Performing Identities:Tyagaraja Music Festivals In

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH, Vol.16, No.2, Autumn 1996 PERFORMING IDENTITIES: TYAGARAJA MUSIC FESTIVALS IN NORTH AMERICA Kathryn Hansen It is 9 a.m. in Cleveland and the beginning of what promises to be an extraordinary event.l Soon the speeches will commence and the governor’s proclamation will be read, declaring April 18 and 19, 1992, as Saint Tyagaraja Days throughout the state of Ohio. But now scores of musicians are coming up and sitting on the carpeted stage. Vocalists and instrumentalists, amateurs and professionals, women and men, old and young crowd together until there is room only in the wings. After a flute prelude, they launch into brisk unison singing, commencing with Jagadanandakaraka, a Sanskrit composition enumerating the 108 names of Lord Rama, composed in the raga Nata. This is followed immediately by three equally wordy but lively, rhythmic pieces set to different ghana (heavy, serious) ragas. The chorus falters a bit on the multiple stanzas of composition number four, Kanakana in raga Varali, musically the most challenging of the pieces, but the leaders at the front pull the laggards along. Endarõ mahanubhavula, a homage in Telugu to all the great souls who have gone before, brings the group singing triumphantly to an end. The paflcamma krids- the five gems or masterworks - have been completed, and another Tyagaraja festival has officially begun. The Tyagaraja festival, known to its participants as an aradhana utsavam (or a jayanti, when held on the birth rather than death anniversary of the poet-composer), has in the past decade become the most popular annual celebration for South Indians resident in North America. At least one hundred such observances are held in the United States and Canada every year. Commencing about fifteen years ago in Toronto, Cleveland, 1 Much of the research on which this article is based was undertaken with the assistance of a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1992-94), whose support is most gratefully acknowledged. I also wish to thank the American Institute of Indian Studies for a fellowship that enabled me to study Karnatak music in India in 1990-91. This essay draws upon my observation of a number of Tyagarja festivals, including those held in Cleveland in 1992 and 1987, in the New York/New Jersey area in 1992-93, in Tiruvaiyaru in 1978, and in Madurai in 1991. Vasudha Narayanan, Norman Cutler, Stuart Blackburn, David Shulman, and T. Temple Tuttle commented on an earlier draft of this essay, and their suggestions were extremely helpful. I am particularly indebted to Carla Petievich, my collaborator on the SSHRCC-funded project, whose assistance contributed significantly to the success of this research. Whatever flaws remain in the work are of course my own. Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at University of Texas Libraries on November 28, 2015 156 Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Queens, these festivals have since spread to other cities and to the recently-built Hindu temples. Like similar events all over India and elsewhere around the world, their prototype is the yearly commemoration in Tiruvaiyaru in Tanjavur district, Tamil Nadu. In the U.S. and Canada, the festivals take place in areas with significant concentrations of immigrants from the four southern states of India: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. Produced locally by small groups of volunteers, they receive their staunchest support from amateur musicians, music teachers, and lovers of Karnatak music--the classical music system of South India. Audiences are overwhelmingly of South Indian origin, with Tamil and Telugu speakers predominating. Many festivals originated as small-scale observances in private homes. Lately they have taken on a grander, more public character as community size and resources have expanded. Common venues are university or high school auditoria, churches, and multi-functional halls within South Indian-style temple complexes. The attachment of diasporic South Indians to the Tyagaraja festival illustrates the major role played by the performative arts in the reinvention of cultural identities that occurs following migration. Celebrations in which music and dance figure centrally have become ubiquitous in the public culture of Indian communities in the diaspora, yet only recently has attention focused on the expressive life of immigrant groups in general and of South Asians in particular. As part of a larger project to document changes in text and context as art forms from the Indian subcontinent move into new locales, this essay undertakes to describe the dynamics of the transplantation of one particular festival. The Tyagaraja music festival provides an illuminating example of how cultural performances that are highly specific, even parochial, in their origins, can acquire extended layers of meaning as they move into transnational territory. Although the figure of Tyagaraja has served as a significant icon for South Indians since the early twentieth century, the upsurge in Tyagaraja festivals worldwide is quite a recent phenomenon. This essay is necessarily too preliminary to explain fully the reasons for the festival’s growing global popularity. However, it is possible at this point to identify three central concerns shared by festival participants that are addressed directly and indirectly throughout the celebration. These concerns--the reproduction of culture, the building of community, and the construction of transnational identity - help to explain the role the Tyagaraja festival plays in the new landscape created by the growing presence of South Indians in the U.S. and Canada. Of these concerns, the reproduction of culture is most frequently suggested by the festival’s organisers and participants as their principal aim, typically in the form of assertions that the festival’s function is to transmit musical tradition from one generation to the next. By honouring Kamatak music’s historical figures and present- day leaders and by providing an opportunity for both amateurs and professionals to Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at University of Texas Libraries on November 28, 2015 157 perform, the festival creates an arena for passing on valued cultural traditions, transplanting them, as it were, into new soil. Through its rituals and rhetoric, moreover, the festival situates music performance and learning within a matrix of Hindu devotionalism, asserting a bond between art and belief that is understood as a distinctive sign of ’Indian culture.’ At the level of social organisation, the Tyagaraja festival draws disparate groups together through its participatory order of events and generates a sense of common purpose. Although public festivals characteristically obliterate certain boundaries and erect others, the increased need for group articulation and cohesion among recent immigrants seems to underlie the elaboration of this aspect of the celebration. Community-building occurs both through the reinterpretation of the vocabularies of service (seva) and devotion (bhakti) and through creative adaptations to the new and to a certain extent alien environment. Less intentional, less explicitly acknowledged perhaps, is the powerful process by which transnational identity is negotiated within the festival proceedings. As a cultural space that links the diaspora with the homeland, the festival demarcates an arena of exchange and contestation between South Asia and the North American landscape. Even as festival participants forge a bond with the past through remembrance of a culture hero, they cement present ties with the artistic community in India, setting up flows of capital via cultural patronage. Those involved in the festival, especially in the capacity of organisers but also as performers or simple spectators, demonstrate that they are preserving their Indianness, even though they have settled outside India. By producing a major cultural event, immigrants strive to legitimise their presence on North American soil and validate their status--that of the ’non-resident’ Indian (NRI)--among ’resident’ Indians back home. Viewed from these various perspectives, this festival (like cultural performances in general) offers its participants a superfluity of meanings. It operates on a number of levels, and individuals and sub-groups take from it what they need (and give what they have). Indeed, the Tyagaraja festival is characterised by a complexity of structure and a richness of symbolism that make it a particularly versatile medium for diasporic interaction. Multiple strands are incorporated within the discrete sections that constitute the festival’s temporal order of events, an order that has remained fairly standard even after the shift to the North American environment. But before turning to these, first a few words about Tyagaraja. Tyagaraja (Ty5ga Brahmam, 1767-1847) belonged to a highly respected line of viiggeyakäras or poet-composers who crafted poems of praise to the gods and also composed the musical settings that best displayed them. While such a dual role was not uncommon, Tyagaraja’s unique contribution to Karnatak music history was to develop the lqiti, a tripartite genre of composition that greatly enhanced the musical Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at University of Texas Libraries on November 28, 2015 158 sophistication of devotional song. Tyagaraja is generally thought to be the most eminent of the early nineteenth-century triad of composers (the ’Trinity’), which includes his contemporaries Muttusvami Ddcsitar and gyama Sastri,

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