If you are used to percussionists raising a sonic storm on stage, you could be forgiven for thinking sometimes that K Arun Prakash has gone into a reverie during a concert. No razzle dazzle virtuosity for him, the flying fingers, the electrifying upbeat or the satisfying crash of a crescendo. For this mridangam stalwart, silence is an ally, it is the moments when his fingers are off the drum that define his music.
For stretches during a concert, Arun sits still, an arm anchored at an angle on a knee or rested on the mridangam, his gaze distracted. But when he steps in, the beats on his mridangam work an unusual magic, becoming one with the note emerging from the singer’s throat or the violin’s bow, framing, highlighting and embellishing it.
For all the moments of quietude and the absence of predictable fireworks, Arun is one of the most lyrical, engaged and moving percussionists of our times. His mridangam playing is like the percussive voice of a raga, melodic and mood driven.
In the galaxy of Carnatic rhythm wizards, Arun’s quietude is an aberration. He is acutely aware of how polarising his style is, of the dark mutterings that he plays too little. But winning applause for his skills, formidable as they are, is at the bottom of his priority list, he says.
“I don’t need to go thaka-chika thaka-chika non-stop on the stage just because people expect it of me,” he said. “Audiences are conditioned to speed and they may find my philosophy hard to accept. But laya is not just math. And it is my duty to respect the beauty of the composition. I am a rasika first and foremost.” He added only in half jest, “If you enjoy music as much as I do, it is almost impossible to drum.”
His percussive ideology has a fiercely loyal band of musicians and audiences. For the past nearly four decades, he has formed an exceptional triumvirate with vocalist TM Krishna and violinist RK Shriramkumar and is a staple in their ensemble presentations like the Friends in Concert series. He is much-sought after for his lecture demonstrations on the spaces where raga and tala meet. And very unusually for a drummer, he is a tunesmith and a composer of formidable strength.
Carnatic vocalist Vignesh Ishwar says it is limiting to categorise Arun as a tala accompanist. “I would say he is a raga accompanist,” Ishwar explained. “He has a vision of the total melody, and his approach is very eclectic – he likes every kind of sound and he draws from all of it in his music. His silence on the stage comes with an intent and you have to be intensely aware of it when he is accompanying you, at all times, or it could show you up.”
An accompanying percussionist in Carnatic music has two kinds of spaces in a concert – one in tandem with the primary music being performed and within the interludes that this offers, and the second, in the tani avartanam, time given to the percussionist to stage a brief solo, often along with a second percussionist.
Shriramkumar argues that far from being an indifferent musician, as some critics allege, Arun’s understanding of music and music systems are way beyond what is expected of a percussionist. He points to the unerring exactitude with which his friend understands the subtleties of closely allied ragas like a Devagandhari and an Arabhi or a Surati and Narayanagaula or a Harikambhoji and Kamas. Or the intracacies of poetics and music ingrained in the compositions of the Trinity. All this, apart from his mastery over the complexities of laya.
“He is stupendous – he can compose, impromptu, a tani avartanam with the shollu (syllable) developments, nadais (subdivisions), moharas (small compositions) and korvais (rhythm pattern) in any tala, in any eduppu (beginning point) with such precision and ease,” said Shriramkumar.
For younger mridangam players he opens up an alternative world of percussion, showing them possibilities that they can explore on their own individual journeys. Praveen Sparsh defines Arun’s music as minimalistic and equally deserving of space as the electrifying stuff we usually see on stage. “There has to be space for all approaches,” said Sparsh. “His is a very unique ideology and has tremendous space for exploration and he must be heard more.”
Math and aesthetics
It was on a bus ride to a concert in Thirumullaivayil, on Chennai’s northwestern fringes, that Shriramkumar recalls first meeting his friend and long-time collaborator. All these years, the violinist has never tired of marvelling at Arun’s engagement with music systems of all kinds, from Hindustanti to jazz, and film to folk.
“He has a very astute sense of math and aesthetics,” said Shriramkumar. “So the strokes range from absolute silence to tender touches to tight exuberant ones....never harsh or inappropriate. Sometimes his playing is mistaken for indifference but his thought process is directed by the music, not preset directives.”
This approach became evident at a jam-packed morning academic session at Chennai’s Music Academy last December. Arun was explaining why he does what he does in a talk titled Accompanying a Raga, A Percussive Perspective. Alongside him, illustrating his philosophy of how rhythm meets melody, was young Carnatic vocalist Brinda Manickavasagam and accompanying violinist N Madan Mohan.
