BRIDGING SOCIAL DIVIDES THROUGH

THE HEALING POWER OF MUSIC AND

THE ARTS
By Thodur Madabusi Krishna
2016 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee
for Emergent Leadership
Presented at the 58th Ramon Magsaysay Awards Lecture Series
30 August 2016, Manila, Philippines

May I have your permission, friends, to begin with some thoughts about
a process all of us know, all of value. The process that is called healing.
The etymology of 'heal' goes back not to Latin or German but to Old
English and Old German, in which heilan means to cure, save, make
whole. But the meaning of the Tamil the language that we speak in
the state of Tamilnadu in Southern India for 'heal', is the lovely Aaru
which means to close a wound, join the tissues.
It suggests an easing of pain, a converting of injuries that blame, to scars
that understand. It indicates not a forgetting but beginning anew, with
the wisdom of feeling behind it. Healing is not a retrieval of innocence
but a bearing of experience without rancour, without ego even.
Something healed is not something re-born but something re-aware.
Healing is not surgery, certainly not plastic surgery, nor a transplant. It is
a cure wrought by knowledge, honed by experience, with sadness as part
of it, as also forgiveness.

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Keeping this in mind we have to ask ourselves whether the arts really
heal. Do they bring people together, help in the bridging of differences?
Do they address the iniquities and inequalities in our living? These are
difficult questions because we will all vouch for the fact that music, for
instance, gives us the wings to fly in abandon, to soar, and to get so
completely suffused by the limitlessness of flight as to feel in every note
the whole universe: animals, trees, human beings all becoming
extensions of the music in which the musician dwells.
But that intense equality is transient and very soon we glide back to our
ways, our divided and divisive ways. Therefore we have to explore this
with greater depth and only then can we hold on to the true-ness in art;
that which heals.
Healing begins with the recognition of the wounds that we in every
artistic community inflict upon others. I am saying this to those who I
may be speaking with, but essentially I say this to myself, as a musician
to the musician in me.
What does it mean to be an artist musician? Our creative spirit, we
believe, provides happiness, joy, even relief from the challenges that life
throws at us. Sometimes art is even a cathartic experience. But beyond
an evening of pleasure, a few hours of rejoicing, does art have any role
in society? And let me further problematize these thoughts. Do the
powerful and dominant consider or treat all art forms with equality? Just
as we have divided people based on their colour, creed, caste and
gender, the arts too are segregated into dualities, where one holds the
upper hand while the other seeks legitimacy; classical/folk, urban/rural,
mainstream/subaltern, sophisticated or the so-called crude. None of
these are purely artistic observations; they are in fact based on the
hierarchies inherent in society. There are numerous such separations in

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all societies making me question the truth in every moment of bliss that
art gifts us. In this complex maze of inequalities where does the art,
artist and the idea of beauty exist?
I am going to stop right here and reflect upon my own journey as a
musician. It is essential I scrutinize my thoughts and actions and place
before you the nuances of this self-enquiry that has led me to where I am
today. I will be presenting my experience in a linear form but I must tell
you right at the beginning that many of these overlapped and changed
me due to their confluence.
Karnatik music, the classical arts belong to the elite Brahmin
community.
I come from the city of Chennai in South India that has acquired the
status of being the performing arts capital of our country. A city that has
been the mecca for Karnatik music one of Indias classical music
systems and over the years cultivated a discerning audience for the
classical arts be it music or dance. I was born into a patrician family
belonging to the Brahmin caste. Caste is (for those who are not aware of
this term) in Indian society a discriminative social hierarchy that
operates in all spheres, be it cultural, political or economic. It is a top
down model and hence every caste group mimics the behavior of the one
above it. Mine belongs to the top of the ladder the Brahmin and has
sought to control the religious and cultural notions of aesthetic India.
Naturally the classical arts, which are part of the elite narrative in all
societies, belong to us. All those who are part of the classical community
are either Brahmin or brahminised.
I learnt Karnatik music like many others in my community and with the
encouragement and recognition I received from musicians and
impresarios was soon one of the leading artists in my field occupying the

