performances. Their music was so closely integrated that connoisseurs remarked that the mrdangam sounded like a third vina. A few years after his elder brother’s death, Sambasiva Iyer resumed performing and began composing cittaswaras for well-known compositions by Tyagaraja and Mudduswamy Dikshitar.
My Learning with Sambasiva Iyer
I belong to the ninth generation of this lineage and am the grandson of Subbarama Iyer, Sambasiva Iyer’s elder brother. In 1957, my mother, Lakshmi Ammal, gave me in adoption to her uncle, Sambasiva Iyer, who had no children.
My training with him centred on Sarali, Jantai, Alankaram and five gitams. He did not play the exercises for me to imitate. Instead, I played what my mother had taught me; he listened and corrected me, allowing me to proceed only when I played correctly. I practised for an average of eight hours a day. This left no time for school studies, and I lost an academic year. Only later did I realise how much I had gained during the short time we had together. He knew that he had little time left, though I did not. He died of throat cancer in 1958, while serving as principal of Kalakshetra. That brief, intensive period of learning has stayed with me throughout my life as a musician and teacher.
Just a few months before his death, Sambasiva Iyer called me to him, took my left hand in his palm and examined the marks on my index and middle fingers. They were somewhat close to the nails. He asked me to shift the point where the string touched my fingers a little higher. The change felt uncomfortable at first. Only later did I understand his reason: it made a remarkable difference to my playing. I wondered why he had not told me earlier. This experience showed me how carefully he attended to the technical details needed to achieve the musical effect he sought.
That clue stayed with me. Later, when I returned to the basics, it helped me recognise the need for a left-hand finger pluck and a stopping technique to produce a particular smoothness of sound.
The Fundamentals at the Heart of Our Bani
In our tradition, these exercises are taught with their musical embellishments, or gamakas, from the beginning and practised in three speeds. As the speed increases, the gamakas must become progressively less elaborate. The arrangements of the exercises differ slightly from the versions commonly found in print. Each exercise calls for attentive listening and care in shaping the notes. Repeated practice develops the sensitivity through which the aesthetics of the bani become part of the learner’s own musical expression.
The importance Sambasiva Iyer placed on these foundations was evident in 1952, when he received the Sangita Kalanidhi honour at The Music Academy, Chennai. On the day of his award, he had his disciples present these fundamental exercises. To my knowledge, no
other recipient had marked the occasion in this way. His choice expressed a conviction at the heart of our tradition: preserving its musical character begins with giving the simplest lessons the highest musical care.
In his presidential address that year, he compared music without a grounding in its grammar to a building without a foundation. He emphasised devoted learning under a guru and sustained practice. He also described bani as a path through which sound training, feeling and imagination can develop into individual musical expression. These principles help explain the importance he gave to the fundamental exercises.
Singing and Instrumental Expression
In Karnatak music, melodic instruments primarily render the works of great composers. Listeners familiar with these compositions may recognise them from their melodies. Appreciating how faithfully an instrumental performance conveys the words, however, requires a deeper understanding of the composition.
To do a composition full justice, instrumentalists must also sing it, allowing its meaning and expressive nuances to shape their playing. Even listeners unfamiliar with the words can experience the resulting richness of expression. Integrating singing with instrumental practice is therefore essential to a well-rounded musical education.
Although performers in the Karaikudi vina tradition also sing, I wanted to bring words into the basic exercises themselves, helping learners explore the relationship between language and instrumental expression from the very beginning.
Bringing Music and Language Together
Building on this musical foundation, I have sought to introduce meaningful poetry that expresses human values and a love of Nature, without religious connotations, so that all children can benefit from learning music. Beginning with my mother tongue, Tamil, I wish to make this approach accessible to people throughout India, whatever their faith or background. I have long believed that music and language can enrich one another from the very first lessons. The beauty of language lies in its meaning as well as in its sounds, rhythms and subtle inflections.
With this aim, I invited Kavignar S. Vaidheeswaran to Brhaddhvani as a visiting poet. An important voice in modern Tamil poetry since his first poem appeared in Ezhuthu in 1961, he was also a short-story writer and an actor. His poetry has been described as bringing a painter’s eye to everyday life. What drew me to his work was its musical quality.
Our friendship began at a presentation organised by Na. Muthuswami, the founder director of Koottu-p-Pattarai. Recognising that folk theatre artistes needed musical training to strengthen their stage performances, Muthuswami took an interest in my setting of Mahakavi Subramania Bharati’s poem “Odi Vilaiyaadu Paappa” and invited me to sing it at a presentation for actors. It was there that I met Vaidheeswaran. That encounter helped crystallise my belief in a holistic approach to teaching classical music that draws on the expressive resources of language.
I hoped that Brhaddhvani’s atmosphere of learning, teaching and performance would inspire him to compose poems for the fundamental exercises. Though initially hesitant about the idea, he warmed to it when he heard me sing the words with the exercises. Through our collaboration, the imaginative richness of his poetry became part of the disciplined progression of musical learning.
Poetry offers learners a way to discover the music within a language, while musical practice can deepen their sensitivity to its expression. For children especially, bringing the two together connects the practice of pitch and rhythm with the meaning and feeling of words. Sambasiva Iyer’s insistence in his address that musicians understand the meaning of what they sing has particular relevance here. A strong technical foundation on the vina rests on precise right- and left-hand fingering, together with sliding and pulling techniques that bring clarity to performance. Adding a lyrical dimension to this training can further enrich the bani, helping learners discover how the meaning and sound of words can shape musical expression.
This exploration forms part of COMET, Correlated Objective Music Education and Training, developed at Brhaddhvani. I hope it will encourage further work in other languages and contribute to music education across the world, while retaining the musical integrity of the tradition from which it grows.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the students of Brhaddhvani who helped prepare this material for learners at different stages. My special gratitude goes to Kavignar S. Vaidheeswaran, whose poetic imagination opened a further dimension of learning through these exercises.
Through www.patantara.com, the electronic platform created by my son Dr. Srikumar Karaikudi Subramanian, these COMET exercises can reach learners across the world in a meaningful and practical way. I am grateful for his contribution to making this work more widely accessible.
Above all, I remain indebted to my mother, Lakshmi Ammal, and to my granduncle and guru, Karaikudi Veenai Sambasiva Iyer. His pious and disciplined life gave dignity and authenticity to his teaching. His distinguished disciples, Ranganayaki Rajagopalan and my sister, Rajeswari Padmanabhan, further nurtured my understanding of this tradition and gave me opportunities to perform alongside them.
This publication brings together an inherited tradition, years of learning and teaching, and the collective efforts of those associated with Brhaddhvani. As these are now made available to a wider public, we invite learners to engage with them with care, sensitivity and thoughtfulness of the tradition they embody. we hope these exercises, together with the poetry composed for them, will inspire attentive practice and fresh discoveries in how music and language illuminate one another. we welcome learners to share their explorations in learning and rendering these verses. Audio and video recordings of their renditions may be sent to contact@brhaddhvani.com.
A tradition truly lives when what we inherit becomes a source of learning and discovery for the generations that follow.
- Karaikudi Subramanian
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