� l SRUTI December 2011

COVER STORY

TRICHY SANKARANScholar vidwan extraordinaire V. Ramnarayan

The 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 non-resident 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

� l SRUTI December 2011

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.

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.

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

nonagenarian mridanga vidwan Madras A. Kannan describes as an avatara purusha – and mridanga vidwan Palani Muthayya Pillai took the tradition forward in grand style.

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 much-loved 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.

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.

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.

Young Sankaran