After Geneva, contemplating India’s impact, he wrote with realism to Nehru, “The influences we have exercised in the last four or five years have not been of a conventional quality and have not been amenable to formal methods. We have not the power to shift equilibriums, except by the wise and timely use of influence and the power of idea and personality and, as will become increasingly evident, by the internal strength of the country in every respect … All else necessarily flows from it.”
Although other letters from the mid-1950s reveal a man in wrenching mental pain (“far from being a help to you or relieving you of burdens I am an embarrassment and add to your worries”), this period was the summit of his and Nehru’s international success, a moment when India’s standing as an international actor was acknowledged even by those who did not approve of its choices. But that achievement was soon followed by serious missteps.
In 1956, Khrushchev ordered the Soviet invasion of Hungary; Menon abstained from a UN resolution condemning the Russians and voted against a motion for free Hungarian elections. He may have feared that India would be subjected to a similar UN vote on Kashmir (see 43, Sheikh Abdullah), where Nehru was temporizing on a promised plebiscite. The Indian government’s failure to live up to its vaunted policy of nonalignment was noted around the world, and cost it the moral high ground.
A still greater error resulted after Nehru, wanting to ensure civilian authority over the army (neighboring Pakistan was about to fall into the hands of its generals), sent the frail, resolutely civilian Menon from the United Nations to the Ministry of Defence. The appointment angered the top brass, while Menon, for his part, was appalled by the military’s disarray. In an urgent private note to Nehru in 1961, he wrote, “Although I have explained it to you several times it appears little understood that in an emergency we can meet Defence’s requirements, even conservatively, only if the apparatus of Defence Production is capable of expansion ten times over.” The following year, Mao Zedong surprised India by starting a war to assert Chinese control over borders claimed by India in remote Himalayan regions and the northeast. Indian defenses crumpled like tinfoil, and Menon was held responsible for the loss.
The short war cost the lives of fourteen hundred Indian soldiers, making it, by the twentieth century’s standards, a glorified skirmish. The country’s failure to predict the war seems less egregious in a wider context: all over the world, thousands of diplomats since have misread China’s intentions and underestimated its willingness to play hardball. But the defeat succeeded both in asserting China’s superiority over India and in disengaging India from Asia for the better part of four decades—outcomes that benefited the Chinese as they developed into one of the world’s greatest powers. It also ruined Menon’s political career. As so often in popular judgments of historical figures, the bad end vaporized the good that preceded it.
* * *
A large part of what drove Menon’s and Nehru’s midcentury diplomatic initiatives was their wariness over China. India, they held, had to use diplomatic means to restrict China from extending its sway over Asia’s weaker states, and to get it to respect the identities of the small countries that were emerging from the end of European colonialism in Asia. Yet the 1962 defeat cast a heavy shadow over Nehru’s foreign policy, and nonalignment came to be seen in many foreign policy circles as a naïve failure.
That negative assessment has been widely accepted by critics of Nehru and Menon abroad, and also in India, which is drawing increasingly close to the United States. So I was struck recently to come across an unexpected admirer of nonalignment: Henry Kissinger. For decades one of the strongest opponents of India’s foreign policy choices, he’s come to see India’s position less partially. “However irritating to Cold War America,” he wrote in 2014, “it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent it could exercise a much wider-reaching influence.” Perhaps Menon’s reputation may be ready for a similar recovery.
45
SUBBULAKSHMI
Opening Rosebuds
1916–2004
In the summer of 1838, a small troupe of dancers, of a “bright copper colour,” captivated audiences across Europe. In Paris, they danced in the Tuileries before the court of King Louis Philippe. “Their dances,” the Journal des débats wrote, “are like nothing we have seen or that can be imagined.”
They dance with their whole frame. Their heads dance, their arms dance—their eyes, above all, obey the movement and fury of the dance. Their feet click against the floor—the arms and hands flash in the air—the eyes sparkle—the bosom heaves—their mouths mutter—the whole body quivers … It is a mixture of modesty and abandonment—of gentleness and fury.
