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Section Synopsis (MAY 2007)
NEWS & NOTES
SIFAS Fest of music and dance
 In the multi-cultural mosaic of Singapore, Indian music blends in its diversity yet stands out as a distinct gem. Organisations like SIFAS (Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society), founded in 1949, champion the cause of Indian music and dance in Singapore, both as educator and organiser of performances. With over 19 full-time teachers and 1300 students, SIFAS is a leading trainer and concert presenter of Indian fine arts in Singapore.
With the objective of presenting to the Singaporean audience famous artists from India together with the best of local and regional talent, SIFAS launched an annual Festival in 2003. This has grown over the years and led by its success, subsequent editions have been scaled up to include more variety. In its fifth year, the Festival of Indian Classical Music and Dance 2007, held 3-18 February, was patronised by over 7000 art lovers. Besides the largely ethnic Indian community, several other Singaporean residents formed a part of the growing audience in addition to people from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
Festival 2007 featured the santoor maestro Shiv Kumar Sharma who was accompanied on the tabla by Zakir Hussain. The santoor/tabla "Samvaad" awed one and all. The Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong and his wife were the Guests-of-Honour at this inaugural concert held at the Esplanade. There was wide coverage in the English and Tamil Press. The Malaysian Press followed suit. The violin duet of Ganesh-Kumaresh captivated the audience with their 'Swarapravaha'. P. Unnikrishnan rendered sampradaya music, Anuradha Sriram and Sriram Parasuram (jugalbandi) sang Carnatic and Hindustani music. The Bharatanatyam concert by Priyadarsini Govind was like a dainty dessert after a luxurious banquet. All these five concerts were held at the Esplanade, Singapore, a world-class concert venue that brings out the best from all musicians and dancers.
The opening concert at the SIFAS Auditorium was the melodious flute of Azizul Islam of Bangladesh. The fare offered at this venue included two flute recitals, two veena concerts, one on the sitar, five violin concerts, three Hindustani vocal recitals, 13 Bharatanatyam concerts and 15 Carnatic vocal recitals! There were two violin duets, interestingly by two pairs of brothers, the younger pair promising to be as illustrious as the older ones. A whole Sunday was devoted to the "Rising Stars", all budding performers from Singapore, many of whom showed remarkable talent. Apart from the best of talent from Singapore, the festival at SIFAS auditorium also featured several artists from India, Thailand and Malaysia including Carnatic singers Gayathri Vekataraghavan, young M. Balamuralikrishna, Shruthi Jayashankar, Hindustani singer Sucheta Bhattacharya, young violinists Sean King and Anish King and dancer Bhavya Balasubramanian.
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COVER STORY
Kalamandalam Gopi Kathakali's evergreen hero turns seventy -K.K. GOPALAKRISHNAN
 Klamandalam Gopi, one of the greatest exponents of Kathakali and among the most sought after performers of our times, turns seventy on May 25, 2007.Kathakali is among the few Indian art forms popular all over the world. To some Westerners, India is the land of Kathakali. Yet the art form has earned little governmental recognition in its own country.
The first Padma Shri awarded to a Kathakali artist went to the late Vazhengada Kunju Nair (1908-1981) in 1969, followed by the late Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair (1914-1990) in 1970. It took more than three decades to honour another Kathakali exponent. When Keezhpadom Kumaran Nair received the Padma Shri in 2004, he was the sole surviving Kathakali practitioner to be so honoured. He was 88 and had retired from his artistic career.
This year, 82-year old Kathakali exponent Kalamandalam Ramankutty Nair is one of the recipients of Padma Bhushan, making him the first awardee of that title in the field of Kathakali. Kalamandalam Padmanabhan Nair, among the greatest master trainers of our times, did not receive due recognition. He passed away in April this year.
 Kalamandalam Gopi is another great yet to receive any such national honour. This, at a time when artists belonging to other fields are honoured even when they are hardly forty, and a few enter the national arts arena straightaway, armed with such honours and titles! The only national recognition to come this master performer's way is the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1987. This reflects the attitude of successive Kerala State Governments and MPs towards their traditional arts and in recommending deserving artists.
Kalamandalam Gopi, the evergreen hero of Kathakali, is the Number One Kathakali artist of today and the favourite performer of the hero characters that display satvika qualities, distinguished by the paccha (green) facial make-up (the Pandavas, Karna, Nala, and Rukmangada) that they put on.
