There’s a tectonic shift in the milieu of Indian classical arts. With the rise of social media and networks, the rug —and, along with it, the dais — is sliding away from under the artistes’ feet. Suddenly, it seems, artistes and fans are sharing the same stage when, in the past, fans could not sidle to within a hundred feet of an artiste or his entourage.
“Artistes were not approachable. They were people you held in the greatest awe, people whose music you listened to repeatedly, people whom you thought had been dropped on earth from heaven,” says musician Sudha Raghunathan. “You couldn’t write to artistes and they couldn’t write back to you. When you looked at them your eyes would glaze over.”
Sudha inspires that kind of awe. But today, fans are bold enough to walk up to her even though their singular weapon of mass adulation is this: she is their Facebook friend. Sudha doesn’t mind their presumptuousness. “Basically I’m an extrovert and I like connecting with people.” Her experience is an example of how the distance between the stage and the peanut gallery has shrunk, thanks to the tsunami of social media — Facebook, YouTube, Phorum, UStream, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and Wordpress, to mention just a few in this new wave of interactive dissemination of information.
Many artistes claim they enjoy an easy rapport with fans, thanks to technology. Dancer Priyardarsini Govind loves to read the messages from her audience after a show, especially when she is not always able to stay back and talk to people. Access to an artiste is a given now, but there’s more than just an attitudinal shift.
The most significant change is this: social media offers hope and opportunity for youngsters, allowing for “the democratisation” of talent. There is a platform for every aspiring artiste — not just to those who have direct access to newspapers and television cameras — to say what he wants to say and to say it exactly how he wants to say it. It has also given every artiste an audience to interact and grow with. Artistes of the new generation such as vocalist Bharat Sundar like such autonomous channels of communication. “For instance I got introduced to Coke Studio only through Facebook and I started exploring it after that,” he says. Bharat loves being able to share his thoughts about music “then and there”, whether it’s through an audio clipping or a YouTube video. Like him, many youngsters passionate about the classical arts love clicking on such posts. Another young Carnatic vocalist, Rithvik Raja, participates in user groups and discussion forums that provide varied perspectives on the same topic. “There is sharing of information and like-minded artistes interact with each other on one common platform in a very informal manner.”
Vocalist Sandeep Narayan doesn’t care for Facebook as a social tool but uses it to keep up with his musical cohorts. Like him, all artistes, young and old, love social media for the ability to instantly share performance schedules and venues with one universal blast of a status message on forums such as Facebook.
The flip side of social media and high technology is the callousness with which some people exploit it, say several senior artistes. People turn up at events and record something and put it up on YouTube without caring about the quality of the audio or video and, most importantly, without acquiring the artist’s permission.
“I believe in respecting any artiste — junior, senior and veteran,” says Sudha. “People cannot take artistes for granted. We have a certain working code.” As recording equipment pares down in size and beefs up in power, it’s harder to put measures in place to catch offenders who disrespect the artistes’ wishes.
Many artistes feel that the open access to an artiste does not seem to be matched by an understanding of an artiste’s body of work or regard for his or her depth of experience. Some believe that there’s an erosion of respect for the artiste as against the explosion of technology to foster the art; they point to the tendency in people to say what they want to say while hidden behind the protective veil of the Internet.
In a brave new open world the stakes are higher for artistes because fans’ expectations have risen in return for boundless adulation. An artiste’s footprints are difficult to erase. “An artiste now has a great responsibility to behave both on and off stage,” Sandeep Narayan says. He found himself combing through pages of his photographs taken in those first years of Facebook back in college to ensure that they were in keeping with his image as a musician in the Carnatic field. The Internet, unfortunately, also has infinite memory. And performers get caught unawares sometimes as Rithvik’s experience proved after a concert at Thiruvananthapuram.
“I found a post on Facebook from a person who attended my Thiruvananthapuram concert for the same organisation a couple of years before. After commending me for my valiant effort, the man duly noted that I also sang the same kriti , Sri Krishnam, the previous time.”
Comments and judgments like that from fans to junior and senior artistes fall into the accepted norms of behaviour in a networked, digital age. The mystique of the musician has been punctured somewhat by finger pointing — with “likes” and “dislikes” and, on rare occasions, the proverbial middle finger.
In the olden days, the halo that surrounded the artiste was part of what made the world of arts exciting for rasikas . That glow is fading, unfortunately. “I think artistes don’t need it,” says Sandeep. “They don’t require it and care about it as much anymore.”
But Priya thinks otherwise. She believes that art demands that “aura”, just so a curiosity may be alive in the relationship between the artiste and her audience. “There is a certain mystical quality to art. Artists do need a little distance from their audience and I feel that all this over-accessibility demystifies it in some way.”
