Trains thunder past the road that runs parallel to the tracks. Above the toot of the engine rises the tinkle of piano keys — Mozart’s ‘Sonata in C’ reaches out to the neighbourhood from across continents and centuries. Damayanthi Santwon, who celebrated her 90th birthday last month, has been many things these past decades — All India Radio artiste, teacher of music, church organist, wildlife lover, globe-trotting homemaker and mother of four — but what she has loved most is being a pianist.
Santwon answers the door at her incredibly well-kept house, filled with interesting curios from around the world. She briskly pulls out a chair for me, serves some juice and settles down to tell me how music became a beloved fixture in her life.
Across the country
Born in Pune in 1927 to a Tamil father and a Malayalee mother, Santwon was schooled in Ewarts and Presidency High School in Madras and graduated in 1948 with a degree in Home Science from Women’s Christian College. “My mother was from Kozhikode, my father from Salem. He was the editor of a newspaper in Pune, which was how I came to live across the country,” says Santwon, who had her first music lessons when she was eight. “I learnt on an organ with pedals, not on a piano.” At first, her mother felt that Santwon seemed uninterested. “It was my teacher Godfrey Jacobi who convinced her otherwise.”
Although she took exams and played as much music as she could, it was domesticity that ruled Santwon’s life. “We moved around a lot, and raising four children was quite a task,” she says. Nevertheless, Santwon taught music in Hong Kong, played the church organ in Kolkata, accompanied accomplished conductors Handel Manuel of the Madras Philharmonic and Choral Society and George Harris of the Madras Minstrels, helmed the Children’s Orchestra programme on AIR and, to this day, accompanies Shamas, a mixed voice choir she founded in 1987.
“I love visiting wildlife reserves and have been to Corbett, Ranthambore, Mudumalai and Kanha. It was at one such place that I heard the Shama, a long-tailed thrush that sings beautifully. I decided to name the choir after it.” The choristers meet every Friday at Santwon’s house to practise. “We have performed both classical and secular music across the South,” says Felicity Bose, one of the choristers. “And, Damayanthi is very particular we practise harder before a performance.”
“There is no such thing as familiarity with the instrument. You always need to practise,” says Santwon. “Bach and Handel are favourites. So are Mendelssohn and Mozart. Beethoven’s music for choir is difficult but I like him for the piano.”
Santwon’s all-embracing musical vision is supplemented by the books she loves reading, mostly crime thrillers. “I love Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. When I travelled, I read to keep up,” says the pianist, who found Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam moving, and playing on Beethoven’s piano in Austria, enriching. “I couldn’t resist it,” laughs the nonagenarian, who has also performed at Birmingham Cathedral.
When the photographer arrives, she agrees to play a piece on her Yamaha piano. Mozart’s floral notes and light verses rise and fall gently like a personal message — that there is no age to stay in love with music.
