MS Forgotten - Femina

The nightingale languishes...

GROWING up as I did on the music spun by the Mangeshkar sisters, they were my muses and my gods, where music was concerned. One other voice was allowed to claim place on the pedestal... and this despite my lack of understanding of and appreciation for classical Carnatic music.

MY parents owned two 78-rpm records of M S Subbulakshmi singing for the film 'Meera', and though the accent was thickly South Indian, there was something in the quality of the voice that even my naïve ear could not deny. Before long, I had learnt all the four songs, with accent intact, and even today, can sing them verbatim.

GROWING up , I still would not bow to Carnatic music, but if it was MS singing, the ear would deign to listen and appreciate. It was thus, not surprising that I often ferreted away cassettes from my mother's collection of MS-rendered music and listened to them en route to work, converting co travellers to become worshippers at her shrine too. In many ways, listening to her made me feel proud of being a South Indian, of being Indian, of being a woman!

THE little I knew of her as a person, the snatches of conversation that I heard from my mother or aunts, who knew her as a family friend, made me respect her, as much as an individual as for her deep commitment to music.

IF my inspiration in my work came from women who had a deep sense of commitment and made of their art or job an offering, MS too must have, in my subconscious, been on that list.

THEN I read the rather frank and incisive biography on her life, and realised that my instinct about the singer had been right. Here was an artiste who shone like a star, her music signalling the way to generations of artistes and people like me. Her life, a 'sadhana' offered at the altar of her art. The accolades, the riches and the adulation had little effect on her. She was, I felt, a real-life Meera wedded in spirit to her song.

AND yet, today, this national treasure, ailing, old and incapable of continued music, languishes forgotten in her tiny flat, with few visitors, and little help besides that offered by a few who still care.

TRAGIC indeed, that our country, that makes such a noise about our rich culture and waves flags about preserving it at the least provocation, real or imagined, should let the very trustees and propagators of this culture languish in anonymity once they remove themselves from the blaze of publicity.

IT happens time and again , with artiste after artiste, and shows us our selfishness and total lack of fellow feeling.

I WRITE this, hoping that the powers that be who have forgotten, in their power hunting, to remember an MS in their midst should be nudged to remember.

I WRITE this so that well-wishers who wish to help can try to find a way without intrusion into her privacy and quiet.

I WRITE this to tell myself, that the next time I go South, I should make a pilgrimage with someone who knew her and can guide me into her presence, to see face to face, an icon, who I could probably never have dared to meet while at the height of her career. And who has been part of my life, though invisibly. And in that, I know I would have a sense of fulfilment.