A serene river flowing with supreme grandeur under the reddish golden hues of the evening sky — that was what D.K. Pattammal’s rendition of Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s ‘Dharmasamvardhini’ in Madhyamavati sounded like in a 1997 concert at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan auditorium. D.K. Pattammal’s name was always associated with knowledge, rich repertoire and orthodoxy — not with the gift of voice. But for me, in my journey of understanding the singing voice — the Indian singing voice in particular — DKP’s voice and vocal style have remained fascinating. I can listen for hours to her renditions and revel in the impact of the sound of her music.
The beauty of DKP’s vocal style for me is essentially in the geometric design of the sthayas — those soulful phrases of ragas that pulsate with divine life. Sthayas are the words that form the language of the raga. Breaking sthayas into notes, albeit gamaka-defined, causes a fragmentation of the soul of raga music. This integral quality is what I found to be at the core of Pattammal’s music. She had never undergone the fragment-to-whole process of swara training. Her introduction to music was directly through song. When I first read about it in a 1980 interview of hers in Sruti , I was flummoxed. It was Pt. Sunil Bose who helped me experience and understand that musical phrases are units in themselves and are not built up from swaras.
What goes hand in hand with this approach to music is the integrity of musical and verbal thought. The word and musical phrase are experienced and delivered by the singer as one. This contributes to the exquisite lyricism that was the hallmark of Pattammal’s song renditions. It contributed in no small measure to the outstanding reach her songs had with the masses. She was a highly popular singer reaching out to the peripheral perimeters of musical initiation and conditioning through the sheer impact of the verbal communication in her song delivery.
To render sthayas with integrity the voice needs to be able to paint the phrase seamlessly — in a uniform tone — without intended and unintended cuts, breaks and jerks. To achieve this with azhutham , and without sounding like a violin, the voice needs to have depth and body, which Pattammal’s had naturally. But most significantly she had the unique sense of judgment and balance to not force the depth but let it emerge and flow from her body with elegance and ease. So her gamaka, sthayas and singing were serene and flowing, not jagged and laboured as some attempts at depth can descend into. Listen to this aspect even in her early recordings of ‘Eppadi Padinaro,’ ‘Bhajare Gopalam’ and ‘Sivakamasundari.’ And in those early years her beautiful voice had a degree of lightness and brightness to balance depth with flights of fancy.
Hers was a ringing tone — in my opinion a true vengala kural . She gave it consistent volume and drove her breath into it to create that soul-filling richness of swara in its larger sense of integrated pitch, sound and vowel. She never relaxed the output even for a single swara. That was essential to her musical approach and the natural precipitation of the shapes of her exquisitely rounded gamakas and her kolam-like raga phrases, all rendered in a seamless flow of sound. What she rendered in every breath was not a string of swaras but one single thought. Listen to the opening phrase ‘Sartakkamaina Nee’ in ‘Parthasarathi Nannu’ (Poochi Srinivasa Iyengar, Madhyamavati). The phrase sweeps an octave and a half from shadja to tara madhyama and Pattammal captures it in her heavy voice with an honesty, discipline and precision that were part of her nature and musical system.
Pattammal’s voice deepened rapidly with age. Before 50, her adhara shadja had lowered to 3 kattai from the 4 ½ kattai of the earlier years. But the listener could never have realised it unless he read about it in a critique. Her singing continued to be facile with tara sthayi karvais, sancharas, and sweeps unto the Tara Panchama. She was a highly impactful performer, who was focused on holding her audience and adhara shadja provided the desired vocal facility. So Pattammal in fact was a pioneer in dropping fixed notions regarding adhara shadja. Her tone had a beautiful innocent honesty to it — an ever-present smile that was part of her countenance and attitude. She came across as a person and musician surrendered to and driven by a set of simple yet strong and uncompromising values. Doubt and brooding never seemed to cloud her face or disturb the focus of her music.
As I meet scores of young Carnatic aspirants today the world over, I notice a struggle to find the right voice to deliver brilliance of creative and vocal flight. Pattammal’s music is one of the many eye-openers that could help find ways forward. Apart from the limitless lessons to be learnt from her understanding of sthaya, she also championed one great truth about the singing voice as an instrument of performance. The voice need not be just a tool to squeeze out the demands of the mind and ego. The voice is a direct extension of the integrated point of feeling, thought, intention, volition and connectivity to the outside world and to the Essence of Life and Spirit. Singing is the joyful dance of the voice and the being within.
And D.K. Pattammal seemed to have revelled in this dance for a lifetime.