They were devadasis, “servants of god”—temple dancers from South India. It was a brief, anticipatory moment of Indian cultural branding, but European interest in the “Orientals” soon moved on. Back in India, the dancers returned to their unglamorous lives. It would be a century before the daughter of another devadasi mesmerized audiences around the world.
Her gift lay not in rhythmic athleticism, but in her voice. In 1926, at the age of ten, she had begun her career before an audience outside a bicycle shop in the Tamil town of Madurai. That same year, a gramophone company recorded her singing a devotional song, in the Carnatic style of the Indian South. After she finished, she cleared her throat and declared, “I am Madurai Subbulakshmi.”
Listening to her early recordings, the Carnatic musician and critic T. M. Krishna hears gay abandon, a flair for embellishment and nuanced phrasing, and a complete lack of diffidence, which he puts down to her upbringing in the devadasi world—a harsh world where an aura of self-possession was necessary to the work. Her singing voice, striking from the start, would ultimately range three octaves, one more than Carnatic singers usually need. As she grew into it, she excised the hand and body gestures often associated with South Indian vocal performance. “The language of her eyes accomplished for Subbulakshmi what flying arms did for another singer,” wrote the biographer T.J.S. George. A perfectionist, she had the capacity to cross genres, but reduced her performances over the years to what another connoisseur of her music has called a “provokingly small” repertoire. In time, the ambitions of those who loved and profited from her combined with her gift to take her from the concert stage to film to All India Radio to near-official status as an icon of independent India.
It is a moment now past: a moment in which it was possible to believe in an Indian “national culture” and in singers and artists who could embody it. But what was required of Subbulakshmi, in moving from South Indian musical celebrity to national cultural symbol, is deeply uncomfortable when considered through the prism of contemporary values. For she publicly styled herself as a submissive, asserting her dependence on others and often acting as if her music, too, were visited upon her—as if her greatness were quite apart from her own doing. Yet, beneath the placid surface of an icon, there was striving and decisiveness. Even in a patriarchal society, an artistic woman’s volition counted for something, and in many cases allowed her to perfect her art. One clear choice Subbulakshmi made was to distance her skill from the striking South Indian tradition that shaped it. The art of the devadasi would be valuable, but the devadasi herself was not.
* * *
Creating and sustaining an immaculate public image is relentless work, and around Subbulakshmi, one frustrated biographer wrote, was a fortress. It was strange, even by the paternalistic standards of mid-twentieth-century India, how often her husband and manager, Kalki Sadasivam, fielded media questions on her behalf. He lectured the questioners: “If you ask a rosebud how it opens into a flower, can it answer?”
That she said so very little, and certainly nothing controversial, made me assume, seeing her on television or in the occasional concert growing up, that there was little in the famous singer’s head. It was only later, v
ia candid shots of her while off duty, that I made out the mischief and intelligence behind the somewhat bovine mask. In one of my favorite photos, she and her friend, the dancer Balasaraswati, are probably in their late teens. Decked out in striped pajamas, they’re raffishly feigning to smoke cigarettes—a pleasure strictly forbidden to young South Indian women. Instead of the soulful gaze that was her professional trademark, Subbulakshmi’s eyes are alive with fun—girlish fun: a quality that might have been tough to preserve in her actual girlhood, during which her talent was turned like a machine.
M. S. Subbulakshmi, or “MS,” as her admirers called her, was born in 1916 in Madurai, far south and inland on the Indian peninsula. Her brother, her younger sister, and she grew up in a small house not far from Madurai’s famed temple to the goddess Meenakshi, around which ran streets humming with the town’s economic and cultural life. The temple drew thousands of visitors every day, and annual festivals brought more than a million to the town: crowds to be entertained, for music was integral to the worship.
