It is fair to say that India is as much a cultural salad bowl cohered by the major religion as the United States is bonded by the language of English. The Europeans, South Americans and the Chinese established their cultural duality long before the Indians, for whom the experience is somewhat recent. No doubt peoples of different geographical origins who have made the U.S. their adopted home think as one in uncompromisingly maintaining a steadfast loyalty to their origins. These loyalties assume the shape, mostly, of food and, to a good measure, other art forms. In specific reference to the Indian diaspora, it would appear that the latter is conveniently represented by classical music and dance and the ill-defined Bollywood paraphernalia.
Narrowing the considerations to just the south Indian population, the tools chosen to assert one’s roots are classical music (read Carnatic music) and dance (read Bharatanatyam). It is not by accident that these art forms came to be the main vehicle. Many of the immigrants had already acquired a fair degree of proficiency in the arts or had at least been exposed to it incessantly during their formative years. In its extreme, a good number of them are proficient enough in the arts to have been eligible to take it up as a profession had they but stayed back to negotiate the maze of the cultural infrastructure. That is history and in the adopted home, a challenge has cropped up: the challenge of assimilating with the new land and at the same time maintaining a “continuity of culture”. New means and actors are required to take over and who else may be entrusted with the task other than the second-generation progeny?
Even an average Indian family entrenched in the American soil is dubbed as a success story, economically speaking. The primary goal then is to perpetuate this success and, in general, the chosen path is a degree in medicine. A second acceptable option is an engineering programme or, in the least, an entry into an Ivy League school. This is always at the back of the mind even when the child shows early signs of musical inclination. One must hasten to add that what applies to the goose (music) also applies to the gander (dance), the latter being saddled with its own advantages and disadvantages. Let us, therefore, focus on music. What then might be a stereotypical story of a prospective musician child?
Surprisingly, spotting a child’s “musical talent” is less arduous than the initialisation and subsequent steps. Given that there is virtually no pressure in the American elementary school arena and given also that the overall standard of living in the U.S. is pretty high, the “musically talented” children cross early hurdles with ease. They avail the help of “local” instructors, which might be one or both of the parents, or better still, a local guru, a student one time back home of a renowned musician. Here is where the absence of an institution in Carnatic music hurts. In the Western genre, if one has been trained at, say, The Eastman School of Music or the Julliard College, very little else need be said. But in our system, it is based on the individuals and their reputation and influence in making things happen. Such being the case, it becomes essential to get accepted by one such individual, of course from Chennai. This is also done with reasonable ease these days, when a combination of face-to-face and via-networking modes of instruction has become the order of the day.
With all the pegs in the right place, the young student soon comes of age and is ready to be showcased. In a way, that too is relatively facile in the U.S., where all cities are bound to have an Indian temple and a music association. North America does boast a large number of serious organisations — especially in big cities — that offer to provide the finishing touches and a launching pad to aspiring young local musicians. The effort is led and pioneered by the Cleveland Aradhana, which, to the advantage of the native artistes, is rapidly weaning itself off the India-centric approach without actually diluting the emphasis on India-based artistes.
Early successes prompt the student-parent team to aim at bigger destinations, Chennai being the final frontier. It is from this point that the travails of pursuing Indian classical music anywhere — even at a semi-professional level — are felt and a detailed sketch of the unforeseen and unforeseeable roadblocks are beyond the scope of the present essay and are left at that.
A major turning-point arrives when the young musician is ready to enter college. Despite the level of recognition achieved thus far, the musician and family realise, in most cases, that they may soon be reaching a dead end. The musician is now old enough to think independently and realises that Indian classical music — vocal music in particular — is a not a saleable commodity in the U.S. and the training received so far is inadequate to make inroads into the Western classical genre. The “American Dream” seems to be the best option to pursue and the years of rigorous musical training are relegated to storage. The hard work does not go waste since leading American Universities take kindly to “extracurricular” activities and the stereotypical musician easily gets admission into a prestigious school for a programme that would assure him of a comfortable future. They may also opt to continue music as a “hobby” so as to be available for artistes touring from India, who, understandably, prefer employing locals to flying in accompanists along with them.
Select diehards continue to maintain hopes of “making it” as a musician and this has led to the so-called “reverse immigration”. These new trendsetters, upon shifting to Chennai, try to live and think like the native musicians in manners and mannerisms and shun everything NRI-related in terms of music, one might guess. They tend to avoid events in sabha -s that have NRI-based programmes, lest they be branded thus. It is hard to speculate as to what this trend, still relatively new, portends. But one looks forward to the end point of this movement.
(R.V. Krishnamurthy is a Professor at Western Michigan University and has been associated with Carnatic music and musicians in the United States and India for the past fifteen years.)
