Do public concerts matter? Can they be a milestone in the cultural as well as the political history of a city? The answers were obvious to anyone who attended the open-air concert in Delhi’s Garden of Five Senses on a crisp November evening while Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna sang his heart out. Songs about faith, devotion, harmony, about brutal inequities in our society and those who are castigated because they speak up for justice. Songs you can’t pigeonhole.

Like many in the audience, I knew very little about Carnatic vocal music. It was my first real exposure to a live performance by a Carnatic vocalist. But that did not detract in any way from the joy of listening to Krishna sing. The occasion had less to do with the depth of one’s knowledge about Carnatic music and more to do with assertion, aesthetics and solidarity.  

By being there, along with friends and family, many of us were saying loudly and clearly that no genre of music was anyone’s ancestral property, that a musician had the right to interpret his art the way they wished, that aesthetics was a personal choice and we had the right to listen to whatever form of music we chose.  We may have been a minority. But we were there, and we were saying “no” to the politics of polarisation, “yes” to the politics of pluralism.

TM Krishna is a musician, activist and public intellectual. As everyone knows by now, the celebrated Carnatic vocalist, who won the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award for “social inclusiveness in culture” in 2016 alongside Bezwada Wilson (famous for his sustained campaigns against manual scavenging), was scheduled to perform at a programme jointly organised by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and SPIC-MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth), a voluntary youth movement. His concert was to be part of a two-day “Dance and Music in the Park” festival to be held on November 17 and 18 in Delhi’s Nehru Park at the diplomatic enclave of Chanakyapuri.

But at the eleventh hour, the AAI “postponed” the event, citing no specific reason. Since then, social media has been overflowing with speculation. The AAI does not say why it backed down, but it is widely believed that it was under pressure from Right-wing trolls who have made little attempt to disguise their hatred and contempt for Krishna. The “postponement” coincided with an avalanche of abuse tossed at Krishna for being “anti-India” and an “urban Naxal” who sang about Jesus and Allah, and many other colourful expletives. In their posts, the trolls tagged several ministers in the Modi government.

After three days of uncertainty, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi stepped in and played host to the Carnatic vocalist and his team.

The concert, part of the Delhi government-supported Awam ki Awaz series and packaged as “a musical evening dedicated to voices of the common people”, was important for many reasons. It was an unapologetically political moment. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury were in the front row. In his opening speech, Kejriwal emphasised freedom of cultural expression, a political position in our polarised times when there is a concerted attempt to homogenise culture.

You did not need to pay to attend the concert; anyone who was interested could stroll in. The music reflected multiple voices, multiple languages, multiple traditions and multiple religions. Krishna himself spoke little about each piece barring the name of its composer and the language. There was a song about Jesus in Malayalam; multi-faith bhajans that were favourites of Gandhiji and sung in the Sabarmati ashram; verses from Kannada writer-activist Basava; words in honour of writer Perumal Murugan, who has been harassed and attacked by Right-wing groups; a Tamil song on Allah, and so on.

Yes, it was a political act, a strong and strident statement asserting that an artist is not a public enemy, as some people were making it out to be, and h/she had every right to question societal norms and to push others to think differently, that many views and positions can co-exist. This is what politics of pluralism is all about.

Why is Krishna an object of hate among so many Right-wing trolls? There are many reasons. But in essence, as Sohail Hashmi of Sahmat pointed out, Krishna is determined to take Carnatic music out of the control of a handful of people and to bring it to the public arena where everybody can enjoy it. It is about redefining what is classical and what is appropriate to the genre. This is what riles many people.

The concert in the Garden of Five Senses was about reclaiming “public space” which is the soul of this country, the need to recapture the public space and share it with everybody, as Krishna said. Millennials may not remember but my generation knew Safdar Hashmi in whose memory was Sahmat was set up. Hashmi was fatally attacked while performing a street play in Sahibabad, a working-class area in the outskirts of Delhi, in broad daylight.