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Vidya Shankar Veteran vainika and scholar -LAKSHMI DEVNATH
 After my recent lecture at the Academy, several people complimented me on the strength of my fingers and the ease with which I negotiated the strings. There is nothing surprising in this. I have been playing the veena for eighty of my eighty-eight years." Vidya Shankar hobbles across to her chair and slowly sits down, only to swiftly draw you into the recesses of her past- to the youthful years of the twentieth century. The ensuing return trek, efficiently steered by her agile memory is remarkably free from fumbles and stumbles.
The year was 1924. C.S. Ayyar, IA&AS, Acct. General of the GIP Railways, musician and musicologist, readied himself to perform the familiar ritual. It was his practice to initiate all his children into the field of education in their fifth year on Vijayadasami, a day traditionally earmarked for goddess Saraswati. It was the only festival in the long row of Hindu festivals that C.S. Ayyar celebrated. Vidya, his seventh child, was born on 28th December 1919. "Ta Pa Ma"- C.S. Ayyar, sitting in the pooja room,guided the index finger of his five-year old daughter to shape these letters of the Tamil alphabet on a layer of paddy spread on a wooden plank.
The break from practice was only in the choice of letters. In this, C.S. Ayyar was guided by family conventions. His father, Chandrasekhara Iyer, an educationist of repute, had rationalised that children would find it easier to outline geometric lines rather than curves, a logic that also influenced Daniel, the author of the popular Tamil primers of the time. The ceremonial initiation successfully completed, C.S. Ayyar lifted the child off his lap and got up. From now on, as with all their children, C.S. Ayyar and his wife Sitalakshmi would teach Vidya at Chandravilas, their home, till she was ten. After that she would be enrolled in school in the First Form (equivalent to Standard VI of today).
Sitalakshmi was a great lady, a self-made woman in the best sense of the term. In straight contrast to the family of intellectuals that she hailed from (brother Rajasamy was a judge; another was a Tamil scholar and so on), Sitalakshmi had meagre academic qualifications; her formal education having been arrested in the First Form. The scholastic and artistic thirst of her husband was probably infectious and inspirational because post-marriage Sitalakshmi learnt enough English to translate Ibsen's A Doll's House into Tamil and this was prescribed as a textbook for high schools. She wrote prolifically in Tamil magazines. Her articles were socially relevant and thought-provoking. Matters concerning the welfare of women were her pet topics and powerful words from her pen condemned the dowry system, counselled women on the benefits of breast-feeding, and offered suggestions on the upbringing of children. She also taught herself the veena.
There was nothing casual about the Ayyar couple's informal approach to teaching their children at Chandravilas. The couple allocated subjects between themselves and conducted regular, structured classes. Sitalakshmi took over Vidya's education from the day after Vijayadasami. For the next three months she would teach the child Tamil. Sitalakshmi was also an excellent raconteur. Post-lunch, the children, along with their maternal grandmother and a grandaunt, would sit in a semi-circle in the centre hall of the house. For the next few hours, Sitalakshmi would have her little audience spellbound with her emotional narration of episodes like the Dasaratha saapam, from the Ramayana. As the children progressed in years, other subjects would be introduced into the curriculum with Ayyar teaching the children Mathematics, Science and English, subjects that he was passionate about.
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Palghat Mani Iyer and Palani Subramania Pillai Two pillars of Carnatic music during its Golden Age -K.S. KALIDAS
 Differing in age by just four years- Palani Subramania Pillai (Palani) b. 1908 and Palghat Mani Iyer (Mani) b. 1912, the legendary twosome provided an unforgettable feast of laya to music lovers from the early decades of the twentieth century upto its sixties. Palani was gone in 1962 and Mani in 1981, but one cannot think or talk of one without in some way bringing the other into the picture.
After about five years of training in mridanga at Calcutta, I had the good fortune of learning from Palani for a couple of years. On a few occasions while teaching me and my fellow students, he would sink into a reverie and relive the past. For him, 'periyavanga' (literally elders) meant Pudukottai Dakshinamoorthy Pillai whom he never mentioned by name. He would play a sollukattu, the way 'periyavanga' would have handled it. On a couple of occasions, he also mentioned that Kumbakonam Alaganambia Pillai's method of playing was extremely simple without any 'vyavaharam' (laya intricacies) but it was as sonorous that listeners would compare him favourably with Dakshinamoorthy Pillai.
