M. Balamuralikrishna (1930-2016): Rare Are The Great Souls, Before Them We Bow

Only one non-Bengali was given the honour of singing 30 songs of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore in a project to preserve the compositions of the Pride of Bengal.

He could speak, read and write in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali and English. He sang at concerts in all those languages, plus Punjabi and French.

He played multiple instruments with ease, including the kanjira, the mridangam, the violin and the viola. He gave several solo concerts playing the viola.

The awards were too numerous to count. Two National Film Awards (1976-1987), the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1975, the Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan, Padma Shri from the Indian government for his contribution towards arts, the Mahatma Gandhi Silver Medal from UNESCO in 1995, the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2005, the Sangeetha Kalanidhi, and the Sangeetha Kalasikhamani were the most notable.

Muralikrishna was born in Sankaraguptam, Andhra Pradesh, in the delta of the Godavari, a village sandwiched between the river and the sea. It is a place verdant with rice paddies and coconut palms, its pristine beauty punctuated by the ebbs and flows of India’s second mightiest river. It is a village not far from my own native village of Peruru, and perhaps I felt the terroir of the fertile delta brush my soul whenever I heard his voice.

His first performance was at age six, the age when child prodigies tend to burst on to the stage. It was the same age that Mozart had given his first performance in the court of Vienna 174 years earlier. Soon he was given the title “Bala” meaning child, as an honorific. The name stuck, and he became Balamuralikrishna or Balamurali for eternity. The name was also apt. He retained a childlike quality throughout life. His penchant for action movies, his love for the occasional day spent gambling in casinos (he called it a form of art), and the imp-ish sense of humour that he retained throughout his life belied the sheer talent and effort that he put into redefining the genre of Carnatic music.

Such was his talent that his performances seemed effortless. His routine was more or less the same. He would show up half an hour before a concert, polish off a tiffin of vada, idli or samosa in the concert hall cafeteria first, chew on a betel leaf to activate his throat, get on the stage and extemporize. You never knew what he was going to perform at a concert. No two performances were the same, and he just let the creativity flow. A rendition of Pibare Ramarasam by Sadasiva Brahmendra, performed by most vocalists in two minutes, could turn into a 45 minute exploration of the raga Ahir Bhairavi, leaving the audience in rapture. Or he would get stuck into Annamayya’s Bhadrachala Ramadas keerthanams that would take one into a mood of total euphoria. He would take a 20 minute break during concerts for a glass of water, or perhaps it was something a little stronger, and pick up where he left off as if it had been mere seconds since he paused.

His approach drove the sticklers at the Music Academy in Chennai to frothing at the lips, mad with rage. Those who claimed to be the guardians of “sampradayam”, which they interpreted to be a regimented, form-bound rendition of whatever the original composer had intended, said that he was an upstart, a fusion-artist. To them all, he replied that every maestro creates his own style, and that sampradayam is a much misunderstood word.

Yet Balamurali was proficient enough and structured enough to propagate and systematise the Melakarta system of Carnatic Music, which define 72 mathematically derived parent ragas as the fundamental underpinnings of the musical tradition. As a teenager, he realised that melakartas offer perfect training in clarity and precision. The result: he produced an imposing 72 raga melamalika, or compositions in all 72 ragas, to develop a standard for teaching. His goal was to establish the raga swarupa or framework. This is important not only for teaching Carnatic music, but it provides Carnatic vocalists the unique ability to sing any genre like fusion, jazz or jugalbandi with ease, unlike Hindustani or other traditions. Even his critics accept that no ordinary mortal can sing, let alone compose, in ragas at the opposite ends of the Melakarta like Kanakangi or Sucharitra.

The sheer fearlessness with which he charted his own course left the serious critics fuming and delighted in equal measure. Those critics who compared him to the perfection of the holy trinity and found him wanting, missed the boat altogether. Those of us who adored him needed a man we could hope to emulate, not a perfect being that we could only worship. Balamurali was an artist of exceptional talent, effort and achievement, but he was a human, with all the human frailties and imperfections. He was not afraid to be wrong, or to be found wanting. If his composition or his rendition failed, he simply moved on. The renowned music critic BRC Iyengar, no acolyte of Balamurali, had this to say some twenty years ago.

“He does not believe in the pristine principles of the past, but has supreme confidence in the practical purview of the present. He is a paradox for the puritan, a bore for the conservative and an avathara for the neo-classicist”. Indeed.

Balamurali’s career is defined by his non-conformism. He composed many new ragas like Ganapathi, Sarvashri, Mahati, Lavangi, Omkaari, Siddhi, Sumukham. Ragas like Lavangi are set to three or four notes in ascending and descending scale. Ragas created by him, like Mahathi, Lavangi, Siddhi, Sumukham have only four notes. Sarvashri, Omkaari, and Ganapathi have only three notes. The way he handled the compositions of the Thyagaraja, Shyama Shastri and Muthuswamy Dikshitar, the Holy Trinity of Carnatic music is a revelation. In particular, Dikshitar krithis are some of the toughest to render melodically, one has to be trained by vidwans coming from that lineage. Balamurali simplified and sang some of Dikshitar krithis with no such formal training.

It is said that he gave over 5000 concerts in his lifetime, a staggering achievement that spanned eight decades of performances.

The last time I met Balamurali garu was at MIT in Boston several years ago, where he had come to give a concert. There was some healthy banter going around between Tamil and Telugu speaking students. One student was proudly saying that Tamil was the oldest of the major South Indian languages, and that Telugu was a relatively recent upstart.

The maestro smiled mischeviously, his face ever so child-like, and shut the student down with this gem “So what you are saying is that Telugu is Tamil 2.0?”

His voice is timeless, blessed with “timbre”, that rarest of rare qualities. It is timbre that sends shivers down ones spine when you listen to him, and one that wakes you up when you put on his renditions of Thyagaraja’s pancharatna kritis, no matter where and at what time of day.

“Endaro Mahanubhavulu, Andariki Vandanamulu”, Saint Thyagaraja wrote. Rare are the great souls, before them we bow in welcome.

Balamurali not only sang this kriti with aplomb, he became the song.