Come September and one is tuned to remember the voice that carried Carnatic music from Edinburgh and New York to the United Nations in the 1960s.
With M.S. Subbulakshmi at the helm, India’s distinguished musical star, the world took notice of the genre.
“September 16 marks my mother’s 98th birth anniversary,” says her daughter Radha Viswanathan, a resident of Bangalore, who has three of MS’s tamburas.
Having accompanied her mother to all her concerts and recordings for nearly six decades, Radha points to all the tamburas at her home saying, “I feel my MS Amma when I play on all these tamburas. She has left them behind for my grand-daughter Aishwarya to carry the legacy forward.”
Apart from the bhakti bhava she was known for her passion for using the tambura. The instrument was considered a part of her persona. She used five of these instruments, each one for the varied tonal quality they offered. Her penchant for point-shruti-alignment had people at All India Radio singing praises about her perfect voice configuration in all her recordings. Talking about the tamburas of the MS family, Radha says, ‘Lakshmi’ and ‘Saraswati’ were the first two tamburas that Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer had personally named and gifted to MS in the 1940s.
She says it is a matter of pride that the tamburas were part of the concerts at the International Music Festival at Edinburgh in 1963, Carnegie Hall, New York; the UN General Assembly on UN Day in 1966; Royal Albert Hall, London in 1982; and the Festival of India in Moscow in 1987.
While the four-stringed Miraj tambura was used in some of MS’s Meera bhajans, the rare six-stringed one, gifted by dancer Bala Saraswati’s family, was used for the recording of ‘Vishnu Sahasranamam’.
“When my mother appreciated Bala Saraswati’s six-stringed tambura, her brother T. Sankaran got a replica made specially for MS,” recalls Radha, saying, the continuity, tonal purity and the options it offered enthused MS.
“It sure made its presence prominently felt in our recording that made history,” she says. No wonder Bade Ghulam Ali Khan said, “You are not Subbulakshmi, you are Suswaralakshmi!”