Those days, in the fifties, a disciple posing questions to the 'guru' was unthinkable and one had to be content with what the guru chose to tell. Thus, it was not possible to form our opinion on those great artists analytically; not that even a more vivid description would have enabled me, in my teens then, to get much insight. I have heard from my father and his friends, all keen listeners, about the two Pillais and their prowess but this again was not good enough for me as technical details were not available. The few 78 rpm gramophone records of Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar in which Dakshinamoorthy Pillai played on the khanjira (his mridanga playing records are not available at all- perhaps they were never made), which I heard a few years ago, thanks to a collector of vintage music as well as radio broadcasts, do not give a full account of the vidwan's prowess.
What can a mere three-minute or six-minute record in which the alapana, kriti, niraval and swara-s and a half-minute tani with two percussionists- the mridanga and khanjira artists- are packed in reveal? Of course an alert listener did discover flashes of the tonal quality and uniqueness of a few sollukattu-s but that was all.
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The Cleveland Aradhana Festival Sustaining Sampradaya in North America -S.T. RAO & SHANKAR RAMACHANDRAN
The inaugural concert at the 30th Cleveland Aradhana was a trendsetter. Called "Sustaining Sampradayam", it featured a full concert by a group of 28 boys and girls brought up in North America. The children were trained for this concert by several well-known Carnatic music vidwans from India, without face-to-face contact, using the Internet. The students included about twenty vocalists, instruments making up the rest of the ensemble with venu, veena, violin and mridanga. These youngsters came from great distances across the United States- from California to New Jersey and from Texas to Michigan.
The idea was conceived by the organisers of the festival (read V.V. Sundaram) and announced in October 2006. There was much scepticism and many expressed doubts about the outcome. The more cynical perception was to view this as a mere fundraising gimmick at the expense of good music. But the Cleveland Aradhana Committee, the vidwans who took up the task of preparing the students and the students themselves proved them all to be mistaken.
Selected students had trained for this concert over the Internet to sing specific kriti-s with several vidwans located in India for a period of a few weeks. The efforts and the training were painstaking. According to one of the teachers who spoke to us, each teacher would teach one student a song. The lesson would be recorded and transmitted along with notation to all the others so they could learn each song in that particular style- a somewhat Ekalavyan concept. Thus did Seetha Rajan teach the varnam and P.S. Narayanaswamy the Dikshitar kriti. Srimushnam Raja Rao even recorded himself accompanying each song, and his students used the recording as an aid to practice.
Every vidwan and every student had laboured long and hard to be able to create the evidence of effortless performance on the day of the programme. Even selecting the sruti was not easy. Alapana and swaram-s had to be "practised" to some extent to allow for seamless transitions, as each singer or instrumentalist would pick up where the other left off. The effect for the audience was quite extraordinary as a Bhairavi was started by a lower voice and handed over before being picked up by a violin and then a flute and so on. Each transition seemed natural and unrehearsed.
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Off to a spectacular start - Chennai Sangamam
Book Review
Enchanting Echoes through the Corridors of a Golden Age -P.K. DORAISWAMY
VOICES Within, Carnatic Music: Passing on an inheritance. By Bombay Jayashri & T.M. Krishna with Mythili Chandrasekar. [MATRKA - Block 2, 1A Tarangini, 3rd Seaward Road, Valmiki Nagar, Chennai 600 041. www.matrka.org English. Edition 2007. Hardbound. Pp. 177. Rs. 1900 or US $ 43 (postage extra)].
Voices Within, authored by Bombay Jayashri and T.M. Krishna with Mythili Chandrasekar, is a veritable collector's item (provided, of course, like most such items, the collector can afford it!). It is the story of seven- shall we say The Magnificent Seven- landscape-makers, or more correctly, landscape-changers, of Carnatic music. In the words of the authors, "They were musicians who were entrepreneurs. They dared to dream, to try, to take the road less travelled and in so doing, they revolutionalised the system, shaped its growth, raised performing standards and left their indelible mark on the musical firmament". The musicians chosen are Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, T.N. Rajarathnam Pillai, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, G.N. Balasubramaniam, Palghat Mani Iyer, M.S. Subbulakshmi and T.R. Mahalingam. The beautifully drafted generic description of self-realisation (reminding one of Kipling's "If.") given at the beginning of the book admirably epitomises the personalities of these seven: "To recognise the gift within, to see what others don't, to listen to the urge of the inner voice, to go where dreams beckon, to dare to change the context, to try to stand for something, to create your own idiom. this is to have realised The Self ".
