The Wisdom and Passion of VK Narayana Menon

In the Penguin edition of the ‘Collected Letters of George Orwell’ is printed a picture of a BBC group, called Recording Voices, taken in December 1942, where among those seated and looking seriously at the document spread out before them are MJ Tambimuthu, Venu Chitale, TS Eliot, Mulk Raj Anand and VK Narayana Menon. Standing behind them are Orwell, Nancy Parratt and William Empson. They were chalking out the wartime radio broadcast strategies and the ways of combating the powerful and sophisticated Nazi propoganda machine.

Menon, the scholar of classic Indian dance and music, was himself an excellent veena player apart from his many other accomplishments. He was a William Butler Yeats scholar and had written a definitive study on that Irish poet and great friend of India. Starting his career with the BBC as a music programme producer Menon was to become its director general.

He was also joint head of the International Broadcasting Association which he alternated with the celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Their association eventually was to prove a great boon for Indian artists. And there had been other surprising spinoffs of this association. This also required Menon to be travelling constantly across the world. During the course of one of these trips he had a brief encounter with the writer RK Narayan, in New York on 1954, where the latter had gone on a Rockefeller fellowship. The writer in his book, My Dateless Diary, recalls an instance where both of them are stepping out of Waldorf Astoria hotel with Menon jingling a pocketful of one dollar coins. At each step he would tip the bell boy, the doorman and the usher who opens the car, and they would deferentially bow and mention softly, ‘Watch your step, Sir’.

Menon was to join the All India Radio at the instance of Jawaharlal Nehru, as a  direct recruit, without having to go through the cumbersome  processes of administrative procedures and being cleared by the numerous agencies. He rose to become its Deputy Director General in 1954 and later the DG in 1965.

Apart from these positions he also held various important posts in many cultural organisations, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi. His last assignment was the setting up of the Tata’s ambitious National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai’s Nariman Point in 1980.

His friendship with Menuhin was to prove providential for India. The world famous artist was specially invited to perform in India in aid of drought relief and Menuhin reached in Delhi in 1952 and at the residence of Menon he renewed his acquaintance with the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar whom he had met as early as 1932 in Europe. It was in this house too they had a meeting with some of the musicians who were already famous and the violinist was charmed by the variety and spiritual overtones of Indian classical music, both Hindustani and Carnatic. He probably met the young DV Paluskar, who had suddenly burst into the music scene with his concert at the centuries-old Harivallabh Samaroh at Jullundur, and was charmed by the mellifluous voice of this gifted musician.

Yehudi Menuhin also undertook a tour of the South around this time and in Chennai was to meet MS Subbalakshmi and  virtuoso violinists like Dwaram Venkitaswami Nadu, Lalgudi Jayaraman and MS Gopalkrishnan and the mridamgam exponent Palghat Mani, who were all at the time at the peak of their careers. He was amazed by the way the violinists had adapted this Western instrument to the complexities of Carnatic music.

In Bombay during this same trip Menuhin had another interesting encounter with the chief conductor of the concerts that were organised on his behalf. That was Meli Mehta, the father of the celebrated conductor Zubin Mehta. Mehi and the violinist were to travel and perform together and at his request he performed with the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. During their rehearsal time Meli used to pick up the violin and play solo and the young Zubin pick up the conductor’s baton and began working with Menuhin. That was the beginning of another long friendship between the two musicians.  He also found that Zubin’s standards were impressive. India was capable mastering the best of the Western classical standards as well and not just the violin.

It was during this time that Menuhin had a recurrence of a chronic back problem which none of the doctors and experts in US or Europe he had consulted were able to cure, or did have a clue even. At the instance of Menon he was introduced to the yoga exponent BKS Iyengar, whom, according to legend, he gave just10 minutes. But their meeting was to last 50 minutes and this helped the violinist eventually to effect total cure of the problem. There is an interesting instance of the violinist meeting Nehru and both showing off their expertise in the headstand, (shirshasan). Iyengar’s reputation was subsequently to spread and he was almost solely responsible for popularising this system in the West though other yoga gurus had taken it abroad earlier.

While MS went on to perform at the United Nations Assembly and the Edinburgh festival and kept the diplomats and negotiators enthralled with her voice, Siddheswari Devi, the thumri singer from Benares, was to have a concert at the packed Albert Hall in London, but it was Paluskar who went to Beijing as part of high level Indian goodwill delegation, that also included Pandit Omkarnath Thakur, who was to get the greatest of applause. The Chinese were so attracted by his singing of bhajans especially that they did not leave him till he had sung for five hours.

