Maiyyage santosada mallige biridaithe
If you’ve never seen a virtual lying-in-state, it might be a good idea to get over to the quarter of YouTube that is reserved for clips of ‘song-and-dance sequences from South Indian films’-to borrow the gloss that Bangalore newspapers used for programmes named Chitramala and Chitrageethe in the Stone Age of television.
People file past several hundred videos in sombre processions, saying a name, dropping a tear, or vice versa, while remembering a time in their past, and talking of divine gifts.
Where did the collective, continuing sadness that greeted his going come from?
The easy answer is to talk of the pandemic claiming him, that his passing somehow makes more visible the wound that COVID-19 has become. That his well-known insistence on being a good man is now transformed into a tragic intensity.
Are there other answers? I should begin with a story about him.
My mother (or someone like that, maybe my Tamizh teacher in school) once told me that he worked in the Accountant General’s Office in Madras as a clerk. I haven’t found a single reference anywhere to support this.
Not that it matters. Even if it were completely untrue, as many such stories are, there’s something else in it that I want to pay attention to. So, he worked as a clerk, and then somebody noticed his other talent, and told him to press ahead with it. And so he did, and lived happily ever after.
This story is a little piece of 1970s lore, produced by people like my mother, with a little help from their friends.
Many of them were people with an SSLC or an Intermediate qualification to their names: stuck in non-jobs at places like the AG’s Office and the drudgery of mindless pen-pushing, yet fearful of being pushed back into unemployment. They were grateful for the leg-up that a ‘Class III’ job offered, but were nevertheless magicked into being piggy banks; each day went like a penny for thoughts of escape. Some of these pennies went rolling out in circumambulations around that other offices that produced correspondence degrees.
He was, for all these people, the one who escaped. From all those fears, those calculations and the premature middle age that they impose; not by the known ways and means, but by a mystery. Not into the dream he himself seems to have had, the white-collar one, but another far more fantastic one-the mystery of art--where job and picnic and reporting only to yourself were one. His agelessness may have come from being seized up in this mystery, at least to people who believed that story.
His life as an escapee is also visible in the other stories around him. That he liked smoking, that he liked a drink ‘within limits’, that he liked ice-cream, that he wasn’t a stickler for some strict routine mandated by orthodoxy.
S. P. Balasubrahmanyam’s life was turned by such means into a modern fairy tale, that of the escape hero. Visible within it are traditional motifs of the fairy tale such as ordinary but consistent decency, luck, hard work, amateur talent, and flashes of the modern such as a self that he made without apprenticeship or formal training, and playing by his own rules rather than those sanctioned.
In my own youth, the common, shared fantasy was a ‘business-American’ version. Making a pile young, and retiring young to be some Bill-Gates-type person, rather than finding something you love, working at it all the time, and never leaving it. SPB was this opposite, older thing, and it is still far more fascinating.
There is another such escapee, from a stricter era. R.K.Narayan, who worked for himself, and made a living almost exclusively from writing, but I don’t recall him travel through other people’s words with this heroic aura of having escaped a job into a life in a sort of art.
That fairy tale came to an end last month, for some people. The fake backstory was perhaps a way of making the fairy tale more faerie, more satisfying.
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When does the singer become the song he has sung, taking it back from the actors who own it at first sight because it seems to come from within them, from other claimants like those who filmed it, or wrote it, or composed the music?
Each of you will remember a moment when you learned to recognise his voice. That moment, embarrassingly, for me, did not happen inside a language in which I have any mooring-not in Kannada, Malayalam or Tamizh. I must have heard a thousand songs he sang, but they never registered in singerly fashion, invariably as from this film, or from a film by this director, or actor.
The moment of recognition happened sometime in the year 1985, a time when the afternoons of my summer vacations were dutifully deposited around AIR’s Man Chahe Geet. Listeners from some other corner of India kept requesting a song from a Blue Lagoon rip-off starring Mohnish Behl and Ayesha Dutt, later Shroff.
It never appeared on Chitrahaar, and never played on the Saturday or Sunday slots reserved for films. You might figure why upon watching the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jHSYXoVBkU
That endlessly voyeuristic tangling of limbs apart, it is a song of operatic vowelling, opening with words built for elongation, for public baring of tonsils and laryngeal sightings: dewaanaaaa, anjaaanaaa, afsaaanaaa and zamanaaaa.
