18 The Glaring Genius

If you stumbled upon this post, reading this introduction might help

I once attended a concert of T R Mahalingam, the flute maestro. He was accompanied by T Rukmini on the violin and on the Mridanga was a young and upcoming artist. I never liked the fact that Mahalingam was referred to by music lovers as Mali because mali in Kannada means a gardener– not a great association for so great a genius, in my opinion. Classist perhaps, but there it is.

In those days, there were no chairs at the concerts. The whole floor of the hall would be covered by striped cotton carpets. One could sit cross-legged right in front of the stage just a metre away from the artist. Earlier you go to the venue closer, and more coveted, a place you could get. If you were a bit late, you wended your way through the already seated audience and plopped down in as small a place as you could manage to and all around you people would realign themselves to accommodate you, without too much complaint.

I remember this concert because Mahalingam played an elaborate swaraprastara in Kalyani (I think) and the tani avartana began. I remember that the mridangist was wearing a flashy silk kurta and a gold chain with a large pendant around his neck. He played an extensive tani with an elaborate muktaya and finished. Mahalingam had picked up his flute to continue to play at the muktaya and when it came, he put the flute down and glared at the poor mridangist, who visibly shrank. Mahalingam gestured to him to repeat the whole thing. And the poor fellow started all over again. This time too, Mahalingam was not satisfied. He gestured to him to do it again. I did not really understand what was happening. I asked an elderly gentleman who seemed to be knowledgeable, what was happening. He explained to me that the mridangist had missed one eighth of a beat or even one sixteenth of a beat of the tala and that Mahalingam had an internal metronome and hence was not satisfied. This time the mridangist was sweating but finished the muktaya to Mahalingam’s satisfaction. He nodded at the mridangist and picked up the line at the end of the next cycle of the tala. The elderly gentleman also told me that T Rukmini herself had an excellent sense of tala and was one of the few artists who felt confident enough to accompany Mahalingam, because of it.