 Golden oldie
The family anthem is alive and kicking. For decades now members of the Sivaramakrishna Iyer family from all parts of the globe have joined in chorus on important occasions to render in unison Muttuswami Dikshitar’s Mamava Pattabhirama in Manirangu raga, the gradual and inevitable attrition in the number of vocalists notwithstanding. What is heartening is that even as the oldest singers have passed on, younger volunteers have joined the group. Earlier this year, two weeks after Mahadevan’s death, the group was bolstered by a couple of concert musicians from among his relatives lending their voices to the otherwise strictly amateur team.
Pananjadi Sivaramakrishna Mahadevan has been gone for a while now to another world, where I am sure he is enjoying a good laugh at some celestial joke, or better still, singing for payasam the equal of the best his loving wife Pankajam served him during his innings here.
What would this generation know of the forgotten custom of singing for payasam;a generation to whom attending an Indian wedding means posing with the bridal couple for the video camera, pretending to listen to the vocal gymnast on stage, shaking a few hands and struggling to be heard above the din, making a beeline for the dining hall, partaking of an imitation north Indian meal and dashing off towards the harassed band of car retrievers at the exit?
The year was 1968 and the occasion was the wedding of Mahadevan’s niece. The lunch was every bit as delicious and sumptuous as you would expect from the expert hands of Annaswami Iyer or whoever was the reigning caterer of the day. The wedding revellers had waded through Iyer’s outstanding rasam and were now impatiently waiting for his celebrated payasam;which took a long time to arrive on our thirsty banana leaves, as, for the next 20 minutes or so, Mahadevan, in glorious voice, sang slokas in a ragamalika that would have done his favourite musician Maharajapuram Visvanatha Iyer proud. (Viswanatha Iyer’s father had been one such supremely talented amateur whose untutored ways made him such a spontaneous singer). Such traditions belonged to an era when time stood still to make way for friendship and camaraderie.
Mahadevan was more than a gifted amateur vocalist. An upright officer of the Indian Railways, he was one of eight siblings whose father retired as an inspector of schools in Travancore. Growing up in an intellectually stimulating atmosphere in which a love of literature and music was dominant, he was also one of nature’s humorists, roaring his appreciation of the oddities of life.
Mahadevan’s integrity and devotion to duty were tempered by genuine humanism. He was loved by his subordinates and peers and respected by his superiors. He was scrupulously ethical when peppered by friends and relatives for official favours - or even train reservations, as this incident related by a nephew in the course of his memorial tribute shows. When he was a member of the Railway Board, this nephew approached him one day with a request to secure him a berth on the train leaving for Madras the next evening. Mahadevan’s reply was simple if slightly misleading to a nephew eager to travel in comfort: “You go and do your job of buying the ticket. I’ll do my job of releasing the Emergency Quota.”
Going to the station next evening in a relaxed frame of mind, the nephew was shocked to find out that his name did not figure in the passenger list. Hurt and upset, he ran to his uncle for an explanation. Mahadevan’s response was typical of the man: “The EQ is for an emergency. If you really had one, wouldn’t you have sacrificed comfort and got into an unreserved compartment instead of postponing your trip and coming to me to register your protest? Wouldn’t you have travelled on the roof of the train?”
V Ramnarayan
vramnarayan@gmail.com
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