Krishna is not the only musician from the south who has been targeted because he is seen to have deviated from the “purity” of Carnatic vocal music. Several musicians faced similar attacks this year. They include renowned singer OS Arun, who was scheduled to perform at a concert called Yesuvin Sangama Sangeetham, or a Confluence of Jesus’s Music. His promotional poster on social media attracted abuse: he was called a stooge of the Vatican, out to convert gullible Hindus to Christianity. So strong was the troll attack that he cancelled the event. Artists like Arun have also been threatened with violence if they organised similar concerts in the future.

This is what we were railing against.

Political music

Through articles and speeches from public platforms, Krishna has been calling out the dominance of Brahminism and patriarchy in Carnatic music in recent years. In 2015, Krishna pulled out from Chennai’s famous December music festival, citing lack of social inclusiveness. Subsequently, he opted to team up with other activists like environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman to start Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha, a counter-cultural multidisciplinary arts festival that takes place in a fishing village in the city. In essence, it was a conscious protest against the ghettoisation of Carnatic music as an elitist preserve.

“Today the Carnatic music world resembles a gated Brahmin enclave. This includes practitioners, connoisseurs and impresarios,” Krishna once told writer Gita Hariharan in an interview. This is political music, and Krishna and other artists in southern India are part of that grand tradition.

Throughout history, music has been used to protest oppression and discrimination. Think of artists like Miriam Makeba (Mama Africa), whose music and words savaged the rule of apartheid leaders in South Africa. Those who spoke out against the apartheid regime saw their music removed from the shelves at music stores. But Makeba found solidarity in other artists both at home in South Africa and abroad who also used political music to stand alongside those who were oppressed by the apartheid government. The anti-apartheid songs are now part of the rich tapestry of South Africa’s social fabric.

Back home, legendary pop singer Usha Uthup also paid the price for pushing social boundaries. Back in the 1980s, she crossed swords with Jatin Chakroborty, the Public Works Minister of West Bengal, then governed by Marxists. Chakroborty thought Uthup’s music was decadent, what he described as “cheap, disco, perverted culture” and not befitting Bengal’s grand reputation as a cultural leader in India. “We want to inculcate in young men the teachings of Marx and Lenin, so that they develop a sense of dedication,” he told a reporter. “This kind of music pollutes that culture.”

He tried to ban Uthup’s performances, but the judiciary came to her aid. Uthup brought a defamation suit against the minister and a High Court judge ruled against Chakroborty, asserting that “everyone has a right to sing and dance”.

Interestingly, Chakroborty’s position was not shared by others even within his government. When a gang from the youth wing of Chakraborty’s Revolutionary Socialist Party tried to disrupt a concert by Uthup, Jyoti Basu, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, had publicly pulled up his minister, saying no one had the right to prevent others from attending shows.

Those who don’t like Krishna and his music have also used other arguments to get at him. In the wake of the brouhaha over the cancellation of Krishna’s original concert, that old chestnut about whether taxpayers should pay for the “arts” has also been raised. So often, the arts are seen as fluff and frills for the privileged, that the argument of the arts being a luxury actually finds some takers. A counter argument: should only the privileged and their children be allowed to enjoy a concert? Why is not the same argument made about government support for science? No reputed scientist thinks arts are inferior to the sciences.

The argument that arts are simply not as important as science has no basis in reality. Both need public investment because both are public goods. Students have been found to do better in all academic subjects when they have a regular infusion of the arts. Supporting public funding for the arts simply makes good sense.

The argument is made that private funds can and should support the arts. And indeed, private donors do support the arts. But if the arts are an important aspect of education, as research shows, why shouldn’t the taxpayer’s money also support the arts as part of the educational system? How is spending a state budget to build a gigantic statue a worthier pursuit than spending public money to support a musician or an artist?

Personally, I am uncomfortable with the purely economic argument which suggests that only activities which generate economic growth are deserving of public investment. By that yardstick, public funding that goes towards anything that promotes social inclusiveness or cohesion would not fit the bill. The arts have always been able to make a society better equipped to speak its mind. It is dangerous to make the artist an endangered species if we call ourselves a democracy.

The Delhi government’s Awam ki Awaz is a step in the right direction. And if Krishna set even a small slice of Delhi and the country thinking about the many ways we can find unity in our diversity, the public concert was worth it in these fractious times.