By Ajay Cadambi
A few days ago, my email inbox and my Facebook wall were flooded with a YouTube link that looked interesting at first glance. The video featured the Carnatic vocalist, Aruna Sairam singing a well known padam, Paiyyada. The padam is a form of music that emerged in the latter half of the fifteenth century in southern and coastal Andhra Pradesh. Although padams have been composed in all of the four major South Indian languages, the padam reached its expressive peak in Telugu, the primary language of South Indian classical music.
Needless to say, as with all things Coke Studio, there was the requisite amount of remixing, this time by Bombay-based music composer Ram Sampath.
Please read MTV’s ill-researched, bordering on hilarious description of the song here:
A song that was originally sung by courtesans of yore, the Devdaasi’s, Paiyada is sensual, seductive & full of yearning. This traditional Padam was however never recorded throughout history & has only been passed down from teacher to disciple. Featuring the gargantuan talent of Aruna Sairam, this powerful production by Ram Sampath is sure to be one of the surprises of this year’s Coke Studio @ MTV — for its deep rooted history, as well as unique presentation, flamenco influenced acoustic Lute, Dobro, Cajun, Clarinet & a meditative-style vocal.
As if purple prose like “gargantuan talent” wasn’t enough, MTV had to spice up their song by appropriating the word courtesan. People like Ram Sampath are free to do what they like with the actual music, but this description of the song is just misleading. The song is a 17th century padam composed by a poet named Kshetrayya. Kshetrayya is believed to have composed over four thousand love songs which commonly use the word “Muvvagopala” to refer to the village in which he was born, Muvva.
The pallavi (refrain) of this padam translates to “that muvvagopala who used to sleep with his head on my breasts in now angry with me, ayyayyo”. It would have traditionally been performed by a devadasi (songstress/dancer) inside a temple, court or salon. The song speaks of the sexual subjectivity of the devadasi and conveys a complex emotional narrative of the anguish of separation.
Aruna Sairam trained under Tanjavur Brinda (fondly referred to as Brindamma) who herself came from an illustrious lineage of singers. (Incidentally, listen to Aruna Sairam’s earlier, better version of this padam if you want to detox from Coke Studio.) Here is the big difference the two women – Brinda and her protégé: Aruna Sairam will not sing the song in a kutcheri to a traditionalist audience, she values her middle-class respectability too much. She will only sing it on MTV.
There are many recordings of Brinda, her younger sister Mukta and half a dozen of their students singing this padam. (Ignore MTV when they tell you the padam was never recorded!) The appropriation of this padam, especially in that oversexed ‘exotic and erotic’ mode, shows an insensitivity to the richness of Brinda’s musical tradition.
The padam style is known for its unhurried, alluring movements, and for intricate gamaka (graces) usage. The style involves tremendous discipline, sensitivity and breath control and its mastery is considered to be the pinnacle of classical excellence. Singing a padam entails more than learning everything else from xyz popular patantharam (style of singing), and then learning half a dozen javalis (another genre of singing, more recent than the padam) and three padams from Mukta or Brinda.
It requires doing what someone like Rama Ravi (also a student of Brinda) did so wonderfully, immersing oneself in that style so that your varnam, kriti and everything else you sing has the same style of musical and phonetic expression. And Rama Ravi could have sung this padam flawlessly – but she is not a big enough name for MTV.
This is the upside down world we inhabit. Where a living person who sings the song is not a valid record of traditions past, but a few kilobytes of sound on a hard drive constitute the most satisfactory, perfectly dehumanised record.
Cadambi is a graduate student based in Bangalore. He is obsessed with Hindustani music and Sanskrit love poetry.