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top slot in all Karnatik festivals across the globe (this phrase was in fact
part of my resume for a very long time!). The audience loved what I
offered and I loved the adulation. But for some unknown reason I began
to ask some basic questions about the music that I treasured. What is this
music? Why am I singing? What is this beauty that we revel in? Where
does this come from? These questions lingered in the far reaches of my
mind. Around the same time a recording project required that I
reconstruct an unfamiliar, unknown composition from a treatise
published in 1904. A friend and I began this process and as we
proceeded interpreting the musical text as per the aesthetic sensibilities
of our times, and this is what all musicians in the Indian classical
tradition do. Since ours is an oral tradition, texts are seen as only as base
reference material. But I began wondering how the same composition
would sound if we rendered it exactly or to the closest possible extent as
notated by the author. Soon we began a project that attempted this
reconstruction. This was for me the first point of inflection. What came
out of this endeavor was an uncomfortable truth. I disliked, even found
unaesthetic the music that was archived in the treatise, which reflected
mid- 19th century Karnatik music. I wondered about accepted,
accustomed beauty. Is the aesthetic a culturally conditioned time bound
idea, or is there something to it that goes beyond my preferences? This
pushed me further into researching the history of Karnatik music.
What began as a purely musicological exercise soon turned sociopolitical. Every technical thread within the art also told us something
about the practitioners, theorists and audience that participated in in its
creation and sharing. A line of music was an aesthetic entity, one might
even call it an aesthoid that was designed by a certain group of
people to derive appreciation of that very same kind of people. Without
doubt then there is a homogeneity that was being cultivated within the
artistic tradition in fact every artistic tradition. Therefore all the
brilliance and diversity in Karnatik music was consciously and sub-

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consciously constructed within a homogenies culture rooted in socialartistic control. Musical research also revealed, information on
communities that have been sidelined or exiled from the Karnatik story.
Have we then lost aesthetic ideas because of this social movement?
A music class is considered a special private, insolated, sacrosanct space
where it is all about aesthoids, single or several, about melody and
rhythm, immersion into the units of the art; a place that the politics of
life does not infiltrate. But is this really true? When I receive, accept or
discard a musical idea, am I instinctive also passing judgment on those
who created the music? Is it then possible to imbibe and introspect on
what we learn, nurture and develop without this socio-political
judgment?
The outer face of a musical art form is the performance and its
presentation is naturally a result of what the community that owns the
art, holds close to its chest. Therefore in the performance plan, structure
and presentation format of Karnatik music was designed within a socioreligious stranglehold that limited the breath of the art. Was the aesthetic
intentionality of the music has been manipulated in order to satisfy
social and religious needs of the Brahmin and brahminized community ?
You will I am sure notice that this tradition art model is not very
different from what the market place does to all of us. Soon these
questions were embedded in my musical practice. Is there anything to
the music that lives beyond the engineering of its performance? If music
is about flight can putting it in a cage, howsoever invisible, help the
flight or restrain it? And that to me was not just a music question but
fundamentally a humanistic question is there anything to all of us that
goes beyond social conditioning? I was not aware at that point of time
that artistic questions were moving me to inquire about who I really was.
But I soon began to perceive, that on stage I was expected not to present
music, not offer it, not to say experience it; I was expected to perform

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it. Was that right? Was that right by me, as a person, as a musician? Was
it right by the music itself? . These questions about the music that I was
performing, the structure of the performance, the meaning of success
and applause (a performers aphrodisiac) began to transform me. For a
very long time I did not even notice these changes that were intrinsically
moving me to zones that I never knew existed. I began aesthetically
recreating the music and my changed practice was a musical, social and
political critique of the artist-performance-audience-success model,
which had been reiterating the nature and beliefs of just one community.
For a performing musician the audience is everything but I was making
my core audience extremely uncomfortable with my practice. I was
asking questions about faith, form, fear, ownership and the art
experience itself. They felt disconnected, slighted and many took
offence to my observations on the performances practices of past
masters. I was not to question their musical expertise, point to their
mannequinization? If my quest was intense, the resistance to it was
and remains immense, I was showered with many descriptive
adjectives, rebel without a cause, maverick, iconoclast, atheist, disrupter
and many others. And I will lying to myself if I do not confess that there
were times when I thought that in a few years my life as a front ranking,
popular musician will be all but over.
But what was I searching for? What was really driving me to push these
aesthetic boundaries?
Earlier in this lecture I spoke, in passing, about the moment of bliss in
art. Every one of us in this room must have experienced the infinite in
art, be it music, dance, theatre or cinema, when we dissolve into the
experience, all our ugliness vanishes and just for those few seconds or
minutes we experience a beauty that is transformative and truly
universal. This was what I wanted in every moment of the music, but

