After the Madras Music Academy awarded the Sangita Kalanidhi award to singer TM Krishna, the news did not sit well with the Carnatic musicians in the industry. Many musicians took to their social media to protest about this, while some also pulled out from the music conference. Amidst this uproar, singer Chinmayi Sripada came forward to defend TM Krishna and she supported the musician.
In a latest conversation with The Wire, Chinmayi Sripada talked about how Carnatic musicians are mixing their personal dislike and their personal problems for TM Krishna. She talked about how the singer is asking to dismantle casteism in Carnatic music and that is something which is not sitting well with the other musicians. She said, “They (Carnatic musicians) are just mixing up their personal problems and their personal dislike for the gentleman because he is asking them to dismantle the general casteism that is associated with Carnatic music.”
Sripada continued, “They want to be the gatekeepers of it, and they want to say that only a certain caste and a community that is the Brahmin community should be ideally practicing the [Carnatic] music. And it’s not that the Brahmin community has always been practicing the craft. They themselves have basically hijacked it from the Devdasi community and they started gatekeeping it saying that nobody else except us, who have any devotion and bhakti can perform this. Therefore, the way of teaching and imparting [music] education [itself] has so many hurdles.”
She also talked about how TM Krishna has been vocal about casteism since the beginning. She added, “So, here T.M. Krishna has been one of the people who has been very vocal about the Tam Bram [Tamil Brahmin] community and dismantling caste and calling out the casteism and the way of treating the accompanying artists and the sub-human behaviour [meted out] to artists from other communities. He has been doing this for a few years.”
Earlier, Sripada had also responded to Ranjani and Gayatri when they pulled out of the music conference after TM Krishna won the award. She had backed the singer even then.
