Charukesi. A lovely raga that sitar maestro Ravi Shankar transported from the South to Hindustani music and made lovelier still in his own evocative style. I had been reading and enjoying the writings of a Tamil journalist using the raga name as his nom de plume for many years before I first met him. ‘Charukesi’ S Viswanathan was someone I knew for a little over a couple of decades before he passed away on January 30 this year after ailing for some six months. Lean of frame and seemingly blessed with unbounded energy, he had earlier been a picture of good health even if he looked underfed most of the time.
From his literary and journalistic moniker it would be easy to assume that my friend was a music critic. It would be wrong on two counts: Charukesi was an all rounder who covered a wide range of fields - music, theatre, dance, literature, even politics, or at least interviews of politicians. Second, the word critic was a complete misnomer where he was concerned, though he had gathered enough knowledge and experience through six decades of dedicated hard work. He rarely wielded a sharp or malicious pen while reviewing performances or profiling personalities.
Music concerts brought us together most often, though we also ran into each other at productions of the other performing arts. He never displayed any intellectual arrogance, even occasionally oversimplified interpreting complex representations on stage, questioning some of these with childlike
petulance, but he was at all times the quintessential rasika generous to a fault with praise, as comfortable with avant garde English theatre as with typically Mylapore drawing room comedies. His understanding and appreciation of experimental works of the Koothuppattarai theatrical genre or contemporary Bharatanatyam presentations by the likes of Alarmel Valli or Malavika Sarukkai could be sophisticated and urbane. It was through his farewell contribution to literature, the Tamil Puthaka Nanbargal group he convened for some three years that I got to read and appreciate a great many living authors in Tamil.
Charukesi and I collaborated on a handful of projects, generally involving translation, that gave me much satisfaction and happiness. One was a book in English and Tamil on a transformational initiative that changed a city slum into a clean, eminently liveable residential colony whose proud residents joined the urban mainstream of well informed, professionally competent citizens. Charukesi translated into Tamil the book A Slum No More by N Byravan-which I had edited. A recent effort involved my editing a brilliant Tamil translation by Charukesi of Fall LikeA Rose Petal, a moving, if brutally self-critical memoir by Avis Viswanathan, someone who has shown great courage in telling the story of his descent into bankruptcy. Both Charukesi and I believed that the story must reach the Tamil reading public, and I hope the book finds a publisher soon.
In all the work we did together, including when I got him to start contributing articles for the performing arts monthly I edited for some ten years, it was an unadulterated pleasure to bask in the sunshine of Charukesi’s friendship and kindness.
(Ramnarayan writes on music and cricket)
