Last week, as world leaders gathered for the BRICS Summit, New Delhi did what it does best: it made room for the world’s contradictions and got everyone to sit at the same table. Watching the New Delhi Declaration come together, I couldn’t help thinking of my great-grandmother, Ammu paati, who managed something similar with nothing but a tanpura, a voice and zero security detail.
In 1966, MS Subbulakshmi walked into the United Nations General Assembly and sang Maithreem Bhajatha; a Sanskrit invocation of universal friendship, composed specifically for her for that stage – asking the world to be friendly and peaceful. If she were alive today, she’d have been the natural bookend to a summit like this, upstaging every single leader in the room without even trying.
That thread, music refusing to recognise borders and divides, pulled tight again on her actual birth anniversary, much closer to home. This week, at Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Bengaluru, my cousins Aishwarya and Saundarya performed a tribute concert that went viral: the kind of clip that gets forwarded on family WhatsApp groups with too many exclamation marks.
But here’s what the headlines and the Bharat Ratna accolades never tell you: what it was like to be her great-grandchild, with absolutely no reverence involved. We called her Ammu paati. Not the legend, not the awardee, just the sweet lady at home who’d light up the moment we walked in, plant us on her lap and sing us half-remembered bhajans until we conked off against her shoulder. She fed us kaju katli, which we insisted on calling ‘diamond barfi’. She told us stories from her travels, books, wherever her mind wandered that evening. My favourite object in her house was her backscratcher, which produced a faintly ridiculous musical squeak, spectacularly out of step with a woman who could hold a raga in dead silence. She didn’t measure love in bloodlines or DNA tests...she just loved, sang us songs and occasionally scratched our backs with a novelty instrument.
I bring this up because there’s a particular strain of online commentator who resurfaces every time our family is mentioned, armed with the same tired footnote: not biological, no DNA match. As if that settles anything, or as if they’ve done any genealogical homework beyond a WhatsApp forward. If blood were the currency she dealt in, why would she pour her life’s musical knowledge into my cousins so they could carry her tradition forward? Why would she encourage me, a small boy who liked stories, to keep reading and writing, when she did not have to care about my talents and interests? Love doesn’t ask for proof or paperwork. She never did, and neither will we. The keyboard warriors are welcome to keep their birth certificates; we’ll keep the memories, music and the taste of being fed ‘diamond barfi’ from her hands.
It’s a question the film industry has been asking too. Sai Pallavi was reportedly the first choice to play her in the biopic; earlier reports claimed it to be Vidya Balan; then Rukmini Vasanth; the role has now gone to Rashmika Mand a n n a , with the project launching in Chennai on the anniversary itself by Kamal Haasan.
None of these actors share a drop of her blood either, and I suspect none of them will be asked to produce their DNA test to prove their mettle. Audiences will judge each portrayal on exactly one thing: did it honour her and respect her legacy? That’s the only test that mattered... for Ammu paati, the actors and a family that loved her loads.
What gives me hope is watching India’s younger generation retire the old sorting mechanisms: caste, class, creed, bloodline, who’s ‘really’ related to whom or who’s ‘really’ a citizen of this country. They seem more interested in who shows up, cares, stays, believes in doing the right thing, and can change the world and considerably less interested in litigating a DNA test in the comments section.
Ammu paati, for all her devotion to a centuries-old classical form, was never precious about tradition for its own sake. She sang playback for films, recorded in half a dozen languages and let her art travel into gramophones, radio waves and eventually the halls of the UN. She’d probably have found Instagram reels ridiculous and within a week, been unreasonably good at them. That instinct, more than any raga, might be her truest inheritance to a generation already doing the same: keeping what matters, and cheerfully discarding the rest