One Name That Evokes An Evening Raga

If Sandhyavandanam means invoking the late-evening twilight hour as per Hindu rituals, then Bismillah Khan used to perform it in his own way with the musical pipe. As the sun would descend beyond the Ganga in his native Varanasi, the shehnai icon would play the humble double-reed instrument. A classical raga or a folk tune will emerge from it—and the notes waft in tandem with the famed arati on the banks of the broad river that lines the pilgrim city in the northern Indian plains.

The ustad died on a Monday when monsoon clouds lingered up the sky eleven years ago. The date of the 2006 loss was August 21, which, coincidentally, is the birth anniversary of a famed classical vocalist from down south of the country. His name: Sandhyavandanam Srinivasa Rao. Now, 2017-18 is being observed as the centenary year of Rao, who was a native of what is today Andhra Pradesh.

Now, 2017-18 is being observed as the centenary year of Rao, who was a native of what is today Andhra Pradesh.

Rao, known for his orthodox Carnatic style with short and effortless forays to the top register, sang for a good six-and- a-half decades. That is, almost till his death in early 1994 at the age of 76. It’s the saga of a vocalist who spread the charm of classical music across the country with his largely reposeful concerts, more specifically across the Deccan. Groomed and famed in Andhra (which also includes the present-day Telangana) as a native of a town off Anantapur, Rao’s ancestors were from near south Karnataka’s Mysore. To be precise, Srirangapatna.

The musician’s native Penukonda is an amazing centre of vintage temples. It features no less than 365 shrines built during the 1336-1646 rule of the Vijayanagara emperors, for whom Penukonda was the second capital. As if symbolising the medieval culture of that vast swathe of kingdom, Rao could fluently speak Kannada and Tamil, too, besides Telugu, points out music buff Padmanabha Rao, a relative. “He always sported angara and akshate on his forehead,”
Padmanabha recalls, pointing out to the two-coloured variety tilak typical of the Madhva Brahmins who follow the Dvaita school of the Vedanta philosophy.

Srinivasa Rao, who rendered music with a largely open-throated voice faintly bordering on the nasal, was an employee in All India Radio—a two-decade tenure (from 1944) that was followed by a service of another 20 years as the principal of Central College of Carnatic Music in Chennai and the College for Teachers of Music under the prestigious Madras Music
Academy. After retirement, Rao worked as an emeritus producer of AIR and went on to be conferred with the Sangeet

After retirement, Rao worked as an emeritus producer of AIR and went on to be conferred with the Sangeet Natak Akademi award. He was also the Asthana Vidwan of Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanam for a while.

Old-timers recall with pleasure Rao’s stints in AIR at Madras (1944-47) and Vijayawada (1954-64). Points out his son and disciple S. Madva Muni Rao: “The introduction of the Bhakthi Ranjani programme became a trailblazer.” It gave the radio

It gave the radio listeners to enjoy the compositions of trinity (Thyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Shastri) played in the much-popular Vadya Vrinda programme. Equally reputed were his music for operas such as Nowka Charitram and Prahlada Bhathi Vijayam, besides features such as Raga Darshana and Sangita Shikshna (music teaching) sessions.

If scholarly Rao’s initial gurus are very widely celebrated in the annals of Carnatic music, so were his disciples too. Young Srinivasa was initially trained under the comparatively lesser-known Pakka Hanumanthachar, Tirupati Rangachar and Chilamthur Ramaiah. His latter-period masters were Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, Tiger Varadachariar, Mysore
Vasudevachariar, Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu and Tanjore Ponnnaiah Pillai. As part of specialising in Dikshithar compositions, he became a disciple of T.L. Venkatarama Iyer, while for Syama Sastri kritis his master was C.S. Iyer. Rao was also a Kshetrayya padam expert, having learned from T. Vijayakrishnan, a grandson of Veena Dhanammal (whose
150th birth anniversary is currently on).

Madhava Muni comes up with a long list of his father’s disciples. The Rao pupils list is truly impressive: Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, M.S. Subbulakshmi, M.L. Vasanthakumari, M. Balamuralikrishna, S. Ramanthan, Radha-Jayalakshmi, Thrissur V. Ramachandran, R. Vedavalli, Sugandha Kalamegam and flautists Prapancham Sitaram and S. Shashank, besides Poonapragna Rao and Arundhati Circar. The son also quotes certain
encomiums from Rao’s contemporaries, who praised the master thus: “His repertoire was quite big, he was equally at home in the theory as well as practice of music and that one could “easily gauge great passion” in his music.

New-age vocalist T.M. Krishna notes that Srinivasa Rao was one of those yesteryear musicians who spent hours listening
to music. Padmanabha Rao fondly recalls Sandhyavandanam presenting a bouquet in the evening raga Pantuvarali
(Poorvi in the Hindustani system), lasting “for more than two hours”.

Students of Carnatic music continue to hold in high esteem the music of Srinivasa Rao, known for its neat gamaka oscillations and restrained bhriga modulations. Up along the Gangetic plains, Varanasi’s own Bismillah Khan’s rendition of a dhun in Poorvi keeps enthralling music lovers with a rally of plain notes.