Late into that festive night, Payyavoor Narayana Marar typically led the chenda ensemble at the vintage shrine which groomed his career from childhood. As the Thidambu Nritham priests ended their frenzied dance and the rustic crowd dispersed, Marar retreated to his ancestral home in the vicinity. Resting, he suddenly felt uneasy. Soon came death — in the small hours of February 18. The percussionist would have turned 60 in a month.
The post-performance collapse happened in the same north Malabar village where little Narayanan made his earliest trysts with the temple arts. As a member of the family traditionally entrusted with playing the ethnic instruments at the Shiva Kshetram in hilly Payyavoor northeast of Kannur, his formative years were defined by assisting elders on the drums and cymbals at the daily circumambulations with the deity. Into his mid-teens, Marar showed talent that went way beyond routine requirements.
Payyavoor Narayanan Marar playing the tayambaka. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
This implied a premature end to schooling. When he was through with upper-primary education, Narayanan found time insufficient to attend classes. The bright side was a total focus on the percussive forms. Veteran Aliyatt Rama Marar taught Narayanan the fundamentals of the community’s profession that bore a mix of religious rites and high culture. From blowing the conch to singing invocatory melodies, the boy gained fair overall proficiency.
A break was in the offing. Renowned Korom Ramakrishna Marar nourished and honed Narayanan’s capabilities, providing intense residential training at Kalliad. His shaping up as a major promise in the late 1970s coincided with the rise of a local artistes’ collective: Mattannur Panchavadya Sangham. So busy was the troupe’s schedules that Narayana Marar’s expertise with the timila and edakka drums caught the notice of seniors and admirers alike.
The loud and weighty chenda eventually turned out to be the youngster’s niche. That meant his emerging role as the anchor for a variety of melam ensembles. Simultaneously, Marar specialised in tayambaka, which permitted freer aesthetics with the chenda. While melam as a group show does warrant its leader to structure rhythmic patterns eminently over a span of three hours, the 90-minute tayambaka permits a great amount of individual improvisations.
Payyavoor Narayana Marar on the Chenda. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“Narayanan had an immense grip over rhythm. His fertile mind generated ideas, yet his tayambaka’s maintained restraint,” remembers maestro Mattannur Sankarankutty Marar.
In 1992, both won a laurel each from Guruvayur. At the eight-day ulsavam in the Srikrishna temple, Sankarankutty’s tayambaka was adjudged first in the senior category, while the topper among the juniors was his pupil Narayanan, eight years younger. An eclectic Narayana Marar, also moulded by Sankarankutty’s guru Sadanam Vasudevan and chenda patriarch Tiruvegapura Rama Poduval, went on to work as an instructor at the Asthikalayam in Cherukunnu. However, he largely remained a freelancer.
The resultant independence facilitated a flurry of tours. Marar’s tayambaka won appreciation from the state’s middle belts and deeper south. Outside Kerala, he was a regular at the Malayali temples in Delhi. In 2009, he made a debut trip abroad, performing for two months across Poland. The UAE (Ajman) was another such destination.
Notes colleague Udayan Namboodiri: “Amid drastic alterations in tayambaka, Marar was a haven for the purists.” The end was particularly poignant, as it happened barely an hour after his drumming for the vibrant temple dance. All his life, he used to say, “I owe my felicity to Thidambu Nritham. It’s my chenda practice, de facto.” Narayana Marar earned Payyavoor a place on Kerala’s percussion map.