If that was the reception that Paluskar got in the Chinese capital, Iyengar’s visit to China as late as the end of the century was even more overwhelming. Iyengar was already78 years old and he said he had vaguely heard of the Chinese interest in yoga and was expecting at the most a mild curiosity about his work. But when he landed in the faraway southern city of Guangzhaou he found he had already been billed as the star attraction at China’s first ‘yoga summit’ that was being held there.

In that industrial city he was to learn that there were at least 30,000 followers of his yoga philosophy and that his books had been translated into Chinese and were being widely read. Schools had sprouted in 57 cities across 17 provinces, from Shanghai and Beijing to Chengdu in western Sichuan. He lectured to an audience of 1,000 practitioners at that summit. ‘They performed honestly, sincerely and with great dedication,’ he declared. He also discovered that in Bejing a student of his had set up a thriving business, called YogiYoga. This person had studied under him at Rishikesh and now had 57 centres spread across China. Iyengar was presented with a commemorative stamp at a function in Beijing by China Post an honour he had never been given in his own country. He said he would not be surprised if ‘China overtakes India in yoga.’

Menon was also lucky to have BV Keshkar as the Information and Broadcasting Minister at the Centre when he joined AIR. A great votary of the Indian classical music Keshkar was keen on encouraging the maestros who had been feeling neglected after the loss of generous patrons like the zamindars and princely states who were the patrons of gharanas and were generous in encouraging them.  He was also to make that somewhat controversial decision to ban the playing of the harmonium at classical concerts. It was during this time that Menon introduced the audacious annual Radio Sangeet Sammelan concerts in 1954, where performances would be held simultaneously at all the 64 AIR centres at the same time and their recording would be broadcast every Saturday evening two months later. Their schedules and the names of the performing artistes were listed in a brochure which also had all the details of the artists. This elegantly brought out pictorial book was a priced possession of those who had occasion to attend the opening concerts. Sushila Mishra, the music critic and head of the Lucknow centre of the AIR, had written nostalgically about this innovative venture and the pains that were taken to compile this document. These concerts covered Hindustani and Carnatic styles as well as vocal and instrumental music and were held simultaneously at AIR centres across the country, from Rajkot to Tiruchi and Puri to Parbani. These started at 6.30 pm sharp and lasted three hours. To conduct an intricate operation on this scale on something as timeless as Indian classical music showed the organising capacity of the institution and the wizards who were involved in this operation.

To start with, though, only renowned artistes were invited to perform but as its popularity increased and spread to other cities the broadcasts were also decentralised regional networks were brought in and given more autonomy and initiative. So you had rare ragas being broadcast from centres away from the mainstream and that led to the opening up of its platform for young and innovative artists to showcase their talent. In that sense the Sangeet Sammelan did wonders for classical music. And every musician of note aspired to perform on this platform and felt it an honour to appear here. The recordings of such maestros as Ali Akbar Khan, Pannalal Ghosh, Kumar Gandharva, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, S Balachandar and Bhimsen Joshi are all available now. They are part of AIR’s archives as also are the renditions of Balamurali Krishna, Kishori Amonkar, Amjad Ali Khan, TN Krishnan and Hariprasad Chaurasia  as well as Viswamohan Bhat and Pandit Shivkumar Sharma.

A former culture secretary and Prasar Bharati chief, Jawhar Sarkar, recalled an amusing instance when the singer Savita Sharma ended her Sammelan concert at Vadodara the audience refused to leave the hall and wanted her to continue even after repeatedly being told that the concert was over. She has no option but to continue singing for some more time before the listeners relented. Echoes of Paluskar’s experience at Beijing in 1957:

Over the years these concerts have been reduced to 28 centres but the Sammelans still continue and the brochures are still brought out though much leaner, but even then this calls for celebration, because in this distracted era of colour television and prevalence of the widescreen and shortened audience  attention span there is not much audience for the radio.

Meanwhile, the sitar-tabla duo of  Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha had been making waves in the West and their performance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963 was such a stand out show that they were specially invited for the first Woodstock festival seven years later. It was here that the Beatles and the flower children were exposed to the dazzling Indian artistry and its many dimensions. That was also the beginning of the anti-war movement and the young going East in search of Nirvana. Among those who came to India in search of peace and a guru was Beatle George Harrison who went in looking for a teacher to Haridwar. The spiritual movement that was initiated by Osho and the transcendental meditation mahatma Mahesh Yogi at that time had by then reached even the Pentagon’s portals.