The get-up of the book is beautiful; the photographs are stunningly realistic and virtually leap at you; and the writing throughout drips with the authors' unconcealed excitement and reverence but at the same time optimally balances spice and substance. The personalities are not blindly deified and we are allowed glimpses of their feet of clay but stopping well short of appearing scandalous. This is neither a collection of matter-of-fact, full-fledged biographies of these seven nor a musicological critique of their music though it does combine interesting biographical details with references to the unique aspects of their music and the bases of the musical greatness of each. In the words of the authors, "Voices Within is to be read not for information but for perspectives. It is not a collage of biographies but an offering and a sharing, and a passing on of an inheritance". This is consistent with T.M. Krishna's (and apparently also Jayashri's) well-known abiding respect for the Carnatic musical tradition which made him say at last year's seminar organised by The Hindu Friday Review: "When I sing Todi, it is not my creation. All my musical ancestors who created and developed it are singing through me".
There is a brief background piece on Tanjavur, the cradle of Carnatic music and the royal patronage there which nurtured the music and produced hundreds of musicians and made many villages' names a surrogate for the musicians who hailed from them, such as Semmangudi and Maharajapuram, and how the concert format which evolved after the age of the Trinity gained ground during the twentieth century and instead of being mainly scholarly chamber concerts in private houses became accessible to the public through temple and sabha concerts, and how the centre shifted from Tanjavur to Chennai as royal patronage declined and public support became important.
Did You Know?
This is with reference to the song Manmatha leelayai mentioned in Did You Know? (Sruti 268). According to another version, the 'congratulation trail' started with the duo (Musiri and Semmangudi) first going to the singer, M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavatar, who gave the credit to the lyricist, Papanasam Sivan, who in turn, passed it on to the music composer/director G. Ramanathan, who humbly attributed the source of his inspiration for the raga, to the kriti Aadamodi galade of Tyagaraja!
When Nauka Charitram, the opera in Telugu, composed by Tyagaraja was presented, some orthodox parasite pundits raised the objection that there was no authoritative basis for the theme. At the instance of Walajapet Venkataramana Bhagavatar, one Kavi Venkata Suri, his disciple in music and an erudite scholar, also from the Saurashtra clan, composed on the same theme in Sanskrit verse, writing it on old palm leaves and presented it as the authority, achieving the desired effect!
Manna Srinivasan
Chennai
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Record Rack
 VARADA VENKATESA - Patnam Subramania Iyer's Keertans. By Challa Prabhavati, Violin. [Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, Tirupati (TTD) SVDSP 049. Rs. 25].
Side A
- Yera napai (varnam) - Todi, Adi
- Ninu joochi - Saurashtra, Adi
- Manasu karugademo - Hamsadhwani, Roopakam
- Paridanamichite - Bilahari, Khanda Chapu
Side B
- Marivere dik evarayya - Shanmukapriya, Adi
- Varamulosagi - Keeravani, Roopakam
- Raghuvamsa sudhambudi chandra - Kathanakutoohalam, Adi
This cassette presents seven of Patnam Subramania Iyer's best known kriti-s. A short introduction in Telugu and English recounts Patnam's eminence as a composer and his image as a second Tyagaraja. The jacket gives the title as 'Varada Venkatesa' which is the mudra (signature) of this composer.
Instead of "keertans" the title should have used the term "kriti-s". Since Prof. Sambamoorthy's time the distinction between keertana and kriti has been recognised and established. Keertan is religious congregational music like Tiruppugazh and Divyanama keertana-s. Kriti refers to a specific form that encapsulates the raga and gives scope for individual creative expression in sangati-s, kalpanaswara, and niraval. Kriti is primarily a vehicle for raga swaroopa whereas keertan is for simple musical expression of bhakti.
