TM Krishna, the disruptive woke, anti-caste activist musician, known to many as TMK, has been in the eye of the Sangita Kalanidhi award controversy since his selection for the award in March 2024. The row has received unprecedented media coverage because it resonates in the multiple social, cultural, legal, aesthetic, and political registers of the nation. In August 2024, V. Shrinivasan, grandson of the legendary musician MS Subbulakshmi (1916- 2004), moved the Madras High Court to restrain the Academy from conferring the mirror Sangita Kalanidhi MS Subbulakshmi award on TMK. Shrinivasan contended that because TMK ‘slandered’ MS’s national image and reputation, it is improper that he receives the mirror MS Subbulakshmi award instituted in her name.
The row could have been settled with a contrite and graceful apology from TMK. Since this did not happen, Shrinivasan was compelled to escalate the matter to the attention of the Madras High Court and then to the Supreme Court of India. On December 16, a Division Bench of the SC heard the case and passed an interim order stripping TMK of the mirror Sangita Kalanidhi MS Subbulakshmi Award, which had been conferred on him on December 15, stating that this status-quo will remain until the petition is heard fully and orders passed.
Instead of allowing the legal process to take its course, TMK attempted mischievously to shift public opinion by claiming victimhood theatrically and did this spectacularly in the regal Kalanidhi concert that was held at the Madras Music Academy on December 25, 2024. In this houseful concert, TMK decided to sing the ‘sudhandiram vendum’ freedom song, composed by well-known writer Perumal Murgan, which extolled the constitutional right of citizens to speak their mind, fearlessly.
By singing this freedom song impassionedly and in ‘full-throated ease,’ TMK staged himself theatrically as a victim of bullying and harassment by a conservative right wing Carnatic music cabal. This ecosystem was invoked metaphorically in the figure of V. Shrinivasan, and his team of lawyers, allegedly denying TMK his fundamental right to speak freely about MS and her legacy. TMK fans loved TMK’s victimhood performance and cheered him on as their woke hero without realizing that their shining knight was woke-washing and wokefying the Kalanidhi controversy with his freedom song. What happened at the Academy on Christmas Day was historic, it was more than what we might describe as ‘performative wokeism’ and can only be understood within the geopolitical framework of global wokeism and social activism gone awry.
What Are the Facts?
Let us step back from the victimhood drama and dwell on the facts. TMK is not a victim, never was and never can be. He is the undisputed cult star of Carnatic music, who alone of his race, can sit regally in his lungi-dhoti and sing Carnatic music on the august platform of the Music Academy. Let it be known that TMK was never disallowed by the alleged right wing Carnatic cabal from speaking his mind whether it be about MS legacy or the musical heritage of Thyagaraja. The Kalanidhi row itself, in my view, is not about the Hindu political Right opposing the progressive Left. It is solely about TMK’s political misuse and misrepresentation of MS’s iconic Bharat Ratna legacy along caste lines.
TMK embarked on what I describe as his modernizing ‘Wake-Up’ Carnatic music initiative by appropriating US woke social justice ideologies and deployed these to reconfigure MS’s national biography and legacy within the demonising framework of Brahmanical patriarchy and caste victimization. After fixing MS in the patriarchal frame, TMK declared that MS is not just the global face and voice of Carnatic music, but also a victim of Brahmanical patriarchy and casteism. TMK then staged himself as an awakened, politically aware anti-caste activist musician, imbued with social justice zeal, to give voice and agency to India’s oppressed and disempowered minorities, including MS.
TMK initiated his ‘MS Understood’ revisionary project strategically in the year of her Birth Centenary Celebrations, which was celebrated worldwide and expressed his radical views in the Caravan (2015) and Wire (2016) publications respectively. The revisionary project was problematic because it distorted and politicised both the biography of MS and the multigenerational national histories of Carnatic music within the pejorative framework of Brahmanical patriarchy, caste, and identity politics.
What did TMK Do, How and Why?
To dismantle MS’s national legacy, TMK opens his Caravan essay with a statement issued from the mouth of an anonymous musician alleging wantonly that MS is the ‘greatest hoax of the twentieth century.’ TMK refutes the ‘hoax’ allegation by cunningly providing detailed information to confirm it and disseminates the fully substantialized thesis widely in social media portals! This is vintage woke culture ideology, which is really a battle of words, operating in the register of language games, metaphor, exaggeration, sophistry and double-speak.