To listen to it is to be propelled into soaring and floating and weightlessness, into an evocation thus of the time-bend that is the rapture of young love, and of the placid wombing in an ocean that is the stage for all this rapture.
I must wonder if I’ recognised’ him in this song because I saw him aim for the familiar absences left behind by Talat and Rafi, and succeed in writing his name next to them while referring to them.
To the non-expert listener to fillum songs that I was, this one quickly became the thing that came to mind when I heard of ardent wooing.
That word ardent once referred to spirits, the distilled kind, the sort that burned and evaporated and condensed again.
It is this quick art that we must understand as the special thing he brought to different moments of transformation in several cinemas; the several iterations of the youth film in Hindi cinema over two decades, the outdoor-urban mode of Kannada cinema, and the coming of a cinema that imagined a non-Brahmin/non-Savarna ordinary in Tamizh Nadu.
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There is also a kind of knowing without knowing. In 1978, I was seven years old, and I did not know any Kannada, because I lived in the Cantonment where nobody really spoke Kannada.
We had singing competition in school; smol boys went and stood next to the class teacher’s desk, folded their hands in front of them to show that they were good boys, and looked up at the ceiling and sang something or the other.
My friend Benu sang I wish I was in Monkeyland, and I never forgot the lyrics because he sang it so well. And because it had a closing stanza in the L language. I sang Aararo-Aariraro Achande mol Aararo. For no earthly reason other than the fact that my mother sang along when it played on the radio, and the words stuck in my head.
A boy named Jayakumar belted out a Kannada song with great feeling at Singing Test that year. I had no idea what the words meant, but I never forgot the one stanza he sang because it seemed to draw a taut length of violin-string below my ribs without hurting immediately.
The cut was for later. The words refused to go away, and one day I asked him to tell me what they meant. He said enough for me to understand that they were about finding it impossible to go on without the other person, but this idea sounded much better in Kannada, a language I did not know at all.
This is that song, and it has the same quality that I found myself remembering in Teri Baahon Mein, an electric kiss, an evaporating burn, somewhat like sneaking a swig of whisky too early, a sense of too much, followed by a sense that it was too little.
SPB, in Hombisilu, with music by Rajan-Nagendra.
https://youtu.be/PjYRNaAucg8
That downward slide with saa-aa-gadu, after the ambitious glide uphill in a wet boat in neera bittu nelada mele doni! I still hear that last heave before the boat finally refuses the shore and lurches back, its bottom lugubrious and hollow against all those rocks and stones.
An Upendrakumar composition for the Puttanna Kanagal film Dharmasere has the lovers trying to invent a way of talking about the pleasure of conversation. In my head, it never fails to suggest a coy post-coital uncoiling. It is likewise a song where we see SPB meet his equal in S. Janaki, in a shared capacity for making the voice shimmer in and out of the word with new suggestions and possibilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoXf5ZKCvVE
One part of the mystery of SPB’s art is his capacity to go beyond a glossiness of technique, or note-perfect virtuosity, to offer those who list a beguiling intimacy. When the initial burn wears off, this is what we are left with.
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In February 1985, I spent an entire day at our neighbours’ with my mother. We had no TV set, and it was Counting Day, in an election that had been called after Hegde’s Janata government had resigned because they drew a blank in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls. We knew which side we were on: Rajiv Gandhi had unnecessarily said that Hegde had no moral right to continue as CM.
In between the thrills of watching Hegde stage a great comeback, we watched several Kannada films, including a Pavana Ganga, starring Aarathi, uncharacteristically in a doormat role that had the women tut-tutting.
https://youtu.be/QbE2mLrK1LM
I didn’t think about the politics of the film. I was enraptured by this song, set in a Bangalore like my own, where many lived in quatres, and kalonies, and riding a red bus in a suit was not at all odd. We rarely got to see these captured cinematically, for the films we got to watch on DD were all studio-era.