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realized that the scaffolding that had been constructed around it made it
that much harder for the artist to live within that possibility. Most of the
time we only dealt with the outer and it was only by accident that we
came in contact with the sound of music. I did not want accidents; I
wanted to always be within the music and in the process myself. And to
me the act of performance as prescribed by the artistic community
ensured that the art experience occurred only when we slipped and by
mistake fell into the unknown. Why? Because this was determined by
mechanisms human beings use to control society. And this was a sociopolitical necessity because further awareness of the fathomless would
spur questioning. I had therefore, for the arts sake disentangle the music
from these chains. And in this path there was of course the danger of me
finding that there was nothing more to the music than its societal
conditionality. Artistic experience told me otherwise and I
unconsciously embarked on this aesthetic counter action.
Hence through my performance of the music I began a self-critique, one
that addressed philosophical, religious and social issues that were
embedded in the way we taught, practiced, organized and celebrated
Karnatik music. Around the same time I began writing and speaking
about the need for a musical rediscovery, the need to investigate the real
role of religion in the art, pointing to the discrimination overt and
covert faced by women in the Karnatik arena and the struggles of
instrumentalists, as compared to vocalists who were and are still
considered only second class citizens of the Karnatik nation-state.
These were crucial questions and activist-musical interventions; an
unusual pairing of those two words. But to look back truthfully, I must
acknowledge that there was an ethical problem in the way I had situated
my art. I was still convinced of the superiority of the Karnatik and the
classical. All my activism was only directed at the people within the
fold. What was implied in my commentary was the first right of people

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like me. Other art forms were beautiful, exotic but there was no question
of equating them to my own complete art form. There was without doubt
condescension as far as other arts were concerned. I wanted Karnatik
music to be shared with a wider section of people but in my terms and
only because I felt that others needed to be artistically uplifted. This is
not just about art, underlying in this attitude was what I the privileged
felt about the rest of society.
Also, my reflections were mostly about traditional wrongs, in other
words, the legacy of the past, not the present. And there was something
missing: there was no proactive action on my part. Feeling sorry and
being critical of the past is one thing, but being honest enough to say that
we are still the same and I am as much part of this problem is completely
another.
Around the same time that I was re-examining the idea of the Karnatik,
an esteemed colleague and I initiated an arts festival called Svanubhava
that provided a stage for diverse art forms. We hoped to create a
community among students and young enthusiasts of the performing arts
questioning all barriers of schools and tradition. This festival aimed at
creating a level playing performance platform where equality and mutual
respect could be nurtured. Svanubhava not only changed the perception
of the attendees, it was also a learning experience for the classicist in
me. Most of us are good people! Arent we? We do things with the best
of intentions but it takes a while before we are honest enough to notice
the unchanged, hardened inside, sometimes a sudden jolt is needed.
Kattai-kootu, is a music-dance and dialogue based street theatre tradition
from Tamilnadu, India. We had invited one of its most proficient and
senior artists, Mr. Rajagopalan to perform along with his troupe. The
performance lasted about an hour and a half and at the end of it I was
disinterested and felt that this was a highly repetitive and un-evolved

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theatrical form. When the students in the audience were allowed to ask
questions Mr. Rajagopalan mentioned in an answer that there were in
that form alone about 60 different types of foot movements. This
statement stunned me because in the course of the performance I had not
noticed any nuance in their footwork. This shook me up and I began to
wonder about my own sense of sophistication. Who here was the
evolved? I pride myself with classical sensitivity but here I was not just
found wanting, I was inadequate.
Did not my inability to identify even a few different movements in kootu
make me the illiterate?
This opened my eyes to many new artistic traditions, each with their
intentionality, form, structure and beauty. It was up to me to give myself
to them, and enrich myself. These experiences of witnessing and then
trying to understand unheard and unseen art forms performed by
wonderful artists made me aware of the discrimination that they face
from larger society and the media.
All this awakening changed the way I viewed my own form Karnatik
music - giving me greater clarity in understanding its process. The
ability to observe without memory was internalized and applying it to
Karnatik music allowed me to dive deeper into its inherent strengths.
Therefore the idea of the outer and the inner was vanishing and I
realized that action was needed both within the Karnatik world and in
the relationship the classical has with the outside. At the same time those
who venerate the classical need to be touched by those art forms that
they believe are low many practiced by the lower castes of India.
My actions were at best incremental and most of the times instinctive
rather than planned.

