When Susheela Raman sings ‘Paalum Thelithenum’ (milk and pure honey), an Avvaiyar prayer to Vinayaka recited everyday by millions of Tamil children, with a twang in her velvety voice, the invitation is surely compelling. What is to be lisped with childish innocence, however, assumes a husky edge in Susheela’s beginning line. When she repeats the word ‘thunga’ (elephant trunk) unnecessarily and distorts and elongates ‘thoo’ in the word ‘thoomaniye” (pure and precious treasure), ‘maniye’ is completely lost on us. Tamil listeners may now feel far removed from the prayer they learned in childhood.
We have already forgiven her for mispronouncing the word ‘theli’ in ‘thelithenum’ with a lighter ‘l’ which is a common mistake television newsreaders in Tamil Nadu commit. But Tamils would wonder why the line offering four eatables to Vinayaka invites a swaying of the hips from Susheela. And even before we come out of our wonder Susheela makes the gesture of spinning a top and lifts her hand like a cricket umpire while praying to Vinayaka for proficiency in Tamil. She doesn’t stop there. Ecstatic gyrations, eyes-shut trances, and wild hair whippings follow, accompanied by electric guitar riffs.
For the traditional Tamil, Susheela Raman’s sound, gestures and gyrations may be controversial. But, in taking the genre of Tamil bhakti to a global audience, UK-born Susheela, a major star of world music, in her own way communicates the essence of the genre — invoking ecstasy. She declares on her website: “I don’t want to respect artificial barriers between music, I want to channel everything into the experience. Music is like a goddess that is always changing its mind, never straightforward. To earn her blessings and stay close to her, musicians have to try new things.”
For Susheela, the ecstasy that Tamil bhakti music seeks to provide is not to be achieved through slow ascendance. She simply plunges into it in the very first opening line as she does in the album ‘Vel’. K B Sunderambal, Madurai Somasundram, and Bangalore Ramani Amma would have also begun their first line of their Murugan bhakti song in a high pitch and gone for a higher pitch as the song progressed. Susheela has no such compulsions and her European audience would not have cared less had she opted for a more sober opening. However, Susheela’s first leap into ecstasy facilitates her fusion, like in her rendering of Madurai Somu’s ‘Marudamalai maamaniye murugaiyya’.
In the song, Somu ascends into emotional heights only after a few syllables. Kunnakudi Vaidhyanathan’s violin accentuates Somu’s climb and the ecstatic bursts come nearly at the end. What Susheela does is to begin in the second half of the original Tamil song, and replace the native morsing, ghatam, and violin interlude with the singing of Mian Miri Qawwals from Lahore. Followed by the tabla, Susheela launches her ‘Marudamalai maamaniye’ from a still higher pitch with a faster rhythm.
The effect is terrific because of the newness of the Qawwali singing merging perfectly with the high singing of Tamil bhakti music. The faster rhythm does not allow Susheela to distort words as she does in other songs. When she hands over the mantle back to the Quwwali chorus the similarity of rhythms smoothens the transition. Susheela’s frenzied whipping of the hair does add its visual quality to the orgasmic outbursts. In a way Susheela discovers and demonstrates the inner flow and the connectivity that exists between Qawwali singing and Tamil bhakti music.
When she sings ‘Velundu mayilundu’ with the interceptions from Quwwali musicians singing ‘Nuri Nuri’, the mixture already feels like a natural flow. It also becomes clear that the meanings of the words no longer matter to anyone except the singers themselves. For the audience, it’s all pure rhythmic sounds and bodily gestures.
Tamil bhakti music is at the centre of her three albums: Salt Rain, Music For Crocodiles, and 331/3. In Tamil Nadu, bhakti music is a vehicle for devotees to achieve communion with their gods guided through the meaning of words. The ecstatic experience is supposed to be the result of such a communion. In the Susheela Raman variety of world music, the ecstasy and emotional heights are already there as rhythms, sounds, gestures, and ambience. Devoid of meanings delivered by words, we experience words mingling with other sounds to create pure music. Perhaps only through such channels and loss of ‘word meaning’, native Tamil bhakti music could reach out and achieve a universal appeal.
For Tamil bhakti music is both ancient and contemporary and is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of Tamils living worldwide. For instance, while the poem ‘Paalum thelithenum’ is a Sangam-age composition attributed to Avvaiyar, the grand old lady of Tamil poetry, ‘Marudamalai maamaniye murugaiyya’ is a film song written by Kannadasan. Along with the Saivite and Vaishnavite bhakti movements, Murugan worship had seeped through Tamil history from ancient times, and it achieved canonical status in the 15th century as evidenced by the corpus of songs by Arunagirinathar. Trance behavior and Tamil Murugan bhakti are intimately intertwined, and it takes a Susheela Raman to identify its potential to sync with the ecstasy of Sufi Quwaali music of Pakistan.
(The author is a writer and folklorist who heads the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai)
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / by M D Muthukumaraswamy, TNN / June 13th, 2015