So while her brother got formal schooling, MS and her younger sister were taught music and performance. That was the tradition of the devadasis, and it upped the odds that a woman would have a roof over her head. Subbulakshmi’s great-grandmother was a dancer whose moment of regional celebrity came when she performed in the presence of the viceroy, in 1886. Her grandmother played the violin (an instrument adopted early into Carnatic music), and her mother, Shanmugavadivu, played the traditional South Indian string instrument, the veena.
In this family of professional artists, there was a glaring absence: fathers. For in addition to being the custodians of local arts, devadasis were sacred concubines. Officially “wed” to deities of the temples they served, they took patrons, often high-caste Brahmins or members of the landed class who were married to women of their own castes. When children were born from these alliances, they belonged to the mothers. Daughters, in due course, would be “dedicated” to the temple devadasi tradition.
In Subbulakshmi’s house, a separate stairway led directly from the street to her mother’s parlor, for the discretion of her mother’s patrons. Subbulakshmi’s published biographies would identify her father as a Brahmin lawyer, though Madurai gossips fingered a local musician as the likely candidate. Whoever he was, the money that patrons gave the household appears to have been limited. Shanmugavadivu continued to earn income through her veena performances, and by introducing her daughters to the stage as soon as they were able.
Subbulakshmi’s abilities were evident early on. Although she’d grown up in a house full of music, she wasn’t adept on the veena, despite her mother’s best efforts. However, from a young age she could listen to a song on the gramophone and effortlessly imitate it. Her mother, seeing the potential, exposed the girl to still more concerts, and to tutors. After the ten-year-old released her first record, her mother took her out of Madurai to perform elsewhere in the region, including at the Tamil royal court of Ramanathapuram.
In keeping with tradition, Shanmugavadivu was also seeking to match her girls to wealthy patrons, and a scion of Ramanathapuram’s ruling dynasty was taken with Subbulakshmi. When her mother tried to settle her with him, however, the girl resisted. It couldn’t have been easy to buck a multigenerational expectation. Yet as a celebrated southern music critic underlined after meeting MS when she was thirteen, she was “not a fragile child but a strong silent girl”—one with “the will of a woman of forty.”
Her sister, less skilled and perhaps less willful, would soon be attached to a Coimbatore-based millionaire. But she died at the age of twenty-two. “If I had stayed in Madurai I would have died long ago,” Subbulakshmi later wrote in a private letter. Publicly, she spoke only elliptically of the adult life she had averted. “When I was small, men would only think of how to spoil me.” She recalled “seeing it all and getting frightened by it.” She wanted to focus only on her music.
Her big break came in 1932, when she was sixteen. The renowned temple at Kumbakonam, near Madras, hosted a great festival once every twelve years. A singer meant to perform there fell ill, and a determined Shanmugavadivu persuaded the organizers to give her daughter the slot. She performed to such an ecstatic reaction that she was asked to sing again, for a larger audience, the next day. It was the beginning of MS’s rise to Tamil stardom—and the beginning of the end of her relationship with her mother and the tradition into which she had been born.
* * *
In earlier centuries, devadasis were so esteemed that some kings dedicated their daughters to temples. But in colonial India, this was one of many indigenous traditions held up to a different light. The vision of a Sanskritic golden age, inspired by the work of William Jones (21) and other Orientalists, and the cultural revivalism associated with movements such as Theosophy (see 29, Annie Besant), produced changes in the lived and performed arts. So, too, did the arrival of technologies such as the gramophone and, by the mid-1930s, the radio. By the time of Subbulakshmi’s birth, the place of music among elite circles had changed.
The aim was to create a more controlled, less improvised structure of performance with good moral tone. A tradition of performing for private and usually male audiences in cloistered spaces, for long hours reaching into the dawn, gave way to the evening concert, with specified timings and access by ticket. The devadasi tradition, with its intimate etiquette of connoisseurship, went from being a subject of admiration to an object of shame. By the turn of the twentieth century, a female member of the Madras legislature could remark: “the appellation of the devadasi as every one of us here knows, whatever the original meaning may have been, stands for prostitute.” Local temple bans were soon followed by stricter laws, supposed both to protect the devadasis and to regulate licentiousness. Their art, tamed, was appropriated by male singers, including great masters whose music Subbulakshmi studied as she developed.