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News you can Use
Died
S.V. Krishnan (71), connoisseur and patron of Carnatic music and promoter of young talent; founder of the cultural organisation Nada Inbam in 1974 in Coimbatore; conducted chamber concerts in Chennai; was the driving force in the construction of the compact and comfortable Raga Sudha Hall with good acoustics at Luz Avenue, Chennai in 1997, and its regular functioning till his death; 15 February, in Chennai.
Prof. Dr. Sumati Mutatkar (90), veteran Hindustani vocalist, distinguished teacher, musicologist, academician and composer; Producer (Emeritus) at AIR and Doordarshan; Fellow of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi (1979), recipient of the Padma Shri, the Kalidas Samman and many other awards; 28 February in Delhi.
Kumbakonam Rajappa Iyer (91), veteran mridanga vidwan and teacher, recipient of awards and titles including the Sangeeta Kala Acharya from the Music Academy; 5 March in Chennai.
Harold Powers (78), music scholar and ethnomusicologist, distin-guished academician, Fulbright Fellow who studied in Chennai and whose doctoral dissertation was on "The Backround of the South Indian Raga System", 15 March in Santa Monica, California
Tiruvengadu A. Jayaraman (73), Carnatic vocalist and teacher, disciple of Madurai Mani Iyer, recipient of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi award (2004), AIR artist, 28 March in Chennai.
P.V. Subramaniam, popularly known as Subbudu (90), colourful and pioneering personality in the field of music and dance criticism, recipient of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Overall Contribution / Scholarship; 29 March in Delhi.
Guru S. Narmada (64), veteran Bharatanatyam guru, founder of the dance school Shakuntala Nruthyala in Bangalore, recipient of many awards including the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi award (2006), Shantala award, the Karnataka Sangeeta Nritya Academy award and the Rajyotsava award of the State Government of Karnataka, 30 March in Bangalore.
Remembering Sundaram
21st March 2007
V. Sundaram, Sruti's former business representative in Mumbai in the 1980s, passed away this day last year. His enthusiasm for promoting Sruti and through the magazine, the cause of classical music and dance was such that he came to be known as 'Sruti' Sundaram. His family, friends and the Sruti parivaar, remember him on this day.
SNA Awards for Youth
The Central Sangeet Natak Akademi has introduced the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar 2006 "to identify and encourage outstanding young talents in diverse fields of performing arts and give them national recognition early in life so that they may work with greater commitment and dedication in life-long pursuit of their chosen form of art." It comprises a purse of Rs. 25,000 and is awarded to artists below the age of 35 as on 1st April of the year and covers music, dance, theatre, puppetry and scholarship in performing arts.
Music
Sandippan Samajpati, Manjari Asnare Kelkar (H-vocal), Niladri Kumar (H-sitar), Abhay Rustum Sopori (H- santoor), T.M. Krishna, Sreerama Prasad Malladi & Ravikumar Malladi (Malladi Brothers) (C-vocal), N. Manoj Siva (C-mridanga), S. Karthick (C-ghata).
Dance
Sheejith Krishna (Bharatanatyam), Prashant Shah (Kathak), Kalamandalam Pradeep (Kathakali), Sijagurumayum Nimita Devi (Manipuri), Bijayini Satapathi and Leena Mohanty (Odissi), Vedantam Venkata Nagachalapathi Rao (Koochipoodi), Kalamandalam Vinod (music for Kathakali).
Theatre
Rajinder Rozy and Ramanjit Kaur (acting), Amir Aslam Bhat and Rabijita Gogoi (direction), Manaswini Lata Ravindra and Asif Ali Haider Khan (playwriting), Zuleikha Chaudhuri (lighting) and Malatesha Badigera (stage craft).
Traditional/Folk/Tribal Music/Dance/Theatre and Puppetry
Kapila Venu (Koodiyattam), Brundaban Jena (Prahlad Natak, Orissa), Thokchom Imomacha Singh (Thang-Ta, Manipur), Lipokmar Tzudir (choral music, Nagaland), Rampada Jamatia (tribal dance and music, Tripura), Arusam Madhusudan, (mime), Anurupa Roy (puppetry).
Scholarship in performing arts
Sangeeta Iswaran (dance).
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T. Muktha: The last bastion of an inimitable tradition
RAVI & SRIDHAR
 Only Pattammal and I are left now. Why should I live anymore?" This was the constant refrain of the veteran vocalist and doyenne of the Veena Dhanammal family, after her close friend M.S. Subbulakshmi passed away.
