Ranjani and Gayatri: Anatomy of a Duet

On Republic Day eve, the government conferred the Padma Shri on two musicians whose careers have moved from violin virtuosity through vocal stardom into something more restless: a refusal to let the form settle, an instinct to test what else their music can hold.

They grew up in a house where ragas arrived before words, Ranjani born in May 1973 and Gayatri three years later. By the time Gayatri could speak, she could identify over a hundred ragas. By the time Ranjani was five, she could navigate polyrhythmic structures that occupy university students. Violin training began at age nine for Ranjani at nine and six for Gayatri. Their teacher, TS Krishnaswami, was a pedagogue of rigour and students knew the cost of insufficient practice. Within three years of their debut concert in 1986, they were accompanying musicians of institutional standing including DK Pattammal and M Balamuralikrishna. As violinists, their bani was notable for structure. They were good accompanists because they could anticipate rather than imitate, returning a vocalist’s phrase not as echo but as reinforcement, thickening the raga’s spine rather than decorating its surface. The sisters were known for restraint in bowing, for letting gamakas breathe. What some older listeners missed in their recent vocal years was not discipline, which remained formidable, but this particular spaciousness—the sense that the music was being allowed to open at its own pace rather than urged forward by performance momentum.

By 1997, aged 24 and 21, they had acquired the recognition most musicians require decades to accumulate: A-grade status, major sabha invitations. They had reached the summit that accompanists occupy. They walked away.

The decision to study voice with PS Narayanaswamy meant beginning again. Fluent in one classical language, they would learn to think in another. Within three years of beginning vocal training, their debut album was released. Vocal performance offered something violin accompaniment could not—the stage as solo territory, the voice as site of authorship. Within a few seasons they had their own audience, their own concert draw, recognition that no longer arrived through association with someone else’s performance. By the mid-2000s, they were among the most visible faces in Carnatic music.

As star vocalists, they continued to make beautiful music and became stars with full awareness of what that status entails. Their concerts combine technical ambition with devotional and lighter pieces, enlarging their support base well beyond the orthodox sabha circuit. Yet success in a classical tradition carries its own tensions. One must keep proving technical credentials while remaining accessible. One must expand repertoire without appearing to dilute form. The mathematics of holding both audiences—the rasikas who demand architectural depth and the broader listeners who want immediacy and emotional legibility—never quite resolves.

They began singing abhangs in the early 2000s, not as novelty inserts but as part of a longer musical biography shaped by growing up in Mumbai, by Vitthal processions and a sound-world where Marathi devotion coexisted with South Indian classicism. They sang Hindustani ragas within Carnatic concerts, shaping abhangs through raga frames like Chandrakauns. They sang in eight languages. These were not random excursions but part of a consistent instinct: to see how far the oeuvre could stretch without snapping.

Not all observers welcomed this trajectory. Concert reviews noted that certain renditions “sounded fast”, that sangatis became repetitive, that the long arcs of raga development sometimes yielded to display. A veteran musician put it more gently: as violinists they had been at the very peak of artistry; as vocalists they continued to make beautiful music, but now within a stardom that demanded different kinds of decisions. What some listeners heard as compression, others experienced as voltage: performances shaped for momentum, with phrases moving swiftly toward resolution.

When they perform, they dress like a duet, complementing each other’s colours. One arrives in a deep tone, the other in its answering shade. Onstage they do not sing as mirrors but as counterweights. One voice leans toward bhāva and contour, the other toward sparkle and propulsion, so that the music keeps correcting itself in real time. An alapana begins in one register and is finished and even contradicted by the other. This responsiveness is part of what travels well online. They are also stars on social media—a quick raga sketch, a clean lift into neraval or swara, percussion locking in, the hall answering back. Their own social feeds lean into pedagogy as much as performance. 

In March 2024, Ranjani and Gayatri withdrew from the Music Academy programme honouring TM Krishna, who had just received the Sangita Kalanidhi. Krishna positions his art as deliberately political, performing works celebrating Periyar, juxtaposing ragas with Christian hymns, arguing that Carnatic institutions carry caste-brahminical infrastructures that constrain the tradition. In their statement of withdrawal, the sisters associated Krishna with what they termed “genocide mongers and filthy discourse”. They made clear they understood his interpretation as fundamentally opposed to their own. To hold a tradition is to hold power—the power to determine what is legitimate, to define acceptable interpretation. They exercised that power.

For some listeners, the comments left a bad taste. For years, these musicians had been understood as broad-minded, willing to move beyond classical purity toward something more plural and accessible. That they would then draw such sharp lines, exclude rather than accommodate, exposed something that had always been present: a sense of who gets to interpret tradition, and how far dissent may travel before it becomes unacceptable. When senior artists take public positions, they are not only expressing belief but signalling institutional alignment. Withdrawal from a programme is also a statement about whom the ecosystem should reward, whom it should isolate, and what kinds of critique it will tolerate within its own halls. In that sense, the sisters’ decision was not merely ideological; it was infrastructural, shaping the cultural weather in which younger musicians must perform.

This does not erase their artistry or their technical achievements. It does not cancel the discipline, the listening, the years of training that make their concerts what they are. It simply names the cost. Ranjani and Gayatri are artists of genuine mastery whose careers hold two impulses at once: an eagerness to stretch musical language, and an equally strong instinct to guard the structures that certify it. They occupy a terrain where artistic generosity and institutional gatekeeping coexist, unresolved.