By the time Subbulakshmi started singing in the mid-1920s, the maharani of the neighboring princely state of Travancore officially “abolished” the devadasi system in her domains, after which the census report noted that the district had no more prostitutes, the recent abolition having “contributed to this happy circumstance.” In such a climate, Subbulakshmi had to proceed with care. An association with prostitution would repel the audiences her singing was drawing in. She and her mother had set up household in Madras as she continued to expand her fan base, and in 1936 she received a request for an interview from a popular feature magazine. The interviewer was the magazine’s cofounder, Sadasivam.
A Brahmin born in Madras, Sadasivam had been an anti-British radical in his youth, and was jailed for it. For a while he was a follower of Subramania Sivam, the revolutionary comrade-in-arms of Chidambaram Pillai (30). Now he became a disciple of the Tamilian Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari, agitating for independence as he ran the magazine. MS was nineteen. Sadasivam was thirty-three, hot-tempered, and decidedly married. His subsequent pursuit of her was so dogged that, before long, her panicked mother rushed MS home to Madurai and arranged a marriage to a businessman. But instead of going to the businessman’s house, where she was expected, MS fled back to Madras, and to Sadasivam, whose wife was away having their second child. It was the beginning of several years of vicious behind-the-scenes fights; meanwhile, Subbulakshmi kept singing serenely.
Her mother charged Sadasivam with using her famous daughter as a meal ticket. Sadasivam charged the mother with the same. As the two of them scuffled, rumors of elaborate schemes to kidnap MS and return her to Madurai enlivened Madras parties. Subbulakshmi compounded the drama by falling in love with another great Carnatic singer and actor, G. N. Balasubramaniam. There was no musician she admired more. Her biography includes excerpts of love letters she dispatched to him, chiding him, in erratic grammar, for his inattentions and proclaiming him the love of her life: “Henceforth even for a moment I will not be separated from you.” (The letters also confirmed her lack of trust in her mother and brother.)
Aro
und the same time, in 1940, Sadasivam’s wife died after a prolonged depression. Rumors of suicide persisted. And while it wasn’t quite funeral meats furnishing marriage tables, in a matter of months he quietly married Subbulakshmi.
Though her love for him was flagging, and if the immediate circumstances created a scandal, Sadasivam ultimately offered her more respectability than marriage to another entertainer could. Since the dance of the devadasi had become less seductive (turning into a Brahminically inflected style that now became the classical form, Bharatanatyam), and as Carnatic music became tame enough for upper-caste housewives to perform, it made marketing sense for Subbulakshmi to look like an upper-caste housewife. In Madras, away from the evidence of her heritage, Sadasivam had already been arranging what T.J.S. George, the biographer, called “an all-out putsch” to broaden her fame and link it with the interests of nationalism.
* * *
By the mid-1950s, when Jawaharlal Nehru described MS as “the queen of music,” her name had become synonymous with the Carnatic tradition. She commanded reverence even among those who knew only vaguely of classical music. Her spiritual image was as Sadasivam had constructed it: “She is a simple woman, and naive,” he told reporters. Her supposed innocence left her well situated for roles in religious or socially instructive films, which he had begun arranging for her almost immediately after she’d fled her mother.
As she played historical or mythological figures, or embodied progressive concerns such as the plight of dowryless young girls forced to marry old men, Subbulakshmi was ill at ease delivering her lines, even after much instruction. Yet the Tamil films were full of songs, and her musical talents transferred beautifully to the new medium—so much so that, after a few years, her success brought her husband into rare agreement with her mother: this film thing was something for her to get out of.
Incarnations Page 42