To politicise MS’s national legacy, TMK invoked the long-forgotten Macaulayan Brahmin/devadasi history and fixed T. Sadasivam in the role of the Brahmin-oppressor-husband victimizing MS as a caste-oppressed hereditary devadasi wife/artist. TMK elaborated on his oppressor/oppressed narrative by alleging that Sadasivam did not just stage-manage MS’s career, but violently erased the non-Brahmin devadasi talent in MS, creating in its place the Brahminized MS and presented this ‘domesticated’ image as the global face and voice of Carnatic music. TMK explained that MS enabled this transformation by distancing herself from her non-Brahmin devadasi roots and Brahminized herself to become an ideal Brahmin wife to Sadasivam. Shrinivasan refuted the Brahminisation and victimhood narratives in his SC petition, casting these as fanciful fabrications articulated in the ideological register of conspiracy theories, hearsay and gossip.
To racialise MS’s profile, TMK described MS as a ‘saintly Barbie Doll,’ mummified by the evil machinations of Brahmanical patriarchy. This metaphor cannot be dismissed as playful rhetoric because TMK deployed it cunningly to challenge the saintly heritage of Thygaraja, which MS embodied eloquently, and to recast her biography within the racial framework of casteism and colourism. Furthermore, TMK used this colourful metaphor to craft a neo-Marxist, anti-caste social history for Carnatic music that is rooted in Periyar’s Dravidianism, rationalism, colorism and caste discrimination.
TMK’s modern social history, layered over the cultural history of Carnatic music, is explicated in his award-winning Southern Music (2013), Sebastian and Sons (2020) and numerous other publications. These books are used as standard history texts in academic Departments at JNU, Ashoka, Hyderabad and in universities globally. TMK created his anti-caste Social Science and Humanities pedagogies for Carnatic music by politicizing, victimising, and racialising MS’s national biography and legacy along caste lines.
TMK similarly revised MS’s global legacy, encapsulated in her historic UN concert held in New York in 1966, and recast this within the geopolitical framework of US anti-caste woke culture and identity politics ideologies. This revision is significant because MS was not only the first Indian musician to perform at the UN, but Carnatic musicians travelled to the US and UK in the multigenerational migratory trajectories that MS enunciated in the 1960s!
How Did the Carnatic Music World Respond?
The Carnatic music community was mortified to read TMK’s radical views on MS and perceived his zeal for social change and activism with a mixture of fear, bemusement, wonder and dismay. While a small group of critics challenged TMK’s misrepresentation of MS and Thyagaraja legacies in 2016, musicians ignored his provocative disruptions, indulged him in the name of freedom of speech and solely because he is a talented musician.
Ten years passed like this, and suddenly a new tremor was heard in the ground of Carnatic music after the announcement of the Kalanidhi award in March 2024. Eminent musicians Ranjani and Gayatri, Palghat Ramprasad, Dushyant Shridhar, Vishaka Hari, Trichur Brothers, Arjun Kumar and Chitravina Ravikiran objected to the conferment of the Kalanidhi award on TMK. They protested on the ground that TMK had falsely politicized Carnatic music community along caste divides. Their dissent is noteworthy because the music fraternity typically shuns conflict and avoids public confrontation. I too aired my views on the Kalanidhi matter in a U-Tube interview in March, and a global solidarity statement, signed by over 40 influential academics, was circulated to silence my dissent.
In August, Shrinivasan stepped into the discursive minefield, named himself as a family member and spoke bravely to reclaim his grandmother’s name from the altar of what he described as TMK’s ‘cheap politics.’ As explained, he filed the historic SC petition in the auspicious month of Margazhi 2024 and created history.
The august body of the SC will now decide whether TMK slandered the Bharat Ratna and Thyagaraja legacies that MS embodied for eight generations and bequeathed to the safekeeping of her family and the nation after her demise in 2004. Did TMK recognize his democratic duty to treat with respect the sentiments of Shrinivasan and MS family members when he took pen in hand and wrote freely about MS’s Bharat Ratna legacy in his now infamous Caravan essay in 2015? How should national legacies be safeguarded in the age of digital social media political activism and wokeism? The Honourable SC will debate these questions raised for the first time and on a scale unimagined in the history of Indian performing arts.
The SC’s verdict, whatever it be, will reverberate loudly on the national and global stage, inclusively.
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