Narayana Menon was a trigger for many of these movements even without his being aware of or consciously initiating any of these or of the ripples these would cause. When the diplomat and author Natwar Singh met his mentor EM Forster at Oxford the latter suggested that he meet a group of interesting Indian writers and thinkers and thus he came to know of Mulk Raj Anand and Narayana Menon and Raja Rao. This group was later to bring out a volume in honour of Forster on his 87^th birthday.

Even after his retirement Menon had been in much demand and he became the executive director of the National Centre for Performing Arts built at Bombay’s Nariman Point. Though the scheme for such a centre was mooted in 1968, it took 12 years to be got ready and for inauguration by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This massive building with a grandstand view of the sea was to come alive to the music at the opening performance by such greats as Bismillah Khan, MS Subbalakshmi, Yamini Krishnamurthi and Birju Maharaj. There were also performances by the Azerbaijan puppet theatre and Portugal’s Gulbenkin orchestra.

This centre was a gift of the Tata Group which had contributed so much to the country in the field of education and scientific research as well in medicine. They had got the idea for such a centre from the Lincoln Centre for Performing Arts in New York and the Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts at Washington. It was with this idea that they approached Menon, who had just then sought premature retirement from AIR.

Menon recalled how they went about planning and executing the project for which the Maharashtra Government was generous enough in giving eight acres of prime land, of which five acres had been reclaimed from the sea. The estimated cost of the land was Rs. 20 crores and this was given on a 99-year lease for a token fee of Rs. 1 a year! They chose as architect Philip Johnson who had designed the Lincoln Centre and who had been familiar with the demands of the modern theatre and its ambience. When he was approached he was only too willing to do something in this part of the world. He made more than a dozen trips to examine the locale and the building material and the local area sources. Thus he took care to see that everything that went into its making has been indigenous. The stone for the structure was quarried from nearby Malad area.

About some of the unique features of the auditorium Menon explained that the acoustics consultant was Prof. Cyrill Harris, who was professor of Architecture and Engineering at Columbia University and he had suggested a fan-shaped theatre with number of rows reduced to 17 from the normal 32and the stage projected almost into the audience. And the electronic amplification of sound eliminated by the construction of elongated three-sided forms of high density plaster which extended in concentric circles over the entire ceiling and along the walls of the auditorium. This meant that the distribution of natural sounds would be so perfect that a soloist performing is heard almost better in the last row than in the first. A dancer’s expressions (abhinaya) likewise can be viewed as clearly in the last row at the back of the hall.

Having experience of dealing with the government and private sponsors during his entire career, Menon felt that with the former any activity tends to be bureaucratised and this is not specific to India alone. The world over this has been the case and since civil servants are bound by rules and precedents they are almost lacking in spiritualisation or spontaneity and inspiration. This has been the bureaucracy’s strength as well as its weakness, according to him.

For this ambitious project contributions had come not from the Tatas alone.  Several major industrialists had chipped in like Godrej, Saraya and Chowgules and major international organisations like the UNESCO and the Rockefeller Third Foundation and Ford Foundation.

Ironically when Zubin Mehta brought his orchestra to play in Delhi later he discovered that there was not one auditorium that had perfect acoustics, neither the Sri Fort Auditorium nor Kamani nor the Soviet-style structure at Vigyan Bahvan. Finally he settled for the Indira Gandhi Valodrome where he hung thick curtains to make for somewhat tolerable sound effects.

Apart from all these activities Menon had been writing regularly and he has an impressive list of publications, including valuable books on music and dance, like a profile on the Bharatanatyam legend Balasaraswati,  The Communication Revolution, and the Language of Music apart from the Yeats study, called the Development of William Butler Yeats, as also Kerala and the Communication revolution. He had also translated Takazhi Siva Sankara Pillai’s classic Malayalam novel Chemmeen into English that has been a remarkable literary achievement.

With all this towards the end of his life he became almost a recluse and when he passed away Khushwant Singh, the  writer, editor and publisher,  wrote in an obituary that Menon who was commissioned to write his autobiography was reluctant to write one and that he forgot the world and eventually the world, in turn, also forgot him.

About The Author

S Sivadas

The author is a senior journalist