On June 20, 1887, a small booklet accompanied by a flowery letter was presented to His Highness Maharaja Mirza Pusapati Ananda Gajapati Raju, Manne Sultan Bahadur of Vizianagaram, KCIE. The writer, Balwant Trimbak Sahasrabudhe, was the honorary secretary of the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj, a pioneering sabha in the city. In his view, as expressed in the letter, the little brochure “cannot be more fittingly offered to the public than by dedicating to your Highness… for what is ‘The Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj' but a memento of your Highness' wish to see a general taste for music established on a sound basis?”
Thereby hung an interesting tale, which had its origins in Poona. On October 3, 1874, an association was formed in that city “to revive a taste for our musical science among our brethren of the upper class, and to raise it up in their estimation.” This was the Poona Gayan Samaj and its livewire and secretary was B.T. Sahasrabudhe. Within a short span many of Poona's social figures had been drawn in as members and the biggest among them all was Lt. Gen. Lord Mark Kerr, Commander of the Poona Division of the Indian Army.
Almost from the beginning, the Samaj made it its mission to encourage an appreciation of Indian classical music by Westerners and towards this end began working on a method of reducing Indian music to staff or Western notation. The first piece so attempted was an anthem in Marathi commemorating the Imperial Assemblage of 1877 in Delhi that saw Queen Victoria being declared Empress of India. This was celebrated in Poona on August 4, 1877, and in the presence of several Europeans.
Impressive list
On August 18, 1883, Sahasrabudhe began a branch of the Samaj in Madras. The inaugural list of members was impressive, including Raja Sir T. Madhav Row, Sir Charles Turner, Justice (Sir) T. Muthuswami Iyer, Dewan Bahadur Raghunatha Row, Gen. Chamier and Col. McLeod. It also managed to get Prince Arthur, The Duke of Connaught and Queen Victoria's son, to be its Royal Patron. The Maharajahs of Travancore and Mysore donated money. The Maharajah of Vizianagaram took great interest in the organisation and with his help, music classes were held at the National Girls School (now the Lady Sivaswami Iyer Girls School), an institution he founded in 1869.
Music concerts, largely of the instrumental variety, were conducted by the Samaj, almost all of which took place at the Pachaiyappa's Building in George Town. The lead in terms of organising performances was taken by the Tachur Singaracharlu Brothers, famous musicians of the day and the elder of whom was a Sanskrit teacher at the Pachaiyappa's School. The programmes were invariably attended by the European elite of the city and there were lectures on Indian music and its intricacies by leading Indians of Madras before every performance. Even the Governor of Madras was present on certain occasions. The newspapers of the day such as The Madras Mail and The Madras Times regularly carried reports of the proceedings of the Samaj. The Madras Mail even hailed the Samaj as an Oriental Philharmonic Society.
By 1887, however, the Madras Gayan Samaj had fallen on bad days. It needed money urgently and the Maharajah of Vizianagaram stepped in to help. He donated Rs. 15,000 as capital which at 4 per cent interest would fetch the Samaj an annuity of Rs. 600. His only condition was that the Samaj should henceforth be called the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee of Accession, which was celebrated in 1887. The Samaj accepted this suggestion and the money, and brought out the brochure detailing all its activities in the past years.
Regretfully, what happened to the Samaj in the years after 1887 is not recorded anywhere. Certainly by 1895, it was no longer in existence. It appears that as long as B.T. Sahasrabudhe lived in Madras, having been posted here as an employee of the Madras and South Maratha Railway (M&SM), the Samaj survived.
But it was to have a long and profound impact on the history of Carnatic music. Inspired by the attempts at getting the music across to Westerners, the Tachur Brothers embarked on a series of publications. A.M. Chinnaswami Mudaliar of the Madras Secretariat began his work of publishing Carnatic songs in staff notation, an effort which was to culminate in his friendship with Subbarama Dikshitar and the latter's magnum opus, Sangita Sampradaya Pradarsini . Almost a century later, proceedings of the Samaj were used as ammunition by S. Balachander in his tirade against Swati Tirunal. But those are stories for another day.
(The author can be contacted at srirambts@gmail.com)