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But I believe they helped touch an important existential question: Why

do art forms need to be shared without barriers and limits? For the
reason that ours is a deeply wounded world, wounded in body and
wounded in mind. I do not if there is such a thing or not called a soul,
so I will not say wounded in its soul. And I know art, and music among
the arts, heals. Paradoxically, the arts can also deepen the wounds. And
that must not be allowed to happen We live in societies of multiple
cultures and every one of them to be experienced with freedom. Any
field is enriched when people of diverse cultures contribute to its whole.
In the year 2011 I was invited to travel to the Northern provinces of Sri
Lanka on a concert tour. Sri Lanka had been through a three decade long
civil war and I was the first musician performing in its most affected
provinces. It was billed as a tour to heal wounds and I too went there
convinced that I was offering solace, a form of panacea. By the end of
the weeklong travel which included concerts and some interactions with
students of Karnatik music and Bharatanatyam, I realized that I was the
one receiving lessons in living, art and culture from the people of the
region. Here were people celebrating these arts with great respect and
passion even in the darkest times without expecting anything from the
art itself.
The art was part of their identity and preserving it was as much about
their own preservation. I came from karnatik musics holding
community that in general respects the Sri Lankan Tamils for their love
of music but silently scorns on their musical acumen and understanding.
But here were the real touch bearers of the art.
This was a deeply humbling experience. It also changed my perception
of art and its role in life. Unfortunately culture and art are always
disassociated from conversations of economic and social upliftment.
There is this notion that we must first deal with peoples basic needs and

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then worry about their culture or art. This idea to me is entirely flawed.
We are first cultural beings and therefore the way we walk, talk,
converse, frolic, mourn and protest define us. Unless this is always part
of any economic or social program, we cannot help people or change
perceptions. It is a fact that even in villages of adverse poverty we find
the most beautiful art work. Art lives everywhere, irrespective of
economics and if we want to uplift people with respect and a sense of
equality we must by giving them artistic and cultural strength.
But this is not some top-down model for just the elite arts. It is a fact that
in society people and the culture they inhabit are differentiated in a
vertical social scale. How can we dislodge this offensive structure?
Realizing the complexities and unique aesthetics in every art form I
wanted to find a way to bring them all together in a fashion that
addresses this unevenness. By default such a platform would also bring
people from two ends of the social spectrum, those who do not even care
for the other or live in suspicion of each other to share in artistic
experience. Was this even possible?
Chennai my town, and home to the largest festival of Indian classical
music and Dance. We believe that the whole city joins in this artistic
revelry, but reality is something very different. The festival only caters
to the cultural elite of the city, where the powerful come together to
showcase what they believe is a representation of the culture that the city
holds within. It is a wonderful experience of course but nevertheless
does further strengthen the art and the people who belong to the
Karnatik and bharatanatyam cluster. The rest and their arts remains on
the rim, some deeply stigmatized by us, the main stream and some
vulgarized by their commodification on the silver screen.
It is from this position that I began thinking about an art festival that
explores spaces alien to my own privileged, elitist, classical world; one

