Music buffs who knew M.L. Vasanthakumari well remember how little care the classical musician used to pay to her throat (and health) despite her eminence as a frontline vocalist. No different was the carefree attitude of her daughter Srividya, who appeared is as many as 800 south Indian and Hindi movies in a four-decade career that ended rather abruptly with her succumbing to a malignant disease.
October is a month the cultural world lost both the artistes—in a span of 16 years. And none of them had reached old age when they breathed their last. MLV, as the Carnatic exponent was known, died at 62 and is also remembered for her early-phase film songs, while Srividya was 53 and remains extremely popular in Malayalam cinema where she concentrated the most amid trysts with Kannada, Telugu and Hindi flicks besides in her native Tamil.
MLV has been the youngest female recipient of Carnatic music’s most coveted honour: she was 49 when the MadrasMusicAcademy conferred her with the Sangita Kalanidhi in 1977. True, the equally-renowned M.S. Subbulakshmi, D.K. Pattammal and T. Brinda did win the title before MLV did, but at ages beyond 50.
Srividya can’t be counted tender when she debuted in cinema. She had entered 13 (though as a ‘child artiste’) in Thiruvarutchelvar (1966), but was playing the role alongside the towering Sivaji Ganesan. From then, there had been no looking back—till spinal cancer made her life miserable and the actress died on October 19, 2006.
Srividya’s footsteps into the world of films overlapped with a time when her family was straining financially and MLV reportedly suffering from an uneasy relation with her husband Vikatam R. Krishnamurthy, a film actor who had won the prestigious Kalaimamani award of the Tamil Nadu government. As if taking a cue from both the tragedies, the actress too found herself being hunted by piling debts following a troubled marriage that ended in divorce. Srividya had a flourishing career when she married film producer George Thomas in 1976—a relation that soured and eventually broke within four years.
That no way meant an end to her love life. Stories of deep affection and pure exploitation defined much of her personal profile, what with her relations with star Kamal Haasan and Malayalam filmmaker Bharathan (1946-98) finding particular highlight. Notwithstanding such highs and lows, Srividya remained a busy actress, excelling in on-screen roles as lover, wife and mother among others.
Srividya did learn music as a child, and that too a stream as weighty as Carnatic. Her prime, needless to say, was spent in cinema, but the actress made sporadic appearances on the concert stage towards what turned out to be the last active phase of her life. MLV junior, vocal-wise, came nowhere close to her illustrious mother, yet Srividya’s singing sounded like a potential musician’s efforts to search for an identity she happened to lose in her formative years in the field of the arts. It was a life-chastened soul’s tenacious bid to re-establish her maternal address.
MLV was a fun-loving vocalist, with a habit of gulping down sometimes two cups of ice-creams just ahead of mounting the dais for a kacheri. Such unadvisable food least managed to spoil her rich use of gamakas that are so essential to the Carnatic idiom. The tonal oscillations came with such clarity, lending constant sparkles her musical diction that was largely based on the style of her celebrated guru G.N. Balasubramaniam, simply GNB (1910-65). Core music circles in Madras weren’t entirely devoid of certain romantic tales spun around the handsome GNB with his sindoor on the forehead and a flamboyant MLV in her bright silk sarees.
The lives of MLV (1928-90) and Srividya (1953-2006) are part of a curious 20th-century Dravidian family story dotted with uncanny similarities and amusing contrasts between the two performers of immense talent and range. When autumn of the present days gives way to winter chill, buffs of south Indian music and cinema tend to recollect a few warm stories of the mother-daughter duo—on and off the stage/screen.
