Thought leaders as new cosmopolitan hope'

Chennai: At first glance, readers may be astounded — purists may even be outraged — as to how T.S. Eliot, one of the foremost poet-critics in modern literary criticism can be juxtaposed with T.M. Krishna, the Chennai-based highly gifted and popular Carnatic musician and a budding critical thinker, but whom many feel has a long way to go.  

Culture scholars may be even more caustic as the two figures belong to two entirely different traditions of English poetry and Carnatic music. They are also separated by nearly a century, as T.S. Eliot’s seminal, still inspiring, outstanding and best-known essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919, while T.M. Krishna splashed uncommon insights in his work, A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story in 2013.  This is no formal comparison between the two achievers. It only seeks to articulate the perils of associated imagery when T.M. Krishna and Bezwada Wilson, were last week announced as the two Indians chosen for the prestigious ‘Ramon Magsaysay Award (2016)’, seen as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel. Both awardees have been pleading and acting against social exclusion in their own spheres.

As the award citation says, While Bezwada Wilson has been leading a grassroots movement to liberate the low-caste Dalit community from the scourge of manual scavenging, T.M. Krishna has been chosen under the ‘emerging leadership’ category, for “his forceful commitment as an artist and advocate of art’s power to heal India’s deep social wounds”, and for striving to ensure “social inclusiveness in culture”.

If the eminent Indian philosopher, Daya Krishna, were to be alive today, he would have likely said that Bezwada Wilson is largely in the domain of ‘Karmic action’ for social betterment, while T.M. Krishna wades in the realm of both thought and action. Thus, the two Indian awardees of the ‘Ramon Magsaysay Award’ this year complement each other, a great achievement in itself to inspire our youth.

These are hard facts and that is one reason why souls like T.S. Eliot, a genius of a bank clerk-turned-poet-and critic remain foundational for possible cross-cultural understanding.

In a sense, the problems that T.M. Krishna has been grappling with in trying to make the Carnatic music tradition more inclusive — the Olcott Kuppam Kutcheris for the fisher folks of Chennai is just one facet of it — are similar to issues T.S. Eliot attacked in his famous essay.

With poetry as his focus, Eliot was seen as moving towards a relatively more objective view of art and tradition in their wider connotations, moving away from the earlier “excesses of romanticism” as other literary critics of him have pointed out.

Similarly, T.M. Krishna is critically revisiting the musical tradition he has been trained in, not just from the perspective of ‘bhava’ and ‘bakthi’, which still is the soul of Carnatic music, but also saying that ‘other’ marginal groups in society have to be factored into its potential to liberate. That stance also alludes to the linkages between traditional music and dance in the South and its institutional settings.

Two key ideas of T.S. Eliot may throw further light on this endeavour. As the great critic said, “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour. It involves in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call clearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

Eliot further down his essay writes: “There remains to define this process of depersonalisation and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach the condition of science.”
In the emergence of a T.M. Krishna, as he speaks from a standpoint of one who has attained considerable proficiency from within a tradition, it speaks all the more for the authenticity of India’s intellectual traditions.

They were very lively and self-critical till, what late Prime Minister Narasimha Rao once said Appayya Dikshita (16th century) was around, until it dried out in the sands of repetition and institutional stifling. No wonder Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen termed T.M. Krishna’s work, as “one of the best books I have ever read on various subjects.”

Second, emerging thought leaders like T.M. Krishna may also be seen, like the late President Dr A.P.J Abdul Kalam, as what David Miller of Nuffield College, Oxford, in his insightful and in-depth paper, ‘The Idea of Global Citizenship’, refers to as the new ‘cosmopolitan hope’ in a world driven by divisions and conflicts.