Nobody is lip-syncing in this song; we are to believe instead that the song is the signifier for the elsewhere that love becomes. SPB, somehow, is often the voice that accompanies us in these peregrinations across a city transformed by the simple magic of the camera’s variable eye. Strike that. SPB, in singing the man entranced, produces an akam, a warm interiority of emotion and the mother tongue, that carries him through the indistinct, affectless spaces of the puram, the exterior that is the city. Pranayaraja, or Romance-King Srinath’s suit is part of that non-descript exteriority; Aarathi’s luminously lit face persists through grimy interiors and the garment factory where she works to become that akam, that sensuous fusion of mother-tongue and wonder that is offered in the opening lines: ‘that light in the sky is you/what is this joy that sighting you brings’?
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SPB manages to be the Johnny on the spot when the camera discovers Bangalore for Kannada cinema in another way.
Maniratnam made his first film in Kannada. Pallavi Anupallavi, to give you the musical metaphor that the film claims for its story, stars a not-yet big-league Anil Kapoor, then cynosure Kiran Vairale, and Lakshmi, with music by Ilayaraja and playback by SPB and S. Janaki, and camerawork by Balu Mahendra.
Given all this outsiderliness that went into its making, the film is a triumph of intuition. It is the first Kannada film where Bangalore’s Cantonment has a starring role. The film stumbles accidentally on history when it lavishes its attention on this spectral location within the city. For generations of Bangaloreans, Cantonment has been in metonymy with the elsewhere that is romantic.
Intuition, is however, a good word to hold. The longevity of SPB’s career seems to come from an unerring capacity to locate the emotional hardwiring of the characters whom he sang for and to make revelations of this discovery to his audience. If we watch his Naguva Nayana, we may see this intuition at work. It is likewise, a less militant version of that moment where they sing the Marseillaise in Casablanca.
https://youtu.be/Dajcwrykmf8
RN Jayagopal’s words are about the capacity of young love to subsist on nothing; smiles contained in the eye, sweet silences, the plucking of the heart. But these are sufficient to cancel out the need for language and for poets. A little later, we find that the lovers will extract language and form from their small transactions with each other by the magic of synaesthesia: the whispers of the night are the sighting of a new raga, their love draws an inner rangoli that cannot be erased. All this makes possible a leap into the territory of miracle: one turns desire into a gentle rain of flowers as they wait while the other must walk across this carpet without crushing the dreams out of which they come.
These mystical transactions are Ilayaraja’s to interpret, and he does so entirely guided by intuition, for Kannada is not a language that he has. SPB’s intuitions guide him towards a hushed production, an understated rapture that lets the words do their work. He has to also make up for an Anil Kapoor who doesn’t know Kannada, perhaps bridge the disconnect between the ebullience of the actor’s body language and the artiste who dubs the Kannada words for him, and he manages to deliver on both these tall orders and make it all look infernally easy.
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In 1989, as I sat by the college canteen in the zone of slow blue conversation possible only when all your friends are smokers, in a year when SPB had begun doing the songs for younger Bollywood heroes, my friend Jolly offered a simple meditation as he tipped the ash. Your SPB, he said, is a good singer, but he’s not suited for Hindi. He doesn’t have the right touch, and he doesn’t know the language, and he gets the feel all wrong.
I wanted to protest, and utter many terms of abuse, and organise some education, but refrained because it was getting late, and I didn’t have the energy.
I should have called on this cheeky delight, composed only of movie titles, from EK Duuje Ke Liye, to school poor benighted Jolly in the range SPB seemed to find so effortlessly in a new language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq021lXIz9w
Mere Jeevan Saathi Pyar Kiye Jaa has two inspired bits of sentence-making . One is a bit that begins Shaadi ke Baad, and turns a bunch of one-word film titles into a family plan: Hamare Tumhaare, Munna, Guddi, Tinku, Mili, and then the somewhat unexpected Shin Shinaki Bubla Boo Khel Khel Mein. The other is the Chandan Kangan bIt. This is a song about wooing without words, or with the words you know, and it is SPB who handles this double task, the comedy of this moment and the wooing of the audience. Kamalahasan doesn’t really have to do anything, but have we ever known him to accept such strictures? More on that, later.
We can however turn around the thing Jolly was fixated on and eyeball it by the barrel of the gun that it belongs to. Despite being obviously the outsider in every industry except Telugu, his longevity across these diverse industries raises a question. What made this possible?
Answers like commitment and dedication are not bad shots. We have to ask what this commitment was about? springs from an intuitive ability to make his protagonist bearable and believable.