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that questions my sense of artistic superiority and respectfully celebrates

the people and the art that inhabit these spaces. I took this idea to
Nityanand Jayaraman, a social activist. He saw in this a completely
different angle, an opportunity to highlight the hidden urban fishing
village of Urur Olcott Kuppam, invite Chennai to visit and enjoy the
village, and use that experience to challenge stereotypes about
fisherfolk. Soon, many others joined us with their own stories of why
this was important, all of us converging at the need for a socio-cultural
conversation. Thus was born in 2014 the Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha
where people from the two book ends of societies cultures sat together,
rubbing shoulders and in absorbing each others art felt a connection that
has rarely been enabled. Insecurities, suspicion and inhibitions
dissolved, at least for those few hours.
There are other challenges too. I have been asked many times whether I
have any music students learning directly from me from other
communities especially from the lowest ebb of social hierarchy. The
truth is I am yet to have such a student, but there are two on-going
projects that I do hope will trigger interest. A few years ago we began
supporting students belong to lower economic or social groups who are
pursuing the so-called classical arts. And recently we began a pilot
project of teaching Karnatik music in government schools in the city of
Chennai where many students from socially marginalized communities
enroll.
I must speak here of Kali, a young man from a little fishing village
Kovalam about 40 kms from the city of Chennai. He graduated in
Bharatanatyam from Indias premier dance school Kalakshetra and
recently performed at the prestigious Music Academy. This was a
momentous occasion no doubt, but watching Kali raised many questions
in my mind. Kalis physique itself was so unlike the upper caste men
who practice Bharatanatyam. Here was a muscled, strong man. Visually

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this was beautiful and distinctive. But we have to be so careful when we

celebrate a person from the outside makes a mark in the inner circle.
Introspection is called for. Am I happy because Kali has conquered an
art form that is too hard for his kind? And even more seriously, will Kali
have to become more like me and us in his cultural and religious outlook
to find acceptance here? I wondered whether Kali would be able to
remain a Dalit boy, culturally and in doing so be able to use
Bharatanatyam vocabulary to retell stories of his community, deities and
the sea? These will change the texture of the form and allow for
fascinating diversity. But will this happen without it becoming another
exotic experiment? Can the subaltern experiences become part of an
upper-class art and thereby challenge elitism itself? I really do not have
answers but I know I need to have conversations with Kali. I cannot
allow Kali to become a poster boy to prove my and our upper class/caste
magnanimity. In my book this is a form of violence. Things can change
only when the philosophy of the art changes and for this we need many
Kalis on and off stage. And let me say here that these are difficult
negotiations that we need to engage in with great care and with constant
self-awareness because our privilege lurks close by.
In our school project too I am uncomfortable with one fact. While
Karnatik music is thus introduced in public schools, why are art forms
associated with this lower section not being taught in upper-caste/class
schools? I do think that this inversion is imperative if we really want this
conversation to be equal and ethical.
Discrimination and marginalization in the arts and culture happens in
surreptitious, insidious ways making it very difficult to spot. Many times
in the name of artistic quality people of lower castes and women are
discriminated against. Even today I hear stories of students from other
communities who are either rejected by us or taught with great disinterest. These students are eager and request for special training, but

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they are not taken seriously. Musician Sangeetha Sivakumar and I are
looking at the possibility of mentoring such aspirant. I do hope others
from the music community will join in.
Similarly, as much as we tout the diversity in the arts that India has we
care very little for those who practice art forms that do not have any
aesthetic connection with the classical. They are treated as art forms that
have no intrinsic value. This just has to change. Support for the
preservation and dissemination of many of these arts forms is also
something we are looking at. We have also just initiated a project of
documenting the art traditions of rural and subaltern India beginning
with my state Tamilnadu.
I am of the firm belief that people change only when they are moved and
not when they understand. Therefore art is the pathway through we can
touch people, make them uncomfortable with their ideologies and hope
that through continued interactions become more respectful and
inclusive human beings. The word inclusive itself needs to be used with
great care. It is not about being benevolent. Inclusiveness is about being
open, welcoming, caring, an attitude that erases exclusivity.
Inclusiveness cannot be a one-way traffic or an appropriation; it implies
that we will bring into every artistic sphere those art forms that have
been shunned. Inclusiveness must not further strength the high-low
imbalance; it should through a period of time make it irrelevant.
Inclusiveness is not an agenda it is a resultant mutuality. And at that
stage the word itself dissolves into oblivion.
Therefore if we are to go back to the original premise that the arts and
music can bridge social divides. Can they? Yes, I have no doubt that
they can, but for that to really happen all the stake holders have to
rediscover art devoid of its and their social trappings. There has to be a
realization that every art is a shared treasure that no one really owns and

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therefore there is no giver and taker. Every one holds the arts together in
our palms as vulnerable human beings who are willing to surrender in
wonderment.

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