Fanfare as Bengaluru’s Tarangini Arts Foundation turns 50

The Tarangini Arts Foundation is celebrating five decades of music with a rare ensemble of Meera bhajans

As a young instrumentalist and student of maestro L Raja Rao, Suma Sudhindra was eager to explore the veena world. After her PhD thesis on the ‘Evolution of Stringed Instruments in Carnatic Music’, she wanted to take advanced lessons to widen her repertoire. After listening to veena veteran Chitti Babu at a concert, she had the good fortune to meet him in person through her vocalist friend Shyamala Bhave in Chennai.

Suma says this was a turning point in her life as the maestro agreed to teach her. “He was gracious enough to immediately agree and school me. Chitti Babu’s tonal clarity, musicality, and masterly fingering techniques were unusual and distinctive. His instrumentation placed the genre itself in a different perspective and I was eager to learn from him.”

It was during this phase that Suma came to realise how much an “instrument can speak and sing” and how instrumentation can reveal a signature styling of its own.

Mesmerised by the stringed world, Suma contemplated on how she could bring awareness to more people and have forums for its propagation. “This is how I started Tarangini Arts Foundation with concerts, workshops and students being exposed to several genres of learning with vocal and instrumental music. We are happy that this golden jubilee year of the foundation will see a 50-member group present ‘Meera Tarangini’ an ensemble woven around six Meera bhajans chosen for this rare orchestration.”

With nearly 40 musicians in the veena section and the chorus concept designed by Suchethan Rangaswamy, the event includes female and male vocalists with production execution by Keerthi Kumar, with a six-member senior percussion team providing cadence to the novel presentation. 

“This is a new experimentation and I hope all our hard work pays off, as Tarangini Arts Foundation has always led the way in welcoming newer instrument programming,” says Suma, adding that she often ruminated on the words of violin maestro Lalgudi G Jayaraman who once said, ‘We have a greater responsibility to take instruments forward as the stringed instruments have a language of their own. Remember to learn and teach this unique language as they have a global audience’.

What were the lessons from Chitti Babu that she was able to adapt to with ease? “The fact that I did not have a pre-set family school helped me have a more open mind to newer presentations,” says Suma, adding that taking to Chitti Babu’s veena styling was “almost an organic integration” as she was soon part of the super hit LPs brought out by the maestro in the early 1980s.