T. Muktha, of the renowned vocal duo Brinda-Muktha, passed away on the morning of Sunday, March 11th 2007. She was 92. Muktha is survived by her daughter Lakshmi and granddaughters Vardhini Prem and Uma Vasudevan
Tanjavur Muktha was born in September 1914 to Veena Dhanammal's fourth daughter Kamakshi. She was one among six children of Kamakshi and 13 grandchildren of Dhanammal. When Muktha was seven and elder sister Brinda nine, they were sent to Kanchipuram Naina Pillai for their musical education. In the four years that they stayed at Kanchipuram, Brinda and Muktha learnt as many as 400 compositions of Tyagaraja, a few compositions of Syama Sastry and Subbaraya Sastry and innumerable Tevaram and Tiruppugazh songs. Naina Pillai was satisfied with their progress and asked Kamakshi to take them back and polish their music in "your mother's incomparable bani".
Back home, Brinda-Muktha's aunt Lakshmiratnam became their guru. She taught them innumerable compositions of Dikshitar, Syama Sastry, Subbaraya Sastry, Gopalakrishna Bharati and their family treasure of padam-s and javali-s and moulded their music along the lines of their inimitable grandmother. A grateful Muktha would later in life give Lakshmiratnam's name to her only daughter. Dhanammal herself taught Brinda and Muktha about 30 to 40 compositions
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Young Talent
Nisha Rajagopal
Perhaps the most striking thing about 26-year-old Carnatic vocalist Nisha Rajagopal is her voice. And for one so young, she has a remarkable stage presence that complements her youthful good looks. On the kutcheri stage, she remains totally focused on her performance and has not developed any irritating mannerisms. At present a student of both P.S. Narayanaswamy and Suguna Varadachary, Nisha started her music lessons with her mother Vasundhra Rajagopal, herself an accomplished vocalist and a disciple of Gopala Iyer, a descendant of the famous composer Koteeswara Iyer. This was in Delhi before the Rajagopalans- Raju, Vasundhra and kids- moved to Canada.
Nisha's earliest memories of her involvement with Carnatic music have to do with driving down weekends from Toronto to Pittsburgh, where visiting vidwan T.R. Subramanyam taught.
Point Of View
Goodbye Kalyani, Hello Kokilapriya
BARADWAJ RANGAN takes a look at the popular trend of main pieces in rare raga-s.
Sikkil Gurucharan doesn't seem to believe me when I say he's the inspiration behind this story. His email to this effect ends with a semicolon followed by a dash and a closing parenthesis- the universal emoticon for a wink, suggesting that I may be kidding. But then I take him back to his concert at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan earlier this year, when he announced midway, "The main piece I will be singing is a Tyagaraja kriti in the raga Kokilapriya." In a trice, he wasn't a singer so much as a scientist in a laboratory holding a strip of litmus paper- for one section of the audience instantly saw red, flinching at the very idea of a main piece in a raga other than a Todi or a Kambhoji or a Bhairavi. This may be the ultimate taste test- the ultimate indicator of belonging to (or, at least, leaning towards the preferences of) a particular generation of music listeners. Likening the main piece of a concert to the main course of a feast, the critic Sulochana Pattabhiraman perhaps speaks for this set of rasika-s when she offers a culinary metaphor: "A dessert can't become a meal."
But there are an equal number of rasika-s who are game for experiments- and Bombay Jayashri speaks for this brave new generation when she discloses, "It is very refreshing to sing and hear a rare raga during the main piece. I do it often." Her contemporary, T.M. Krishna, agrees that "it is very interesting to sing pallavi-s in rare raga-s," but he mulls over the qualifier 'rare'. "Are we referring to old raga-s that are no longer common or the newer raga-s that have cropped up? If we are referring to older raga-s not in vogue, I find that many of them- like Narayanagaula- do lend themselves to elaboration. The same cannot be said of the newer ones, which seem to give scope only for permutations and combinations."
He reveals that he is not a fan of raga-s that are mere scales, and that the rare raga-s he has presented "have been mostly older raga-s that may not have been used for pallavi-s before- raga-s that have a swaroopa beyond the arohana-avarohana." Then, as if to restore the balance, he adds, "I still believe that the major raga-s are the kings for pallavi singing."
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