At various points in the Ek Duuje Ke Liye song, you have Kamalahasan trying to crawl out of his own skin, and scale up the lift like some prototype Spiderman.
This song is a prophecy of the monkey that Kamalahasan would eventually become.
A Kamalahasan who didn’t have SPB tempering his public persona would not have lasted as long as he did. The man cannot stop showing off.. If he didn’t sooner become the ridiculous figure that he is today, it could be because the voice that SPB gave him made people pause.
Our Savarna celluloid heroes tend to run amuck on a stage created by Avarna sweat. SPB’s long career was an exercise as peacemaker, in making these fellows given to excess seem bearable, seem interesting, seem like romantic possibilities.
All those people on YouTube were mourning him like they might have mourned a lover; they either did not know it, or found other words to say it.
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The imagination that SPB brought to taking the edge off his Savarna heroes is something that has gone underappreciated. Because in it is another element-a new, realistic Savarna work-ethic built on a recognition of the fact that the culture industries have changed hands.
I’m not entirely sure how to read one part of this rapprochement that he seemed to renew every time he sang.
There are his occasional attempts at going undercover to find a mode for Avarna characters. These stand out in contrast to the numbers where he delivered a sort of flighted intensity to go with the milk-chocolate good looks of otherwise ordinary Savarna heroes.
I use the word Avarna not as a synonym for Dalit, but as a replacement for Kancha Ilaiah’s famous hyphenated conjuring of a Dalit-Bahujan continuum.
In Parasangada Gende Thimma, the protagonist who is everywhere and nowhere is voiced, in the songs, by SPB. They are a treat, for you see him adroitly sidestepping the traps of cutesiness and caricature to arrive at some sort of truth.
The Thimmanna in love is given these extraordinarily beautiful lines by Doddarange Gowda: ‘Kunthru ninthru nanna cheluvi cheluvi kaadaithe/Maiyyage santosada mallige biridaithe (“Whether I sit or stand, my love is forever there/ Joy has unfurled across my body in jasmine blossoms”). In SPB’s new-found voice, these lines are an intimate acknowledgement of yearning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71_Rt_2iNj0
In Nenjathai Killathey, we see SPB reading a similar sort of terrain for us.
The image of a jogging woman turns into a sort of dialectical image for the idea of feminine independence in this film. Mahendran’s adventurous will leads him to cast the upper-crust Tam-Brahm debutant Suhasini in a non-Brahmin world in order to find what chance her free-spiritedness has against the shifting contours of caste and class. Her independence dwindles into nothing against a canvas of interacting individual choices.
The thing that marks the film for me is the idea of the anxious hero-Mohan plays a mechanic who ran away from home as a child and amounted only to so much without education. The settling of an initial contest between man and woman into companionable romance that the Paruvamae Puthiya Paadal Paadu contains is nevertheless continuously undone by SPB pulling off a somewhat subterranean brooding through the number.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNgo-JZzV5I
This is probably the most sophisticated, layered bringing-together of image and sound in Tamizh cinema: the collaboration between J. Mahendran, Ilayaraja and Ashok Kumar is completed when SPB gets his voice to offer intimations from the abyss.
In these two songs we see SPB as he was; the greatest actor of his generation because he did not need to go before the camera.
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How should we remember him? In the things he made possible for us; for me, and for you, which dear reader, may be entirely different from the ones I have listed. I shall not quarrel with any list you might make, as long as you have time for this one moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQBcRuSQBwU
Many years ago, somebody once told me that the words don’t matter in Indian music. SPB’s engineering degree was in use always through his career: in aid of an inventive joining of words and sound in lightness and lift that took us by surprise many times every year.
The camera remembers to show you a beaming BR Lakshman Rao, the man who wrote the superbly macaronic verses of Jaalibaarinalli kootha poli hudugaru, as he follows the singers in their gambolling through the fun in the lyrics. You’ll see SPB doing a little shabash as the younger singer pulls off a perfect glide on ‘chewing gum aadanu’.You don’t need superpowers to observe him taking in the writer’s capacity for mixing nonsense verses and sugama sangeetha to share its heady effervescence with you. You will perhaps wish, as I did, for the capacity to whistle a pitch-perfect version of the tune with the singers as they finish.
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