Should T M Krishna sing? Or, to extend that already anomalous question into truly perilous waters, should T M Krishna only sing? Should an artist just “Shut Up and Play the Guitar” (to quote the maverick rock star Frank Zappa out of context)? Should he or she not have views on the world? On nature, on society, on politics? Is art not part of the world? Or is ‘pure art’, as aesthetes would have it, an autonomous realm, disconnected, hermetically sealed off, doing nothing else but opening up a vista of discernment on its own terms and, if found worthy, detached bliss?
That’s the idea that gave birth to the self-damning phrase, Art for Art’s Sake, the subject of numerous (and furious) debates. Plato wanted poets banished from his ideal republic. Stalin had more strings in his bow: banishment (or worse) was offered as an either/or option. If the artist made “pro-people” art, he or she could be suffered, if nervously and subject to constant vigil. Indian communists always looked askance at those, like the great theatre man Sombhu Mitra, who moved away from the “committed” art of IPTA and ploughed his own egocentric furrow.
Krishna weighs in at the other end. Not only is his music among the greatest on the contemporary scene, he insists on connecting his music and his own person to the fraught issues of the day—environmental degradation, communalism, free speech, the entrenched casteism within the Carnatic sphere. He writes excellent dissenting pieces in the media.
He collaborates with others beyond Carnatic on protest videos. He even abjures the Brahminist cocoons of the Margazhi season. Should the government (and PSUs) be playing patron to all this, they ask. Should it be supporting art anyway? Should he be fooling around with Carnatic? Answer to all of the above: yes. Public money is our money. The state is only its custodian. Art is one of our deepest needs. And art evolves in the artist’s mind: It should be left to him or her.