Early August marks the birth anniversary of two frontline classical vocalists, the elder of whom put Andhra in prominence on the Carnatic map. A look at the life and contributions of Dr Sripada Pinakapani.
Nookala Chinna Satyanarayana died exactly four months after his guru’s life ended in the spring of 2013, while the two frontline vocalists were born in a gap of precisely a decade early last century when Carnatic music thrived in pockets along their native Deccan.
This least implies that that Nookala was the source of reputation for his teacher. For, Sripada Pinakapani had been a father figure for the 20th-century Andhra stream of south Indian classical. In a life-span that narrowly fell short of 100 years, Dr Pinakapani groomed an array of disciples across the Telugu region from where Carnatic had anyway inherited a lot from the middle ages. Nookala, whose 94th birth anniversary falls today (August 4), was just one among his several eminent pupils.
Nookala also had a doctorate, but that wasn’t in medical sciences—as was the case with Pinakapani. The senior master, who was born on August 3, 1913, had completed his post-graduate studies in medicine from the Andhra Medical College, the institute at Visakhapatnam, which was the birthplace of Nookala. Dr Pinakapani, who wouldn’t miss his music practice at the hostel while otherwise studying human anatomy and remedies to ailments, went on to work in his alma mater and spent a later part of his life as a medical practitioner in Kurnool, where he worked for 17 years and eventually settled.
In between all these was a critical professional stint Dr Pinakapani had in Madras, also the Mecca of Carnatic music (as is increasingly the case now). He was bowled over by the beauty of the renditions of Tamil Nadu musicians like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Veena Dhanammal and Musiri Subramania Iyer, whose concerts he kept attending. “Ariyakudi (1890-1961) is the best vocalist I have ever heard,” Pinakapani would reiterate, admiring the icon’s oscillatory gamakas “which none can reproduce”.
In that phase of life around his mid-twenties, Pinakapani would regularly meet the veneered Dhanammal (1867-1938), who was equally first-rate in vocals and veena-playing. Not long after, he stumbled upon Musiri (1899-1975), whose ornamental alapana sketches of the raga and unhurried neraval passages expanding upon a two-line part of the composition fascinated him.
In short, Pinakapani felt the urge to introduce the Thanjavur style of Carnatic music back to his people in Andhra. That led him to bring in leading vocalists, instrumentalists and percussionists with the ethos of the Cauvery to his part of the country, points out music buff S Sivaramakrishnan, a veena player. “It was a pioneering exercise,” notes the Chennaiite banker. “For, till then, Andhra apparently had its music primarily relying on the accompaniment of its dance (Kuchipudi as well as javalis and padams performed by Devadasis).”
The ‘Pinakapani effect’ on the land of the Krishna river was tremendous, with Andhra becoming more visible on the Carnatic music map. If new local musicians with immense talent began emerging from there like never before, quite a few of them were disciples of Pinakapani.
“If you ask me what is the greatest thing in my life, I’d say it is to have become a student of Pinakapani garu,” according to veteran vocalist Nedunuri Krishnamurthy, who died at age 87 in Vijayawada, 21 months after the expiry of his guru. Nedunuri’s own young disciples, Vijayawada-origin Malladi brothers Sreeramprasad and Ravikumar, have learned under Pinakapani as well. “He was over 80 years when we took lessons under him,” recalls Sreeramprasad. “The guru was bedridden, but his mind was still full of music and his memory sharp. He used to teach us for no less than eight hours a day.”
Pinakapani, always obsessed with the seven swaras (though as a little boy believed music was “only for girls”), had given tune to 120 of the Telugu compositions of 15th-century Hindu saint Annamacharya hailing from a village in what is today Kadapa district of south-central Andhra Pradesh. He himself composed half-a-dozen varnams and notated around 1,200 compositions. The book, which is virtually a tribute to Telugu-descent greats Tyagaraja and Syama Shastri (of the revered trinity also comprising their contemporary Muthuswamy Dikshitar, who wrote in Sanskrit), has been published by the Tirupati-Tirumala Devasthanam (TTD) that administers one of the country’s richest temples.
Paradoxially, Pinakapani was least materialistic. His family recalls instances of the musician occasionally forgetting to deposit cheques that came to him as remuneration for concerts. Nedunuri would recall occasions where his master would fail to remember buying a thing or two from the shop because he would be humming ragas while carrying the bag and looking for household materials. “Mind you, these won’t be the more popular ones like Todi or Sankarabharanam, but tougher ones like Reetigowla, Surutti and Begada.”
Begada is a difficult raga that another of Pinakapani’s pupils had mastered and used to present brilliantly. Rajahmundry-born Voleti Venkateswarlu (1928-89), who worked in Vijayawada AIR from 1966, was one of Andhra’s “greatest-ever” Carnatic exponents, according to Pinakapani, who has had close association with top musicians like Ranga Ramanuja Iyengar (1876-1936) and Mysore T. Chowdiah (1895-1967), under whom also he learned, staying at the violinist’s house in Mysore. It was a native of the same Karnataka city—B.S. Lakshmana Rao—who was Pinakapani’s initial guru.
Other Pinakapani disciples include Srirangam Gopalaratnam (an asthana vidushi at TTD) and Malladi Suribabu. Back to Nookala (1923-2013), he developed an individual style and worked in several music colleges before being conferred with the Padma Bhushan, a civil honour that came to Pinakapani as well.
Andhra today has several high-calibre Carnatic musicians like Lalitha-Haripriya, Hyderabad brothers, A. Kanyakumari (violin), Manda Sudharani, Pantula Rama, Dwaram Tyagaraj and star mridangam player Patri Satish Kumar. Not to speak of yesteryear giants like Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu (violin), Emani Sankara Shastry, Chitti Babu (veena) and Sheikh Chinna Moulana (nagaswaram) and vocalists M. Balamuralikrishna and T.R. Subramaniam besides Mandolin U. Shrinivas.
Ironically, Chennai overall didn’t encourage Pinakapani much to sing, tagging him more as a scholar than a musician. It is another matter the Madras Music Academy conferred him with Sangita Kalanidhi (1983), the most coveted institutional honour for a Carnatic exponent.
(The essay partly relies on Gana Rishi,
a documentary produced by Sanskriti Series.)