Arun’s exceptional understanding of raga music became evident as he took the audience through its lyrical expanse, explaining how critical it is to expose the “trump cards” that composers hide in a work. For him, it is the mridangam that is his co-conspirator in this effort. As Brinda sang an array of ragas – Kannada, Bhairavi, Chetashri – he pointed out that his place in this music was not to perform what he knows but underline how she sang.
“Arun anna totally is in total empathy with the musician he accompanies,” said Brinda. “His playing tells me: we are speaking the same language. And he is not playing to shine but to make sure that the music we produce is precious. Also, he is so erudite he plays differently for different banis (styles).”
To grasp his approach to music, it helps to understand where it comes from – a place of sweeping curiosity.
Diverse influences
In his characteristic self-deprecating style, Arun says he was not one of those born geniuses. “My mother maintains that I would bang pots and pans in the kitchen but I have no memory of this.”
His father L Krishnan was a disciple of the great vocalist GN Balasubramaniam and music was a constant at home. “My father lived in Delhi as a youngster, and when GNB went to sing for his upanayanam there, he heard my father and asked him to come and learn from him in Chennai.” Krishnan was into every kind of music – Hindustani, Carnatic, film, devotional, western classical – and this openness was inherited by Arun as a legacy.
In Chennai, Krishnan moved to a new world, starting with assisting composer Rajeshwara Rao in the Telugu film industry. He then joined All India Radio Chennai as a composer in 1976. His career took yet another turn when he moved into the then booming industry – devotional music cassettes. “There was not a Carnatic musician he did not work with, as a composer and arranger in the 1980s and 1990s when this industry was at its peak,” said Arun. “And there was not a cassette company that grew in this boom that he did not produce music for.”
It was at age nine that Arun stumbled into music. The year was 1977 and, during his school vacation, he had been tasked with taking lunch to his father at All India Radio. One day, he was waiting in the music room when he began drumming on a mridangam lying around. His father stepped in with a reprimand when a voice asked: “Is he learning mridangam?” “No, but you should teach him,” his father responded.
And just like that, Arun became a student of the drum. His guru was the mridangam master Ramanathapuram MN Kandaswamy Pillai. He debuted two years later, and within a few years, started to play for the greats of the time, including DK Pattammal, KV Narayanaswamy, TN Krishnan and Lalgudi G Jayaraman.
Through all of this, he says, he kept his ears open to all kinds of musical influences, especially film music. And that remains an obsession to this day. For him SD Burman, Madan Mohan and Salil Chowdhury are the trinity of Hindi film music.
In school, he recalls being riveted by the hits of the day and humming them all day. Mere sapnon ki rani from Aradhana and Zindagi ek safar from Andaz became earworms. With his friend Jagan he would analyse film songs – and still does – critiquing Sholay’s soundtrack, figuring out the chords of Chura liya hai, diving into how a composer probably put a song together, discussing the dynamism a singer brought to it, how and where the orchestration stepped in.
But nothing prepared him for the impact of Ilaiyaraaja who, as Arun says, brought to Tamil films a new sound – the sheer content of it and the way he redefined orchestration – with Annakili in 1976. He was smitten, he remembers, and also moved enough to realise the importance of breaking barriers.
“You have to be original,” he said. “I know there are many critics of my style. ‘What is happening?’, ‘What are you doing?’, I am asked. My work is not accepted easily because I am working on rewriting the rules of percussive accompaniment. Of course I am inspired by the great mridangam vidwans of yesteryear, but where is the value in just following them? I take a leaf out of everyone’s books but then I do my own thing, convert this inspiration into my voice.”
Arun recalls a musician, unnerved by his pause on the drum, nudging the ghatam player into stepping in to fill the silence. “But my whole idea always is to create a comfort zone for the musician I accompany. Fast music is considered difficult and of course it is but slow is even harder. Krishna’s kala pramanan [pace] for instance is not easy to play with.”
For Arun, the three of them are sounding boards for each other’s music – highly individualistic artistes who argue, discuss, fight over creative ideas. Which, he says, is how music should be made.
In a moving tribute to his friend and collaborator on his 50th birthday, Krishna wrote in The Hindu: “What and when is a mridangam artiste actually accompanying? Is he playing only when noticed unmistakably?...Does that one stroke that Arun plays per beat not amount to embroidery? Isn’t it magical that you forget that he exists?”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
