TM Krishna: unleashing music not just for some but for all

TM Krishna, winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award this year for “Emergent Leadership,” is much more than a Carnatic musician. As a release from the Magsaysay Foundation notes, the award is for “his forceful commitment as artist and advocate of art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions, breaking barriers of caste and class to unleash what music has to offer not just for some but for all.”

Krishna, trained by Vidvans Seetharama Sarma, Chingleput Ranganathan and the legendary Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer in his formative years in Carnatic music, had a voice that forced sabha-goers in Chennai to sit up and take notice. It helped that Krishna attended Krishnamurti Foundation’s The School, which lays emphasis on overall growth of a student than on academics.

Always restless, Krishna first explored changes to the concert format, and insisted that he was not singing to provide entertainment. The reality of life outside the sabhas often drew him out into the streets, and he collaborated with diverse groups, sometimes exploring their music, and highlighting issues of social importance, at other.

He has experimented with the music of many groups of people, including the jogappas in Karnataka, and folk musicians. He has taken music to the slums of Chennai, talked about intolerance in India, and runs a music class in select lower-income schools in Chennai.

But what stands out is his courage in reaching out to Sri Lanka’s Northern Province a few years after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Eelam War IV — it was a time when no artist from Tamil Nadu dared have any truck with Sri Lanka because fringe Tamil nationalist groups held out menacing threats.

Krishna didn’t budge: He insisted that he was not collaborating with the Government, his attempt was to help the Tamil-majority region rebuild its classical music traditions.

Though many of Krishna's ardent fans want him to sing more and speak his mind less, Krishna does both. When he speaks, he stirs a wide-ranging debate: In October 2015, Krishna wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to break his silence on the future of pluralism in India after the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi.

His initiative in Sri Lanka lies abandoned. Speaking to this correspondent about the issue in an earlier interview, Krishna said that he found it difficult to get any cooperation from the Indian High Commission in Colombo, after the departure of then High Commissioner Ashok Kantha, in 2013. (It was Kantha’s initiative to foster cultural ties between Jaffna and Tamil Nadu.)

“After Ashok Kantha, I found it difficult to… But I found that there was not much interest for the High Commission to take it forward...To put it very bluntly, the change in government in India, changed the attitude towards that festival (in Jaffna). I don’t know why… I actually thought it is something that should be taken forward… At that point we were thinking of doing some teacher training… I had started that conversation.”

Asked if he would take up this collaboration independent of the government, through his organisation, Svanubhava, he said: “Yes, yes. It is now possible to do a direct link. How do you raise the level of music, dance that’s happening there, and what kind of connectivity we can build…That’s something we can definitely explore”

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